I know there are plenty of more serious issues people have with Mozilla's direction and focus, but patronizing stuff like this really grinds my gears.
> Which animal best represents your Firefox browsing style? [List of emoji animals]
The marketing/PR trend of speaking to communities as though they're kindergartners is distracting and off-putting. This is the most egregious part but the whole post has a similar tone.
I'll note that I'm not saying outreach should necessarily be professional or devoid of fun/humor. There's just a sterile, saccharine way about Mozilla's community engagement that evokes artificiality.
I think the root problem here is that the communication isn't genuine. It's marketing trying to craft a certain brand image instead of actual stakeholders being open about the what is going on with the project.
Don't forget colorways, the non-feature that still needed to be force-fed to us. I assumed people who wanted to change the color theme already could, and that the limited time and ebergy available were being spent on things like compatibility and escaping from Google.
This all started with the "Engagement Team" like … 15+ years ago. I was there (part of the team). They started with mascots, being cute, having this infantilizing attitude towards users.
Kinda hard to be inclusive if no one uses your browser. The greatest thing Mozilla could do for inclusiveness is to have more users. Not treat your users like children.
Agreed, this just looks really tone deaf and amateurish. And it's avoiding the bigger issues. There are plenty and they actually need dealing with. Even just acknowledging some of those issues would be progress.
There must be internal discussion on this. I imagine more than a few shouty meetings might have happened. This indicates to me that management doesn't know how to deal with that and clearly isn't dealing with anything effectively. If anything this makes me more worried, not less worried about how things are going at Mozilla.
More rust/C++ writing, less cuddly animals please. Firefox needs more people that work on the product and are allowed to work on the product not people that do busywork like this and just get in the way.
I'm an actual user BTW. The product is fine for me. Performance is great and steadily improving. My main concern is that the developers are allowed to stay on mission and empowered to do that. Which means doubling down on making sure I never get confronted with shitty ads, popups, and other advertising abuse. And that it keeps up technically with Chromium and Webkit in terms of standards support.
>> The marketing/PR trend of speaking to communities as though they're kindergartners is distracting and off-putting.
I think this is just changing with the times. Go back a bit further and the idea of communities around products is the new cool thing. Personally I find that a bit weird. We have a whole generation of people who find social media managers talking to each other hilarious.
In my limited career I have been in several projects whose plight didn't make any sense -- with all the smart people and the effort poured over them, how could the disaster continue to unfold! -- until I realized failure rather than success was the goal.
That's insane :/. But, maybe, "on the bright side", The Mozilla Foundation is unrelated in some sense to Firefox? AFAIK, they don't spend any of their money on it anyway.
The whole Mozilla situation is even more of a scam than how the Wikimedia Foundation uses sob stories about paying for Wikipedia to get people to donate money to an entity which spends almost no money on Wikipedia... but, at least it does run Wikipedia! lol :/.
There is another interesting detail from your reference that makes it seem even worse to me: it says the CEO's salary is "paid only by a related for-profit"; at first, I was thinking "ok, at least the Foundation in fact is spending the money it is being donated (though, not on Firefox)"... but then I realized that means the Corporation is, in fact, spending $7m that it could have spent on Firefox.
> AFAIK, they don't spend any of their money on it anyway
The glass-half-full take I heard a while back was: at least every dollar they take from the foundation donations for these causes is a dollar that they could have found a way to take from Firefox development instead.
Every dollar they take from the foundation donations for these causes is a dollar that enables them to better sabotage Firefox development actually. If they were starved like cancerous tumour the body might heal and survive.
I don't really understand the angst against the Wikimedia Foundation.
They are transparent. No one's being conned into donating. As long as Wikipedia is running fine, and is not degrading, and they're not actively harming it, I don't care. People routinely spend money on much worse things. Is donating $3 to Wikimedia once a year really worse than giving 50-100x more to Starbucks?
People get annoyed at them for their massive banners begging for money making it seem like wikipedia is on the verge of being closed down unless you donate despite the fact they have a ton of money they have saved away which could keep wikipedia running for decades. Even long running wiki editors and donators get pissed off with the behavior of the wikimedia foundation as not enough of this money actually seems to get spent on Wikipedia. Kinda similar to the whole Firefox situation now I come to think about it.
If the donation is given on the false belief that the donations are necessary to keep Wikipedia running, I'd argue donors are being conned into donating. And that is exactly the message the donation banners convey.
> The whole Mozilla situation is even more of a scam than how the Wikimedia Foundation uses sob stories about paying for Wikipedia to get people to donate money to an entity which spends almost no money on Wikipedia... but, at least it does run Wikipedia! lol :/.
I don't think these are comparable at all or how it's a scam. The CEO of the entire wikimedia foundation makes half a million a year. The foundation is considered a GREAT charity to donate to by Charity Navigator. https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703
wikipedia still being around after all this time and still maintaining links to just download the entire thing and having no ads makes whatever they're doing good to me, ha.
And they do experiment and i think the passion for the society upholding project that is the encyclopedia is still there. Its the same wirh web archive.
Wikimedia is run transparently which is great but I dont really believe they need the money when you see their financial statement (link below) and think about what they need to run. Plenty of really deserving charities running on the sniff of an oily rag not paying 100m in salaries plus travel, conferences etc.
Keep in mind that the community aka the editors etc are all volunteers so the foundation organizes conferences, hackathons, grants etc for them (not as a compensation, but to help strengthen the community). Keeping "servers running" is only a small aspect of the whole. There's a lot of maintenance work necessary and there are also sister projects as well, like commons, wikidata, etc.
They have 82 million dollars in cash and 116 million in short term investment, why do they need to run giant screen sized popup banners a few times every year begging for money and making it seem like everything will be gone tomorrow unless you donate now? They don't even run these adverts by the wiki editors themselves, just impose them from on top. They are very controversial in the wiki community and always cause pages of arguing every year.
It says "PAID ONLY BY A RELATED FOR-PROFIT", which looks to be the Mozilla Corporation. Donations are not directly paying the CEO, although I agree more of the profits from the Corporation could flow into the non-profit.
The reasonable assumption here is that without any donations, most of that money from Mozilla Corp would have had to cover what the donations paid for instead. So in practice, every dollar donated might have increased the CEO bonus by say 90 cents, which feels like donating to the CEO.
I currently still use Firefox but stopped donating to Mozilla after that.
I mean if you reduce something enough you can say “x pays for y” in almost any case for anything since it’s all technically one big pot for one group. Even earmarked money.
If I give you $500 to help pay for your medical bills and a few months later (bills have been paid by then) I see you bought a PS5, can I say, “not cool you used my money to buy a PS5”?
Don’t get me wrong I think Mozilla/FF has been very poorly managed. But I have just never liked these kinds of “transitive property” arguments or whatever we want to call it. Unless they’re straight up funneling donations into the CEO’s bank account I just don’t see it that way.
But that's the whole point: they did pay their medical bills. It's not like they didn't pay their medical bills and instead bought a ps5. They did both.
Mozilla develops Firefox, and they also pay their CEO a lot. Their CEO may be overpaid, the company may be mismanaged, but at least they are still upholding their commitment to maintaining Firefox. Picking out one expense that you don't like and saying "all the donations go to this, see!" is just disingenuous.
Whether donating is worthwhile is another question, and it seems like the answer would be no. But it is a very different thing to say "All the donations just go to the CEO" instead of "I think the CEO is paid too much".
We could also cherry-pick in the other direction and say the CEO is negotiating deals to bring in the 90% of non-donation revenue of Mozilla, in which case you could easily say that his pay is a result of that revenue creation.
I'm not trying to defend Mozilla begging for donations when they really don't need them. My point is that cherry-picking one expense that you don't like, and then saying all the donations go to that, is cherry-picking the financials, and is misleading.
This is absolute nonsense. I am arguing that cherry-picking one expense is ridiculous. A much more reasonable approach would be to say that your donation is spread out over the entirety of the spend of Mozilla. That would suggest 1% of your donation is going to the CEO, not 100% of it like earlier commenters suggest.
It is dishonest to pick out one expense you don't like and equate that to all of the donation money being spent on just that. That's all. I don't know how you got from that to "this guy thinks money isn't fungible."
You gift me $100 on Venmo or cashapp or whatever to go dinner with my partner. I transfer it to my bank. It’s in the same bank account as all my other liquid cash. How can either of us ever say whether or not I spent that specific $100 on dinner?
Mozilla/FF has a pot of money that donations go in to, which is the same pot they use to operate as well as pay people, which includes their CEO.
> How can either of us ever say whether or not I spent that specific $100 on dinner?
there's no such thing as a specific $100.
The donation of the $100 was contingent on you not having $100 for dinner. If it turns out you _did_ have $100 for dinner, but now that you received $100 in donations, you can choose to also spend the extra $100 on something else (which the donor may or may not like).
It is on the donor to figure out whether donating the $100 is worth it - at least the recipient needs to declare all their financials, so they'd have the info to make a judgement on future donations.
Exactly, so the donations are not being funneled to the CEO, and suggesting that they are would be silly.
If you split up your donation by how Mozilla actually spends its money, then most goes to operating Mozilla, and a small amount (~1%) goes to paying the CEO.
Money is fungible. There's no such thing as funneling. There is ring fencing though - that's when a certain budget cannot exceed a certain source of revenue, some countries do this with road tax I think. Afaik Mozilla is not doing any ring fencing. It is perfectly appropriate to compare the fraction of their income as donations to the fraction of their costs as CEO salary.
Let’s be honest, the only advantage Firefox has over other browser and especially chrome is its extension support. And it’s not even Mozilla merit, it’s Google who removed MV2 support.
Same for Android, the only advantage it has is its extension support because Google is stubbornly not adding extension support to Android chromium even though such support was already done by an indie developer (kiwi browser) and open sourced.
They hang on by a thread.
The web need Firefox to be thriving but it’s been a sinking ship since a while.
They know perfectly what users want, what makes a good browser : speed, good user interface, low on energy, block ads,..
These are universal things.
Have you taken a look at Android Firefox user interface ? It’s horrendous, the url box for instance is already small but now there is 3 buttons (share, reading mode, translate) on top of it. I got to put the phone on landscape mode to see the url.
And it’s not even that I want to see the url every second, but it just looks and feel bad.
On computer, there are 4 different browser history. The traditional one that opens in an outdated window, the « recent one » that shows only the 10 or something last links , a better looking browser history when you go in the top left button where there are synced browser tabs, synced history ,.. and an history in the sidebar.
I'm not using the containers extension, since it only goes about 20% of the way and then they lost focus and stopped developing it. I think most people don't use it. It could have been a differentiator.
So... Here's an idea: stop wasting time and money on things like that, listen to the community, hire engineers, and make a browser that can be at the same level as Chrome. We already told you what we want and need, no need to keep asking.
Mozilla and the story on "How to waste money and resources" is getting tiresome at this point.
It's wild how often Mozilla asks for feedback, gets clear answers (less bloat, better performance, fix regressions), and then drops something like another random experiment no one asked for
Mozilla develops a better browser than Chrome in a lot of ways, and they do it with a tiny fraction of their budget. I would not describe that as "money wasting".
To be fair, most of Chrome’s budget is spent on developing ever more complex web standards to stay ahead of the competition, and to make sure no one will ever catch up to them.
So just think how much greater the browser could be if Mozilla put more of the money they get into improving Firefox instead of into pointless UI redesigns that only slow things down, or breaking existing functionality - not to mention all the other frivolous nonsense they seem preoccupied with instead of being a credible competitor to Google.
With how they've been in recent years it's almost as if they're trying to be inept competition, as if they're being paid by Google to suck - in fact, that is all but established by now.
> > stop wasting time and money on things like that
> What do you mean? The AMA?
I’m not the parent but it’s not the AMA, it’s paying multi-million dollar salaries to CEOs that layoff engineers and divert money to political campaigning.
We could have had a Servo based Firefox by now if the team hadn't been canned in 2020 instead of Mitchell Baker giving herself a $3 million pay increase every year.
It's shameful to then come cap in hand for donations after that.
I had an email from Mozilla last week on how to prepare my phone for participation in violent political demonstrations.
I have to ask myself, what does this have to do with web browsers?
Keeping up with web standards, and dropping the advertising rubbish that's making them somehow atrophy users faster than they were before.
Otherwise, they'll be gone. Thunderbird has proven people are willing to donate millions if they know their money will go directly to the software. In 2022, Thunderbird collected ~6 million in donations (~20 million users) compared to Mozilla's ~9 million (from >200 million users)
Mozilla made $826.6M in 2024. If they got thunderbird levels of support $6/20 firefox would bring in $60 million. Aka 7% of current revenue. Idk all their revenue sources so idk what the overall picture would be, but my gut says $60mil wouldn’t cut it and firefox will never get the support thunderbird gets because of different user bases.
Straight to under 0.5% usage no doubt. Making a mockery of all the unpaid people who have committed code over the years. The Mozilla foundation have shirked their responsibility as a bastion against commercial interests.
The kneejerk Mozilla hate on HN gets so fucking tedious.
Google's marketing budget for Chrome is greater than Mozilla's entire budget. They sponsor a Formula 1 team FFS. They spent a decade paying off Adobe, Java, AVG, Avast and all the other shitty free AV softwares to auto-install Chrome. They targeted Firefox users with Chrome ads on the homepages of Google and YouTube. That's literally billions of dollars worth of marketing alone that they don't even have to pay for.
Mozilla's competitors (Google, Microsoft, Apple) are collectively worth the GDP of three entire continents combined (Africa, South America, Australia) with a couple trillion USD to spare. Each controls an operating system (or two) with more than a billion users each on which their browsers are pre-installed.
No shit they struggle to compete on brand and marketshare. They're basically forced by the economics of the market to do search deals with Google, and whenever they try to develop independent sources of revenue people shit on them for that too. People shit on them for making deals with Google and make insinuations about them being "controlled opposition" because of that dependency, but also shit on them for pursuing any other independent sources of revenue, like the branded VPN service or the innocuous cross-promotion of that Disney movie with the Red Panda.
People shat on them for trying to compete with Android via FirefoxOS because the bet didn't work out, even though it was probably the only way they could have avoided this outcome and gained real independence, had it worked out.
"Just focus on Firefox", they say - unless that means laying off people that work on Rust, or AV1, or Opus, or WebAssembly, or Let's Encrypt, or experimental browser engines that wouldn't have been production-ready for a decade. According to HN, Mozilla should focus but also keep churning out and spinning off research projects, but only successful research projects, not ones that fail. Anything Mozilla does is always retroactively terrible if it fails but if it works out great they never get credit for it anyway.
The idea behind the parent comment is not that they can't compete, but they are specifically made not to.
Sort of a puppet browser made only for proving the court that the giants are not technically a monopoly, while ranking a bare minimum number of users for them to count.
While that's not entirely unreasonable, I don't think that's the doom of Mozilla.
Puppet or not, their tangled codebase makes it a pita to contribute anything if you're not being paid a salary for it.
Despite having a high expectation for the "free browser", deep down we know that it's the same "Free in theory" software, not unlike Java or Vscode.
Software that's made by a company and once they stop pouring money on corporate development and support the project will become a zombie in no time.
It is completely unreasonable and (willfully) ignores the long, long list of places where Mozilla has fought against the other vendors including (especially) Google on privacy grounds.
It's the sort of thing people say mostly for their own self-satisfaction, without actually thinking about it or trying to figure out the answer. Like: "both parties are the same" or "what have the Romans ever done for us"
Yes, I agree completely. You cannot even compare Chrome and Firefox because the sheer privacy violations of Chrome make it not a worthy competitor. The difference is, nobody cares.
Google develops Chrome and Chrome relies entirely on Google's money. Google is the default search engine. They are much, much, MUCH more tightly coupled to Google than Firefox could ever be.
But nobody says anything. And yet, Firefox makes Google the default search engine, and everyone has a think piece on it. Firefox is dead, they say, they're just Google's puppet. Then what is Chrome?
Mozilla can do a lot more to fight on privacy grounds. I realize it isn't going to happen since even enabling a lot of the existing privacy features by default is going to break many websites (which, in the minds of most people, would reflect a broken web browser), so they are stuck talking about it while end users have to jump through a bunch of hoops if they want to get the browser as it is advertised.
They don't need alternative revenue streams. Just take the millions they receive from Google and spend it on tech. Cut out all the warm and fuzzy political marketing bullshit and all the management that have promoted it.
It is not so clear cut now, is it? The often silly wannabe social justice stuff does cost money, and their management does get record high payments, even though they don't do a particularly good job, and even though important engineering projects were cut. Mozilla's behavior is not a culture of engineering, that fosters trust in the browser product.
The address bar has become cluttered with buttons THAT SHOULDN'T BE THERE: "home" (useless), "translate" (won't go away no matter the setting), and now "share" (for real!?), "reading mode"; remove them from there, I can barely see the first few letters of the address! Also way too much spacing around them
I always have to manually close the previous tab when tapping on a link, let us reuse them instead, you may call us owls or wharever, but we don't like having zillions of tabs open to be closed automatically after x time
Improve speed, it's currently the slowest browser out there
Allow more customization (like about:config) and extensions, and for ex. to be able to remove the useless buttons from the address bar
if there's one surprising thing I've learnt from HN users, it's that there're loads of people out there who run browsers with zillions of tabs open all the time
I was going to say that different people have different needs, but many of the things you bring up simply aren't true or are context dependent. For example: translate and share are not on the address bar (they are accessed via a menu, along with many other things, that is on the address bar). For the most part, tabs are reused. The main exception is when sites tell the browser to open a link in a new window.
Firefox may be far from perfect, but I've found it must more malleable than Chrome.
They move things in mobile UI a lot, so the docs might not reflect that. I know it used to look like on this screenshot, but I haven't had it in my Nightly for a while.
FWIW about:config is available in beta and nightly on android, my main browser was nightly for a while but it sometimes was too unstable, so I switched to beta as my daily, which seems to be stable.
Honestly, "reading mode" is the one reason I switched to firefox on mobile. When I open a page with tons of ads and popups, it gets rid of all of that.
Firefox should focus on privacy, keeping extensions viable, and implementing standards, so they don't get swamped by competition.
No one really cares about a majority of the UX sugar, IMO.
I personally find the LLM context menu useful and reading mode awesome, but these are not features that by themselves would drive me to use the browser.
I feel like the addition of LLMs is an introduction to finding another source of revenue. That Perplexity pop-up we've been shown lately seems like an experiment in that.
Sadly "I'd like Firefox to not be owned by an advertising/surveillance company" is unlikely to be considered in that forum (even if I were prepared to sign up to comment).
Everything else is minor details compared to that.
(Yes, this was posted using LibreWolf, but I often wonder if I can even trust that, having the vast majority of it's code written and managed by Mozilla.)
This is the key differentiator Mozilla seems to deliberately avoid understanding. Chrome is a perfectly okay browser from almost every perspective: standards, functionality, performance, etc. What Chrome is not good at and can never be good at while it's owned by an advertising company is respecting user choice to disable advertising and choose privacy models that exclude the browser company.
Features and bugfixes are important, but they're table stakes for an everyday browser. They aren't enough to sell it.
There are quite a few browser that don't ever need extensions to block ads. There's thus no reason for me to use Firefox (and I don't want to, until it's managed by Mozilla).
I didn't downvote you, but your vague mentioning of some browsers "that don't ever need extensions to block ads" is not helpful at all and sounds wrong to me. There are only three major browser engines in the world, and only Firefox's one blocks ads reliably.
Well, I dont see ads in my non-FF browser. Don't know what else I could say. And, to be precise, FF doesn't block anything by itself. It just relies on an the job of unpaid volunteers to block ads.
> Features and bugfixes are important, but they're table stakes for an everyday browser. They aren't enough to sell it.
One of the reasons I've moved to Chrome is because of the memory problems with Mozilla that I've been experiencing for years. Every so often I look up other people who've been having the same issues. They seem to have been reported for years, but there's often a surprising amount of hostility from Firefox fans whenever they get mentioned.
As an aside, both Firefox and Chrome made their browsers significantly worse when they changed the order of windows in the windows menu from chronological to alphabetical.
> Chrome is a perfectly okay browser from almost every perspective
No, it isn't. They killed adblock, and have a business model of throttling other browsers to force people to Chrome (Youtube throttling) and doing digital fingerprinting with exclusive-only Chrome finger prints as seen here on HN the other day.
Firefox has anonym, where it sells your 'anonymous data'
I just looked, go to Settings -> type advert and you'll see
Website Advertising Preferences
Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement
This helps sites understand how their ads perform without collecting data about you. Learn more
It comes pre-checked for you.
I use Chromium for dev stuff, but now; there's no ublock origin.
I tried to be clear about how Chrome is fine in most respects except for the incentives conflict, and you've simply pointed out symptoms stemming from that fundamental issue. Are we actually disagreeing or do you just dislike how I phrased it?
I've yet to have one single problem after running Firefox as my main driver for ~3 months. Only 2 webpages have made me quickly open Chrome instead to check them out, and the content wasn't worth engaging for long.
It puzzles me how more programmers don't switch to a real open source browser not controlled by an advertising giant which will use their overwhelming monopolistic force to steer the way browsers work so that it benefits its bottom line.
I used it for many years but ultimately abandoned it because its memory use was just unacceptably high. A couple of windows with 30-40 tabs in each would eat all my laptop's memory - Chromium in a similar setup will sit around 40% used. I don't know what Firefox is doing but it's crazy far off the pace there.
Mozilla should be focusing on fixing things like that and making the browser be good before the barely related campaigning, let alone the whole "we're going to be an advertising business as well" thing.
I think clearly Google want Firefox alive as a 'competitor', and they explicitly are buying that Google search is the default. I highly doubt they have any agreements limiting Firefox's market share or features though - that would undo the benefit of it being a competitor if it ever came out, but more significantly they don't have to. Mozilla have managed to achieve all that on their own. I actually think Google would probably rather that Firefox was at say 10% market share so they had a more legit argument that it was a competitor.
I actually prefer it the way it is now. For me, private mode is effectively an extra temporary profile that is full featured, but wiped once the last window is closed. I usually don't need more than one.
But I understand that other people have other needs. It can be very useful for developers for instance. Make it an option, maybe.
I see both. I wouldn't want every tab to be separate but I occasionally want to have more than one independent private profile at a time. It would be nice if I could do this. Any sort of ephemeral container tabs option would probably satisfy this option and could maybe even remove most of my use of private browsing if I could just open ephemeral containers in an otherwise regular window.
I might be the only one but I'm quite annoyed that Safari's incognito mode works like this. I WANT it to have knowledge of all the other incognito tabs of the same window. Only when I make a new incognito window, it should be a new container.
Pretty interesting how preferences can vary, because this bothers me everytime I use incognito mode on safari and think, can this not just work like in Firefox.
On desktop OSes, I definitely also prefer that behavior. I wonder if Safari behaves like that for consistency with iOS, where there isn't any hierarchy above tabs, so it would be a choice between no separation at all or sandboxing each tab individually?
In the old days logging in twice would bother me as is have to type in a password, but now with password manager and fingerprint/face scan it's low effort.
It's very handy for sites where you may have more than account
> It's very handy for sites where you may have more than account
For that Firefox's container tabs are a much handier option as you can stay logged in and also open new tabs that are already logged in. It has colours to tell apart which tab is part of which container
> The comment was: make the Firefox containers work in private mode.
My solution to this is having multiple Firefox profiles where the default one clears all history/cache/etc automatically upon closing (default in Librewolf). It's not technically private mode so containers work.
Yes, that's the one I want fixing, and possibly moving from extension to feature.
Why would you create a privacy tool, and then not offer it in private mode. Makes no sense.
(You can setup Firefox so it's permanently in Private Mode and clears history and data on exit - as per Libre comment above -,which is how I have it set)
I still feel that the isolation is backwards. Instead of having me to split containers, ask me to merge things like google.com and youtube.com, but by default keep every domain isolated.
It would be great if they restored the `Smart Bookmarks` feature they removed a number of years ago. Smart Bookmarks were fantastic. Add your favorite sites' RSS feeds to your bookmark toolbar and you'd have all the recent headlines from all your favorite sites at one click. Fortunately I wasn't the only one that appreciated this long neglected feature so someone created Livemarks (https://github.com/nt1m/livemarks/) that mostly replicated its functionality, but it's not quite the same as having native support for them.
Sometimes I cannot close tabs by clicking the X, or refresh/go-forward/go-back using the buttons next to the address bar.
Computer B:
Sometimes I get downloads that have "Unknown time left" (0 bytes/sec) when the X of X KB/MB is 100% and you can't remove it from the downloads dropdown.
I just discovered a new bug on Computer B, clicking the hamburger menu doesn't do anything.
Both are Ubuntu.
(I'm not a fan of the new menu in Firefox Beta for Android. I guess it looks nicer due to the greater whitespace, it just break muscle memory and has less options/selections.)
I wonder, if these problems aren't Ubuntu fault, since it forces snap version of Firefox on you. I had Firefox crashing repeatedly on me with the snap version. Maybe switching to Firefox apt repo would help? (I tried the repo, but before I had chance to test it properly, I found I could use Debian instead of Ubuntu and reinstalled immediately.)
I just made the switch to ubuntu as my main os from windows. Firefox on windows never seemed to have any problems. Now I keep getting the same problem as your computer a. It doesnt happen every time, and i havent figured out the pattern.
But clicking the x to close a tab does nothing, middle clicking the tab still closes it. Any time this problem starts I also have issues using the mouse middle button to scroll (on all apps, not just ff) Very, very annoying. Since these issues seem linked it seems bigger than just ff.
At the end of the day, if you want to see these types of bugs fixed then by far the fastest way is to report them, which will probably mean you'll have to spend some time to track down what's causing that on your system. I have generally found reporting bugs to Firefox to be a reasonably positive experience.
What I’d like to see is a setting that prevents websites from opening links in new tabs. eBay and AliExpress, specifically, but I’m sure others do it too.
I haven’t found a way to block this very annoying behaviour in any browser, short of installing “new tab blocker” browser extensions, but they are unreliable.
This was obvious to anybody with half a brain at the time of the pitchfork mob. At least a lot of folks got to feel like they were on the right side of history, one supposes. That was surely worth the free and open browser.
I want nothing more now from Firefox than iterative performance improvements across all platforms and adherence to web standards. That’s it. Let extensions handle all the other crap.
Tbh I disagree, the official vertical tab support is so nice and less janky than any of the extensions I used that had this functionality
After opening FF while previously using Arc for a while I was super happy with the usability improvements (that don’t seem to have impacted older workflows fortunately… big fan of how FF makes it easy to customize the toolbar etc)
I tried Tree-style tabs and Sidebery, and I bounced off of both. The new native vertical tabs feature works for me, and it is the most impactful feature they've shipped in years for my particular firefox experience.
The biggest benefit I've seen is that it automatically hides the old tab bar at the top. Before that, you had to dig into some hidden profile directory and modify some userchrome CSS file and modify the CSS directly hoping it would work.
I use this method personally and it works great on GNOME and KDE. First set `toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets` to true in `about:config` then find your profile directory in `about:profiles`.
cd $FIREFOX_PROFILE_DIR
cd chrome
git clone https://github.com/MrOtherGuy/firefox-csshacks
touch userChrome.css
Back when I tried sidebery, there was some weird issue where either shift-click or right clicking didn't work on mac, and that turned me off. I just tried it again, and both work fine now.
One other feature that is nice for me is the ability to collapse the sidebar to just the tab icons. It's a nice middle ground between being able to see what I have open and getting a full screen experience.
TST and Sidebery are both fantastic extensions, I don't think they do anything wrong. For whatever reason though, the FF native implementation worked for me where they didn't
I'll wager most users are happy with primitive over advanced.
For example, I sometimes run with hundreds of tabs and my wife has many thousands, at all times. My needs and hers are very different from typical users who have single digits numbers of tabs open, heavily biased toward the low end.
Of course I would prefer TST or Sideberry, but I'm not like most users. For most users, the Firefox experience is superior to Sideberry for its ease of use and fewer failure modes.
Yes, Firefox should focus on being a lean mean machine, with the caveat that it returns to exposing its API and making it easily accessible for anyone who wants to go beyond that principle of leanness at the expense of speed or memory.
I’d even go so far as to say that extensions should have full control over Firefox again. They shouldn’t have to wait 20 years for a tray icon on minimize feature to be added or require external apps to add that feature on certain operating systems. Min2Tray existed. They should have the ability to completely alter the UI to make it function however you want. For example, the old search was great for keyboard users. A couple of strokes and you could switch search engines to site specific ones. Now it takes dozens. And when they all have the same icon, it is a painful experience. There was even at one point an add-on to restore that functionality. All this should be exposed.
The extension and plugin infrastructure didn’t die. It was killed! If security is a concern, just add more warning cones and blood red messages.
In my personal opinion, while the flexibility of the old XUL addons was amazing, the two big issues are compatibility and performance.
Compatibility: these addons could be broken very easily because they could depend on almost anything, and with the monthly release cycle, it is very difficult for mod authors to keep up. For instance, some addons would work by taking a core browser function written in JS, convert it to a string, run a regular expression to edit the string, then use eval to create a new function to replace the old one. In some release, the syntax of the "convert a function to a string" output changed slightly and it broke these addons, because it broke the regexp they were using.
Performance: XUL addons could do all sorts of things that are horrible for performance, and there was no real way for a user to tell what was causing it, because the addon wasn't isolated in any way. I ran into somebody who was having severe performance issues because the browser was generating colossal amounts of garbage for no reason. It eventually turned out that on a whim they'd installed a "LaTeX the World" addon, which would look for LaTeX typesetting instructions on pages and replace it with the nice looking output. The problem was, the way it worked was that every 10 seconds or so it would convert the entire contents of every single tab you had open into a zillion strings, search those strings, then throw them out.
The problem isn't security per se, it's compatibility. Exposing all the browser internals to extensions means that all the internals are part of the platform's public API and it's almost impossible to change anything. A lot of HN users will be like "that's fine, software should be finished, I don't want any more features", but things like performance and especially security require ongoing maintenance. The particular thing that killed off Firefox's old extension model was that it blocked migration to a multi-process architecture, which was clearly necessary even at the time and became even moreso when Spectre showed up a couple years later. "Warning cones and blood red messages" do not solve this because a vulnerable architecture exposes all users to exploitation, not just those who choose to use sketchy extensions.
(Also we know from long experience that "warning cones and blood red messages" don't in practice suffice to prevent end users from being exploited, but that's a separate issue.)
It should also be pointed out that the Firefox devs spent years and countless dev hours trying to keep the old extension system and solve the problems wrt. multi-process, security, performance, and compatibility. They removed the extension system only after they tried everything else, and mostly failed.
They also spent tons of effort explaining the background of these choices and why they felt they had no choice and this was the only path forward. It's disappointing people are still coming up with this "oh, why don't they just [..]?!" type stuff.
The concept of "web standards" is odd because new "standards" keep getting added. And what's more, they're being added rather promiscuously by an entity with almost unlimited resources, who is also the primary competitor. ;)
I abandoned Firefox because it was dragging its feet on some vital web standards such as WebGPU and import maps. The former is obvious. The latter is such a massive quality of life improvement for devs (makes build systems obsolete) that I simply could no longer care for Firefox which ignored it for the longest time.
That's literally the process. TC39 in particular requires two real world implementations to exist before some new feature becomes a formalized part of the standards.
Several proposals backed by "the primary competitor" failed to get through the process, or were radically changed to make other implementors happy.
You don't want that though. Nobody wants that. Browsers have been nothing but edge-case handlers since servers figured out they could segment by user-agent, and users realized they could lie about their agent.
Then they should improve the ground for addons too. Add more API, more abilities. I'm still waiting for Firefox improving the shortcut-handling, gaining back the level we once had with extensions like vimperator. How long is this now? 8 years of broken promises?
Agreed! I stuck with Firefox for a long time, but within the last year moved to Brave because too many sites were breaking. To your list I'd add "adblock," though, because it seems like extension standards are converging on a point where that's more effectively scaffolded inside the browser.
I really have to emphasize that browser extensions are a terrible security nightmare and generally speaking, should be avoided at all costs. I understand they're fun and convenient, but it's one of those things that really doesn't age well into our modern cybersecurity issues.
Running a browser without an adblock extension is an even worse cybersecurity issue, since tracking online is so extensive. I live in a country where the government routinely buys surveillance data from data collection companies to spy on us. But even if you don’t live in the US, it’s still a good thing to protect your privacy.
This sort of used to be true and mostly isn't today. Firefox and Edge both have reasonably good tracking prevention features. They rival Privacy Badger in effectiveness (it's largely moot these days), and the only thing between tracking prevention and ad blocking is that the latter also focuses on protecting your poor innocent eyes from advertising, which I mostly couldn't care less about if the tracking is being defeated.
I think if you are extremely narrowly scoping well-trusted ad blockers, you may be okay, as long as you understand you are trusting the ad blocker with your banking info. But it would be far better for a browser to include capabilities in first-party and eradicate extensions altogether.
A Pihole is also far safer than an adblock extension, because it can't see your decrypted your web traffic the way a browser extension can.
I’ve used Firefox for years and really wanted to stick with it, but too many sites keep breaking. I originally ditched Chrome because it chewed through my RAM, but on the new M4 MacBook I’ve got headroom, so I’ve reluctantly gone back to Chrome. Painful switch, but I don’t have much choice right now.
It's somewhat of a taboo around here, and every time I have mentioned this there has been a bunch of responses certifying that Firerox works perfectly for them.
Firefox has this really unsolved issue for me where firefox and firefox based forks basically first load through all of my cache which after months of using will take literal minutes and then and only then would my search queries / network requests by browser take place.
That means, to use my browser I have to wait literally minutes and yesterday, it was so long somehow on Zen (I created an issue there but they linked me to the firefox (downstream?) issue which wasn't solved in like sooo many years)
I basically just use a password manager and just create a new profile and start afresh most of the times but still its a little inconvenient I guess.
I had to move to Brave/Vanadium on Android because Firefox is slow as hell. It happens when you log in, which for me is the whole point, as that's what I use on my computer (Linux).
These luke-warm takes become even more luke-warm when you look at the competition.
You have Chrome, which disrespects it's users as a principle. And then you have chromium forks, which rely on Google for... let's see here... 99.99% of their application's code.
Mozilla might make mistakes, but next to Google, they are angel.
Mozilla brings in a lot of money and they're sitting on a pile of cash. There's nothing even remotely close to pressure to become lean. They could double the CEO compensation and it wouldn't even be noticed. They have the opposite problem, a lot of money but not enough worthwhile ventures to invest it in.
Everyone I know who works on Firefox says their team is understaffed and people are not always being replaced when they leave. They could stand to invest a lot more (or more efficiently) into their core product.
Could they hire more people to ask Firefox users what they want Mozilla to work on? They’d probably say Firefox features and bug fixes. There are people who could do the work in exchange for some of that money. I don’t think this is a case of too much money chasing too little profits, which seems to be what you’re suggesting.
If I get a nickel every time an advertising company in possession of a mainstream web browser gains a reputation for an accumulated history of product graveyards, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice.
We might be able to get you up to a whole dollar, just listing off the various chat/messaging apps Google has killed off over the years. I take it as an opportunity to move to FOSS/self-hosted substitutes when that happens.
I do all my dev in Firefox and rarely test in Chrome. I've been made aware of maybe a handful of issues over many many years doing it this way. If it works in Firefox, 99.9% of the time, it's also working in Chrome.
it is true that iphones itself isn't a monopoly (yet), but i reckon consumer protection should extend to the ability to install arbitrary software on a device they purchased, regardless of the intent of the company selling the device.
Firefox only supports a limited number of alphabetic text translations, and other third-party plugins are not as convenient as Chrome & Edge.That's why I gave up on using it.
When are we getting Mac biometric support for extensions? I want to be able to use my Touch ID with my password manager on my Mac! Do any HNers have solutions for this (Dashlane)?
I interact with physical devices frequently. Mozilla's adamant refusal to implement WebSerial and WebUsb in Firefox forces me to install Chrome on every platform i use. That is just an asinine hill to die on.
So, basically, they noticed some potential insecurities in the implementation proposed by Google. Instead of negotiating modifications to the spec like adults, they threw their toys out of the stroller and refused to participate.
What a bunch of idiots. They seem to have a completely misguided concept of what a browser is. They still have a 1990s mindset of the browser being a window into the Internet, instead of the universal UI that it has become today.
Well, the reason is in the links I provided, and the reasoning doesn't scream arrogance to me.
Personally, I think choice is great. Why be upset when you can download chromium (it is supported by pretty much any platform FF is) and use it to do all sorts of stuff with WebUSB, if you are into that?
Still, I would like to see FF disable these features by default and allow opt-in. I don't see a great reason to avoid implementing them behind some "wall" (other than to avoid an increase in a concealed attack surface).
It literally is their job. One of Mozilla's roles is to give their opinion on proposed web standards. It's one of the factors that determines what actually becomes a standard. WebUSB is Chrome (and derivatives) only at the moment. You can not like where they landed, perfectly valid, but they were asked.
Yes, but instead of saying "this spec is shit and full of vulnerabilities. Let's work on improving it", they just refused to participate in the discussion. What a childish POV.
I don't think that's a fair summary of Mozillas Position on the WebBluetooth/WebSerial/WebUSB specs. Interacting with arbitary devices has arbitrary consequences, mozilla seems to assume users are not able to understand these consequences and therefore cannot consent to it.
I was reading a couple of days ago the Frank Miller's Robocop comic series. I laughed so hard at the comment/response of "Dr. Love" when asked "have you sold out?" and the response was "I'm reposisioned Lilac to where I can more efficaciously relate values of cooperation and participation to our children. Where I can infuse a spirit of caring and sharing to marketing and media."
Then she (Dr. Love) continues to say... "I welcome this change to dialogue. To relate to you OCP's commitment...."
So when I read the FF's post, Dr. Love and the beginning of a big spin came to mind!
Uh yeah, rip nearly every feature out of Firefox and move it to “official extensions” that you can install optionally.
Go on a hardcore crusade on performance and battery life. Safari currently uses half the amount of energy compared to Firefox (according to macOS measurements), so I switched from Firefox to Safari and noticed hours of difference in battery life when I’m out and about.
I don't think Firefox uses meaningfully more energy due to "optional features", but rather due to simply not optimizing for battery efficiency at the same level that Apple does for Safari.
That type of optimization requires tons of profiling and is less glamorous than implementing new features, so I could see how it's hard to prioritize for Mozilla, especially if optimizations might look very different across OSes.
> rip nearly every feature out of Firefox and move it to “official extensions” that you can install optionally.
Only if they properly maintain those APIs. I'm still salty that they had tab groups, then broke that feature out to an extension, then killed the extension. (Then, much later, recreated the feature over again)
But yes, if done well modularity is probably good from a development perspective too.
Vulkan is the modern option, the difference is not being stuck with legacy paths and using something that allows explicit sync.
Wayland is also the modern option, so I don't really worry about X11 use cases. For remote desktops, better to use something like FreeRDP anyway. X11 forwarding is much worse in every sense.
I think KDE are working on integrating FreeRDP server into Plasma for seamless usage.
Another thing to add for Firefox would be may be switching to Vulkan video from VAAPI (or at least having it as an option since ffmpeg already supports it) and using hardware acceleration for video encoding too, not just for video decoding.
X11 can also do remote window forwarding, not just desktops which is super handy. Your windows appear in the remote computer with its own window manager just like you run them locally. One of the reasons I still use X.
For barebones window forwarding (no input) I use something like gpu-screen-recorder with SRT streaming output and play the result on the other end with mpv / ffplay.
Haven't looked into it, but FreeRDP might support specific window forwarding too rather than the whole desktop.
If you need something fancier there is Sunshine / Moonlight, but they still have an issue with not using Pipewire for window / screen capturing (and kmsgrab is not really the proper way to do it).
Anyway, X11 is a complete dead end in general so it's not really a viable option for anything serious.
X11 may be a dead end but Wayland sucks as a replacement, so for now, I see no other option than supporting them both.
It may be technically possible to do the equivalent do X11 forwarding with Wayland, that is connecting to a server with a ssh terminal (no remote desktop, headless server), run a GUI app, and have it display its windows on my own desktop as if it was running locally. The problem is that Wayland is 17 years old and I still can't.
FreeRDP is pretty feature rich, so I wouldn't call it a kludge.
For any kind decent remote desktop access you need good performance, specifically low latency. X11 just isn't there.
Headless server is headless server - you can't have anything in such case there with X11 either. If you want to forward X11, you need X server, which means it's already not headless.
Instead of X server you can have any Wayland compositor (Wayland server) and whatever part that provides streaming (FreeRDP or what not).
So I don't see how X11 is any better - it's just worse due to having abysmal performance. X11 was never designed for real world remote desktop usage - it just happens to have network transparency. So it's X11 that's a kludge for such scenario if anything.
> Headless server is headless server - you can't have anything in such case there with X11 either. If you want to forward X11, you need X server, which means it's already not headless.
To me this reads a bit confused, but perhaps I'm misreading it? In X11 terminology the server is sitting in front of you (the one that draws to the screen), so no, you don't need need the remote host to be running X11 server.
You do need the program that draws to the screen, but I think it's fair to say the remote host is headless if it doesn't have a GPU nor a program to interface with the GPU at all. All the remote host needs is code to interact with such a server over TCP or Unix domain sockets. And that code is tiny, even small computers without memory for frame buffer can do it.
> So I don't see how X11 is any better - it's just worse due to having abysmal performance. X11 was never designed for real world remote desktop usage - it just happens to have network transparency. So it's X11 that's a kludge for such scenario if anything.
I think X11 was actually pretty great at the time it was created, i.e. clients can create ids and use them in their requests (no round-trip to the server) and server can contain large client bitmaps that the client can operate on, but sometimes poor client coding can kill the performance over the network. As worst offender I once noticed VirtualBox did a looooot of synchronous property requests during its startup instead of doing them in concurrently, stretching the startup time from seconds to minute or more. (Whether it truly needed those properties in the first place is another question.)
Sending the complete interaction as a video stream? That's what I'd call a hack—though X11 should be modernized in various aspects, for example to support more advanced encodings for media, controlled by the client.
In some sense the web is the direction where I would have liked to see X11 going: still controlled by the client, but some light server-side code could be used to render and interact with the widgets. This way clicks would react immediately, but you would still be interacting with the actual service running on the remote host, not just a local program.
(Another reason why I consider X11 better is the separation of the server and the compositor.)
Yeah, I've seen it in action (nomachine/nx) It's not bad. But problem is that it's not open source, so it's sort of DOA, unlike all the open options. They should have opened it from the start for it to be relevant.
Same here, vanilla Firefox snap on Ubuntu. If anything, Firefox with hundreds (literally) of tabs starts way faster than Chrome with 10, thanks to lazy its loading. RAM usage has always been stellar in Firefox, in my experience.
Maybe their distro has a broken Firefox package, they messed with the default installation, have too many extensions, or malware? A slow mechanical disk?
Maybe try creating a new profile? I've had cases where a profile can cause Weird Shit™ to happen. Kind of annoying though. Probably something in a SQLite database or some such, but I didn't have the interest to track it down.
I've experienced this since 2018 across all versions of linux mint since 2018.
The problem appeared to be a lot of unnecessary disk io coupled with DNA lookup that only get done after every single read request is complete. This means that when tab #10 is taking long to read whatever from disk it blocks every other tab.
I'm noticing it on a fast SSD, though it's more like 5-10s after launching. No issues once it's running. I'd guess it's related to my very old and large profile.
Mozilla should drop this BS, and instead deliver on feature parity of web extension API with the old XUL plugin system. Yes; I'm still salty about that.
I use FF as a primary browser on Desktop and Nightly in Android. There's much I could say about FF, but I think it would be futile.
In Debian, I'd use FF-LTS and regular FF. Since moving to Void, xbps allows only one version, so I use FF and Vivaldi.
I'd appreciate any opinions on Vivaldi. It's the only functional alternative browser I've found in the repos. But I have to start it with:
LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1
Which sucks, and applies to OpenShot and a lot of other software that gets fussy with intel chips in some versions of Linux. Chromium I prefer to avoid, and it wants a password to initiate, which I understand but refuse to comply with. But that's all aside the point. Opinions, please...
Firefox has search based discover of content on the web, but it has failed to keep up with the trend of discovery using recommendation feeds. Firefox should be able to recommend new web pages I would be interested in.
No, thanks. After I finish my task on my browser, I would take a break offline rather than indulging into an endless stream of "You May Also Like". Actually, I would thank FF for not filling their homepage with these noises.
Getting people to use Firefox less and take more breaks from it is not how you gain market share. You need to make it easy for people to find content they are interested in.
Firefox should ship with a local AI agent that can browse, summarize, and act on the web — entirely on-device.
I don’t want to send my searches through Google or OpenAI just to get basic tasks done. Give me a sandboxed local model that can:
* Read pages and data that’s loaded through it
* Summarize content
* Act on rule-based prompts I define (e.g. auto-reply in Slack, triage emails, autofill forms, upvote followed author’s posts…)
Let me load a Slack tab and have the AI draft replies for me. Same for Gmail. Basically, let Firefox interact with the web on my behalf and train the AI to be my assistant.
Beyond that, extensions already do most of what I need — but a built-in, private AI agent would actually move the needle.
I know there are plenty of more serious issues people have with Mozilla's direction and focus, but patronizing stuff like this really grinds my gears.
> Which animal best represents your Firefox browsing style? [List of emoji animals]
The marketing/PR trend of speaking to communities as though they're kindergartners is distracting and off-putting. This is the most egregious part but the whole post has a similar tone.
I'll note that I'm not saying outreach should necessarily be professional or devoid of fun/humor. There's just a sterile, saccharine way about Mozilla's community engagement that evokes artificiality.
Thank you for loving Firefox - https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/m/m-p/16863/highl...
This is an amazing rant! Too bad it was only had 4 comments here at the time:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33293892
> Ah, but does anyone from Mozilla take any notice of our grumbling and complaining here?
Apparently, no. Bodes well for this Q&A with someone thoroughly air-gapped from development and management.
I think the root problem here is that the communication isn't genuine. It's marketing trying to craft a certain brand image instead of actual stakeholders being open about the what is going on with the project.
Don't forget colorways, the non-feature that still needed to be force-fed to us. I assumed people who wanted to change the color theme already could, and that the limited time and ebergy available were being spent on things like compatibility and escaping from Google.
Wasn't that added around the same time where they removed compact mode from the UI because supposedly it was too much of a burden to maintain?
This all started with the "Engagement Team" like … 15+ years ago. I was there (part of the team). They started with mascots, being cute, having this infantilizing attitude towards users.
They killed the dino logo:
- https://imghost.online/GBswvjTZ38PtAnf
- https://imghost.online/0HTX7YVnImu49qc
We were hackers, we became "cute and inclusive" (nothing wrong about inclusive… it just became the brand).
Fuck this.
Edit: I said 10+ years… but actually, it was more like 15 years ago.
Kinda hard to be inclusive if no one uses your browser. The greatest thing Mozilla could do for inclusiveness is to have more users. Not treat your users like children.
Agreed, this just looks really tone deaf and amateurish. And it's avoiding the bigger issues. There are plenty and they actually need dealing with. Even just acknowledging some of those issues would be progress.
There must be internal discussion on this. I imagine more than a few shouty meetings might have happened. This indicates to me that management doesn't know how to deal with that and clearly isn't dealing with anything effectively. If anything this makes me more worried, not less worried about how things are going at Mozilla.
More rust/C++ writing, less cuddly animals please. Firefox needs more people that work on the product and are allowed to work on the product not people that do busywork like this and just get in the way.
I'm an actual user BTW. The product is fine for me. Performance is great and steadily improving. My main concern is that the developers are allowed to stay on mission and empowered to do that. Which means doubling down on making sure I never get confronted with shitty ads, popups, and other advertising abuse. And that it keeps up technically with Chromium and Webkit in terms of standards support.
100%.
Also, I think we can sense where Firefox is going. Mozilla is a mismanaged company. A victim of itself and Google's monopoly/life support.
>> The marketing/PR trend of speaking to communities as though they're kindergartners is distracting and off-putting.
I think this is just changing with the times. Go back a bit further and the idea of communities around products is the new cool thing. Personally I find that a bit weird. We have a whole generation of people who find social media managers talking to each other hilarious.
Are Mozilla’s donations still roughly equal to their CEO’s compensation [1][2]?
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/a... ”$7.8M in donations from the public, grants from foundations, and government funding” in 2023
[2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-990... $6.9mm in 2022, page 7
Meredith Whittaker at Signal made < $800K [1]. I can't fathom how $6.9M is even remotely acceptable.
[1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...
A plant from Google.
Firefox is an antitrust litigation sponge, but you have to keep it rudderless and ineffective.
How on point.
In my limited career I have been in several projects whose plight didn't make any sense -- with all the smart people and the effort poured over them, how could the disaster continue to unfold! -- until I realized failure rather than success was the goal.
That's insane :/. But, maybe, "on the bright side", The Mozilla Foundation is unrelated in some sense to Firefox? AFAIK, they don't spend any of their money on it anyway.
The whole Mozilla situation is even more of a scam than how the Wikimedia Foundation uses sob stories about paying for Wikipedia to get people to donate money to an entity which spends almost no money on Wikipedia... but, at least it does run Wikipedia! lol :/.
There is another interesting detail from your reference that makes it seem even worse to me: it says the CEO's salary is "paid only by a related for-profit"; at first, I was thinking "ok, at least the Foundation in fact is spending the money it is being donated (though, not on Firefox)"... but then I realized that means the Corporation is, in fact, spending $7m that it could have spent on Firefox.
> AFAIK, they don't spend any of their money on it anyway
The glass-half-full take I heard a while back was: at least every dollar they take from the foundation donations for these causes is a dollar that they could have found a way to take from Firefox development instead.
Every dollar they take from the foundation donations for these causes is a dollar that enables them to better sabotage Firefox development actually. If they were starved like cancerous tumour the body might heal and survive.
Mozilla's setup feels more like a shell game
I don't really understand the angst against the Wikimedia Foundation.
They are transparent. No one's being conned into donating. As long as Wikipedia is running fine, and is not degrading, and they're not actively harming it, I don't care. People routinely spend money on much worse things. Is donating $3 to Wikimedia once a year really worse than giving 50-100x more to Starbucks?
People get annoyed at them for their massive banners begging for money making it seem like wikipedia is on the verge of being closed down unless you donate despite the fact they have a ton of money they have saved away which could keep wikipedia running for decades. Even long running wiki editors and donators get pissed off with the behavior of the wikimedia foundation as not enough of this money actually seems to get spent on Wikipedia. Kinda similar to the whole Firefox situation now I come to think about it.
> No one's being conned into donating
They are. The banners are dishonest every year, making it seem like they can barely keep the lights on.
If the donation is given on the false belief that the donations are necessary to keep Wikipedia running, I'd argue donors are being conned into donating. And that is exactly the message the donation banners convey.
> No one's being conned into donating
You've never seen the banners asking for money to cover the costs of the servers?
They're saying its not a con because they agree with it and its a good thing. It's doublespeak, maybe even to themself.
Sophists railing against Socrates seems about right.
> The whole Mozilla situation is even more of a scam than how the Wikimedia Foundation uses sob stories about paying for Wikipedia to get people to donate money to an entity which spends almost no money on Wikipedia... but, at least it does run Wikipedia! lol :/.
I don't think these are comparable at all or how it's a scam. The CEO of the entire wikimedia foundation makes half a million a year. The foundation is considered a GREAT charity to donate to by Charity Navigator. https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703
wikipedia still being around after all this time and still maintaining links to just download the entire thing and having no ads makes whatever they're doing good to me, ha.
I love other wikimedia projects like Wiktionary and wiki commons too.
And they do experiment and i think the passion for the society upholding project that is the encyclopedia is still there. Its the same wirh web archive.
Wikimedia is run transparently which is great but I dont really believe they need the money when you see their financial statement (link below) and think about what they need to run. Plenty of really deserving charities running on the sniff of an oily rag not paying 100m in salaries plus travel, conferences etc.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f6/Wikim...
Keep in mind that the community aka the editors etc are all volunteers so the foundation organizes conferences, hackathons, grants etc for them (not as a compensation, but to help strengthen the community). Keeping "servers running" is only a small aspect of the whole. There's a lot of maintenance work necessary and there are also sister projects as well, like commons, wikidata, etc.
They have 82 million dollars in cash and 116 million in short term investment, why do they need to run giant screen sized popup banners a few times every year begging for money and making it seem like everything will be gone tomorrow unless you donate now? They don't even run these adverts by the wiki editors themselves, just impose them from on top. They are very controversial in the wiki community and always cause pages of arguing every year.
Wow, I could run a brand into the ground for far less than $6.9mm.
But could you do it while convincing yourself and everyone you're beholden to that you're not?
Isn't that most software devs?
$6.9M just seems like overkill
It says "PAID ONLY BY A RELATED FOR-PROFIT", which looks to be the Mozilla Corporation. Donations are not directly paying the CEO, although I agree more of the profits from the Corporation could flow into the non-profit.
The reasonable assumption here is that without any donations, most of that money from Mozilla Corp would have had to cover what the donations paid for instead. So in practice, every dollar donated might have increased the CEO bonus by say 90 cents, which feels like donating to the CEO.
I currently still use Firefox but stopped donating to Mozilla after that.
Makes it hard to justify chipping in as a user. Transparency is great, but alignment with mission matters more.
She's not the ceo anymore.
I mean if you reduce something enough you can say “x pays for y” in almost any case for anything since it’s all technically one big pot for one group. Even earmarked money.
If I give you $500 to help pay for your medical bills and a few months later (bills have been paid by then) I see you bought a PS5, can I say, “not cool you used my money to buy a PS5”?
Don’t get me wrong I think Mozilla/FF has been very poorly managed. But I have just never liked these kinds of “transitive property” arguments or whatever we want to call it. Unless they’re straight up funneling donations into the CEO’s bank account I just don’t see it that way.
You could say “you bought a ps5 with my money” though.
If that person had the money, they should have spent on medical bills. If they got it after, they should have paid you back before buying a ps5 maybe.
Or if you just gave them the money and don’t expect any accountability, it is ok.
But that's the whole point: they did pay their medical bills. It's not like they didn't pay their medical bills and instead bought a ps5. They did both.
Mozilla develops Firefox, and they also pay their CEO a lot. Their CEO may be overpaid, the company may be mismanaged, but at least they are still upholding their commitment to maintaining Firefox. Picking out one expense that you don't like and saying "all the donations go to this, see!" is just disingenuous.
Whether donating is worthwhile is another question, and it seems like the answer would be no. But it is a very different thing to say "All the donations just go to the CEO" instead of "I think the CEO is paid too much".
We could also cherry-pick in the other direction and say the CEO is negotiating deals to bring in the 90% of non-donation revenue of Mozilla, in which case you could easily say that his pay is a result of that revenue creation.
I think the key here is that they didn't have money to do both.
If they had money enough for medicine, then why beg for donation?
I'm not trying to defend Mozilla begging for donations when they really don't need them. My point is that cherry-picking one expense that you don't like, and then saying all the donations go to that, is cherry-picking the financials, and is misleading.
> I'm not trying to defend Mozilla begging for donations when they really don't need them.
They essentially do. The problem is they have a greedy, self-obsessed CEO taking it.
You're arguing that money isn't fungible. It's absurd.
This is absolute nonsense. I am arguing that cherry-picking one expense is ridiculous. A much more reasonable approach would be to say that your donation is spread out over the entirety of the spend of Mozilla. That would suggest 1% of your donation is going to the CEO, not 100% of it like earlier commenters suggest.
It is dishonest to pick out one expense you don't like and equate that to all of the donation money being spent on just that. That's all. I don't know how you got from that to "this guy thinks money isn't fungible."
You gift me $100 on Venmo or cashapp or whatever to go dinner with my partner. I transfer it to my bank. It’s in the same bank account as all my other liquid cash. How can either of us ever say whether or not I spent that specific $100 on dinner?
Mozilla/FF has a pot of money that donations go in to, which is the same pot they use to operate as well as pay people, which includes their CEO.
> How can either of us ever say whether or not I spent that specific $100 on dinner?
there's no such thing as a specific $100.
The donation of the $100 was contingent on you not having $100 for dinner. If it turns out you _did_ have $100 for dinner, but now that you received $100 in donations, you can choose to also spend the extra $100 on something else (which the donor may or may not like).
It is on the donor to figure out whether donating the $100 is worth it - at least the recipient needs to declare all their financials, so they'd have the info to make a judgement on future donations.
If donations doubled, would CEO pay double?
If donations halved, would CEO pay halve?
I suspect the answer is "no" to both of those.
Exactly, so the donations are not being funneled to the CEO, and suggesting that they are would be silly.
If you split up your donation by how Mozilla actually spends its money, then most goes to operating Mozilla, and a small amount (~1%) goes to paying the CEO.
> whatever we want to call it
Fungibility [1].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility
Thanks that’s the word I was fishing for
> straight up funneling
Money is fungible. There's no such thing as funneling. There is ring fencing though - that's when a certain budget cannot exceed a certain source of revenue, some countries do this with road tax I think. Afaik Mozilla is not doing any ring fencing. It is perfectly appropriate to compare the fraction of their income as donations to the fraction of their costs as CEO salary.
> weren’t just ideas – they were direct responses to what you told us you wanted.
This is AI.
Let’s be honest, the only advantage Firefox has over other browser and especially chrome is its extension support. And it’s not even Mozilla merit, it’s Google who removed MV2 support.
Same for Android, the only advantage it has is its extension support because Google is stubbornly not adding extension support to Android chromium even though such support was already done by an indie developer (kiwi browser) and open sourced.
They hang on by a thread.
The web need Firefox to be thriving but it’s been a sinking ship since a while.
They know perfectly what users want, what makes a good browser : speed, good user interface, low on energy, block ads,.. These are universal things.
Have you taken a look at Android Firefox user interface ? It’s horrendous, the url box for instance is already small but now there is 3 buttons (share, reading mode, translate) on top of it. I got to put the phone on landscape mode to see the url.
And it’s not even that I want to see the url every second, but it just looks and feel bad.
On computer, there are 4 different browser history. The traditional one that opens in an outdated window, the « recent one » that shows only the 10 or something last links , a better looking browser history when you go in the top left button where there are synced browser tabs, synced history ,.. and an history in the sidebar.
Seriously ? 4 different history.
There need to be one clear, working history.
Strong disagree. Firefox gives you more options to configure things, and I am using the Containers Extensions (sandboxed tabs based on domains).
I'm not using the containers extension, since it only goes about 20% of the way and then they lost focus and stopped developing it. I think most people don't use it. It could have been a differentiator.
So... Here's an idea: stop wasting time and money on things like that, listen to the community, hire engineers, and make a browser that can be at the same level as Chrome. We already told you what we want and need, no need to keep asking.
Mozilla and the story on "How to waste money and resources" is getting tiresome at this point.
It's wild how often Mozilla asks for feedback, gets clear answers (less bloat, better performance, fix regressions), and then drops something like another random experiment no one asked for
Mozilla develops a better browser than Chrome in a lot of ways, and they do it with a tiny fraction of their budget. I would not describe that as "money wasting".
To be fair, most of Chrome’s budget is spent on developing ever more complex web standards to stay ahead of the competition, and to make sure no one will ever catch up to them.
So just think how much greater the browser could be if Mozilla put more of the money they get into improving Firefox instead of into pointless UI redesigns that only slow things down, or breaking existing functionality - not to mention all the other frivolous nonsense they seem preoccupied with instead of being a credible competitor to Google.
With how they've been in recent years it's almost as if they're trying to be inept competition, as if they're being paid by Google to suck - in fact, that is all but established by now.
> stop wasting time and money on things like that
What do you mean? The AMA?
> listen to the community
Huh? Isn't that exactly what they are doing with this?
> > stop wasting time and money on things like that
> What do you mean? The AMA?
I’m not the parent but it’s not the AMA, it’s paying multi-million dollar salaries to CEOs that layoff engineers and divert money to political campaigning.
We could have had a Servo based Firefox by now if the team hadn't been canned in 2020 instead of Mitchell Baker giving herself a $3 million pay increase every year.
It's shameful to then come cap in hand for donations after that.
I had an email from Mozilla last week on how to prepare my phone for participation in violent political demonstrations.
I have to ask myself, what does this have to do with web browsers?
I think your parent poster has a point. What is needed from firefox is fairly clear to any person of good faith:
Better web compatibility and speed, be more lean (higher dev to admin ratio) and no more shenanigans / distractions.
To keep asking the question when you know the answer is at best incompetence according to Hanlon.
Keeping up with web standards, and dropping the advertising rubbish that's making them somehow atrophy users faster than they were before.
Otherwise, they'll be gone. Thunderbird has proven people are willing to donate millions if they know their money will go directly to the software. In 2022, Thunderbird collected ~6 million in donations (~20 million users) compared to Mozilla's ~9 million (from >200 million users)
Mozilla made $826.6M in 2024. If they got thunderbird levels of support $6/20 firefox would bring in $60 million. Aka 7% of current revenue. Idk all their revenue sources so idk what the overall picture would be, but my gut says $60mil wouldn’t cut it and firefox will never get the support thunderbird gets because of different user bases.
Most would be search engine agreements I presume, which is still proportional to the user counts.
Straight to under 0.5% usage no doubt. Making a mockery of all the unpaid people who have committed code over the years. The Mozilla foundation have shirked their responsibility as a bastion against commercial interests.
Their job was to rake in millions while keeping the benefactor happy with no real competition. Mission accomplished.
The kneejerk Mozilla hate on HN gets so fucking tedious.
Google's marketing budget for Chrome is greater than Mozilla's entire budget. They sponsor a Formula 1 team FFS. They spent a decade paying off Adobe, Java, AVG, Avast and all the other shitty free AV softwares to auto-install Chrome. They targeted Firefox users with Chrome ads on the homepages of Google and YouTube. That's literally billions of dollars worth of marketing alone that they don't even have to pay for.
Mozilla's competitors (Google, Microsoft, Apple) are collectively worth the GDP of three entire continents combined (Africa, South America, Australia) with a couple trillion USD to spare. Each controls an operating system (or two) with more than a billion users each on which their browsers are pre-installed.
No shit they struggle to compete on brand and marketshare. They're basically forced by the economics of the market to do search deals with Google, and whenever they try to develop independent sources of revenue people shit on them for that too. People shit on them for making deals with Google and make insinuations about them being "controlled opposition" because of that dependency, but also shit on them for pursuing any other independent sources of revenue, like the branded VPN service or the innocuous cross-promotion of that Disney movie with the Red Panda.
People shat on them for trying to compete with Android via FirefoxOS because the bet didn't work out, even though it was probably the only way they could have avoided this outcome and gained real independence, had it worked out.
"Just focus on Firefox", they say - unless that means laying off people that work on Rust, or AV1, or Opus, or WebAssembly, or Let's Encrypt, or experimental browser engines that wouldn't have been production-ready for a decade. According to HN, Mozilla should focus but also keep churning out and spinning off research projects, but only successful research projects, not ones that fail. Anything Mozilla does is always retroactively terrible if it fails but if it works out great they never get credit for it anyway.
The idea behind the parent comment is not that they can't compete, but they are specifically made not to.
Sort of a puppet browser made only for proving the court that the giants are not technically a monopoly, while ranking a bare minimum number of users for them to count.
While that's not entirely unreasonable, I don't think that's the doom of Mozilla. Puppet or not, their tangled codebase makes it a pita to contribute anything if you're not being paid a salary for it.
Despite having a high expectation for the "free browser", deep down we know that it's the same "Free in theory" software, not unlike Java or Vscode. Software that's made by a company and once they stop pouring money on corporate development and support the project will become a zombie in no time.
It is completely unreasonable and (willfully) ignores the long, long list of places where Mozilla has fought against the other vendors including (especially) Google on privacy grounds.
It's the sort of thing people say mostly for their own self-satisfaction, without actually thinking about it or trying to figure out the answer. Like: "both parties are the same" or "what have the Romans ever done for us"
Yes, I agree completely. You cannot even compare Chrome and Firefox because the sheer privacy violations of Chrome make it not a worthy competitor. The difference is, nobody cares.
Google develops Chrome and Chrome relies entirely on Google's money. Google is the default search engine. They are much, much, MUCH more tightly coupled to Google than Firefox could ever be.
But nobody says anything. And yet, Firefox makes Google the default search engine, and everyone has a think piece on it. Firefox is dead, they say, they're just Google's puppet. Then what is Chrome?
Chrome is Darth Vader. Firefox is Lando Calrissian. I’ll let you guess who Palpatine is.
Mozilla can do a lot more to fight on privacy grounds. I realize it isn't going to happen since even enabling a lot of the existing privacy features by default is going to break many websites (which, in the minds of most people, would reflect a broken web browser), so they are stuck talking about it while end users have to jump through a bunch of hoops if they want to get the browser as it is advertised.
They don't need alternative revenue streams. Just take the millions they receive from Google and spend it on tech. Cut out all the warm and fuzzy political marketing bullshit and all the management that have promoted it.
It is not so clear cut now, is it? The often silly wannabe social justice stuff does cost money, and their management does get record high payments, even though they don't do a particularly good job, and even though important engineering projects were cut. Mozilla's behavior is not a culture of engineering, that fosters trust in the browser product.
Firefox Android:
if there's one surprising thing I've learnt from HN users, it's that there're loads of people out there who run browsers with zillions of tabs open all the time
People approach browsers in the same way they approach sex or basically anything else - whatever can be done will be done.
I was going to say that different people have different needs, but many of the things you bring up simply aren't true or are context dependent. For example: translate and share are not on the address bar (they are accessed via a menu, along with many other things, that is on the address bar). For the most part, tabs are reused. The main exception is when sites tell the browser to open a link in a new window.
Firefox may be far from perfect, but I've found it must more malleable than Chrome.
See the first picture.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/android-translation
They move things in mobile UI a lot, so the docs might not reflect that. I know it used to look like on this screenshot, but I haven't had it in my Nightly for a while.
The reader view and translation buttons aren’t shown on all pages, just pages for which they are relevant.
FWIW about:config is available in beta and nightly on android, my main browser was nightly for a while but it sometimes was too unstable, so I switched to beta as my daily, which seems to be stable.
It is also available on stable though you have to enter the more verbose `chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml` to get there.
There's another way to get to about:config, see the following link.
https://www.askvg.com/how-to-access-about-config-page-in-fir...
Honestly, "reading mode" is the one reason I switched to firefox on mobile. When I open a page with tons of ads and popups, it gets rid of all of that.
this honestly sounds unhinged. except the part about abou:config
Firefox should focus on privacy, keeping extensions viable, and implementing standards, so they don't get swamped by competition.
No one really cares about a majority of the UX sugar, IMO.
I personally find the LLM context menu useful and reading mode awesome, but these are not features that by themselves would drive me to use the browser.
Reading mode is awesome! Especially on mobile. Yes to everything else you said too.
I feel like the addition of LLMs is an introduction to finding another source of revenue. That Perplexity pop-up we've been shown lately seems like an experiment in that.
Sadly "I'd like Firefox to not be owned by an advertising/surveillance company" is unlikely to be considered in that forum (even if I were prepared to sign up to comment).
Everything else is minor details compared to that.
(Yes, this was posted using LibreWolf, but I often wonder if I can even trust that, having the vast majority of it's code written and managed by Mozilla.)
I’d also ask them how they plan to build a time machine to undo selling their users’ data when they said they wouldn’t.
Also- what kind of animal are you?!
This is the key differentiator Mozilla seems to deliberately avoid understanding. Chrome is a perfectly okay browser from almost every perspective: standards, functionality, performance, etc. What Chrome is not good at and can never be good at while it's owned by an advertising company is respecting user choice to disable advertising and choose privacy models that exclude the browser company.
Features and bugfixes are important, but they're table stakes for an everyday browser. They aren't enough to sell it.
Now that Google blocked uBlock origin, that's a good reason to keep using Firefox. It amazes me how much worse the web is on Chrome.
There are quite a few browser that don't ever need extensions to block ads. There's thus no reason for me to use Firefox (and I don't want to, until it's managed by Mozilla).
Thank you for the downvotes. I forgot to mention that the toxic community is an additional reason to avoid FF and anything related with it.
I didn't downvote you, but your vague mentioning of some browsers "that don't ever need extensions to block ads" is not helpful at all and sounds wrong to me. There are only three major browser engines in the world, and only Firefox's one blocks ads reliably.
Well, I dont see ads in my non-FF browser. Don't know what else I could say. And, to be precise, FF doesn't block anything by itself. It just relies on an the job of unpaid volunteers to block ads.
> Features and bugfixes are important, but they're table stakes for an everyday browser. They aren't enough to sell it.
One of the reasons I've moved to Chrome is because of the memory problems with Mozilla that I've been experiencing for years. Every so often I look up other people who've been having the same issues. They seem to have been reported for years, but there's often a surprising amount of hostility from Firefox fans whenever they get mentioned.
As an aside, both Firefox and Chrome made their browsers significantly worse when they changed the order of windows in the windows menu from chronological to alphabetical.
Floorp is basically Firefox without the memory issues.
You might want to check it out.
> Chrome is a perfectly okay browser from almost every perspective
No, it isn't. They killed adblock, and have a business model of throttling other browsers to force people to Chrome (Youtube throttling) and doing digital fingerprinting with exclusive-only Chrome finger prints as seen here on HN the other day.
Firefox has anonym, where it sells your 'anonymous data'
https://lifehacker.com/tech/why-you-should-disable-firefox-p...
I just looked, go to Settings -> type advert and you'll see
Website Advertising Preferences Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement This helps sites understand how their ads perform without collecting data about you. Learn more
It comes pre-checked for you.
I use Chromium for dev stuff, but now; there's no ublock origin.
I tried to be clear about how Chrome is fine in most respects except for the incentives conflict, and you've simply pointed out symptoms stemming from that fundamental issue. Are we actually disagreeing or do you just dislike how I phrased it?
You were very clear. PP seems to be in agreement with you in spite of objecting to the first line and ignoring the rest.
"ublock origin lite" works well
Not on Google's own websites such as Youtube.
I am pretty sure Google donates a great share of Mozilla's revenue but demands the following with this money:
- Firefox is alive, so that they are a theoretical competitor to avoid anti-trust measures
- Firefox has the lowest market share that remains that said competitor without distracting many users from G engagement
- Firefox emains of few steps behind in features and perforfance so that it remains in this pesky market share
- of course Firefox keeps Google search the default
- may be other under the table agreements? (Request for comments)
I cannot foresay what will happen next with the state of MV3.
I've yet to have one single problem after running Firefox as my main driver for ~3 months. Only 2 webpages have made me quickly open Chrome instead to check them out, and the content wasn't worth engaging for long.
It puzzles me how more programmers don't switch to a real open source browser not controlled by an advertising giant which will use their overwhelming monopolistic force to steer the way browsers work so that it benefits its bottom line.
Vote with your feet, use Firefox.
I used it for many years but ultimately abandoned it because its memory use was just unacceptably high. A couple of windows with 30-40 tabs in each would eat all my laptop's memory - Chromium in a similar setup will sit around 40% used. I don't know what Firefox is doing but it's crazy far off the pace there.
Mozilla should be focusing on fixing things like that and making the browser be good before the barely related campaigning, let alone the whole "we're going to be an advertising business as well" thing.
Sounds like an extension issue. Firefox by itself uses way way less memory than Chromium-base browsers.
Running latest Firefox on latest MacOS on Intel.
Hundreds of tabs open, memory usage is ~3GB for main process, 2-3GB for isolated content (ie the tabs).
Really not sure what the problem is.
Are you on Linux, Windows or macOS ?
I think clearly Google want Firefox alive as a 'competitor', and they explicitly are buying that Google search is the default. I highly doubt they have any agreements limiting Firefox's market share or features though - that would undo the benefit of it being a competitor if it ever came out, but more significantly they don't have to. Mozilla have managed to achieve all that on their own. I actually think Google would probably rather that Firefox was at say 10% market share so they had a more legit argument that it was a competitor.
Made a comment, it then asked me to sign up and couldn't be bothered.
The comment was: make the Firefox containers work in private mode.
In Safari private mode. Each tab has no knowledge of another (e.g. log into Gmail and then open a new tab and go to Gmail and you won't be signed in).
Firefox doesn't have this tab level isolation.
Also offer equivalent of safari's lockdown mode. So images and site features capable of loading malware etc are blocked by default.
I actually prefer it the way it is now. For me, private mode is effectively an extra temporary profile that is full featured, but wiped once the last window is closed. I usually don't need more than one.
But I understand that other people have other needs. It can be very useful for developers for instance. Make it an option, maybe.
I see both. I wouldn't want every tab to be separate but I occasionally want to have more than one independent private profile at a time. It would be nice if I could do this. Any sort of ephemeral container tabs option would probably satisfy this option and could maybe even remove most of my use of private browsing if I could just open ephemeral containers in an otherwise regular window.
How about per-window private sessions?
That would be limiting if I can't have multiple windows of one private session. (Although admittedly this is something I do quite rarely)
A "private tab" feature in addition to "private window" could be a useful, if potentially confusing
I might be the only one but I'm quite annoyed that Safari's incognito mode works like this. I WANT it to have knowledge of all the other incognito tabs of the same window. Only when I make a new incognito window, it should be a new container.
Pretty interesting how preferences can vary, because this bothers me everytime I use incognito mode on safari and think, can this not just work like in Firefox.
On desktop OSes, I definitely also prefer that behavior. I wonder if Safari behaves like that for consistency with iOS, where there isn't any hierarchy above tabs, so it would be a choice between no separation at all or sandboxing each tab individually?
In the old days logging in twice would bother me as is have to type in a password, but now with password manager and fingerprint/face scan it's low effort.
It's very handy for sites where you may have more than account
> It's very handy for sites where you may have more than account
For that Firefox's container tabs are a much handier option as you can stay logged in and also open new tabs that are already logged in. It has colours to tell apart which tab is part of which container
> The comment was: make the Firefox containers work in private mode.
My solution to this is having multiple Firefox profiles where the default one clears all history/cache/etc automatically upon closing (default in Librewolf). It's not technically private mode so containers work.
temporary containers [0]
> disposable containers which isolate the data websites store (cookies, storage, and more) from each other
Granted, they're not in private broswing mode just normal mode, but same effect
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...
Yes, that's the one I want fixing, and possibly moving from extension to feature.
Why would you create a privacy tool, and then not offer it in private mode. Makes no sense.
(You can setup Firefox so it's permanently in Private Mode and clears history and data on exit - as per Libre comment above -,which is how I have it set)
I still feel that the isolation is backwards. Instead of having me to split containers, ask me to merge things like google.com and youtube.com, but by default keep every domain isolated.
Shameless, deprecated plug: I built a very hackish Firefox extension to do that about 17 years ago [1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EBkB-Yp-zM
It would be great if they restored the `Smart Bookmarks` feature they removed a number of years ago. Smart Bookmarks were fantastic. Add your favorite sites' RSS feeds to your bookmark toolbar and you'd have all the recent headlines from all your favorite sites at one click. Fortunately I wasn't the only one that appreciated this long neglected feature so someone created Livemarks (https://github.com/nt1m/livemarks/) that mostly replicated its functionality, but it's not quite the same as having native support for them.
I’d forgotten about this. What a banging feature that was.
They should fix bugs.
Computer A:
Sometimes I cannot close tabs by clicking the X, or refresh/go-forward/go-back using the buttons next to the address bar.
Computer B:
Sometimes I get downloads that have "Unknown time left" (0 bytes/sec) when the X of X KB/MB is 100% and you can't remove it from the downloads dropdown.
I just discovered a new bug on Computer B, clicking the hamburger menu doesn't do anything.
Both are Ubuntu.
(I'm not a fan of the new menu in Firefox Beta for Android. I guess it looks nicer due to the greater whitespace, it just break muscle memory and has less options/selections.)
I wonder, if these problems aren't Ubuntu fault, since it forces snap version of Firefox on you. I had Firefox crashing repeatedly on me with the snap version. Maybe switching to Firefox apt repo would help? (I tried the repo, but before I had chance to test it properly, I found I could use Debian instead of Ubuntu and reinstalled immediately.)
I use Firefox as my main browser on both Linux and Windows and have no problems.
I suspect you have an Ubuntu problem.
I just made the switch to ubuntu as my main os from windows. Firefox on windows never seemed to have any problems. Now I keep getting the same problem as your computer a. It doesnt happen every time, and i havent figured out the pattern. But clicking the x to close a tab does nothing, middle clicking the tab still closes it. Any time this problem starts I also have issues using the mouse middle button to scroll (on all apps, not just ff) Very, very annoying. Since these issues seem linked it seems bigger than just ff.
At the end of the day, if you want to see these types of bugs fixed then by far the fastest way is to report them, which will probably mean you'll have to spend some time to track down what's causing that on your system. I have generally found reporting bugs to Firefox to be a reasonably positive experience.
yeah the download thing was a corrupted profile when i had it.
Does computer B ever finish?
Do you see any disk i/o spikes when this is happening?
> Does computer B ever finish?
No, it stays there until I close the browser at which point I get the option to cancel the download or not to exit.
> disk i/o spikes
Unknown, I don't monitor that, and the bug doesn't happen all the time, not sure how to recreate it.
What I’d like to see is a setting that prevents websites from opening links in new tabs. eBay and AliExpress, specifically, but I’m sure others do it too.
I haven’t found a way to block this very annoying behaviour in any browser, short of installing “new tab blocker” browser extensions, but they are unreliable.
I was wrong, Brendan Eich would have been better.
This was obvious to anybody with half a brain at the time of the pitchfork mob. At least a lot of folks got to feel like they were on the right side of history, one supposes. That was surely worth the free and open browser.
> Which animal best represents your Firefox browsing style?
I'm not an infant so I don't need pretty pictures of animals to express myself. This is offensive and ridiculous. Please fuck off.
I use Firefox as a fucking browser, to, you know, browse the web. Open web pages. Read stuff. Avoid ads at all costs. And that's pretty much it.
I want nothing more now from Firefox than iterative performance improvements across all platforms and adherence to web standards. That’s it. Let extensions handle all the other crap.
Tbh I disagree, the official vertical tab support is so nice and less janky than any of the extensions I used that had this functionality
After opening FF while previously using Arc for a while I was super happy with the usability improvements (that don’t seem to have impacted older workflows fortunately… big fan of how FF makes it easy to customize the toolbar etc)
I tried Tree-style tabs and Sidebery, and I bounced off of both. The new native vertical tabs feature works for me, and it is the most impactful feature they've shipped in years for my particular firefox experience.
I kind of prefer TST since it's tree style. The native vertical tabs is flat, but I would like to organize my tabs more hierarchically.
yeah i'm hoping it can be enhanced with nesting.
What do you like about the native vertical tabs which was not present in tree style tabs or Sidebery?
To me, what they shipped seemed lacking in features to both, with no real improvements.
The biggest benefit I've seen is that it automatically hides the old tab bar at the top. Before that, you had to dig into some hidden profile directory and modify some userchrome CSS file and modify the CSS directly hoping it would work.
I use this method personally and it works great on GNOME and KDE. First set `toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets` to true in `about:config` then find your profile directory in `about:profiles`.
The contents of userChrome.css should be: Then restart the browser. If anything breaks the repository will likely be updated soon and you just have to pull the changes.Back when I tried sidebery, there was some weird issue where either shift-click or right clicking didn't work on mac, and that turned me off. I just tried it again, and both work fine now.
One other feature that is nice for me is the ability to collapse the sidebar to just the tab icons. It's a nice middle ground between being able to see what I have open and getting a full screen experience.
TST and Sidebery are both fantastic extensions, I don't think they do anything wrong. For whatever reason though, the FF native implementation worked for me where they didn't
I've tried the new vertical tabs and I'm not a fan, it's very primitive compared to my favorite vertical tab extension Sideberry.
I'll wager most users are happy with primitive over advanced.
For example, I sometimes run with hundreds of tabs and my wife has many thousands, at all times. My needs and hers are very different from typical users who have single digits numbers of tabs open, heavily biased toward the low end.
Of course I would prefer TST or Sideberry, but I'm not like most users. For most users, the Firefox experience is superior to Sideberry for its ease of use and fewer failure modes.
Yes, Firefox should focus on being a lean mean machine, with the caveat that it returns to exposing its API and making it easily accessible for anyone who wants to go beyond that principle of leanness at the expense of speed or memory.
I’d even go so far as to say that extensions should have full control over Firefox again. They shouldn’t have to wait 20 years for a tray icon on minimize feature to be added or require external apps to add that feature on certain operating systems. Min2Tray existed. They should have the ability to completely alter the UI to make it function however you want. For example, the old search was great for keyboard users. A couple of strokes and you could switch search engines to site specific ones. Now it takes dozens. And when they all have the same icon, it is a painful experience. There was even at one point an add-on to restore that functionality. All this should be exposed.
The extension and plugin infrastructure didn’t die. It was killed! If security is a concern, just add more warning cones and blood red messages.
In my personal opinion, while the flexibility of the old XUL addons was amazing, the two big issues are compatibility and performance.
Compatibility: these addons could be broken very easily because they could depend on almost anything, and with the monthly release cycle, it is very difficult for mod authors to keep up. For instance, some addons would work by taking a core browser function written in JS, convert it to a string, run a regular expression to edit the string, then use eval to create a new function to replace the old one. In some release, the syntax of the "convert a function to a string" output changed slightly and it broke these addons, because it broke the regexp they were using.
Performance: XUL addons could do all sorts of things that are horrible for performance, and there was no real way for a user to tell what was causing it, because the addon wasn't isolated in any way. I ran into somebody who was having severe performance issues because the browser was generating colossal amounts of garbage for no reason. It eventually turned out that on a whim they'd installed a "LaTeX the World" addon, which would look for LaTeX typesetting instructions on pages and replace it with the nice looking output. The problem was, the way it worked was that every 10 seconds or so it would convert the entire contents of every single tab you had open into a zillion strings, search those strings, then throw them out.
The problem isn't security per se, it's compatibility. Exposing all the browser internals to extensions means that all the internals are part of the platform's public API and it's almost impossible to change anything. A lot of HN users will be like "that's fine, software should be finished, I don't want any more features", but things like performance and especially security require ongoing maintenance. The particular thing that killed off Firefox's old extension model was that it blocked migration to a multi-process architecture, which was clearly necessary even at the time and became even moreso when Spectre showed up a couple years later. "Warning cones and blood red messages" do not solve this because a vulnerable architecture exposes all users to exploitation, not just those who choose to use sketchy extensions.
(Also we know from long experience that "warning cones and blood red messages" don't in practice suffice to prevent end users from being exploited, but that's a separate issue.)
It should also be pointed out that the Firefox devs spent years and countless dev hours trying to keep the old extension system and solve the problems wrt. multi-process, security, performance, and compatibility. They removed the extension system only after they tried everything else, and mostly failed.
They also spent tons of effort explaining the background of these choices and why they felt they had no choice and this was the only path forward. It's disappointing people are still coming up with this "oh, why don't they just [..]?!" type stuff.
The concept of "web standards" is odd because new "standards" keep getting added. And what's more, they're being added rather promiscuously by an entity with almost unlimited resources, who is also the primary competitor. ;)
I abandoned Firefox because it was dragging its feet on some vital web standards such as WebGPU and import maps. The former is obvious. The latter is such a massive quality of life improvement for devs (makes build systems obsolete) that I simply could no longer care for Firefox which ignored it for the longest time.
That's literally the process. TC39 in particular requires two real world implementations to exist before some new feature becomes a formalized part of the standards.
Several proposals backed by "the primary competitor" failed to get through the process, or were radically changed to make other implementors happy.
Mozilla is a founder of WHATWG and they have, historically, had opinionated takes on standards.
https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions
You don't want that though. Nobody wants that. Browsers have been nothing but edge-case handlers since servers figured out they could segment by user-agent, and users realized they could lie about their agent.
Then they should improve the ground for addons too. Add more API, more abilities. I'm still waiting for Firefox improving the shortcut-handling, gaining back the level we once had with extensions like vimperator. How long is this now? 8 years of broken promises?
Agreed! I stuck with Firefox for a long time, but within the last year moved to Brave because too many sites were breaking. To your list I'd add "adblock," though, because it seems like extension standards are converging on a point where that's more effectively scaffolded inside the browser.
I really have to emphasize that browser extensions are a terrible security nightmare and generally speaking, should be avoided at all costs. I understand they're fun and convenient, but it's one of those things that really doesn't age well into our modern cybersecurity issues.
I only stick with the "recommended" extensions that are reviewed by Firefox.
Running a browser without an adblock extension is an even worse cybersecurity issue, since tracking online is so extensive. I live in a country where the government routinely buys surveillance data from data collection companies to spy on us. But even if you don’t live in the US, it’s still a good thing to protect your privacy.
This sort of used to be true and mostly isn't today. Firefox and Edge both have reasonably good tracking prevention features. They rival Privacy Badger in effectiveness (it's largely moot these days), and the only thing between tracking prevention and ad blocking is that the latter also focuses on protecting your poor innocent eyes from advertising, which I mostly couldn't care less about if the tracking is being defeated.
I think if you are extremely narrowly scoping well-trusted ad blockers, you may be okay, as long as you understand you are trusting the ad blocker with your banking info. But it would be far better for a browser to include capabilities in first-party and eradicate extensions altogether.
A Pihole is also far safer than an adblock extension, because it can't see your decrypted your web traffic the way a browser extension can.
I’ve used Firefox for years and really wanted to stick with it, but too many sites keep breaking. I originally ditched Chrome because it chewed through my RAM, but on the new M4 MacBook I’ve got headroom, so I’ve reluctantly gone back to Chrome. Painful switch, but I don’t have much choice right now.
Which site don't work on Firefox ?
I have the same experience.
It's somewhat of a taboo around here, and every time I have mentioned this there has been a bunch of responses certifying that Firerox works perfectly for them.
It would be great if they figured out that about:config and command-line to do anything is not actually good UX for most humans.
How else would they hide the useful settings that they don't want you to mess with because you might change the bad default behavior?
inb4 "We've simplified and streamlined the firefox experience by removing confusing control knobs and options."
It really seems to me like they've been intentionally adding friction to the configuration.
Firefox has this really unsolved issue for me where firefox and firefox based forks basically first load through all of my cache which after months of using will take literal minutes and then and only then would my search queries / network requests by browser take place.
That means, to use my browser I have to wait literally minutes and yesterday, it was so long somehow on Zen (I created an issue there but they linked me to the firefox (downstream?) issue which wasn't solved in like sooo many years)
I basically just use a password manager and just create a new profile and start afresh most of the times but still its a little inconvenient I guess.
I had to move to Brave/Vanadium on Android because Firefox is slow as hell. It happens when you log in, which for me is the whole point, as that's what I use on my computer (Linux).
Mozilla is the problem, not FireFox.
I just don't really feel like using FireFox while Mozilla has a hand in it.
These luke-warm takes become even more luke-warm when you look at the competition.
You have Chrome, which disrespects it's users as a principle. And then you have chromium forks, which rely on Google for... let's see here... 99.99% of their application's code.
Mozilla might make mistakes, but next to Google, they are angel.
i am kind of surprised that no one has mentioned ladybird (https://ladybird.org/) here. it seems to be progressing quite nicely along.
i like where firefox is going but stop paying the executives so much, get leaner
Mozilla brings in a lot of money and they're sitting on a pile of cash. There's nothing even remotely close to pressure to become lean. They could double the CEO compensation and it wouldn't even be noticed. They have the opposite problem, a lot of money but not enough worthwhile ventures to invest it in.
Everyone I know who works on Firefox says their team is understaffed and people are not always being replaced when they leave. They could stand to invest a lot more (or more efficiently) into their core product.
Could they hire more people to ask Firefox users what they want Mozilla to work on? They’d probably say Firefox features and bug fixes. There are people who could do the work in exchange for some of that money. I don’t think this is a case of too much money chasing too little profits, which seems to be what you’re suggesting.
idk, get more people to use it? Release a standalone password manager that integrates nicely? Buy some ads on instagram or something?
Lockwise? They killed it.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/end-of-support-firefox-...
If I get a nickel every time an advertising company in possession of a mainstream web browser gains a reputation for an accumulated history of product graveyards, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice.
We might be able to get you up to a whole dollar, just listing off the various chat/messaging apps Google has killed off over the years. I take it as an opportunity to move to FOSS/self-hosted substitutes when that happens.
How you would benefit from FF having more users?
Sites would not mark my session as suspicious so much which causes me so many evil captchas
More developers would test for Firefox again.
I do all my dev in Firefox and rarely test in Chrome. I've been made aware of maybe a handful of issues over many many years doing it this way. If it works in Firefox, 99.9% of the time, it's also working in Chrome.
That's because, with a few exceptions, everything Firefox implements is a subset of what Chrome, and increasingly Safari support
Ive used firefox for a decade, theres only two features I want: uBlock origin on iOS (hard?) and PWA support on Desktop
> uBlock origin on iOS
that is the fault of apple. Firefox on iOS is not really firefox.
Yeah somehow Apple is allowed to get away with this for years despite Microsoft being forced to give users options like browser back in the day.
it is true that iphones itself isn't a monopoly (yet), but i reckon consumer protection should extend to the ability to install arbitrary software on a device they purchased, regardless of the intent of the company selling the device.
Firefox only supports a limited number of alphabetic text translations, and other third-party plugins are not as convenient as Chrome & Edge.That's why I gave up on using it.
The animal thing's cute, but maybe focus less on branding exercises
>Which animal best represents your Firefox browsing style?
Ironic that "fox" isn't even an option. And the fact that they even ask this tells that they probably don't want serious feedback.
When are we getting Mac biometric support for extensions? I want to be able to use my Touch ID with my password manager on my Mac! Do any HNers have solutions for this (Dashlane)?
I interact with physical devices frequently. Mozilla's adamant refusal to implement WebSerial and WebUsb in Firefox forces me to install Chrome on every platform i use. That is just an asinine hill to die on.
If firefox implemented WebSerial and WebUsb, I'd lose a lot of trust in it. I say this as an embedded developer.
Care to elaborate?
Plenty of takes on this
https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#webusb
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34564119
https://nullrequest.com/posts/thecaseagainstwebusb
and on and on...
So, basically, they noticed some potential insecurities in the implementation proposed by Google. Instead of negotiating modifications to the spec like adults, they threw their toys out of the stroller and refused to participate.
What a bunch of idiots. They seem to have a completely misguided concept of what a browser is. They still have a 1990s mindset of the browser being a window into the Internet, instead of the universal UI that it has become today.
What arrogance. Why it is their job to gatekeep this?
Well, the reason is in the links I provided, and the reasoning doesn't scream arrogance to me.
Personally, I think choice is great. Why be upset when you can download chromium (it is supported by pretty much any platform FF is) and use it to do all sorts of stuff with WebUSB, if you are into that?
Still, I would like to see FF disable these features by default and allow opt-in. I don't see a great reason to avoid implementing them behind some "wall" (other than to avoid an increase in a concealed attack surface).
It literally is their job. One of Mozilla's roles is to give their opinion on proposed web standards. It's one of the factors that determines what actually becomes a standard. WebUSB is Chrome (and derivatives) only at the moment. You can not like where they landed, perfectly valid, but they were asked.
Yes, but instead of saying "this spec is shit and full of vulnerabilities. Let's work on improving it", they just refused to participate in the discussion. What a childish POV.
I don't think that's a fair summary of Mozillas Position on the WebBluetooth/WebSerial/WebUSB specs. Interacting with arbitary devices has arbitrary consequences, mozilla seems to assume users are not able to understand these consequences and therefore cannot consent to it.
No improvment to the spec can fix users.
At least edge supports it so I have something users can use without needing to install even chrome. So disappointing Firefox is too high and mighty
I was reading a couple of days ago the Frank Miller's Robocop comic series. I laughed so hard at the comment/response of "Dr. Love" when asked "have you sold out?" and the response was "I'm reposisioned Lilac to where I can more efficaciously relate values of cooperation and participation to our children. Where I can infuse a spirit of caring and sharing to marketing and media."
Then she (Dr. Love) continues to say... "I welcome this change to dialogue. To relate to you OCP's commitment...."
So when I read the FF's post, Dr. Love and the beginning of a big spin came to mind!
How about fix copy and paste on Linux?
I cant think of a single time ctrl-v or middle click didnt work
Hm. Are you referring to the bracketed paste weirdness? This is fixable.
https://superuser.com/questions/1532688/pasting-required-tex...
no sometimes paste does not work for discord and messenger.com especially when the clipboard is a picture
Built in fact checker would be nice.
I guess another one would be a political news filter given so much polarization online.
Firefox on android has a weird interface and is irritating.
I am looking forward to the day I can discard Firefox.
I am currently semi-forced to use it on one website ( ankiweb's desktop view does not seem to work well in Brave or Chrome ).
What's wrong with Firefox on Android? I have been using it for ages and I have no issue with it.
Uh yeah, rip nearly every feature out of Firefox and move it to “official extensions” that you can install optionally.
Go on a hardcore crusade on performance and battery life. Safari currently uses half the amount of energy compared to Firefox (according to macOS measurements), so I switched from Firefox to Safari and noticed hours of difference in battery life when I’m out and about.
I don't think Firefox uses meaningfully more energy due to "optional features", but rather due to simply not optimizing for battery efficiency at the same level that Apple does for Safari.
That type of optimization requires tons of profiling and is less glamorous than implementing new features, so I could see how it's hard to prioritize for Mozilla, especially if optimizations might look very different across OSes.
> rip nearly every feature out of Firefox and move it to “official extensions” that you can install optionally.
Only if they properly maintain those APIs. I'm still salty that they had tab groups, then broke that feature out to an extension, then killed the extension. (Then, much later, recreated the feature over again)
But yes, if done well modularity is probably good from a development perspective too.
What I want to see:
* Use Vulkan for rendering instead of OpenGL
* Drop dependency on GTK (it's a source of many problems) and just implement their own full fledged Wayland handling like Wine is doing.
* Back Servo again as the future engine.
> Use Vulkan for rendering instead of OpenGL
How much of a difference does it make?
> just implement their own full fledged Wayland handling
As long as they still support X11... (I often do ssh -X ... firefox when I need to see a webpage from a remote machine)
> Back Servo again as the future engine
100% yes, if they still can that is
> I often do ssh -X ... firefox when I need to see a webpage from a remote machine
Isn't https://github.com/neonkore/waypipe supposed to cover that?
> Isn't https://github.com/neonkore/waypipe supposed to cover that?
The correct repository for Waypipe is https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe, but yes it does what you said and works well.
> As long as they still support X11... (I often do ssh -X ... firefox when I need to see a webpage from a remote machine)
Look into xpra
Vulkan is the modern option, the difference is not being stuck with legacy paths and using something that allows explicit sync.
Wayland is also the modern option, so I don't really worry about X11 use cases. For remote desktops, better to use something like FreeRDP anyway. X11 forwarding is much worse in every sense.
I think KDE are working on integrating FreeRDP server into Plasma for seamless usage.
Another thing to add for Firefox would be may be switching to Vulkan video from VAAPI (or at least having it as an option since ffmpeg already supports it) and using hardware acceleration for video encoding too, not just for video decoding.
X11 can also do remote window forwarding, not just desktops which is super handy. Your windows appear in the remote computer with its own window manager just like you run them locally. One of the reasons I still use X.
For barebones window forwarding (no input) I use something like gpu-screen-recorder with SRT streaming output and play the result on the other end with mpv / ffplay.
Haven't looked into it, but FreeRDP might support specific window forwarding too rather than the whole desktop.
If you need something fancier there is Sunshine / Moonlight, but they still have an issue with not using Pipewire for window / screen capturing (and kmsgrab is not really the proper way to do it).
Anyway, X11 is a complete dead end in general so it's not really a viable option for anything serious.
These look like kludges more than anything.
X11 may be a dead end but Wayland sucks as a replacement, so for now, I see no other option than supporting them both.
It may be technically possible to do the equivalent do X11 forwarding with Wayland, that is connecting to a server with a ssh terminal (no remote desktop, headless server), run a GUI app, and have it display its windows on my own desktop as if it was running locally. The problem is that Wayland is 17 years old and I still can't.
FreeRDP is pretty feature rich, so I wouldn't call it a kludge.
For any kind decent remote desktop access you need good performance, specifically low latency. X11 just isn't there.
Headless server is headless server - you can't have anything in such case there with X11 either. If you want to forward X11, you need X server, which means it's already not headless.
Instead of X server you can have any Wayland compositor (Wayland server) and whatever part that provides streaming (FreeRDP or what not).
So I don't see how X11 is any better - it's just worse due to having abysmal performance. X11 was never designed for real world remote desktop usage - it just happens to have network transparency. So it's X11 that's a kludge for such scenario if anything.
> Headless server is headless server - you can't have anything in such case there with X11 either. If you want to forward X11, you need X server, which means it's already not headless.
To me this reads a bit confused, but perhaps I'm misreading it? In X11 terminology the server is sitting in front of you (the one that draws to the screen), so no, you don't need need the remote host to be running X11 server.
You do need the program that draws to the screen, but I think it's fair to say the remote host is headless if it doesn't have a GPU nor a program to interface with the GPU at all. All the remote host needs is code to interact with such a server over TCP or Unix domain sockets. And that code is tiny, even small computers without memory for frame buffer can do it.
> So I don't see how X11 is any better - it's just worse due to having abysmal performance. X11 was never designed for real world remote desktop usage - it just happens to have network transparency. So it's X11 that's a kludge for such scenario if anything.
I think X11 was actually pretty great at the time it was created, i.e. clients can create ids and use them in their requests (no round-trip to the server) and server can contain large client bitmaps that the client can operate on, but sometimes poor client coding can kill the performance over the network. As worst offender I once noticed VirtualBox did a looooot of synchronous property requests during its startup instead of doing them in concurrently, stretching the startup time from seconds to minute or more. (Whether it truly needed those properties in the first place is another question.)
Sending the complete interaction as a video stream? That's what I'd call a hack—though X11 should be modernized in various aspects, for example to support more advanced encodings for media, controlled by the client.
In some sense the web is the direction where I would have liked to see X11 going: still controlled by the client, but some light server-side code could be used to render and interact with the widgets. This way clicks would react immediately, but you would still be interacting with the actual service running on the remote host, not just a local program.
(Another reason why I consider X11 better is the separation of the server and the compositor.)
Look into NX. I used some kind of free NX package with Ubuntu about 10 years ago and it was about as fast as RDP.
Yeah, I've seen it in action (nomachine/nx) It's not bad. But problem is that it's not open source, so it's sort of DOA, unlike all the open options. They should have opened it from the start for it to be relevant.
Not going compute-bound for two minutes after launch, while not displaying pages?
Android?
No, Linux. I don't know what it's doing in there. Lots of disk I/O. Clearing the "startup cache" can help.
My guess: something is seriously borked in your profile. Easy to test.
I have run Firefox on Linux for decades (and a few extensions, and metric gobs of tabs), with zero cases of the behaviour you describe.
Same here, vanilla Firefox snap on Ubuntu. If anything, Firefox with hundreds (literally) of tabs starts way faster than Chrome with 10, thanks to lazy its loading. RAM usage has always been stellar in Firefox, in my experience.
Maybe their distro has a broken Firefox package, they messed with the default installation, have too many extensions, or malware? A slow mechanical disk?
Maybe try creating a new profile? I've had cases where a profile can cause Weird Shit™ to happen. Kind of annoying though. Probably something in a SQLite database or some such, but I didn't have the interest to track it down.
I've experienced this since 2018 across all versions of linux mint since 2018.
The problem appeared to be a lot of unnecessary disk io coupled with DNA lookup that only get done after every single read request is complete. This means that when tab #10 is taking long to read whatever from disk it blocks every other tab.
Noticeable only when using spinning rust disks.
I'm noticing it on a fast SSD, though it's more like 5-10s after launching. No issues once it's running. I'd guess it's related to my very old and large profile.
Not sure if it will help but about:processes might give some more info about what is causing the activity.
Dude, I have literally 4,000 tabs (not a joke), and my Firefox is fully loaded on boot after only a couple of seconds.
Something is wrong with your system.
The only feature a browser needs is speed. Anything else should be an extension.
straight into the history books unless they drop the AI, ads and telemetry
mozilla are now an advertising company, so other than ublock origin there's no reason to use it over chrome
and I'm pretty certain they'll get rid of manifest v2 soon too
Genuinely curious, what history book would talk about a browser with 10 years of commercial success?
I’d say it made some mark on FOSS, but in any book not dedicated to that it’s nothing more than a footnote.
All I want today is Chrome-style profiles in Firefox. None of this about:profiles nonsense.
/dev/null
Mozilla should drop this BS, and instead deliver on feature parity of web extension API with the old XUL plugin system. Yes; I'm still salty about that.
I use FF as a primary browser on Desktop and Nightly in Android. There's much I could say about FF, but I think it would be futile.
In Debian, I'd use FF-LTS and regular FF. Since moving to Void, xbps allows only one version, so I use FF and Vivaldi.
I'd appreciate any opinions on Vivaldi. It's the only functional alternative browser I've found in the repos. But I have to start it with:
Which sucks, and applies to OpenShot and a lot of other software that gets fussy with intel chips in some versions of Linux. Chromium I prefer to avoid, and it wants a password to initiate, which I understand but refuse to comply with. But that's all aside the point. Opinions, please...Can you run a different Firefox via flatpak? (Or x11docker or plain docker, or nix, or I guess Snap)
TL;DR: nowhere good.
Firefox has search based discover of content on the web, but it has failed to keep up with the trend of discovery using recommendation feeds. Firefox should be able to recommend new web pages I would be interested in.
Please tell me this is sarcasm. That is exactly the kind of terrible idea that Mozilla would come up with and force on users.
No, thanks. After I finish my task on my browser, I would take a break offline rather than indulging into an endless stream of "You May Also Like". Actually, I would thank FF for not filling their homepage with these noises.
Getting people to use Firefox less and take more breaks from it is not how you gain market share. You need to make it easy for people to find content they are interested in.
Firefox should ship with a local AI agent that can browse, summarize, and act on the web — entirely on-device.
I don’t want to send my searches through Google or OpenAI just to get basic tasks done. Give me a sandboxed local model that can:
* Read pages and data that’s loaded through it
* Summarize content
* Act on rule-based prompts I define (e.g. auto-reply in Slack, triage emails, autofill forms, upvote followed author’s posts…)
Let me load a Slack tab and have the AI draft replies for me. Same for Gmail. Basically, let Firefox interact with the web on my behalf and train the AI to be my assistant.
Beyond that, extensions already do most of what I need — but a built-in, private AI agent would actually move the needle.
I very much do not want AI slop added to the browser. That would be such a negative feature.
think it as an adblock to the slop
Change your name to Rust Foundation and give up on browser market