12 ms·

Where's Firefox going next?

327 points by ReadCarlBarks 1y ago

Animats 1y ago
Not going compute-bound for two minutes after launch, while not displaying pages?
- blahaj 1y ago
  Android?
  - Animats 1y ago
    No, Linux. I don't know what it's doing in there. Lots of disk I/O. Clearing the "startup cache" can help.
    - quesera 1y ago
      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.
      - ASalazarMX 1y ago
        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?
    - arp242 1y ago
      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.
    - hcs 1y ago
      Not sure if it will help but about:processes might give some more info about what is causing the activity.
    - dralley 1y ago
      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.
    - lelanthran 1y ago
      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.
      - morsch 1y ago
        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.
jjordan 1y ago
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/ https://github.com/nt1m/livemarks/) that mostly replicated its functionality, but it's not quite the same as having native support for them.
- dwayne_dibley 1y ago
  I’d forgotten about this. What a banging feature that was.
deanc 1y ago
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.
- Scramblejams 1y ago
  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.
- rtpg 1y ago
  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)
  - dns_snek 1y ago
    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.
    - asadotzler 1y ago
      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.
  - Centigonal 1y ago
    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.
v5v3 1y ago
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.
- dietr1ch 1y ago
  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.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- _lvbh 1y ago
  > 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.
- weikju 1y ago
  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-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...
  - v5v3 1y ago
    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)
sneilan1 1y ago
How about fix copy and paste on Linux?
- quesera 1y ago
  Hm. Are you referring to the bracketed paste weirdness? This is fixable. https://superuser.com/questions/1532688/pasting-required-text-into-terminal-emulator-results-in-200required-text https://superuser.com/questions/1532688/pasting-required-tex...
  - nicman23 1y ago
    no sometimes paste does not work for discord and messenger.com especially when the clipboard is a picture
- ac29 1y ago
  I cant think of a single time ctrl-v or middle click didnt work
charcircuit 1y ago
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.
- csmantle 1y ago
  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.
  - charcircuit 1y ago
    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.
- jksflkjl3jk3 1y ago
  Please tell me this is sarcasm. That is exactly the kind of terrible idea that Mozilla would come up with and force on users.
  - charcircuit 1y ago
    It's not sarcasm. Firefox used to have a built in RSS feed, but instead of modernizing this by not requiring sites to setup a RSS feed and using algorithmic rating to find the best article they got rid of it altogether.
    - danudey 1y ago
      The last thing Mozilla should be spending time and money on is some kind of hosted algorithmic discovery feed. There are a ton of those out there, so if you want that you can get it anywhere you like. RSS feeds were great because you could choose what you wanted and opt in to them; using algorithmic analysis would require not only a lot of infrastructure and dev time but also a lot of data collection and all the privacy concerns that comes with it.
RandomBacon 1y ago
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.)
- ImPostingOnHN 1y ago
  Does computer B ever finish? Do you see any disk i/o spikes when this is happening?
  - RandomBacon 1y ago
    > 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.
- arp242 1y ago
  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.
- TrueSlacker0 1y ago
  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.
shmerl 1y ago
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.
- GuB-42 1y ago
  > 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
  - shmerl 1y ago
    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.
    - wkat4242 1y ago
      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.
      - shmerl 1y ago
        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.
bigiain 1y ago
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.)
- AlotOfReading 1y ago
  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.
  - vpShane 1y ago
    > 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-privacy-preserving-ad-measurements 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.
    - AlotOfReading 1y ago
      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?
eth0up 1y ago
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...
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
  Can you run a different Firefox via flatpak? (Or x11docker or plain docker, or nix, or I guess Snap)
  - eth0up 1y ago
    Yes. Thanks for the reminder.
- dspillett 1y ago
  > Chromium … it wants a password to initiate, which I understand but refuse to comply with. That sounds like the the keyring issue that pops up if you have your user account auto-login on machine start. If you don't let Chromium store passwords⁰¹ this can be safely disabled: see https://archive.is/G6pPH#ID15 https://archive.is/G6pPH#ID15 ² I ran into the issue when setting up a simple temporary public kiosk a short while back. -------- [0] I don't, I prefer to keep my internet facing UAs and my credential stores a bit more separated than that. It also removes some friction from moving between browsers, when one annoys me enough to (re)try another. [1] If you do let Chromium store passwords, then you can still do this, but not safely as per the warnings in that article. [2] Or https://easylinuxtipsproject.blogspot.com/p/tips-1.html#ID15 https://easylinuxtipsproject.blogspot.com/p/tips-1.html#ID15 for the original, if you enjoy consent dialogues or want to be commercially internet stalked
throwaway81523 1y ago
[flagged]
dbg31415 1y ago
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.
- bigstrat2003 1y ago
  I very much do not want AI slop added to the browser. That would be such a negative feature.
  - nicman23 1y ago
    think it as an adblock to the slop
  - dbg31415 1y ago
    Where should "Jarvis" live -- in the OS, not the browser? I guess that makes sense. I just want to get to the point where I can say: "Siri, draft an email response to my boss..." or "Siri, monitor all my Slack and Teams channels and text me if anything important comes up... and go ahead and auto-respond with RTFM links if the answer is already in the docs or a past part of the channel thread..." or "Siri, go do the grindy parts of the video game so I can log in and just do the fun parts this weekend..." or even, "Siri, take my stupid defensive driving course I got slapped with for going 5 miles over the speed limit." That’s when AI will be fun. Right now, it still feels like I’m doing way more work than I want to. I want to be able to start handing it tasks I can hand interns now. (Ha, and yes, I have made interns do the boring grindy parts of video games for me, and take my defensive driving tests.)
scubadude 1y ago
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.
- kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
  Their job was to rake in millions while keeping the benefactor happy with no real competition. Mission accomplished.
  - dralley 1y ago
    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.
nixpulvis 1y ago
idk, get more people to use it? Release a standalone password manager that integrates nicely? Buy some ads on instagram or something?
- ivanjermakov 1y ago
  How you would benefit from FF having more users?
  - nixpulvis 1y ago
    More developers would test for Firefox again.
    - werdnapk 1y ago
      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.
      - paradox460 1y ago
        That's because, with a few exceptions, everything Firefox implements is a subset of what Chrome, and increasingly Safari support
  - wkat4242 1y ago
    Sites would not mark my session as suspicious so much which causes me so many evil captchas
- wvenable 1y ago
  Lockwise? They killed it. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/end-of-support-firefox-lockwise https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/end-of-support-firefox-...
  - xeonmc 1y ago
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
Are Mozilla’s donations still roughly equal to their CEO’s compensation [1][2]? [1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/article/financing-an-open-internet-mozillas-path-forward/ 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-ty22-public-disclosure.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-990... $6.9mm in 2022, page 7
- saurik 1y ago
  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.
  - anonymousab 1y ago
    > 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.
    - hoseja 1y ago
      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.
deepspace 1y ago
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.
- Neywiny 1y ago
  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
- accelbred 1y ago
  If firefox implemented WebSerial and WebUsb, I'd lose a lot of trust in it. I say this as an embedded developer.
  - deepspace 1y ago
    Care to elaborate?
    - ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago
      Plenty of takes on this https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#webusb https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#webusb https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34564119 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34564119 https://nullrequest.com/posts/thecaseagainstwebusb https://nullrequest.com/posts/thecaseagainstwebusb and on and on...
      - xxpor 1y ago
        What arrogance. Why it is their job to gatekeep this?
        ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago
        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).
robswc 1y ago
Mozilla is the problem, not FireFox. I just don't really feel like using FireFox while Mozilla has a hand in it.
- const_cast 1y ago
  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.
blibble 1y ago
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
- pipeline_peak 1y ago
  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.
radley 1y ago
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.
- musicale 1y ago
  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?
- msgodel 1y ago
  It really seems to me like they've been intentionally adding friction to the configuration.
- krackers 1y ago
  inb4 "We've simplified and streamlined the firefox experience by removing confusing control knobs and options."
musicale 1y ago
TL;DR: nowhere good.
promiseofbeans 1y ago
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)
- kennywinker 1y ago
  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.
  - chrishare 1y ago
    Most would be search engine agreements I presume, which is still proportional to the user counts.
  - Tadpole9181 1y ago
    A single Google antitrust case can lose $500,000,000 of annual revenue.
- tristan957 1y ago
  You can't donate to the Mozilla Corporation. The Foundation is where donations go.
- Squeeeez 1y ago
  Eh... I'm not too sure about Thunderbird. For example on Android, they bought a very good product (K-9 Mail), rebranded it to Thunderbird and then proceeded to break every feature which made it stand apart. Otherwise I 100% agree.
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago
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.
- aorth 1y ago
  Reading mode is awesome! Especially on mobile. Yes to everything else you said too.
- danelski 1y ago
  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.
- anon7000 1y ago
  Agreed -- I'm using the hell out of Zen browser on Linux and Windows. It's missing a couple things, but it works pretty great as a Firefox wrapper. The reality is that with so many different users, there will be lots of opinions about the best way to do things, and especially in OSS communities, it's literally impossible to keep everyone happy. Mozilla should let others do UX experimentation (like Zen, which is an Arc copy), and focus on the core performance and compatibility of the engine itself. Keep FF itself more streamlined as a core browser, and empower others to build fancy stuff on top. And ditch literally anything related to ads & sponsorships, which have no place in a piece of tech so foundational to the open web.
  - EasyMark 1y ago
    *and fixing bugs.
- lucius_verus 1y ago
  Honestly, the Firefox feature-set it what prompted me to pick it up again after years of not using it. - I wanted ad-blocking on Android, so I tried out Firefox on mobile. - Then there were times I wanted to sync browser history/tabs between mobile and desktop, so I picked up Firefox on desktop again. - I fell in love with reader mode (and using the narrate feature to listen to articles when my eyes get tired) - I flirted with Zen browser, but now that Firefox has vertical tabs and tab grouping, I'm having trouble finding a reason to use Zen Firefox basically does everything I want it to do, and it's incredibly rare that I need to open a chromium-based browser to handle something Firefox can't do.
aetherspawn 1y ago
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.
- lxgr 1y ago
  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.
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
  > 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.
  - aetherspawn 1y ago
    I’m salty that at some point the Firefox interface became laggy on a state of the art 3GHz laptop when it wasn’t laggy in the past on a 400Mhz machine. It doesn’t look all that different to how it did back then.
dec0dedab0de 1y ago
I was wrong, Brendan Eich would have been better.
- ai_critic 1y ago
  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.
  - thoroughburro 1y ago
    This is the Great Man Theory. It’s a child’s view of history. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory
    - a-french-anon 1y ago
      Nah, that's the "less worse man" in this case, nothing as grand.
    - ai_critic 1y ago
      As of 2024Q1, Brave had a market share of 1.27% vs Firefox's 3.97% (via Cloudflare, here: https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/browser-market-share-2024-q1 https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/browser-market-share-20... ). As of 2025, 1.05% vs 4.10% ( https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/browser-market-share-2025-q1 https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/browser-market-share-20... ). Interestingly enough, right, we can see that the same CEO left Mozilla and then started Brave, and we can see the growth of Brave and the decline of Mozilla. You can argue, sure, that market conditions are responsible for Mozilla's plight--the decreasing value as antitrust insurance for GOOG and so forth. But, Brave managed to do well in spite of that, and to my knowledge if you look at the pay, at his peak at Mozilla Eich was making in the 800-900K range while Baker made over 6M a year from 2022 to 2023 (and just a bit under 6M in 2021). So, for around 8x the price, you had worse leadership. To restate again: the dude started a new browser company and grew it to a quarter the size of Firefox--and this without having GOOG as a sugardaddy. It's an incredibly mid take to assume that individual competence in business is somehow not actually relevant.
ripped_britches 1y ago
Change your name to Rust Foundation and give up on browser market
nektro 1y ago
i like where firefox is going but stop paying the executives so much, get leaner
- Spivak 1y ago
  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.
  - aspenmayer 1y ago
    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.
    - EasyMark 1y ago
      add 50% more and have them work on nothing but bugs and performance.
  - nicoburns 1y ago
    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.
pipeline_peak 1y ago
/dev/null
- EbNar 1y ago
  Pretty much.
rappatic 1y ago
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)?
Reason077 1y ago
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.
tsoukase 1y ago
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.
- mparramon 1y ago
  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.
  - CamouflagedKiwi 1y ago
    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.
    - rswail 1y ago
      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.
    - 1y ago
t1234s 1y ago
The only feature a browser needs is speed. Anything else should be an extension.
captainepoch 1y ago
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.
- const_cast 1y ago
  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".
  - uncircle 1y ago
    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.
    - const_cast 1y ago
      And advertising, if I had to guess. The Chrome ads were very pervasive for a few years there.
  - NackerHughes 1y ago
    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.
    - const_cast 1y ago
      One man's "useless UI redesigns" is another man's feature. Every person I talk to has a completely different idea of what Mozilla should be doing. Keep pocket, or pocket is stupid, or pocket is the second coming of Christ, or the VPN is stupid, or the VPN is a revenue stream not dependent on Google, or whatever fucking bullshit. Firefox does not "suck" - this is a legitimate psyop. It has all the features of Chrome minus the horrendous privacy violations. It has all the performance of Chrome, too. I mean, what are we missing? Web USB? Give me a fucking break. If you really, really need Web USB then fine - use Google Chrome. You win. 99.99% of people I've ever talked to don't even know what Web USB is, let alone do they rely on it.
hyruo 1y ago
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.
KnuthIsGod 1y ago
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 ).
- sebtron 1y ago
  What's wrong with Firefox on Android? I have been using it for ages and I have no issue with it.
gfdjghd 1y ago
Firefox Android: 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
- nicman23 1y ago
  this honestly sounds unhinged. except the part about abou:config
- SushiHippie 1y ago
  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.
  - _Algernon_ 1y ago
    It is also available on stable though you have to enter the more verbose `chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml` to get there.
- neRok 1y ago
  There's another way to get to about:config, see the following link. https://www.askvg.com/how-to-access-about-config-page-in-firefox-on-mobile-phones/ https://www.askvg.com/how-to-access-about-config-page-in-fir...
- II2II 1y ago
  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.
sarthaksoni 1y ago
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.
- fooker 1y ago
  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.
  - NamTaf 1y ago
    I genuinely can't think of any sites I come across that are broken, at least visibly enough for me to notice. I think that speaks more to the variety in browsing habits than anything else. I'm sure they exist and I don't think it's a taboo. People who don't share that impression probably just don't visit any of those broken sites, e.g. me.
    - fooker 1y ago
      YouTube, Netflix are the most common sites I have had issues with.
- ksec 1y ago
  Which site don't work on Firefox ?
  - sarthaksoni 1y ago
    Some forms just break in Firefox for me. I’ve been applying to a lot of tech companies, and roughly 10% of their application forms fail in Firefox but work fine in Chrome. I can’t figure out why it’s inconsistent. Even some CAPTCHA and payment pop‑ups won’t load.
  - jerhewet 1y ago
Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
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.
SnowProblem 1y ago
All I want today is Chrome-style profiles in Firefox. None of this about:profiles nonsense.
- 1718627440 1y ago
  As a non Chrome user, can you explain the features of Google Chrome's profiles, that Mozilla Firefox doesn't have?
kevinlinxc 1y ago
Ive used firefox for a decade, theres only two features I want: uBlock origin on iOS (hard?) and PWA support on Desktop
- chii 1y ago
  > uBlock origin on iOS that is the fault of apple. Firefox on iOS is not really firefox.
  - globular-toast 1y ago
    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.
    - chii 1y ago
      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.
  - thoroughburro 1y ago
    This argument doesn’t hold now that Firefox’s smaller and less funded competition manages to deliver. Being forced to use a webview does not leave you as helpless to implement features as Mozilla stans claim. https://kagi.com/orion/ https://kagi.com/orion/
    - chii 1y ago
      being able to block ads, vs being able to install extensions, are two separate requirements with different difficulties. In the past, apple was anti-extensions - your app weren't allowed to be able to load remote (and thus unreviewed) extensions that executed code and changed app behaviour.
- mijoharas 1y ago
signa11 1y ago
i am kind of surprised that no one has mentioned ladybird (https://ladybird.org/ https://ladybird.org/) here. it seems to be progressing quite nicely along.
KurSix 1y ago
The animal thing's cute, but maybe focus less on branding exercises
- krackers 1y ago
  >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.
idle_zealot 1y ago
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.
- OldfieldFund 1y ago
  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.
- ReadCarlBarks 1y ago
  Thank you for loving Firefox - https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/m/m-p/16863/highlight/true#M7430 https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/m/m-p/16863/highl...
  - ralfd 1y ago
    This is an amazing rant! Too bad it was only had 4 comments here at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33293892 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33293892
    - rendaw 1y ago
      > 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.
      - ethbr1 1y ago
        I’d love a Q&A with the Mozilla exec team… https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/ Considering, you know, Firefox is their most important product.
another_twist 1y ago
Built in fact checker would be nice. I guess another one would be a political news filter given so much polarization online.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
bambax 1y ago
> 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.
icar 1y ago
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).
_Algernon_ 1y ago
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.
aucisson_masque 1y ago
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.
- littlecranky67 1y ago
  Strong disagree. Firefox gives you more options to configure things, and I am using the Containers Extensions (sandboxed tabs based on domains).
  - rendaw 1y ago
    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.
    - andersonklando 1y ago
      I use it every single day. It helps open the same website in "Cognito" instead of opening it in Cognito mode. Plus, as a developer, it makes it easy to run tests using multiple accounts.
HenryBemis 1y ago
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!
bonoboTP 1y ago
> weren’t just ideas – they were direct responses to what you told us you wanted. This is AI-generated text. It's also insanely dense with suffocating coddlespeak.
CalRobert 1y ago
Apparently it’s getting dumbed down since the url bar on iOS* no longer shows anything but the domain. What subreddit am I in again? Hell if I know, apparently “Reddit.com” should be the only thing I see about my current site. *(yes I know on iOS it’s fake Firefox but this is still a profoundly stupid change that shows they think their users are idiots)
anon7000 1y ago
While we're piling on Firefox, here's my current least favorite thing: it's not possible to share a bookmark hierarchy between desktop and mobile. I want a basic tree style bookmark/tab combo like Arc. This approach works extremely well for me. But in Firefox, you have: - All bookmarks - Bookmarks toolbar - Bookmarks Menu - Other Bookmarks - Mobile bookmarks I don't give a shit about toolbars and menus and others. I want to organize it by my own categories. I can get close by putting all my folders in "menu" -- then I can have a button to access my tree of bookmarks. but then on mobile, I have to click "desktop bookmarks > bookmarks menu" just to see those. Plus whenever you install fixefox, new bookmark entries are created in random spots. Not a fan.
spwa4 1y ago
Before reading, I'm going to say "AI". I'll ad-fundum a beer if I'm right.
- spwa4 1y ago
  Nope.
mijoharas 1y ago
I've got two on my wishlist: WebUSB. The only time I open chrome nowadays is to flash an ESPHome device. I'd like to drop that dependency. I wish the extension API supported favicons in a better way. I use vimium and due to a recent change it's nice and easy to have a key binding to select bookmarks. It can't have the visual favicon which would it easier to distinguish things at a glance.
- M95D 1y ago
  One of the most horrible things ever invented. But then, maybe I'm too old. Why do you need chrome when there's a stand-alone python program to build and flash esphome?
  - ciberado 1y ago
    It allows using the browser as a very convenient and accessible programming platform for many types of applications, not only web-based. That's specially important for beginners, I think, as they can run (and create) all kind of projects just by opening a web page. But it is also very handy for more advanced users, as the wled project [1] shows. And yes, there are security implications. But that's true for any other platform and as long as the users are asked for the proper permissions, I'm good with it. [1] https://kno.wled.ge/ https://kno.wled.ge/
    - account42 1y ago
      Python is also easy and accessible. In fact that's its whole thing. We should not poke holes into the browser sandbox to satisfy the needs of amateur programmers.
  - mijoharas 1y ago
    I only use ESPHome with home assistant and the web usb device flashing is well integrated. I did look into the standalone version, but decided it was fewer hoops to jump through to just use chrome. The user experience _is_ good there, and I'd like it in my preferred browser.
  - 1y ago
zx8080 1y ago
> Where's Firefox going next? Spending donations on C-levels bonuses? /s Would you please __try__ paying attention to the top 10+ years old issues in the FF bug tracker?
sub7 1y ago
Firefox might as well rebrand to Mozilla365 Spyware Edition Absolute disgrace the amount of telemetry and home phoneing bloat in the official releases They are absolutely yesterday's browser and tomorrow's browsers are trying to be better/faster while they just keep pouring cement on the grave they're already in.
alfiedotwtf 1y ago
People have said (including me) that I’d pay for Firefox if I could… Maybe we should collectively put our money where our mouth is! Would there be any interest in starting a fork or even a new browser that was supported by the community via donations? What would people actually want in such a thing? IMHO I would like something like that to be the best damn standards adhering browser, minimalistic but configurable, secure and fast. … to be hones, thinking about how everyone wants something different and you can’t please everyone, the most ideal situation would be something like an Emacs for browsers (yes I know Emacs has browser functionality). Imagine a JavaScript console that could call functions that ran browser functionality! You could script your own browser, use someone else’s config, build your own plugins, etc!
M95D 1y ago
Ask Me Anything with Firefox product managers! Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy! Is it going to be live? I can hardly wait to ask them how long until they remove Manifest v2!
graycat 1y ago
(1) "Tab Pickup". I've never used it, don't want to use it, doubt if I will ever use it, but when I'm in the middle of my work, moving fast, lots of windows open, then bring a window to the top of the Z-order and get "Tab Pickup" and an INTERRUPTION of my work. If I had a gun and if it would do any good, I'd SHOOT the computer. I HATE "Tab Pickup". PLEASE, in Settings, make "Tab Pickup" =====>>> Optional <<<===== hopefully with default OFF. (2) Again, in the middle of busy work, I move the mouse and, presto, bingo, again, if a gun would do any good, another INTERRUPTION in my work as Firefox has a POPUP that covers what I'm trying to look at. Sometimes the popup is of a URL, a LONG URL with ~10 lines of text, and covers a LOT of the screen. Sometimes so, ASAP I have to get rid of the popup. I hate interruptions, "Tab Pickup", popups, changes I didn't ask for.
allthedatas 1y ago
The same place the author should go.
allthedatas 1y ago
As an original firefox backer I knew the daily version updates were the beginning of the end. I knew people at mozilla at that time and complained loudly to them about breaking my extensions with their constant releases. And then there's all the dark pattern default config values which are totally unethical The list of user hating behavior is long. There is no saving anything there now. The good people have left and been replaced by the author of that awful article.
- kuschkufan 1y ago
  hn would seriously benefit from a system to display user "contributions" like this as the ai rage bait and lies that they are.
graphememes 1y ago
The further we go, the more I want old web back
MollyRealized 1y ago
I'm not saying that removing it was a bad decision, but I will say that Firefox became infinitely less useful to me when they wiped out so much extension capability. There were so many 'power user' things you could do. I miss my extensive Keyconfig, for example.
trefoiled 1y ago
> Features like tab groups, vertical tabs, profiles, new tab wallpapers, PWAs, and taskbar pinning weren’t just ideas – they were direct responses to what you told us you wanted Yeah, that's ChatGPT. And not a particularly high quality ChatGPT style sentence. They weren't just ideas, they were direct responses? Ok.
9021007 1y ago
This is just so sad. It’s like they don’t even use their own product. I want to like Firefox. I try so hard to like Firefox. Why is it so hard for them to like their users back?
6thbit 1y ago
I guess OpenAI's browser does have a real chance to get a big bite of the browser market?
qiine 1y ago
now that I think about it its not just firefox that has reach zombie states, its the whole web browser ecosystem.
xnx 1y ago
Firefox should fork Chromium so they can spend more time on differentiation instead of re-creation of Chrome feature.

327 points by ReadCarlBarks 1y ago

Animats 1y ago

Not going compute-bound for two minutes after launch, while not displaying pages?

blahaj 1y ago
Android?
- Animats 1y ago
  No, Linux. I don't know what it's doing in there. Lots of disk I/O. Clearing the "startup cache" can help.
  - quesera 1y ago
    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.
    - ASalazarMX 1y ago
      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?
  - arp242 1y ago
    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.
  - hcs 1y ago
    Not sure if it will help but about:processes might give some more info about what is causing the activity.
  - dralley 1y ago
    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.
  - lelanthran 1y ago
    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.
    - morsch 1y ago
      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.

jjordan 1y ago

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/ https://github.com/nt1m/livemarks/) that mostly replicated its functionality, but it's not quite the same as having native support for them.

dwayne_dibley 1y ago
I’d forgotten about this. What a banging feature that was.

deanc 1y ago

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.

Scramblejams 1y ago
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.
rtpg 1y ago
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)
- dns_snek 1y ago
  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.
  - asadotzler 1y ago
    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.
- Centigonal 1y ago
  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.

v5v3 1y ago

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.

dietr1ch 1y ago
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.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
_lvbh 1y ago
> 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.
weikju 1y ago
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-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...
- v5v3 1y ago
  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)

sneilan1 1y ago

How about fix copy and paste on Linux?

quesera 1y ago
Hm. Are you referring to the bracketed paste weirdness? This is fixable. https://superuser.com/questions/1532688/pasting-required-text-into-terminal-emulator-results-in-200required-text https://superuser.com/questions/1532688/pasting-required-tex...
- nicman23 1y ago
  no sometimes paste does not work for discord and messenger.com especially when the clipboard is a picture
ac29 1y ago
I cant think of a single time ctrl-v or middle click didnt work

charcircuit 1y ago

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.

csmantle 1y ago
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.
- charcircuit 1y ago
  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.
jksflkjl3jk3 1y ago
Please tell me this is sarcasm. That is exactly the kind of terrible idea that Mozilla would come up with and force on users.
- charcircuit 1y ago
  It's not sarcasm. Firefox used to have a built in RSS feed, but instead of modernizing this by not requiring sites to setup a RSS feed and using algorithmic rating to find the best article they got rid of it altogether.
  - danudey 1y ago
    The last thing Mozilla should be spending time and money on is some kind of hosted algorithmic discovery feed. There are a ton of those out there, so if you want that you can get it anywhere you like. RSS feeds were great because you could choose what you wanted and opt in to them; using algorithmic analysis would require not only a lot of infrastructure and dev time but also a lot of data collection and all the privacy concerns that comes with it.

RandomBacon 1y ago

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.)

ImPostingOnHN 1y ago
Does computer B ever finish? Do you see any disk i/o spikes when this is happening?
- RandomBacon 1y ago
  > 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.
arp242 1y ago
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.
TrueSlacker0 1y ago
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.

shmerl 1y ago

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.

GuB-42 1y ago
> 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
- shmerl 1y ago
  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.
  - wkat4242 1y ago
    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.
    - shmerl 1y ago
      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.

bigiain 1y ago

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.)

AlotOfReading 1y ago
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.
- vpShane 1y ago
  > 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-privacy-preserving-ad-measurements 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.
  - AlotOfReading 1y ago
    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?

eth0up 1y ago

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...

yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
Can you run a different Firefox via flatpak? (Or x11docker or plain docker, or nix, or I guess Snap)
- eth0up 1y ago
  Yes. Thanks for the reminder.
dspillett 1y ago
> Chromium … it wants a password to initiate, which I understand but refuse to comply with. That sounds like the the keyring issue that pops up if you have your user account auto-login on machine start. If you don't let Chromium store passwords⁰¹ this can be safely disabled: see https://archive.is/G6pPH#ID15 https://archive.is/G6pPH#ID15 ² I ran into the issue when setting up a simple temporary public kiosk a short while back. -------- [0] I don't, I prefer to keep my internet facing UAs and my credential stores a bit more separated than that. It also removes some friction from moving between browsers, when one annoys me enough to (re)try another. [1] If you do let Chromium store passwords, then you can still do this, but not safely as per the warnings in that article. [2] Or https://easylinuxtipsproject.blogspot.com/p/tips-1.html#ID15 https://easylinuxtipsproject.blogspot.com/p/tips-1.html#ID15 for the original, if you enjoy consent dialogues or want to be commercially internet stalked

throwaway81523 1y ago

[flagged]

dbg31415 1y ago

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.

bigstrat2003 1y ago
I very much do not want AI slop added to the browser. That would be such a negative feature.
- nicman23 1y ago
  think it as an adblock to the slop
- dbg31415 1y ago
  Where should "Jarvis" live -- in the OS, not the browser? I guess that makes sense. I just want to get to the point where I can say: "Siri, draft an email response to my boss..." or "Siri, monitor all my Slack and Teams channels and text me if anything important comes up... and go ahead and auto-respond with RTFM links if the answer is already in the docs or a past part of the channel thread..." or "Siri, go do the grindy parts of the video game so I can log in and just do the fun parts this weekend..." or even, "Siri, take my stupid defensive driving course I got slapped with for going 5 miles over the speed limit." That’s when AI will be fun. Right now, it still feels like I’m doing way more work than I want to. I want to be able to start handing it tasks I can hand interns now. (Ha, and yes, I have made interns do the boring grindy parts of video games for me, and take my defensive driving tests.)

scubadude 1y ago

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.

kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
Their job was to rake in millions while keeping the benefactor happy with no real competition. Mission accomplished.
- dralley 1y ago
  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.

nixpulvis 1y ago

idk, get more people to use it? Release a standalone password manager that integrates nicely? Buy some ads on instagram or something?

ivanjermakov 1y ago
How you would benefit from FF having more users?
- nixpulvis 1y ago
  More developers would test for Firefox again.
  - werdnapk 1y ago
    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.
    - paradox460 1y ago
      That's because, with a few exceptions, everything Firefox implements is a subset of what Chrome, and increasingly Safari support
- wkat4242 1y ago
  Sites would not mark my session as suspicious so much which causes me so many evil captchas
wvenable 1y ago
Lockwise? They killed it. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/end-of-support-firefox-lockwise https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/end-of-support-firefox-...
- xeonmc 1y ago

JumpCrisscross 1y ago

Are Mozilla’s donations still roughly equal to their CEO’s compensation [1][2]? [1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/article/financing-an-open-internet-mozillas-path-forward/ 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-ty22-public-disclosure.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-990... $6.9mm in 2022, page 7

saurik 1y ago
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.
- anonymousab 1y ago
  > 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.
  - hoseja 1y ago
    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.

deepspace 1y ago

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.

Neywiny 1y ago
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
accelbred 1y ago
If firefox implemented WebSerial and WebUsb, I'd lose a lot of trust in it. I say this as an embedded developer.
- deepspace 1y ago
  Care to elaborate?
  - ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago
    Plenty of takes on this https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#webusb https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#webusb https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34564119 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34564119 https://nullrequest.com/posts/thecaseagainstwebusb https://nullrequest.com/posts/thecaseagainstwebusb and on and on...
    - xxpor 1y ago
      What arrogance. Why it is their job to gatekeep this?
      - ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago
        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).

robswc 1y ago

Mozilla is the problem, not FireFox. I just don't really feel like using FireFox while Mozilla has a hand in it.

const_cast 1y ago
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.

blibble 1y ago

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

pipeline_peak 1y ago
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.

radley 1y ago

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.

musicale 1y ago
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?
msgodel 1y ago
It really seems to me like they've been intentionally adding friction to the configuration.
krackers 1y ago
inb4 "We've simplified and streamlined the firefox experience by removing confusing control knobs and options."

musicale 1y ago

TL;DR: nowhere good.

promiseofbeans 1y ago

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)

kennywinker 1y ago
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.
- chrishare 1y ago
  Most would be search engine agreements I presume, which is still proportional to the user counts.
- Tadpole9181 1y ago
  A single Google antitrust case can lose $500,000,000 of annual revenue.
tristan957 1y ago
You can't donate to the Mozilla Corporation. The Foundation is where donations go.
Squeeeez 1y ago
Eh... I'm not too sure about Thunderbird. For example on Android, they bought a very good product (K-9 Mail), rebranded it to Thunderbird and then proceeded to break every feature which made it stand apart. Otherwise I 100% agree.

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago

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.

aorth 1y ago
Reading mode is awesome! Especially on mobile. Yes to everything else you said too.
danelski 1y ago
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.
anon7000 1y ago
Agreed -- I'm using the hell out of Zen browser on Linux and Windows. It's missing a couple things, but it works pretty great as a Firefox wrapper. The reality is that with so many different users, there will be lots of opinions about the best way to do things, and especially in OSS communities, it's literally impossible to keep everyone happy. Mozilla should let others do UX experimentation (like Zen, which is an Arc copy), and focus on the core performance and compatibility of the engine itself. Keep FF itself more streamlined as a core browser, and empower others to build fancy stuff on top. And ditch literally anything related to ads & sponsorships, which have no place in a piece of tech so foundational to the open web.
- EasyMark 1y ago
  *and fixing bugs.
lucius_verus 1y ago
Honestly, the Firefox feature-set it what prompted me to pick it up again after years of not using it. - I wanted ad-blocking on Android, so I tried out Firefox on mobile. - Then there were times I wanted to sync browser history/tabs between mobile and desktop, so I picked up Firefox on desktop again. - I fell in love with reader mode (and using the narrate feature to listen to articles when my eyes get tired) - I flirted with Zen browser, but now that Firefox has vertical tabs and tab grouping, I'm having trouble finding a reason to use Zen Firefox basically does everything I want it to do, and it's incredibly rare that I need to open a chromium-based browser to handle something Firefox can't do.

aetherspawn 1y ago

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.

lxgr 1y ago
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.
yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
> 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.
- aetherspawn 1y ago
  I’m salty that at some point the Firefox interface became laggy on a state of the art 3GHz laptop when it wasn’t laggy in the past on a 400Mhz machine. It doesn’t look all that different to how it did back then.

dec0dedab0de 1y ago

I was wrong, Brendan Eich would have been better.

ai_critic 1y ago
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.
- thoroughburro 1y ago
  This is the Great Man Theory. It’s a child’s view of history. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory
  - a-french-anon 1y ago
    Nah, that's the "less worse man" in this case, nothing as grand.
  - ai_critic 1y ago
    As of 2024Q1, Brave had a market share of 1.27% vs Firefox's 3.97% (via Cloudflare, here: https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/browser-market-share-2024-q1 https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/browser-market-share-20... ). As of 2025, 1.05% vs 4.10% ( https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/browser-market-share-2025-q1 https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/browser-market-share-20... ). Interestingly enough, right, we can see that the same CEO left Mozilla and then started Brave, and we can see the growth of Brave and the decline of Mozilla. You can argue, sure, that market conditions are responsible for Mozilla's plight--the decreasing value as antitrust insurance for GOOG and so forth. But, Brave managed to do well in spite of that, and to my knowledge if you look at the pay, at his peak at Mozilla Eich was making in the 800-900K range while Baker made over 6M a year from 2022 to 2023 (and just a bit under 6M in 2021). So, for around 8x the price, you had worse leadership. To restate again: the dude started a new browser company and grew it to a quarter the size of Firefox--and this without having GOOG as a sugardaddy. It's an incredibly mid take to assume that individual competence in business is somehow not actually relevant.

ripped_britches 1y ago

Change your name to Rust Foundation and give up on browser market

nektro 1y ago

i like where firefox is going but stop paying the executives so much, get leaner

Spivak 1y ago
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.
- aspenmayer 1y ago
  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.
  - EasyMark 1y ago
    add 50% more and have them work on nothing but bugs and performance.
- nicoburns 1y ago
  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.

pipeline_peak 1y ago

/dev/null

EbNar 1y ago
Pretty much.

rappatic 1y ago

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)?

Reason077 1y ago

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.

tsoukase 1y ago

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.

mparramon 1y ago
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.
- CamouflagedKiwi 1y ago
  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.
  - rswail 1y ago
    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.
  - 1y ago

t1234s 1y ago

The only feature a browser needs is speed. Anything else should be an extension.

captainepoch 1y ago

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.

const_cast 1y ago
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".
- uncircle 1y ago
  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.
  - const_cast 1y ago
    And advertising, if I had to guess. The Chrome ads were very pervasive for a few years there.
- NackerHughes 1y ago
  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.
  - const_cast 1y ago
    One man's "useless UI redesigns" is another man's feature. Every person I talk to has a completely different idea of what Mozilla should be doing. Keep pocket, or pocket is stupid, or pocket is the second coming of Christ, or the VPN is stupid, or the VPN is a revenue stream not dependent on Google, or whatever fucking bullshit. Firefox does not "suck" - this is a legitimate psyop. It has all the features of Chrome minus the horrendous privacy violations. It has all the performance of Chrome, too. I mean, what are we missing? Web USB? Give me a fucking break. If you really, really need Web USB then fine - use Google Chrome. You win. 99.99% of people I've ever talked to don't even know what Web USB is, let alone do they rely on it.

hyruo 1y ago

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.

KnuthIsGod 1y ago

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 ).

sebtron 1y ago
What's wrong with Firefox on Android? I have been using it for ages and I have no issue with it.

gfdjghd 1y ago

Firefox Android: 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

nicman23 1y ago
this honestly sounds unhinged. except the part about abou:config
SushiHippie 1y ago
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.
- _Algernon_ 1y ago
  It is also available on stable though you have to enter the more verbose `chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml` to get there.
neRok 1y ago
There's another way to get to about:config, see the following link. https://www.askvg.com/how-to-access-about-config-page-in-firefox-on-mobile-phones/ https://www.askvg.com/how-to-access-about-config-page-in-fir...
II2II 1y ago
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.

sarthaksoni 1y ago

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.

fooker 1y ago
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.
- NamTaf 1y ago
  I genuinely can't think of any sites I come across that are broken, at least visibly enough for me to notice. I think that speaks more to the variety in browsing habits than anything else. I'm sure they exist and I don't think it's a taboo. People who don't share that impression probably just don't visit any of those broken sites, e.g. me.
  - fooker 1y ago
    YouTube, Netflix are the most common sites I have had issues with.
ksec 1y ago
Which site don't work on Firefox ?
- sarthaksoni 1y ago
  Some forms just break in Firefox for me. I’ve been applying to a lot of tech companies, and roughly 10% of their application forms fail in Firefox but work fine in Chrome. I can’t figure out why it’s inconsistent. Even some CAPTCHA and payment pop‑ups won’t load.
- jerhewet 1y ago

Imustaskforhelp 1y ago

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.

SnowProblem 1y ago

All I want today is Chrome-style profiles in Firefox. None of this about:profiles nonsense.

1718627440 1y ago
As a non Chrome user, can you explain the features of Google Chrome's profiles, that Mozilla Firefox doesn't have?

kevinlinxc 1y ago

Ive used firefox for a decade, theres only two features I want: uBlock origin on iOS (hard?) and PWA support on Desktop

chii 1y ago
> uBlock origin on iOS that is the fault of apple. Firefox on iOS is not really firefox.
- globular-toast 1y ago
  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.
  - chii 1y ago
    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.
- thoroughburro 1y ago
  This argument doesn’t hold now that Firefox’s smaller and less funded competition manages to deliver. Being forced to use a webview does not leave you as helpless to implement features as Mozilla stans claim. https://kagi.com/orion/ https://kagi.com/orion/
  - chii 1y ago
    being able to block ads, vs being able to install extensions, are two separate requirements with different difficulties. In the past, apple was anti-extensions - your app weren't allowed to be able to load remote (and thus unreviewed) extensions that executed code and changed app behaviour.
mijoharas 1y ago

signa11 1y ago

i am kind of surprised that no one has mentioned ladybird (https://ladybird.org/ https://ladybird.org/) here. it seems to be progressing quite nicely along.

KurSix 1y ago

The animal thing's cute, but maybe focus less on branding exercises

krackers 1y ago
>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.

idle_zealot 1y ago

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.

OldfieldFund 1y ago
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.
ReadCarlBarks 1y ago
Thank you for loving Firefox - https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/m/m-p/16863/highlight/true#M7430 https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/m/m-p/16863/highl...
- ralfd 1y ago
  This is an amazing rant! Too bad it was only had 4 comments here at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33293892 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33293892
  - rendaw 1y ago
    > 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.
    - ethbr1 1y ago
      I’d love a Q&A with the Mozilla exec team… https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/ Considering, you know, Firefox is their most important product.

another_twist 1y ago

Built in fact checker would be nice. I guess another one would be a political news filter given so much polarization online.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

bambax 1y ago

> 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.

icar 1y ago

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).

_Algernon_ 1y ago

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.

aucisson_masque 1y ago

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.

littlecranky67 1y ago
Strong disagree. Firefox gives you more options to configure things, and I am using the Containers Extensions (sandboxed tabs based on domains).
- rendaw 1y ago
  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.
  - andersonklando 1y ago
    I use it every single day. It helps open the same website in "Cognito" instead of opening it in Cognito mode. Plus, as a developer, it makes it easy to run tests using multiple accounts.

HenryBemis 1y ago

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!

bonoboTP 1y ago

> weren’t just ideas – they were direct responses to what you told us you wanted. This is AI-generated text. It's also insanely dense with suffocating coddlespeak.

CalRobert 1y ago

Apparently it’s getting dumbed down since the url bar on iOS* no longer shows anything but the domain. What subreddit am I in again? Hell if I know, apparently “Reddit.com” should be the only thing I see about my current site. *(yes I know on iOS it’s fake Firefox but this is still a profoundly stupid change that shows they think their users are idiots)

anon7000 1y ago

While we're piling on Firefox, here's my current least favorite thing: it's not possible to share a bookmark hierarchy between desktop and mobile. I want a basic tree style bookmark/tab combo like Arc. This approach works extremely well for me. But in Firefox, you have: - All bookmarks - Bookmarks toolbar - Bookmarks Menu - Other Bookmarks - Mobile bookmarks I don't give a shit about toolbars and menus and others. I want to organize it by my own categories. I can get close by putting all my folders in "menu" -- then I can have a button to access my tree of bookmarks. but then on mobile, I have to click "desktop bookmarks > bookmarks menu" just to see those. Plus whenever you install fixefox, new bookmark entries are created in random spots. Not a fan.

spwa4 1y ago

Before reading, I'm going to say "AI". I'll ad-fundum a beer if I'm right.

spwa4 1y ago
Nope.

mijoharas 1y ago

I've got two on my wishlist: WebUSB. The only time I open chrome nowadays is to flash an ESPHome device. I'd like to drop that dependency. I wish the extension API supported favicons in a better way. I use vimium and due to a recent change it's nice and easy to have a key binding to select bookmarks. It can't have the visual favicon which would it easier to distinguish things at a glance.

M95D 1y ago
One of the most horrible things ever invented. But then, maybe I'm too old. Why do you need chrome when there's a stand-alone python program to build and flash esphome?
- ciberado 1y ago
  It allows using the browser as a very convenient and accessible programming platform for many types of applications, not only web-based. That's specially important for beginners, I think, as they can run (and create) all kind of projects just by opening a web page. But it is also very handy for more advanced users, as the wled project [1] shows. And yes, there are security implications. But that's true for any other platform and as long as the users are asked for the proper permissions, I'm good with it. [1] https://kno.wled.ge/ https://kno.wled.ge/
  - account42 1y ago
    Python is also easy and accessible. In fact that's its whole thing. We should not poke holes into the browser sandbox to satisfy the needs of amateur programmers.
- mijoharas 1y ago
  I only use ESPHome with home assistant and the web usb device flashing is well integrated. I did look into the standalone version, but decided it was fewer hoops to jump through to just use chrome. The user experience _is_ good there, and I'd like it in my preferred browser.
- 1y ago

zx8080 1y ago

> Where's Firefox going next? Spending donations on C-levels bonuses? /s Would you please __try__ paying attention to the top 10+ years old issues in the FF bug tracker?

sub7 1y ago

Firefox might as well rebrand to Mozilla365 Spyware Edition Absolute disgrace the amount of telemetry and home phoneing bloat in the official releases They are absolutely yesterday's browser and tomorrow's browsers are trying to be better/faster while they just keep pouring cement on the grave they're already in.

alfiedotwtf 1y ago

People have said (including me) that I’d pay for Firefox if I could… Maybe we should collectively put our money where our mouth is! Would there be any interest in starting a fork or even a new browser that was supported by the community via donations? What would people actually want in such a thing? IMHO I would like something like that to be the best damn standards adhering browser, minimalistic but configurable, secure and fast. … to be hones, thinking about how everyone wants something different and you can’t please everyone, the most ideal situation would be something like an Emacs for browsers (yes I know Emacs has browser functionality). Imagine a JavaScript console that could call functions that ran browser functionality! You could script your own browser, use someone else’s config, build your own plugins, etc!

M95D 1y ago

Ask Me Anything with Firefox product managers! Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy! Is it going to be live? I can hardly wait to ask them how long until they remove Manifest v2!

graycat 1y ago

(1) "Tab Pickup". I've never used it, don't want to use it, doubt if I will ever use it, but when I'm in the middle of my work, moving fast, lots of windows open, then bring a window to the top of the Z-order and get "Tab Pickup" and an INTERRUPTION of my work. If I had a gun and if it would do any good, I'd SHOOT the computer. I HATE "Tab Pickup". PLEASE, in Settings, make "Tab Pickup" =====>>> Optional <<<===== hopefully with default OFF. (2) Again, in the middle of busy work, I move the mouse and, presto, bingo, again, if a gun would do any good, another INTERRUPTION in my work as Firefox has a POPUP that covers what I'm trying to look at. Sometimes the popup is of a URL, a LONG URL with ~10 lines of text, and covers a LOT of the screen. Sometimes so, ASAP I have to get rid of the popup. I hate interruptions, "Tab Pickup", popups, changes I didn't ask for.

allthedatas 1y ago

The same place the author should go.

allthedatas 1y ago

As an original firefox backer I knew the daily version updates were the beginning of the end. I knew people at mozilla at that time and complained loudly to them about breaking my extensions with their constant releases. And then there's all the dark pattern default config values which are totally unethical The list of user hating behavior is long. There is no saving anything there now. The good people have left and been replaced by the author of that awful article.

kuschkufan 1y ago
hn would seriously benefit from a system to display user "contributions" like this as the ai rage bait and lies that they are.

graphememes 1y ago

The further we go, the more I want old web back

MollyRealized 1y ago

I'm not saying that removing it was a bad decision, but I will say that Firefox became infinitely less useful to me when they wiped out so much extension capability. There were so many 'power user' things you could do. I miss my extensive Keyconfig, for example.

trefoiled 1y ago

> Features like tab groups, vertical tabs, profiles, new tab wallpapers, PWAs, and taskbar pinning weren’t just ideas – they were direct responses to what you told us you wanted Yeah, that's ChatGPT. And not a particularly high quality ChatGPT style sentence. They weren't just ideas, they were direct responses? Ok.

9021007 1y ago

This is just so sad. It’s like they don’t even use their own product. I want to like Firefox. I try so hard to like Firefox. Why is it so hard for them to like their users back?

6thbit 1y ago

I guess OpenAI's browser does have a real chance to get a big bite of the browser market?

qiine 1y ago

now that I think about it its not just firefox that has reach zombie states, its the whole web browser ecosystem.

xnx 1y ago

Firefox should fork Chromium so they can spend more time on differentiation instead of re-creation of Chrome feature.