It's pretty fast these days, the UI is good, has a lot of great extensions and privacy features.
I use Brave at work to have a better chrome-based experience with gsuite. It's also a fast, excellent browser with good privacy features, built-in ad/tracker blocking and for the time being seems to be user-not-revenue-first.
But using a non-free browser feels like a trap to me. Just as what happened with Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Netscape before, being the middle man between the user and the rest of the internet is just too tempting for any company not to try to leverage for their own advantage.
FF hasn't been always perfect, but for 20 years now they have made a browser that didn't have a shady corporate agenda. It feels like the writing is on the wall though. Even people I know who care about FLOSS are using Chrome as their daily driver these days.
Mozilla is great and I hope they continue to focus on building a best-in-class browser.
This doesn't fully describe situation, but over last 3 years, mobile users went from 50% to 75% users in my prev company's data. And Firefox is nowhere in those mobile stats.
Also, the market share numbers reported by client side trackers like StatsCounter are very close to log file collection and analysis by companies like Kinsta.
Even before the whole privacy focused thing FF was already in decline to sub 10% market on Desktop.
If you think about it the other way around, it is still hanging on to 5-10% of Desktop market after all is actually quite good. At its peak, Firefox was closing to 40% in some European countries. If you consider IE in Business Cooperate usage and Firefox are not available in those settings, 40% is a really big deal.
https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
I’ve watched the decline for years, straight from the source. These usage numbers are not affected by privacy settings.
Between telemetry, safe browsing, sqlite database with all sites you visited & gvfs they siphon off some serious data. So bad for privacy but snappy otherwise, particularly the new versions. MDN is pretty good too, but they chopped off their tech team to “save money” for a top heavy mgmt team.
I would bet money that even the majority of HN readers wouldn't pay money for something so heavily commoditized.
Is that really a fact though? I read somewhere that >80% FF users have Ad Blocker installed. Wouldn't that keep it hidden to Google Analytics and similar outfits that come up with browser usage stats?
Do you trust Mozilla? They share the numbers.
I'm not too informed on the subject.
A parent company that could and would literally put ads for it on the front page of Google? (i.e. before a sesrch term has been entered)
This is a place where I'm not aware that anyone else has been allowed to put anything, so if this isn't abuse of market power then I don't know what.
Same with other Google web properties that magically work better in Firefox if you change the request headers..!
Firefox on the other hand prioritizes your browsing history by default (you can still change that in settings) which makes finding anything much faster and the whole experience much smoother. Plus you can easily limit the search to your history by preceding the keywords with ^, or to your bookmarks with *.
Making Google web applications (YouTube) use technologies only available in Chrome with much slower fallback used in other browsers.
Bundling Chrome with Android.
Ads pushing it aggressively on Google/YouTube. Ads IRL.
After the rewrite things were super fast but it has gotten slower each release.
Today it might be a top 50 website that doesn't work properly, yesterday maybe it's excessive cpu usage, day before maybe pinch to zoom doesn't work. Who knows what dumb crap is happening tomorrow.
Life is too short to muck around with half baked software.
I still have to restart Firefox at least once every other day because it leaks and becomes a runaway process.
No plugins/addons. As stock as it gets. One single website only... and it still pukes all over itself.
Since that's where most users are, I hope Mozilla will be able to communicate these advantages better. Chrome is arguably better on the desktop for most users, unless they're in the tiny subset of users who care about privacy.
It's interesting to me that many of my favorite/most used web technologies in the past decade or so have come from individual, non-profit developers just trying to make something useful, free and flying in the face of a lot of legal and industry norms (e.g., gorhill, elbakyan). In my experience, these tend to work best on FF + VPN, or on Tor (built from FF).
This being said, I agree with you about the optics of Firefox management. There is a lot going on that isn't good and the personal enrichment of the executives feels all sorts of wrong.
If FF management can not be good stewards of a vital product, who can be? What sort of system could be set up to properly manage, motivate and pay for development?
A lot of questions are not answered, which makes the whole FF a bit shady. As a user, how much can I trust FF as a browser? Before answering, keep in mind that the browser is the single most important software we use every day since it carries most of our activities. Is it safe to use software made by someone who is not capable of sustaining themselves?
I've noticed that when the words "duopoly" / "monopoly" get thrown around in a thread about Firefox, it almost reads as if people use Firefox for the sole reason that it isn't Chromium.
In that vein, I've always wondered why some Firefox users tend to use it because of something it isn't?
I'm starting to realize (taking off my rose-tinted glasses) that a lot of these companies really like children. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc. etc.
I'm guessing it's because children will learn how to use their products and probably stick with it. I'd love to see some statistics of this in practice though.
One would assume children would rather a "proper computer" (read: Windows) when they grow up though. I'm not sure.
There might still be a small window of opportunity for Mozilla to be the champion of the web platform. It has an excellent operations team. Its CDN still delivers updates to hundreds of millions of devices. I would have loved to see Moz Inc create a Netlify service for developers and a Shopify service for small businesses.
Also, stop removing useful features from Firefox. It's insane the amount of functionality that has been totally chopped out.
Sometimes the most important thing is persistence.
Firefox is a really good browser (at least on Linux, even though the lack of HW-acceleration on NVIDIA cards is a pain) made even greater with best-in-class uBlock Origin support, and of course piroor's Tree Style Tab. Containers are also a great feature (I containerize Google, Facebook, Amazon and Twitter properties in their own silo). Tab unloaders (I don't remember which I'm currently using) is also a good idea to reduce memory usage (even though with 32 GB I have NEVER run into issues)
I've been rocking it and a custom user stylesheet to hide the tabs on top, reorder and customize the address bar to be tighter, have more contrast; and the whole UI to be black (I use the dark variant of Adwaita all day on my desktop). Having an ultrawide display, I have plenty of horizontal space. Here's an screenshot if that interests you: https://imgur.com/a/8PEKED5
Edit: How could I have missed that?! Picture-in-picture is incredibly good as well! I use it daily, mainly to watch a YT video on the side while continuing to browse the web. They even added multiple PIP windows a while back, which is a god-send when I watch livestreams such as a rocket launches (eg. official livestream in one window, and EverydayAstronaut's in another)
Edit: following this¹ (without installing any driver though) was enough to make it work for YouTube, apparently. Thanks for the info!
"Firefox Browser:
1. It is not google.
2. It's not a Chrome fork maintained by potentially flaky/untrustworthy players.
3. uBlock Origin.
4. Multi-Account Containers."
6. Incredibly customizable via CSS, including multiple rows of tabs
8. Non-nerfed ad blocking
I have only seen the code of Chrome and it’s very Google-like C++, with truly enormous codebase.
Even Chrome did not fork Firefox back in the day and forked Safari.
Electron did not use Firefox either.
For example, I have tried Bromite on my phone but the adblocking is limited. I've tried ungoogled-chromium on desktop and the speed is impressive.
The main things I want:
1. Speed
2. Speed
3. Native plugins that can preempt network requests
4. Configurable for privacy (referrer, first party isolation, etc)
All these are doable in Firefox but I've doubted them ever since Pocket integration
It also has its own advertising platform. The ads are simple notifications, no bullshit. It actually pays users in cryptocurrency for their attention. It can also be completely disabled.
My personal experience with it is that it is slow to start, bloated, the ad-blocker doesn't block Google ads by default and it fills home screen with some kind of crypto sites by default. It looks like it is trying to be a general purpose browser but judging by the choice of default options it looks more like a very niche browser for the crypto community.
The most innovative thing they have right now is Search, hopefully it doesn't end up being ad-monetized too.
- Picture in Picture
- Expanded Dark Mode
- DNS over HTTPs
I really like Firefox, but features like this are not going to cause people to switch browsers. I'm pretty sure most end users would never even notice them. DNS over HTTPs is actually a bit of a pain if you want to host your own DNS.
Anyway, they should really put more focus on polishing the containers extension, and make it one of the main selling points. This is the feature that has converted the most people in my experience. And since it's unique to any browser AFAIK, it has great retention power once one integrates it in their workflow.
Edit: ah, nevermind, I thought this was specifically a Firefox IOS release today. Taking the link directly talked about iOS for me.
But it seems like Cloudflare is working on it https://blog.cloudflare.com/encrypt-that-sni-firefox-edition...
- https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/01/07/encrypted-clien...
- https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1709263
Cloudflare has another blog post with the implementation details for ECH:
I'm not even really sure what "Expanded Dark Mode" is.
DOH is probably good for many people, but I prefer to run my own DNS server (and I VPN back into my LAN when not at home with WireGuard).
Also Firefox: We support internet censorship.
(source: CEO of Mozilla, link: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...)
Just imagine Blender Foundation or GIMP making statements about how we need a tools to control whatever 3D models people able to work on because you know you can create some fake child pornography using them.
Or might be Apache or Linux Foundation management would say how we need to track all possible malicious actors who can run some botnet / CNC software using their products. This would be totally dystopian, isn't it?
Not to mention what immediately follows, advocating for something beyond this in the future: "This is how we can begin to do that."
Looking forward to the silently installed browser extension that hides search results and social media posts that they don't want you to see. (related: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/mozilla-back...)
Where we're at, is that most people are happy running a Chromium variant. It's open source and there are enough downstream consumers that you can pick your poison.
If Mozilla is going to push the "private browser, for you" angle, they are going to need to push harder on the "for you" angle.
I'm still a loyal Firefox user. It seems to me that its users would rather have more say in its direction - give the people what they want.
* as-in-freedom
And how can you claim you are free* when 90% of your revenue comes from your main competitor?
Maybe making a paid browser is what they need to become truly free* and reset to a user-centric product development culture, which could then actually make it an exciting product again (even if they initially lost 90% of users as a consequence, those would be lost with time anyhow).
1. Firefox has Ctrl+Tab MRU
2. Firefox has a way more usable address bar - Chrome breaks it on purpose and returns weak results to push you to use Google search for things which should immediately pop up in the address bar.
3. Firefox has container tabs - a feature so crucial to browsing the web (whenever you need to login to 2 different accounts on the same site) that you would wonder why on Earth would the leading web browser not implement it (until you remind yourself that the browser is brought to you by a certain company that has the word "evil" in it's motto and likes tracking too much).
4. Firefox has a sidebar, enabling interesting extensions.
5. This is small - but I recently noticed how Chrome broke the bookmark UI, after clicking the star icon, you don't add bookmark immediately, no. You have to choose between a bookmark or reading list first.
Please don't do things to make titles stand out, “
The title you wrote isn’t even in the article as far as I can tell. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
I'd also imagine it's hard to convince younger folks (eg. those who didn't leave firefox in the first place) on firefox over brave which includes adblock out of the box, no setup or extensions required
Technically it's a great rendering engine, fast, standards-compliant, maybe only slightly more buggy than Webkit. Unfortunately it has a different set of bugs than webkit. Web developers have just so much time to debug the apps. Once the app works for ~90% of users on webkit, spending as much time or more testing and debugging for ~7% of FF users is not always justified.
This is a catch 22: FF users get more bugs - more pressure to move to Chrome, fewer users on FF - less money to develop Gecko leading to more bugs. My prediction is that FF will either drop Gecko or die.
Do you mind sharing your WebUSB use case(s)?
Besides, there's only one mainstream browser that's better than Chrome, and that browser is Edge
Anyone who uses this feature, feel free to chime in.
From here: https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing
Avoid Gecko-based browsers like Firefox as they're currently much more vulnerable to exploitation and inherently add a huge amount of attack surface. Gecko doesn't have a WebView implementation (GeckoView is not a WebView implementation), so it has to be used alongside the Chromium-based WebView rather than instead of Chromium, which means having the remote attack surface of two separate browser engines instead of only one. Firefox / Gecko also bypass or cripple a fair bit of the upstream and GrapheneOS hardening work for apps.
Worst of all, Firefox runs as a single process on mobile and has no sandbox beyond the OS sandbox. This is despite the fact that Chromium semantic sandbox layer on Android is implemented via the OS isolatedProcess feature, which is a very easy to use boolean property for app service processes to provide strong isolation with only the ability to communicate with the app running them via the standard service API. Even in the desktop version, Firefox's sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux, where it can hardly be considered a sandbox at all) and lacks support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole.
This does nothing to improve browser engine diversity but at this point Mozilla's best path to commercial success would be to launch a new browser product that's a rebranded Blink/WebKit with a focus on privacy, e.g. ad/tracker blockers, optional integrated VPN, simple UX for clearing browser history per site/date range/etc. Personally I'd prefer they adopt Safari's WebKit over Chrome's Blink to remove the dependency from Google.
I'm too old to deal with navigating the web with rendering inconsistencies of browser web developers don't test against. For the same reason I've no hesitation to use their gorgeous Firefox Focus iOS browser over Chrome since they're all forced to use the same rendering engine, and given all things being equal I trust Firefox to protect privacy much more than Google.
Being reminded today I also just installed Firefox on my - relatively new - work machine. Somehow I am more tolerant there running Chrome than on my own machines.
Sadly though, the mobile version (still) lacks support for "pull to refresh" gesture. Other than that, mobile FF is great (privacy features, browser addons...).
A few months in I'm really happy with it. Main tip is: I found the scroll behaviour janky when the URL bar was at the top. Once I put it at the bottom (IIRC this is the default anyway, and once I got used to it I realised it's pretty unambiguously a better location) things behaved nicely.
I wish I could install an add-on to deal with GDPR spam but unfortunately without significant faffing you can only run vetted extensions from a fairly short list of adblockers and privacy tools. This seems like a smart move but I wish they'd expand this list, e.g. perhaps blanket-allowing extensions that only use certain safer API subsets.
I have seen only inside Chrome as I was debugging some edgecases; it’s very google C++, but once you get used to the enormous size, it’s not that hard to follow.
Sorry Mozilla, we love you, but all the good you think you're doing means nothing when you end up with no one using your browser.
Of course, Mozilla can continue to arrogantly ignore its user base.
Edit: I’m HN-wrong, best type
> Reveal who is paying for advertisements, how much they are paying and who is being targeted.
> Commit to meaningful transparency of platform algorithms so we know how and what content is being amplified, to whom, and the associated impact.
> Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation.
> Work with independent researchers to facilitate in-depth studies of the platforms’ impact on people and our societies, and what we can do to improve things.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...
However, recently I have run into a lot of situations where foxfire does not work with some of the apps I need, and chromium based browsers do work. These apps are vital to what I do, and while I prefer firefox for all the usual reasons, I cannot use it. Sad really.
A "free" web where you pretend to fight against Google, but copy every user-hostile anti-feature from them, take almost all your money from them, and put them as your default search engine.
Mozilla deserve every bit of their recent problems, just like they deserved their meteoric rise in the 2000s.
