> 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.
Hah, perfect. I recently got a contract to "upskill" a team. I mean, I kinda get it: training, right? But I was not confident that I really did understand it, specifically. I asked what the hell that meant and was met with a lot contorted phrases to describe it. Sure enough, training.
We're inventing work...
More than not being genuine, it's condescending and patronizing.
It's because those entire departments are daycare for the people working in them.
8-9, snacks. 9-10, tweeting. 10-11, snacks and socializing. 11-12, nap time. 12-2, lunch. 2-3, tweeting. 3-4, socializing.
Most average users don't ever change settings or otherwise customize stuff, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't enjoy a different theme. Colorways saw good adoption according to our internal Telemetry. In fact, three years later colorway themes combined remain more popular than either Dark, Light, or Alpenglow, despite not being offered or advertised directly in Firefox anymore.
There must be internal discussion on this. I imagine more than a few shouty meetings might have happened. This indicates to me that management doesn't know how to deal with that and clearly isn't dealing with anything effectively. If anything this makes me more worried, not less worried about how things are going at Mozilla.
More rust/C++ writing, less cuddly animals please. Firefox needs more people that work on the product and are allowed to work on the product not people that do busywork like this and just get in the way.
I'm an actual user BTW. The product is fine for me. Performance is great and steadily improving. My main concern is that the developers are allowed to stay on mission and empowered to do that. Which means doubling down on making sure I never get confronted with shitty ads, popups, and other advertising abuse. And that it keeps up technically with Chromium and Webkit in terms of standards support.
Playing devil's advocate: how does that help your average Joe adopt Firefox?
They killed the dino logo:
- https://imghost.online/GBswvjTZ38PtAnf
- https://imghost.online/0HTX7YVnImu49qc
We were hackers, we became "cute and inclusive" (nothing wrong about inclusive… it just became the brand).
Fuck this.
Edit: I said 10+ years… but actually, it was more like 15 years ago.
Having mascots is fine. It's like having a logo. Having multiple mascots is not good. What does a dinosaur have to do with a Firefox? The dinosaur was supposedly Mozilla's logo, as in Mosaic and Godzilla. Firefox is one of the many projects under the Mozilla umbrella. Keep the fox theme in Firefox communications, leave dinosaurs for Mozilla's one.
I will be sad if en-dashes come to be seen as LLM fingerprints, because I rather like them.
> This is for those who insist they can easily spot AI-generated text. Many of us old farts were using bulleted lists and em dashes and en dashes long before artificial intelligence was no more than a (usually) reliable plot device for sci-fi, much less the fever dream of tech bros. So, for God’s sake, stop using those as “proofs” that some text is AI-generated. As for my own writing, I reiterate what I said over two years ago: “... although the stuff on this site ... may not be any good, it always has been and will be written by a human, namely me.”
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.
I think this is just changing with the times. Go back a bit further and the idea of communities around products is the new cool thing. Personally I find that a bit weird. We have a whole generation of people who find social media managers talking to each other hilarious.
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/a... ”$7.8M in donations from the public, grants from foundations, and government funding” in 2023
[2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-990... $6.9mm in 2022, page 7
[1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...
Firefox is an antitrust litigation sponge, but you have to keep it rudderless and ineffective.
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.
They are transparent. No one's being conned into donating. As long as Wikipedia is running fine, and is not degrading, and they're not actively harming it, I don't care. People routinely spend money on much worse things. Is donating $3 to Wikimedia once a year really worse than giving 50-100x more to Starbucks?
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.
I don't think these are comparable at all or how it's a scam. The CEO of the entire wikimedia foundation makes half a million a year. The foundation is considered a GREAT charity to donate to by Charity Navigator. https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703
I currently still use Firefox but stopped donating to Mozilla after that.
There were major noticeable speed differences in Firefox when they implemented key component in Rust. I say this having used Firefox since 2004.
I'm not sure exactly what you have in mind here but this really isn't true for basically any plausible value of "finished Oxidation of Firefox".
As context for scale, during the Quantum Project, Mozilla imported two major pieces of Servo: Stylo and WebRender. Each of these involved sizable teams and took years of effort, and yet these components (1) started from pre-existing work that had been done for Servo and (2) represent only relatively small fractions of Gecko. Replacing most of the browser -- or even a significant fraction of it -- with Rust code would be a far bigger undertaking.
If I give you $500 to help pay for your medical bills and a few months later (bills have been paid by then) I see you bought a PS5, can I say, “not cool you used my money to buy a PS5”?
Don’t get me wrong I think Mozilla/FF has been very poorly managed. But I have just never liked these kinds of “transitive property” arguments or whatever we want to call it. Unless they’re straight up funneling donations into the CEO’s bank account I just don’t see it that way.
If that person had the money, they should have spent on medical bills. If they got it after, they should have paid you back before buying a ps5 maybe.
Or if you just gave them the money and don’t expect any accountability, it is ok.
Fungibility [1].
Money is fungible. There's no such thing as funneling. There is ring fencing though - that's when a certain budget cannot exceed a certain source of revenue, some countries do this with road tax I think. Afaik Mozilla is not doing any ring fencing. It is perfectly appropriate to compare the fraction of their income as donations to the fraction of their costs as CEO salary.
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.
Have you seen how much data Chrome collects for Google? Especially on Android. That's another massive advantage of Firefox.
I get it, it's very useful to understand what and how features are used. But it's a fine line to walk for a browser playing market share catch-up.
Most people happily give away their privacy to these companies for very little or no benefit, on the other hand being able to block ads is a big thing. Everyone is annoyed when a pop up on how to enlarge your penis show up.
So I opened the same page on both, my comments page on HN.
Firefox Android UI:
Home button, SSL padlock, URL, reader mode, tabs, hamburger menu. URL displays extends from 20% of the screen to 70% of the screen. I see news.ycombinator.com/thre(a) [the a is partially faded].
Chrome Android UI:
Home button, settings icon (shows cert details), URL, new tab button, tab list, hamburger menu. Icons have like 50% more padding that firefox icons, so URL extends from 20% to 60% of the screen. I see "news.ycombinator.com/t"
The only difference in icon count is firefox gives reader mode a dedicated button while Chrome gives new tab a dedicated button. Given how often I use reader mode (as a paywall bypass, or poorly formatted sites) that's... fine?
There is a stylistic difference where the coloured area for the address bar encompasses the reader mode icon so it looks like it's deducting space for the URL but it appears that Firefox actually has more URL space. By like... 3 characters, so it's not a huge difference.
---
As for the desktop history example:
Firefox history views:
- Firefox View: Full page view of your account including history, synced tabs, etc.
- Sidebar history: Useful to see with less disruption to browser
- Overflow menu recent items
- Legacy "Manage history" popup
Chrome history views:
- chrome://history as a full page modal (with sync and other stuff, so closest to Firefox view)
- recent history in the overflow menu
- "grouped history" which is a sidebar history with way too much padding.
So the only extra view of history that Firefox has is the legacy one, which is buried in the UI for power users who don't want to let it go (or more likely the bookmark manager that it lives with).
At least on my phone, an Poco X3, Firefox for Android url box it's BIGGER that Chrome for Android. Chrome shows 4 buttons on my phone.
Google Is An Advertising Company. Honestly, this is more significant.
You are the product, for Google Chrome.
Google's MV3 replacement for MV2 means you are their product and will be served Ads regardless of your preferences.
What are you talking about? Firefox pioneered the whole concept of browser extensions. Can you try to explain to me your train of thought?
> 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.
What point do you think you're making? Firefox works perfectly well on Android, as well as Firefox Focus might I add.
Your comment reads like you're trying to grasp at straws.
Mozilla and the story on "How to waste money and resources" is getting tiresome at this point.
I guess they don't want to listen to things they need to pour money into.
A few years ago, they changed their interface for downloading. This introduced more than a dozen of bugs. Some were cosmetic, e.g. hover was the same color as foreground. Some were rare but caused a file loss. Some were performance related, e.g. deleting the history of downloads could take a minute with no visible change until the end. Most of these regressions are now fixed, but that made me lose confidence in the quality of Firefox.
This year, I had to develop a cross-platform extension for Chrome and Firefox. I started using Mozilla Documentation Network, but many pages seemed unmaintained. The relationship with extensionworkshop.com is unclear. The status of manifest v3 is poorly documented (most pages are for v2 only). The page about the compatibility with Chrome is incomplete. After a few struggles, I switched to Google's documentation. Then I lost time and energy on a severe bug with the Firefox tool that publishes web-extensions: https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/webexterror-unsupported-file...
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.
What do you mean? The AMA?
> listen to the community
Huh? Isn't that exactly what they are doing with this?
> What do you mean? The AMA?
I’m not the parent but it’s not the AMA, it’s paying multi-million dollar salaries to CEOs that layoff engineers and divert money to political campaigning.
We could have had a Servo based Firefox by now if the team hadn't been canned in 2020 instead of Mitchell Baker giving herself a $3 million pay increase every year.
It's shameful to then come cap in hand for donations after that.
I had an email from Mozilla last week on how to prepare my phone for participation in violent political demonstrations.
I have to ask myself, what does this have to do with web browsers?
Better web compatibility and speed, be more lean (higher dev to admin ratio) and no more shenanigans / distractions.
To keep asking the question when you know the answer is at best incompetence according to Hanlon.
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.
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)
Otherwise I 100% agree.
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.)
Also- what kind of animal are you?!
Features and bugfixes are important, but they're table stakes for an everyday browser. They aren't enough to sell it.
One of the reasons I've moved to Chrome is because of the memory problems with Mozilla that I've been experiencing for years. Every so often I look up other people who've been having the same issues. They seem to have been reported for years, but there's often a surprising amount of hostility from Firefox fans whenever they get mentioned.
As an aside, both Firefox and Chrome made their browsers significantly worse when they changed the order of windows in the windows menu from chronological to alphabetical.
No, it isn't. They killed adblock, and have a business model of throttling other browsers to force people to Chrome (Youtube throttling) and doing digital fingerprinting with exclusive-only Chrome finger prints as seen here on HN the other day.
Firefox has anonym, where it sells your 'anonymous data'
https://lifehacker.com/tech/why-you-should-disable-firefox-p...
I just looked, go to Settings -> type advert and you'll see
Website Advertising Preferences Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement This helps sites understand how their ads perform without collecting data about you. Learn more
It comes pre-checked for you.
I use Chromium for dev stuff, but now; there's no ublock origin.
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.
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.
- 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.
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 barhttps://www.askvg.com/how-to-access-about-config-page-in-fir...
But there's another private-tab-killer, and it happens when the screen times-out automatically or manually (eg, when you push the power button). I don't have a passcode or anything, so when I push the power button to power the screen on, it shows the simple "swipe to unlock" screen. The problem is that FF leaves a "private browsing" notification — and FYI, if you click on any notification on my lock screen, it will unlock and go to straight to that app — so of course I see that notification and think "shit yer, here's a shortcut" and click it, to which it unlocks the phone and opens FF, but it wipes all my private browsing tabs in the process!!! But if you unlock it by swiping, then your tabs will survive...
Actually, as I'm typing this, I think it might wipe ALL tabs, but that's not so bad for regular tabs (as you have history, cookies, etc), but it can still ruin your "state" of a search/scroll/etc.
Edit2: I'm also just realising that the way it wipes tabs when I click the notification sounds just like the first issue I mentioned (which I presume is android-OS garbage collecting the memory held by "background" apps). I have a POCO phone that runs Xiaomi HyperOS, and if it's running a non-standard lock-screen "app" by default (because I'm using the default whatever with settings that suit me), then perhaps that's why clicking a notification counts as "changing apps"?! (or perhaps even the default android lock screen counts as its own app?) But this idea seems strange because it would imply that the "swipe to unlock" feature is not part of the "lock screen app"...?
Firefox may be far from perfect, but I've found it must more malleable than Chrome.
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.
But I understand that other people have other needs. It can be very useful for developers for instance. Make it an option, maybe.
Pretty interesting how preferences can vary, because this bothers me everytime I use incognito mode on safari and think, can this not just work like in Firefox.
It's very handy for sites where you may have more than account
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.
> disposable containers which isolate the data websites store (cookies, storage, and more) from each other
Granted, they're not in private broswing mode just normal mode, but same effect
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...
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)
- 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.
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.
Let us know when you find one.
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.
Google access to Firefox telemetry data?
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.
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.
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?
I want the browser to have less interfaces that aren't strictly needed to display self-contained websites. Using a separate program for potentially dangerous stuff like programming external devices is absolutely how things SHOULD work.
*(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)
Computer A:
Sometimes I cannot close tabs by clicking the X, or refresh/go-forward/go-back using the buttons next to the address bar.
Computer B:
Sometimes I get downloads that have "Unknown time left" (0 bytes/sec) when the X of X KB/MB is 100% and you can't remove it from the downloads dropdown.
I just discovered a new bug on Computer B, clicking the hamburger menu doesn't do anything.
Both are Ubuntu.
(I'm not a fan of the new menu in Firefox Beta for Android. I guess it looks nicer due to the greater whitespace, it just break muscle memory and has less options/selections.)
I suspect you have an Ubuntu problem.
Do you see any disk i/o spikes when this is happening?
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.
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!
After opening FF while previously using Arc for a while I was super happy with the usability improvements (that don’t seem to have impacted older workflows fortunately… big fan of how FF makes it easy to customize the toolbar etc)
I’d even go so far as to say that extensions should have full control over Firefox again. They shouldn’t have to wait 20 years for a tray icon on minimize feature to be added or require external apps to add that feature on certain operating systems. Min2Tray existed. They should have the ability to completely alter the UI to make it function however you want. For example, the old search was great for keyboard users. A couple of strokes and you could switch search engines to site specific ones. Now it takes dozens. And when they all have the same icon, it is a painful experience. There was even at one point an add-on to restore that functionality. All this should be exposed.
The extension and plugin infrastructure didn’t die. It was killed! If security is a concern, just add more warning cones and blood red messages.
* 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.
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
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.
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.
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!
I just don't really feel like using FireFox while Mozilla has a hand in it.
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.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/end-of-support-firefox-...
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.
=====>>> Optional <<<=====
(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.
Yeah, that's ChatGPT. And not a particularly high quality ChatGPT style sentence. They weren't just ideas, they were direct responses? Ok.
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.
https://superuser.com/questions/1532688/pasting-required-tex...
Agreed. Also pointless hill to die on. It just forces users to another browser. This supposed average user only sees one side of this argument. Firefox doesn't work so I don't use it.
If only there was some nonprofit with the funds to hire full time devs to work on this issue.....
I want to like Firefox. I try so hard to like Firefox. Why is it so hard for them to like their users back?
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.
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
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 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 for the original, if you enjoy consent dialogues or want to be commercially internet stalked
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.
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
I’d say it made some mark on FOSS, but in any book not dedicated to that it’s nothing more than a footnote.
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 ).
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.
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.
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.
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?
I guess another one would be a political news filter given so much polarization online.
This is AI-generated text. It's also insanely dense with suffocating coddlespeak.
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.