[jhasse]

This is my list, all of which Chrome does better than Firefox (roughly related bug reports included):

* Restore the old settings. They copied Chrome's settings-as-a-tab with the UI just being HTML. But in Chrome I can at least search the settings. Why did Mozilla waste their time on copying the HTML-settings without also implemented the most useful feature? It was just a huge regression, because the UI is now non-native, many things aren't resizeable anymore and some other minor bugs where introduced, without any apparent benefit. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1325286

* When you start Firefox two times in a row, the dialog "Firefox is already running, please close the running instance" or something like this pops up. Chrome doesn't have this problem, maybe just because its startup time is SO much better. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=489981

* On Linux: Integrate the tabs into the titlebar like Chrome does. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=513159

* Way too easy to quit the whole browser with Ctrl+Q (Chrome uses Ctrl+Shift+Q) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52821

* Encrypt passwords with the keyring (like Chrome does) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=309807 (btw: that's the second most voted bug of the "Toolkit" product according to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=productdashboard.ht... )

* No hardware acceleration on Linux (playing HD YouTube videos lags for me in Firefox out-of-the-box, perfectly fine in Chrome) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1280523

* Speed and responsiveness of the UI in general are much better in Chrome. (no bug report link, sorry)

Notice how that there's no complain about the look of the main UI, still Mozilla decides to redo it yet again with project Photon ... Did I miss the bug report with lots of votes for that?

And regarding the bug reports (most of them reported years ago): There was a comment on Reddit a while ago where a GNOME (!) developer said something along the lines "We're not Mozilla, we're actually reading and answering our bug reports". That says something.

[mccr8]

> When you start Firefox two times in a row, the dialog "Firefox is already running, please close the running instance" or something like this pops up.

This is actually due to shutdown (rather than startup) being too slow. Your profile is still in use from the instance of Firefox taking too long to shut down, so when you start a new instance it hits this error. This should be a little better with multiprocess, because web pages are run in a separate process, and we kill that process more quickly, so shutdown should be faster.

[jhasse]

Also happens on startup for me and others. See for example this comment from the bug report:

I simply double-clicked the Firefox icon twice quicker than I ever normally would, and the Close Firefox error appears: "Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system."

[digi_owl]

Indeed. This in particular when launching Firefox in response to opening urls from external sources.

Hit two of those quickly and hello dialog...

[E6300]

> When you start Firefox two times in a row, the dialog "Firefox is already running, please close the running instance" or something like this pops up.

On Windows, this only happens if the second instance starts with a specific command-line option (the name escapes me at the moment). Otherwise, the existing instance just opens a new window.

[kuschku]

> Speed and responsiveness of the UI in general are much better in Chrome. (no bug report link, sorry)

> Notice how that there's no complain about the look of the main UI, still Mozilla decides to redo it yet again with project Photon ...

Are you seriously askong that?

Firefox is doing Photon (like they were doing Australis) because they're replacing their entire UI framework with a faster one.

Australis was the move from native GTK2 to XUL, Photon is a move from XUL to HTML5 for UI.

[bzbarsky]

Firefox has never had a "native GTK2" UI. Australis was not a move from such a UI.

Photon is not a wholesale move away from XUL either.

[unknown2374]

While I do agree with a lot of the points:

> * Way too easy to quit the whole browser with Ctrl+Q (Chrome uses Ctrl+Shift+Q)

Saying that it's nitpicky to include this in your list would be huge understatement, it's straight out ridiculous. I have always found Firefox to be more responsive and less resource heavy than Chrome, so I don't know why you had problems with that.

But yes, you are right when you imply that Firefox seems to have prioritization problems, lots of them imo. However, it is understandable to me, making the UI looking prettier is for marketing, not usability. Most of these things you listed are not addressing a lot of users, on the other hand, having a flashier UI would address and (potentially) attract more users. But their management still needs to improve, and as a company, they should have better direction.

[jhasse]

> Saying that it's nitpicky to include this in your list would be huge understatement, it's straight out ridiculous.

There's a bug report about it with lots of duplicates and 71 votes. I use Ctrl+W to close tabs, so losing work in other tabs is just one key away. For me, it isn't nitpicky.

> having a flashier UI would address and (potentially) attract more users.

You don't know that though. You think it will attract more users.

You'll need some kind of metric to know what people really want. "Gets often repeated in discussions" is one, "which bug reports get voted on" is another.

[fav_collector]

I agree although ctrl+shift+q is still suboptimal because ctrl+shift+tab is right next to it.

[olejorgenb]

I don't get why closing the whole window need a shortcut at all.. Doesn't most OSes have a generic hotkey for that?

[reitanqild]

Edit: I see now that jhasse answered most of this already but I think mine adds some details so I'll leave it here.

I think alt-f4 closes the window while ctrl-q closes down Firefox entirely (in my KDE setup at least.)

On Windows ctrl-q doesn't work for me though.

As for why I sometimes use it it is because I can then do a restore session after restarting Firefox and get back everything.

(On Windows I have to find the now hidden menu and select Quit Firefox or something like that.)

[jhasse]

It actually closes all Firefox windows. The generic hotkey for closing one window would be Alt+F4.

I definitely think that this should be handled by the OS though.

[coldpie]

Nah, "Disable Ctrl+Q"[1] is one of the three extensions I require to browse the web, alongside uBlock Origin and NoScript. I have no idea what the Firefox devs are thinking with that shortcut.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-ctrl-...

[bigbugbag]

Probably that ctrl+q is the historical cross-platform standard for quitting. Also you may have missed that not all keyboard layout are QWERTY.

[jhasse]

QWERTZ also has Q next to W.

[bigbugbag]

I should know, I'm using a QWERTZ keyboard. But those are not all keyboard layouts: QÜERTY, ÄWERTY, QZERTY, DVORAK, BÉPO, JCUKEN, WORKMAN, ŪGJRMV, MALTRON, etc.

Then there are the asian and middle east that do not even use the same alphabet. Though those may use the QWERTY as an underlying layout for compatibility.

[makecheck]

At least on the Mac, I resolve this for browsers and other tools with the Keyboard pane of System Preferences (very powerful, if you've never dug through it). For that matter, I also tweak other things I don't want to easily hit using the keyboard, such as making it harder to Minimize.