Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by vog 3009 days ago
> Why the downvotes? I want Firefox to be successful, it just seems to have lost its charm from when it was originally called Phoenix

Not sure about the downvotes, either, because I think you have a very good point.

However, I suspect that many people want Firefox to be exactly like Chrome, at least subconsciously. This is of course silly, because what do we win if Firefox becomes a second Chrome? Also, it would mean that Firefox will always lose, because every little difference to Chrome would be considered negative.

On the other hand, it might make tactically sense for Firefox to mimic Chrome for now, to win back the lost users.

In the end, I want Firefox to be clearly different from and better than Chrome.

1 comments

It's also fair to say that some people subconsciously go well out of their way to treat every vague similarity as part of some broader conspiratorial case that Firefox is trying to clone some other browser in general. Even when the products still ultimately look, feel and behave so differently that it's clearly not the case.

In fact it's painfully obvious that Mozilla isn't at all trying to "clone" Chrome, given that their recent Photon UI design looks less like Chrome than their previous Australis UI, all things considered. Not to mention that even their own Chromium-based products are drastically differently from Chrome, and they've just confirmed in this post that they intend to even move those over to GeckoView.

As such it's a very silly and tiresome argument to hear, and since the rest of the comment didn't seem very interested in having a conversation or adding to the greater discussion, I'm not surprised it would just get downvoted.