[charlesdaniels]

I use this feature. On a large monitor, Firefox wastes quite a lot of space with the default layout. To be honest, I wish there was an option to make it more compact than the "compact" layout. There used to be an XUL extension to do this, before XUL was killed off.

Seems like every time I see coverage about Firefox, it's Mozilla removing or crippling some feature I care about.

Why bother using FF at this point? Most sites don't work as well, and Mozilla seems actively hostile to my use case. If I'm going to use a browser that is hostile to me, I may as well get better website compatibility out of the bargain.

Not surprised their market share keeps shrinking. At this point, what's the sell?

Edit 1: worth noting, there is a lower-down comment thread[0] with relevant links - Mozilla does not care if you like this feature.

0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26464973

[eulers_secret]

> Why bother using FF at this point?

Lots of reasons: familiarity, it works for your use cases, preventing a Chrome hegemony (though we're already there), their focus on privacy, important add-ons still work great. The fact FF isn't owned by an ad-run business who's main concern is figuring out a more effective way to make you buy stuff.

> Most sites don't work as well

Citation definitely needed. This is worded without precision, you could claim "work as well" to mean nearly anything. Do you have specifics, with data? Performance? Functionality? Features? DRM? What is it? I haven't encountered any broken web sites with desktop Firefox. But, I also don't look at all the internet, so I'm curious - what's broken?

What alternatives are there? Chrome is a no-go, Brave is off doing it's URL redirect and bitcoin weirdness (that I don't need in a browser) Edge is just Chrome. There's some de-googled Chrome options and I guess some weird special-build Firefox options, but really, out of all the options I see, FF is best for me.

I'm not changing because they removed one tiny feature used by a very vocal minority, and it's a mistake to assume that FF has no value or no "sell".

[freebuju]

> I'm not changing because they removed one tiny feature used by a very vocal minority

Seems you have trouble keeping count. Let me remind you how many features FF has nuked in recent times

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25589177

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24231017

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24128865

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24554393

[dralley]

Literally the top comment on each of these was something along the lines of "this is 1) not true 2) not a big deal"

> "Some of these are a bit spurious. I mean, Venkman was replaced by Firebug, which was much better. MXR was similarly replaced by DXR."

> "CNET (and Mozilla)[1] say that Firefox still has a fully functional security team. The source for this is an unsourced tweet. I'm going to flag it because HN does not seem like a good venue to hash out rumors."

> Kind of misleading title – what isn’t planned to be supported is installing PWA:s as standalone apps on desktop Firefox: https://twitter.com/englishmossop/status/1344428028315590656...

Try harder.

[thayne]

> what isn’t planned to be supported is installing PWA:s as standalone apps on desktop Firefox

That is still something that I very much wanted.

[toyg]

The XUL argument is the only significant one; and it was years ago, and there were very clear technical trade-offs.

[addicted]

And security trade offs.

[antman]

And the Firefox Android addon ecosystem disaster. A big thank to an HN user that once pointed me to Kiwi Android browser that accepts Chrome addons.

I had stuck to firefox 68 because after that https over ssl could be disabled remotely for corporate computers but now I switched to Chrome.

I think the end result will be Firefox removing itself from the browser pool.

[ProAm]

> Lots of reasons: familiarity

Not when they constantly change the general way it's used. I am personally tired of having to relearn how to use a tool. Address bar, lockwise, shared passwords, to start.

[rurp]

Exactly. If the interface in my car or the layout of my keyboard changed constantly, and even lost functionality regularly, it would drive me crazy. Fortunately, that doesn't happen. Unfortunately, I use Firefox so my interface to the internet is an ever changing mess.

[nitrogen]

The most obtrusive recent UI change was the new tab switcher that tries to mimic the OS app alt-tab overlay bar. It was taking 30 seconds (not an exaggeration!) to load the first time I hit ctrl-tab on my fast desktop, and would randomly pause up to 5 seconds after that. It also turned what was a rapid-fire muscle memory action with an ergonomic behavior, into a slow and unpredictable chore. To top it off, it would always display full-screen, outside of my never-maximized browser window. Just glad it could be disabled.

If you work on Firefox, or are new to development -- this is not Luddism, and don't let this attitude discourage you. Let it be a lesson that you need to understand your users and not just assume that everybody uses a maximized window on a 13-inch laptop screen with all day to wait for slow code to load.

[lokedhs]

That one annoys me as well. Would you mind sharing how it can be disabled?

[nitrogen]

I think it's about:config -> browser.ctrlTab.recentlyUsedOrder set to false. If that doesn't work, try searching the web for "firefox disable new tab switcher" or similar.

I also saw a browser.engagement.ctrlTab.has-used key in there; didn't know the config store was also tracking usage...

[charlesdaniels]

> Citation definitely needed. This is worded without precision, you could claim "work as well" to mean nearly anything. Do you have specifics, with data? Performance? Functionality? Features? DRM? What is it? I haven't encountered any broken web sites with desktop Firefox. But, I also don't look at all the internet, so I'm curious - what's broken?

Mostly JS-heavy sites by big companies. But yes, I admit that I don't have hard data to back this claim up.

> What alternatives are there? Chrome is a no-go, Brave is off doing it's URL redirect and bitcoin weirdness (that I don't need in a browser) Edge is just Chrome. There's some de-googled Chrome options and I guess some weird special-build Firefox options, but really, out of all the options I see, FF is best for me.

Un-googled chromium is one. I suppose that I trust Mozilla marginally more with my user data than Google.

But yes, I agree, the browser landscape is pretty lousy right now.

> I'm not changing because they moved one tiny feature used by a very vocal minority, and it's a mistake to assume that FF has no value or no "sell".

I perceive this to be the continuation of a trend.

I think FF still has value for now, but it seems like that value is pretty quickly dropping - as a piece of software, if not from a philosophical perspective (supporting the open web and all that).

[cle]

The killer Firefox feature for me are multi-account containers. I haven't found another browser with that feature, and they make it SO much easier to deal with multiple accounts on the same site (Google, Facebook, AWS/GCP/Azure, etc.).

[robertlacok]

To me, they’re a worse version of People in Chrome. I had two windows open, one for work and one personal, one light one dark, easy to distinguish. Never any issue with multiple accounts.

With Firefox, opening a new tab in a non default container has a terrible default shortcut, and you can’t remap it to anything sensible (like cmd + some letter).

I’m sticking with Firefox because I want to support them, but I miss Chrome dearly.

[nitrogen]

With Firefox, opening a new tab in a non default container has a terrible default shortcut, and you can’t remap it to anything sensible (like cmd + some letter).

Just out of curiosity, have you tried creating a shortcut based on the menu name in the macOS global settings? As a Linux user who sometimes works for companies that issue Macs, that functionality goes a long way to preserving my sanity, but sometimes apps just hard-code a shortcut instead of using the OS.

[SilasX]

It's especially bad when they killed the ability remap keys with the extension update in 2016 and haven't replaced the functionality since.

(Extensions can do it, but they only take effect after the current tab is loaded.)

[paulryanrogers]

Firefox has a profile manager and can run separate profiles. It's just a bit awkward to set up.

[alcover]

>> Most sites don't work as well >Citation definitely needed.

Cite me. Impossible to pay my elec bill w/o chrome on my country's biggest energy provider.

Silent errors on many sites.

FF-esr on Debian

[foepys]

"This site works best on Internet Explorer 6 at an resolution of 1024x768."

[CivBase]

You know what they say about history repeating itself...

[webmaven]

> Impossible to pay my elec bill w/o chrome on my country's biggest energy provider.

I've had similar experiences with various bills over the years (though fewer recently), so these days I default to dealing with those by 'pushing' the payment from my bank to the utility rather than having the utility 'pull' a payment from the bank.

It would be nice if the bank could poll a utility to discover the payment amount rather than having to enter the amount manually from reading the bill, but as inconveniences go that's fairly small potatoes.

[Y_Y]

I find it odd that anyone would have to manually pay an electricity bill these days.

[alcover]

I refuse to get auto-debited. This thing is obscene : you let a company debit any sum at will from your bank account.

[jcims]

People were getting five figure debits in Texas because of this. There should be some guardrails in bill pay arrangements.

[cgriswald]

My electricity provider has absolutely no trust from me after a number of experiences which I won’t describe here. I certainly wouldn’t be surprised to find they’ve overcharged me. The process to deal with them in any regard is always byzantine. So, I suppose it depends on what you mean by “have to.”

[neiman]

The world is big my friend, it happens where I live.

[pixard]

I find it odd that anyone would give permission to a third party (any third party) to at will withdraw money directly from your bank account (and if I'm understanding correctly how it works in the US without even being able to set limits on it, neither in frequency nor amount).

[mikepurvis]

I switched to FF on Windows 10 as my daily driver a year and a half ago in order to adopt a multi-account container workflow. MACs aren't perfect [1] and overall I definitely sense that FF is not as power-efficient as Chrome, especially when in a Meet call, but overall I'm very happy with it and the power thing is not a huge issue if I'm sitting wired in all day anyway.

[1]: My criticisms: https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/1...

[hn8788]

On FF, Spotify frequently freezes for a minute or more with 100% CPU utilization, Amazon won't play videos in higher than 720p, and a lot of sites only show alternate text instead of graphical buttons. I switched over to Brave for a few weeks, and was suprised at how much smoother major websites run on a chromium based browser.

[temac]

> Lots of reasons: familiarity, it works for your use cases [...]

Yes indeed... until not anymore. And will this be an enormous change? Oh no but an annoying one for some people, and completely switching browsers might be perceived as only marginally less familiar than just having some of your settings suddenly disappearing in FF.

[thayne]

> What alternatives are there?

This is my problem. If there was a real option to go to I probably would leave Firefox because of the things they've removed or haven't added. But then I look at the alternatives, and they are all worse.

[ekianjo]

> it works for your use cases

Until they remove the feature you used for years. But hey, they are the champion of the Free Web so anything goes.

[pmontra]

I also use this feature. I suspected I did but I had to go and look at the settings. I took two screenshots in normal and compact density. The difference on my 15.6" laptop is very small. A few vertical pixels of spacing in the tab bar and address bars. I'd rather keep compact mode but I'll hardly notice the difference.

Anyway, this designers' fad of making desktop applications look like mobile apps (I'm intentionally using those two different names) must come to an end. My favorite example is "think if Excel on a computer would have half an inch padding around each cell with possibly no borders". This normal layout thing is only a very small step in that direction but it's still in that direction.

[charlesdaniels]

I have noticed this trend across many different applications/toolkits. In Linux land, GTK is an especially bad offender.

Desktops tend to have high-precision pointing devices. It is wasteful of space to make big, touch-friendly buttons. Many web apps and GTK programs that follow this trend are barely usable on my laptop (1366x768 display).

A good UI toolkit should support adjusting the size of the UI elements according to what platform is being used. In an ideal world, I could just set some kind of scale factor and have all my applications respect it. Then the people with touchscreens can be happy, as can the people with mice.

I guess from the perspective of commercial software, it's cheaper to write one UI and have it cater to the lowest-common-denominator. What I don't understand is why these design trends have become popular in the open source space.

[klyrs]

Ubuntu directing me to "swipe up to login" on my desktop with a 4K monitor is a crime against humanity. IIRC a tap at the keyboard has the same effect but that's not the discoverable path

[webmaven]

> Ubuntu directing me to "swipe up to login" on my desktop with a 4K monitor is a crime against humanity. IIRC a tap at the keyboard has the same effect but that's not the discoverable path

I accidentally discovered that the mouse's scroll wheel works for this too.

[wott]

I recently tried to revive a Netbook. It has very limited vertical space.

I had to get rid of almost all programs that used modern GTK.

One major problem was dialogues windows, typically options setting dialogues. They were too big and the buttons were out of the screen (below the screen), because of too much white space everywhere, because of badly organised layout, and because of too many things being packed inside the same dialogue.

But the most infuriating was the bloody CSD (Client Side Decoration). They pretend it saves spaces, because it fuses a menu bar and the window bar (window manager bar).

But firstly, they made it so big that this single bar is only a couple pixels shorter than a traditional set of menu bar + window bar.

And secondly, on a traditional application, with the WM I had, I could (simply pressing one shortcut key) hide both the window bar of the current application (from the top), and the WM task bar (from the bottom), making the entire vertical space available from the current application content (including its menu bar). But with CSD, I cannot hide the window bar, since there is no window bar; so I am forced to keep their huge menu+window bar combo fusion and as a result there is less space available for the content...

[pmontra]

Check these links: I managed to reduce the padding of those huge menus.

https://blog.samalik.com/make-your-gnome-title-bars-smaller/

https://blog.samalik.com/make-your-gnome-title-bar-smaller-f...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36869701/decrease-the-ta...

Your CSS must go to ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css

[toyg]

> In Linux land, GTK is an especially bad offender.

That's has always been the case, even before mobile was a thing. GTK components have always been padded to the wazoo, and pretty badly too; it's one of the reasons I was very much a "KDE guy" back in the early '00s, QT component just looked and scaled so much better.

If only QT had had a C implementation, GTK would never have reached a tenth of its popularity.

[kitsunesoba]

Much of the excess padding in GTK apps comes from the Adwaita theme more than from the apps or GTK itself. After applying a GTK theme that cuts the padding down to more reasonable levels, I find that GTK apps are actually pretty nice and generally handle whitespace better than their Qt counterparts (which often go the opposite direction, packing controls too tightly or arranging them somewhat haphazardly).

Agree that Qt would be more popular with a C implementation. The myriad language bindings available for GTK have gone a long way in boosting its popularity.

[Narishma]

Can you give an example of such a theme?

[kitsunesoba]

There’s a number of themes that cut down padding (just take a look at the GTK Themes section of gnome-look) but two where it’s more obvious are the Nordic and Mcata themes:

https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1267246/

https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1381832/

[ectopod]

I don't know why tabs and taskbars go at the top and bottom of the screen by default. This is exactly where the space isn't. Every screen is wide.

The taskbar can be moved easily, but Firefox doesn't come with a vertical tabs option. Both Chrome and Edge seem to now.

[derefr]

IIRC tab bars are optimized for the most-common usage scenario where you only have two or three tabs open. In that case, running horizontally across the top/bottom of the screen means each tab gets to be wide-enough to show a large amount of text, maximizing the amount of context the tab can give for what it's about.

Vertical tabs are stuck in a side-bar, and that sidebar has to fight with the main content for screen real-estate, with the tab bar usually losing (i.e. getting shrunk by the user in order to increase the size of the main content.) That means that, even with only a few tabs open, a tabs sidebar can't show very much description text for each tab.

When you have a lot of tabs, a tab sidebar shows more per-tab context than a tab top/bottom bar does. But having a lot of tabs is comparatively rare.

[GoOnThenDoTell]

I’ve never met anyone who only had a few tabs open at a time

[derefr]

It’s less “having only a few tabs open at once” and more “having a few tabs per window, in many windows.” People who exclusively use tabs are rare compared to people who mostly use windows and sometimes use tabs.

Remember, the default behaviour in all major browsers is to open external links from other applications in a new window. So, if you’re the regular “go with the flow” kind of computer user who presumes the defaults are defaults for a reason — and are a bit lazy in cleaning up your windows, and you use at least one external app (e.g. a mail client, a piece of collaboration software, etc.) — then even if you yourself prefer to open tabs, you’ll end up opening new windows quite frequently as well.

And, if you don’t care where you open each new tab, you’ll just end up opening it against whichever window was most recently opened; rather than having a dedicated “tabs I opened” window.

(As a person who bothered to install the “Merge Windows” Chrome extension to replicate the feature in Safari, I genuinely don’t get these people — but they really do exist, and are even seemingly in the majority.)

[pmontra]

This is very true for monitors especially with affordable 24+ inches high density models.

Actually, the screen of my laptops got only slightly wider in the last 25 years but considerably shorter. 16:9 is bad on laptops.

This means that an Ubuntu like launcher (on a side) should be optimal and yet it takes away the space I need to display two windows side by side.

That's why I always reconfigure Gnome to move the top bar to the bottom and merge it with a task bar. I also autohide it to gain some space.

[webmaven]

> This means that an Ubuntu like launcher (on a side) should be optimal and yet it takes away the space I need to display two windows side by side.

> That's why I always reconfigure Gnome to move the top bar to the bottom and merge it with a task bar. I also autohide it to gain some space.

Why not use the autohide option with the launcher on the side?

[pmontra]

Because I don't need the launcher. I start most of the programs I need on boot and they go on for weeks until the next reboot (emacs, terminals, browsers, Thunderbird, keepassx, Telegram and 32 GB of RAM.) I use a virtual desktop (a Gnome activity?) per project so I have very few windows open per desktop and I alt tab between them. One browser window per desktop, one terminal per desktop, one emacs frame per desktop, Slack, etc. BTW, I wish that desktop Slack had an option to display multiple windows. Doing it in a browser is obvious but the desktop app is better than the browser one, so I drag it into another desktop when I change project. I run the other programs by pressing the windows key and typing their name, not every day or week. What I use my bottom bar for is to access the icons in the notification bar. Glance at the time, open or close a VPN, take a screenshot with Flameshot. I also placed the favorites menu there (some extension?) to start the file manager. I'm using Nemo instead of Nautilus because I like to predictably access files and folders with type ahead. I occasionally use the bottom bar to click on the name of a dining program and it's nice to have see them side by side as in old Windows versions.

[md5wasp]

Does Chrome have a vertical tabs mode?! Because the primary reason I use Firefox is because it _does_ have a vertical tabs mode, via use of TreeStyleTabs and some userChrome.css hacks.

[vetinari]

> Many web apps and GTK programs that follow this trend are barely usable on my laptop (1366x768 display).

Gtk seems to optimized for the higher-end of not-hdpi-yet displays (100-120 dpi, at @1X), i.e. 1600x900 to 1920x1080 at 14". Fullhd at this size, the sizing is great, it doesn't need hidpi support yet, which would also explain the sad hidpi support in many apps (not the toolkit! just some apps; e.g. virt-manager/spice-gtk only recently got it supported).

[SubiculumCode]

If anything I'd like it even more compact in >= 2k screens.

[bachmeier]

> Why bother using FF at this point? Most sites don't work as well, and Mozilla seems actively hostile to my use case.

I absolutely LOVE the way Firefox dies to force you to restart your browser. Silently updates in the background, then all of a sudden it stops working and you don't know why. Who among us hasn't wanted to be teaching a class with dozens of students and have their browser die? Guess they're going after those that yearn for the days of Windows 98 stability.

[bilkow]

This actually only happens when you update Firefox through your distro's package manager when its running (or your distro updates automatically in the background).

[burnte]

That makes more sense because I've never encoutered this bug but my distro doesn't have a Firefox package, I use the "Windows" distro from Microsoft. Very stable and highly compatible anymore.

[sjcoles]

Unfortunately your distro decides when software updates and leaves very little in your control. Not very stable if it is updating things without your permission.

[burnte]

Those are OS updates, not appolication updates.

[pitaj]

This has never happened to me.

[foepys]

I'm using two different profiles at work simultaneously with the Firefox Developer Edition. When Firefox updates in the background, sometimes new tabs just don't work anymore and keep loading indefinitely.

But I cut Mozilla some slack for it since this is a pretty unusual setup and the Developer Edition is updating quite a lot compared to the release branch and it doesn't happen all the time.

[kaba0]

That’s more of an issue with the package manager that most likely deleted the actual executable underneath. Firefox’s in-built auto-update doesn’t do so.

[foepys]

It happened just a few days ago to a colleague of mine.

[serf]

it happens pretty routinely to me on computers that idle with browsers for long periods.

example : a cctv kiosk I have just sits on a URL all day.

It updates silently and breaks the browser sometimes a few times a month, facilitating remote administration to reset.

The other lovely behavior is when after an update the tab to show update notes is prioritized upon browser auto-restart -- thus covering up the cctv kiosk tab with something advertising firefox changes.

Firefox is getting harder to love, (thankfully?) so is the competition in most cases.

[derefr]

I'm surprised there isn't a browser-ish application purpose-built to be used as a webview of a single site, with no distractions, that does the right thing when self-updating (= wait for a scheduled maintenance window, restart, then reload everything exactly as it was.) This app would be to browsers, as Windows IoT Core (nee Windows Embedded) is to regular Windows: the thing you run on a kiosk to minimize the need for interactive administration and maximize useful uptime.

I mean, you can kind of use Electron for this, but it's not designed to be used this way (i.e. to be used un-customized as a long-running service with hot updates.) It's designed as an SDK for developers to produce apps with, not as an app in-and-of itself.

https://fluidapp.com/ exists, but it's not multiplatform, and it still doesn't address the needs of the embedded market either.

[nitrogen]

Firefox has a kiosk mode; I wonder if they didn't consider the effect of updates on kiosk mode.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-enterprise-kios...

[bachmeier]

They even have a special page for it. I keep it handy because this seems to be the only response anyone ever makes when I bring it up:

"Firefox has just been updated in the background. Click Restart Firefox to complete the update."

It would at least be a minor improvement if they'd open a new tab to show you that information. Instead you're refreshing the page wasting everyone's time because it doesn't always tell you that's what's going on.

[sciurus]

IIRC this only occurs if you are using your distro's firefox package. If your package manager upgrades firefox out from under it, things break and you have to restart Firefox to get back in a sane state.

If you use Mozilla's build of Firefox and it's built-in update system I think this won't happen.

(Disclosure: I work for Mozilla but not on this)

[addicted]

I believe this also happens with certain pre release editions (Nightly, which I use) which is absolutely reasonable.

[prionassembly]

Would you agree it’s still bad UX if it only happens to people who haven’t gone out of their way to get a “good” Firefox?

[ben0x539]

It's bad UX but how far should Firefox go out of its way to support the situation where a (from its perspective) third-party package manager just deleted all its files, replacing them with subtly different/newer ones?

[dastx]

Unlike Microsoft and Apple, on Linux you're never forced to upgrade. Thus, when you do upgrade, you should really be checking what packages are upgraded. The alternative to such a page would be to require you to stop Firefox before the updates start. So it is still a trade off.

[PostOnce]

it says something like "we need to restart to keep going" and you have to reload the browser, without warning, and it's hard to turn off without fucking around in about:config

[kwk1]

This is a fairly common occurrence for anyone running a Debian-family Linux distribution with unattended-upgrades turned on.

[shock]

> Why bother using FF at this point? Most sites don't work as well, and Mozilla seems actively hostile to my use case. If I'm going to use a browser that is hostile to me, I may as well get better website compatibility out of the bargain.

I feel the same. I am saddened that some guy from Mozilla now wants to remove support⁰ for user.js, supposedly to save a stat() call :-/

⓪ - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1543752

[masklinn]

> I use this feature. On a large monitor, Firefox wastes quite a lot of space with the default layout.

Ditto. First thing I do when setting up firefox, the default is just way too unnecessarily large.

A large monitor isn't even necessary, it's too large at every monitor size between 13" and 34" (which is the range my personal hardware covers).

[charlesdaniels]

I feel like it would be even worse on a smaller display where screen real-estate is at a premium. I am fortunate to be able to afford (relatively, compared to most of the world) high end computer equipment where wasting pixels is not as problematic as it might be for someone with less resources.

[skinkestek]

> Why bother using FF at this point?

Because it is still better and Google has worked even harder to make me dislike them?

That said, if someone made a viable fork of the latest Firefox and fixed all the problems and missing APIs I could easily pay $15 a month for it, maybe $25.

A good browser would be worth almost as much as a good IDE in my current position.

FTR: employeer pays my full subscription to all Jetbrains tools. I'd happily try to get them to pay for unbroken Firefox but more realistically pay it myself. $100 - 200 for the software and $50 to spite Mozilla at this point ;-) Just today someone tried politely to ask about what one could do to get them to reconsider the api to hide tabs and were brushed of by someone.

[paulryanrogers]

My guess is everyone has a different definition of unbroken. And with the Chromium-monoculture one can't reliably use some parts of the web with any other browser. Or even a too-old Chromium-based browser for that matter.

[skinkestek]

Firefox works for everything I need and want to to except my time sheets - and I do a lot.

A fork would of course need to be kept up to date with the base (until everyone switches :-).

[dynamic_sausage]

> I wish there was an option to make it more compact than the "compact" layout.

You can make the url bar smaller by setting the layout.css.devPixelsPerPx in your about:config to a value between 0 and 1. This can also be done by adding the following line to your user.js:

user_pref("layout.css.devPixelsPerPx", 0.8);

[m463]

or just get a 4k monitor and realize things are too small and you need the extra space for readability.

[simias]

> Why bother using FF at this point? Most sites don't work as well, and Mozilla seems actively hostile to my use case.

I share some of your gripes and I do think that Mozilla routinely drops the ball with Firefox, but that's a gross overstatement. I exclusively use Firefox as my main browser (both on desktop and mobile) and I only very occasionally stumble upon websites that will only work correctly on Chromium.

It's annoying when it happens but it's most definitely not "most sites" in my experience, it's a small minority.

[josephcsible]

> Why bother using FF at this point?

Because the alternative is that Blink becomes the new IE6.

[SirLotsaLocks]

at the moment I plan on continuing using firefox so I'm not leaving but you can't keep using a browser with a worse experience because of some futile moral cause. Firefox has to earn their place and be a browser people to use. I think firefox going after the general public makes sense but when it comes at an expense to generally more advanced users they've probably gone a step too far though to be fair they don't have nearly as many devs as other browsers like chrome and edge.

[ddingus]

"Worse" = very highly subjective

"Moral cause" = many people will walk right away from even expensive software over these kinds of things.

Just saying.

[marcodiego]

If it weren't for those 'using a browser with a worse experience because of some futile moral cause', IE would still be king.

[spijdar]

Characterizing early Firefox as only gaining traction because people had more warm fuzzy feelings for it seems off to me, although I wasn't around at the time personally.

I started using Firefox in the late 2000s mostly because I switched to Linux, and Chrome wasn't a thing yet. The web dev tools were better (firebug, anyone?), there were extensions like pentydactyl and whichever predecessor it had back in the day, and overall I just preferred the UI.

Pretty much every reason I originally used Firefox is gone now. I used it out of habit now and because it's less memory intensive still, but that's it. There's just not much going for Firefox except being backed by "the good guys" in a fight against the Empire. Even the cross platform support has withered with all the Chrome components like Skia and dependencies on tools like node.js (ironic that Firefox needs chrome's javascript engine to compile) limiting it to mainstream target triplets.

Firefox is trying to stay usable and I applaud that, but now they're just perpetually stuck trying to play catch up with Chrome's features and performance, always lagging behind, either a little or a lot. Chrome sets the web standards -- I think Firefox has simply lost.

[marcodiego]

Actually not Firefox, but Konqueror. From conqueror came KHTML which was later the base for webkit which evolved in chrome and the rest is history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML

[saurik]

Uh, no? That argument would only make sense if IE were better than every alternative but died because people merely chose to not use it... in fact, it wasn't until the big lawsuits against Microsoft caused IE to stagnate and then better browsers existed that people switched to--first Firefox targeting developers / power users and then (later) Chrome laying waste to the entire field on performance--that IE was dethroned. We thereby need the same thing today: an arrow in the leg of Chrome (though I sadly don't know if we could even pull off an anti-competition suit against them with the current landscape... I am bullish always on such and I am not even seeing the argument :/) and some game-changing competition (which is hard to predict, but doesn't seem to be coming from Firefox the more they try to just emulate Chrome).

[marcodiego]

Konqueror was worse than most popular browsers of the era but users and developers did not gave up on it. It was enough for KHTML eventually evolve in webkit which eventually powered most popular browsers these days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML .

People sticking to their principles and willing to use a less advanced browser just to guarantee its improvement is what gave us the fast browsers we have today.

[toyg]

Man, I remember the Mozilla days, and then Phoenix and Firebird... so many issues, so many problems. But there was a sense of belonging to "the good web" which would have inevitably triumphed. And then Google showed us that anything can be corrupted.

[dandellion]

I find myself in a similar situation, they keep removing more and more features that made me choose Firefox over the alternatives for the last 15 years. Recently I've been using Brave a bit and it seems a good Chrome-based alternative, I still prefer Firefox as my main driver, but in the direction they're headed at some point there'll be just no reason to keep using it.

[aembleton]

> Why bother using FF at this point?

Tree Style Tabs on the desktop and and uBO on Android.

[trulyme]

...and not many other extensions on Android. They killed most of them, leaving just 17 or so. Oh yes, and you can actually install the rest of them on nightly if you follow some weird procedure, just so that we all know there is actually no technical reason for it. Thank you Mozilla, appreciate it.

[seba_dos1]

> Why bother using FF at this point?

Well, the thing is that Firefox would have to be crippled much much much more in order to make me switch to a different browser because there's simply no competition there - everything else is much worse already, so I'd simply trade my browser getting slowly crippled over time with a single instantaneous crippling.

[karaterobot]

> Edit 1: worth noting, there is a lower-down comment thread[0] with relevant links - Mozilla does not care if you like this feature.

They're just saying to please stop spamming the bug tracker with "me too" messages. There are Mozilla forums for giving product feedback which are likely read by product people and not engineers fixing bugs.

[thatguy0900]

They said that engineers are well aware of the feedback, that implies they don't care about the other channels either to me

[limeblack]

> Seems like every time I see coverage about Firefox, it's Mozilla removing or crippling some feature I care about.

I agree. They need an emulate chrome option: Match keyboard shortcuts, menu, and compact layout.

[zenincognito]

100% agree with the default layout wasting too much space. I like this user also wish there was even a more compact layout. This is most certainly a abandon software breaking change for me.

[Seb-C]

I gave up to Firefox about a month ago and switched to Vivaldi. So far I'm not looking back.

I would certainly have preferred to stick with a non-blink browser, but Mozilla won't stop remove features I like and making harmful changes.

How many pointless UX revamps have they done in the last decade? Meanwhile everyone is still waiting for the many unkept promises, including mobile extensions.

[Spooky23]

I’ll never understand why designers hate dense interfaces so much.

[ddingus]

Here is my theory:

The designers before them went for different metrics.

Designers need to design.

And this is how the circle of UX paradigms is powered.

Like fashion, it will cycle.

The current trends are current, until they aren't.

[ddingus]

By the way, that is not a negative statement towards design or designers. I think it's just our nature playing out.

[CRConrad]

It kind of is a negative statement: It illustrates that sometimes (often), our nature sucks.

[Paul-ish]

> Seems like every time I see coverage about Firefox, it's Mozilla removing or crippling some feature I care about.

Maybe this reflects the coverage more than the reality. Read the changelog and you will see things worth getting excited by, but no one is going to write an article about each new feature and change.

[nanis]

> I use this feature. On a large monitor, Firefox wastes quite a lot of space with the default layout. To be honest, I wish there was an option to make it more compact than the "compact" layout.

Ditto ... I am not clear why we need eight pixels' padding around the location bar and what looks like 15 pixels' padding around the icons alongside. It looks like the location bar is around 32 px on this admittedly ancient 1280x800 laptop screen and I'd be happy with 20 px.

[BuckRogers]

I'm an 18+ year non-stop Firefox user and have always routinely checked out the competition (once every few years). Just did my latest comparison last night in fact. What I appreciate about a browser has changed over the years, I'm less of a privacy expert or some sort of Gecko diehard, and more about features and performance.

Brave- no dedicated search bar option (important for privacy / prefetching and not having to continually retype your search query). Didn't get to mobile support and crossplatform sync.

Opera- dedicated search bar, with no way to set a hotkey to focus it. Disqualified as that makes it a non-power user's browser for me right off the bat. This browser's closed source and Chinese ownership does give me pause.

Vivaldi- dedicated search bar and hotkey (yay!), but no way to sync tabs with iOS.

I've already determined for a while now that Firefox (best on features) and native browsers, Edge and Safari (best on performance) were my 3 browsers of choice, and that remains unchanged. Edge on Windows 10 is truly great, and has a decent start at sync, even if it doesn't come close to how well Firefox does there. It just needs fleshed out more.

To answer your question on what the sell is, it's really dependent on the user, and native browsers have huge advantages (most people should probably just use Edge/Safari IMO), but I see Firefox as the only non-native browser worth using due to the best-in-class feature set. I'm not going to draw this post out further detailing all of them, but it wouldn't be hard for me to demonstrate how much Firefox outclasses the competition there. It's a very mature browser.

[dosenbrot]

> I use this feature. On a large monitor, Firefox wastes quite a lot of space with the default layout. Ditto, I hate programs wasting space with these things. The compact design matches really good with other toolbars and stuff in KDE. (however, there could be an option to make it bigger, for touch displays, but it should'nt the only choise)

[jbluepolarbear]

I haven’t used Firefox since they introduced The Australis interface. I hated it. It broke all the extensions I used, the ones I developed, and took away my ability to put the buttons where I wanted. I figured if I had to learn a new browser I’d go with Chrome. Now I mainly use Edge and I really like it.

[lukewrites]

> Why bother using FF at this point?

I use it almost entirely for containers. Do any other browsers have the same functionality either built-in or via plugin?

[freebuju]

Chrome has an addon that's closed sourced but claims to emulate containers feature from FF. I've forgotten the name since I never bothered checking it out.

[testesttest]

I only use them on mobile at this point (for adblock). For desktop, they are just worse than Chrome.

[fastball]

Brave has better adblock on mobile in my experience anyway.

[m463]

> Why bother using FF at this point?

All these people complaining about a free browser, and one that isn't selling your soul to pay for it.

Please check your behavior, and set a better example in the future.

[nevster]

> Why bother using FF at this point?

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