[lxgr]

How does having a browsing experience imply being a product?

Is it possible to use Firefox without having a browsing experience? It is a web browser!

Seems like Mozilla really is fighting a losing battle: Whenever they as much as think about doing 1% of the monitoring that their competitors do (often for user research to guide and focus their development efforts; unclear if that's what's happening here though), they alienate a vocal part of their user base; when they don't, their software drifts further and further from what users actually want and need.

[kjkjadksj]

The base they alienate just wants a web browser. You don’t need to iterate forever on a good tool that does the job. Software can be feature complete. Anyone wishing for a complete overhaul update for something like cp? Absolutely not, people want tools that work the same for years.

[lxgr]

But a browser is never "done", for better or worse, nor are user expectations static. Stopping to iterate on a web browser is like stopping to iterate on an operating system:

It'll go well for a while (and users even might love you for it for a year or two, since you can focus your effort on fixing bugs and not introduce new ones with new features), and then you'll slowly but steadily lose users to other browser that do adapt.

Losing users for a web browser, means losing search referral revenue in the short term (literally Mozilla's lifeblood), and losing web developers in the long term, which will break the experience even further.

Just one example that almost made me switch browsers: Web site translation. I was regularly using Chrome in parallel for that, but now Firefox fortunately supports it too (and in a privacy-preserving local way at that – a true innovation), so they keep me as a user.

[kjkjadksj]

All you have to do is keep up with web standards. Most people don't use 99% of the browsers features I'd guess. About all I need are tabs and bookmarks and a history and thats it, same stuff since netscape basically, my three features for a complete browser experience that would make me very happy. I'm sure other users feel the same.

[lxgr]

Some things technically not part of the core feature set of a browser (at least not the one you've mentioned), yet even just one of them missing would make me immediately drop Firefox:

- End-to-end encrypted tab, history, and bookmark sync across devices

- Content translation, as mentioned above ideally in a privacy-preserving way

- Plugin support

- Cookie-jar-per-tab and proxy-per-tab support (Firefox allows doing both through Multi-Account Containers)

I'm sure some other users also feel the same.

[JohnFen]

And I don't want or use any of those things.

It's almost like a "one size fits all" browser can't actually exist. I'm hoping for a more minimal, but excellent, browser to come around to meet the needs of the sort of user I am.

I think this is one of the adverse effects of Firefox changing how extensions work. In the Good Old Days, Firefox was a reasonably minimal browser and you could pick and choose which advanced functionality you wanted by choosing which extensions to install. But since extensions have been largely neutered now, a whole lot of that advanced functionality has to be built into the browser proper. This is fine if you want that stuff, but it's really uncomfortable if you don't.

[throwaway7356]

> About all I need are tabs and bookmarks and a history and thats it

I'm impressed you don't even need a HTML renderer component and all that comes with it.

[SkyMarshal]

As long as web standards keep evolving you can never stop iterating on browsers. And with Google Chrome pushing some of those web standards additions, Firefox has to keep up or die.

Also, it is possible to continue iteratively improving a complex piece of software like a browser, beyond just the web standards race. Security, privacy, performance, and reliability/bugs/code correctness are areas where new computer science is constantly coming down the pipe and worth integrating. And maybe other things like AI or features for AR/VR systems, though it's more debatable whether those belong in general purpose browsers.

Browsers aren't Unix utilities that should do one thing and just one thing and thus can theoretically reach a state of "done". But even there it's not always a certainty. For example, "sudo" being superseded by a simpler more secure "doas", and then more recently by SystemD "run0". Even simple utilities continue to evolve.

[kjkjadksj]

Firefox is doing a lot more than merely keeping up with web standards. Learning to abrogate a web standard is not an impossibility. They are standards for a reason: to show other engineers how to interface with them. I'd consider a browser finished if it has tabs, bookmarks, history, and print. Same as we had 25 years ago.

[int_19h]

The users are telling them pretty loudly what they actually want and need.

The problem is that Mozilla then consistently does something else, and tells its users that it's for their own good.