[DeusExMachina]

I am not a Firefox user, but I am baffled by the fact that every time I see news about it is because its developers are trying to push something that users dislike. All the comments I read always highlight how they keep wasting time and money instead of working on more important things.

My impression is that this is the reason why they keep losing market share. I never see any positive news about Firefox or Mozilla, and the browser has nothing that would make me switch.

Firefox gained market share because people recommended it and installed it on the computers of friends and family. They seem to have stopped, and its developers don't seem, from the outside, to be interested in doing anything to bring that back.

[shawnz]

Here are some of the things that make Firefox the best browser for me:

- An extension system more powerful than Chrome's, which supports for example rich adblockers that can block ads on Youtube. Also, it works on mobile, too

- Many sophisticated productivity, privacy, and tab management features such as vertical tabs, tab groups, container tabs, split tabs, etc. And now it also has easy-to-use profiles and PWA support just like Chrome

- A sync system which is ALWAYS end-to-end encrypted, and doesn't leak your browsing data or saved credentials if you configure it wrong, like Google's does, and it of course works on mobile too

- And yes, LLM-assisted summarization, translation, tab grouping, etc, most of which works entirely offline with local LLMs and no cloud interation, although there are some cloud enabled features as well

[stogot]

When/where was the PWA support added? I tried to test that this week and their docs say to use a third-party extension.

[shawnz]

They're calling it taskbar tabs and it's behind a feature flag in nightly currently: https://windowsreport.com/firefox-is-bringing-web-apps-to-wi...

[stogot]

Thanks

[uzerfcwn]

My favourite feature is userChrome. The default chrome sucks in both Chrome and Firefox, but at least Firefox allows me to customize it to my liking without forking the entire browser.

On the flip side, changing keybinds in Firefox requires forking, but the defaults aren't too bad.

[godelski]

There are plenty of us that have no problem with Firefox and use it. But I notice people love to hate Firefox. You also get a lot of people complaining who've never used it.

Truth is it's a perfectly fine browser and the average person doesn't really notice the difference when you switch them over. Okay, "you" might be special and we're on a tech forum but most people don't.

But we're also on a tech forum where people don't realize that a chrome/chromium dominance means Google controls how the internet operates. People love to complain about Firefox's lack of standards as if those aren't first protocols in chrome and then Google votes for them to become standards. That's the entire problem right there

[JumpCrisscross]

> I notice people love to hate Firefox

They may be misplacing their hatred for Mozilla, which legitimately deserves the ire.

[godelski]

At this point that doesn't matter, does it? Mozilla has no teeth in which to bite with. They're not even close to. So is that really the priority?

In the meantime all these conversions accomplish is the sharpening of Google's teeth. Google not only has the capacity to bite but is actively demonstrating that they'll use their teeth.

So why the fuck do we complain about a dog with no teeth while another dog is eating our legs? Let's get our priorities right. Let's talk after we're not being bitten or if that dog starts eating our other leg.

[ajkjk]

they hate it because all the news about it is bad, and falls cleanly into the unignorable modern narrative that "everything is being corrupted and turning against users over time". Embedding corporate interests in a browser that was supposed to be for people (see: all the examples of them doing that) is morally disgusting and everyone hates it. The repulsiveness of it is more about the trend that it represents than the feature itself. We are soooooooo fucking tired of good things becoming bad and being unaccountable for it. To win our confidence, the right number of "betrayals of user trust" is absolutely zero, and it's not right now... and since they're ostensibly non-profit/open source the dissonance of "pretending to win trust" and then "betraying it" is especially jarring. When Google does something evil every day you're not surprised, just resigned; when Mozilla does something evil you're truly disappointed because they have no reason to; they were supposed to be good the good guys.

[chairmansteve]

Yes. It's the hypocrisy that is annoying.

Google is expected to be evil so nobody is disappointed.

[godelski]

The annoying part is that Mozilla's lack of sainthood is used as justification to further Google's impiety.

It's a pattern we do a lot in many different settings. We help evil flourish when we concentrate on how tarnished a white knight is. It's petty

[godelski]

Are you sure this isn't perception bias?

Mozilla does good thing: doesn't make news and everyone carries on as doing good things is expected and "normal"

Mozilla does bad thing: people get upset and this drives more attention and discussion.

We live in a world of social media where it's absolutely obvious what drives "engagement". Why would this be any different here? I mean we even see the inverse side where Google is expected to be evil so it's just stats quo. People then complain about how helpless they are to fight off these monopolies and yet are looking for excuses to not do something as simple as changing a browser. Is Firefox perfect? Of course not. The perfect browser does not exist. But browsers are pretty feature rich and fairly on parity these days. But let's not pretend that these complaints are more driven by our want to complain or our need to justify our current choice than it is about the actual impact of these things. I mean here we are talking about an optional feature and we're pigeonholing it into the optional AI quick tab while ignoring other useful things like translation. And let's not pretend like that quick tab is a crazy thing. We're on Hacker News and we all are quite aware at how often people are using LLMs. You think suddenly in this thread everyone is anti-LLM? Or maybe it's perception bias. I for one quite like the quick tab because I can just press <C-x> to open up Claude instead of pinning a tab or navigating to their site. I don't use it to read my websites and it doesn't have to. Everything here is 100% optional.

[ajkjk]

yes, I'm sure. The claim is not "based on the (biased) examples I've seen, Mozilla is 'actually' evil", as if evil was some logical predicate that has a truth value which we are discovering the value of. The claim is "based on the (biased) examples I've seen, Mozilla is not morally trustworthy", because nobody who's trustworthy does any of the things we've seen. In every case they've got in trouble for, they were completely free to do not do the thing. There is no excusing that.

> You think suddenly in this thread everyone is anti-LLM?

No, they're anti "putting LLMs in our software and shoving it in our faces" like literally every corporation is doing right now. You can find LLMs useful as a tool and despise the way corporations are trying to force them on you.

The right way for Mozilla to have Claude built-in is as an optional extension. That's... obvious. But anyway, the concern in the OP is not "Mozilla is adding LLM features" as much as it is the fact that despite this quote

"It’s safe to say that the people who volunteered to “shape” the initiative want it dead and buried. Of the 52 responses at the time of writing, all rejected the idea and asked Mozilla to stop shoving AI features into Firefox."

They're going to do it anyway, and pretend like that didn't happen, because they are slimy; because they consistently do the wrong thing in every moral situation in a way that is tremendously disappointing. Because their attitude is consistently that the point of soliciting feedback is to give the appearance of soliciting feedback rather than a genuine concern for doing right by users.

Presumably you saw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45830770 about the Japanese translator quitting over being blatantly disrespected by the Mozilla bureaucracy. If your reaction to that is "I don't understand what Mozilla did wrong" then you don't understand how repulsive the "Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further? We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with." response was. The grievance already happened, there was nothing else to discuss. Either the entity is capable of feeling empathy collectively (which is to say, the leadership is) and doing the right thing, or it isn't. When their response to fucking up is vapid damage control instead of genuine guilt... yeah, they're just acting like a corporate robot instead of human beings. Nobody wants that, nobody respects it, and nobody trusts it; they deserve all the critique they get until they have leadership that can demonstrate humanity.

(Not that they are the only ones. Mozilla is just particularly frustrating because there's no reason they couldn't; they're not even a public company; they could just do better things for free. We're in a societal epidemic of entities not demonstrating humanity but pretending to; if an actual person acted the way corporations do, with all the corpospeak bullshit + distortive messaging around doing shamelessly profit-seeking things--you would find them sickening and repulsive. Maybe you think we shouldn't hold corporations to human standards? I say, fuck that, that's what benefits them, not us; why shouldn't we seek a better world?)

[albedoa]

Perfectly said, bravo!

To add to all of this, the "perception bias" argument falls apart when we consider that if Mozilla had done the good alternative this case, the very example that we are discussing — if they had made a pledge to never force AI on Firefox users — then it absolutely would have made the news and driven discussion. It would have been a bold statement that re-inspired faith.

[godelski]

  > Mozilla is not morally trustworthy

I'm a big fan of being critical of corporations. But we're worse off by treating this as a binary condition (moral vs immoral) rather than a continuum. No company is fundamentally moral and nobody is perfect. By creating a binary distinction we end up either placing everything into the same bucket or being disillusioned to their faults. Neither is good but the former allows for a race to the bottom and the least moral one to win. That's worse for us users.

I'm not saying don't criticize Mozilla. I'm saying don't act like their problems are even in the same ballpark as Google. Even if Mozilla was "equally evil" it's better to support them simply to distribute that power as I'd rather two evils fight than one evil reign. This is the problem we have and why I'm not addressing your points or why most people aren't. Because we too have the same problems with Mozilla but we recognize what we've been doing has just been giving Google more power. So let's not?

It's not about being dismissive, it's about prioritization.

Let's be honest here, Firefox is only alive because Google needs them to avoid monopoly regulation. I'm not surprised they're trying to do anything they can to survive and that that also involved many bad ideas. Like you said, they're free. But do you donate? How do they fund themselves? They don't have an ad empire to back them up. You might say the CEO is paid too much and I'll agree but this is also a silly conversation when we look at other CEOs pay. The complaint is more a manifestation of being frustrated with Mozilla and a justification. If it was really about the money we'd be prioritizing our conversations about the companies giving magnitudes more. You don't complain about wasting pennies while dollars are flying out the window. So let's make sure we're on the same page.

All this comes down to: if not Firefox, who?

Picking chrome/chromium creates a monopolization of the infrastructure of the Internet. By a mega corp who's primary goal is to destroy privacy. A corporation who is already demonstrating that they will dictate the specifications of internet protocols and in their own interest.

Picking Safari gives undue power to a different mega corp who is less interested in destroying privacy (more ambivalent) but interested in walled gardens.

Picking Firefox gives power to a non profit (giving transparency into their financials) who's primary funding comes through donations and publicly takes a stance on privacy. It's the backbone of privacy browsers like Tor and Mullvad.

Picking Ladybird is currently not viable as it's still in alpha.

I'd say we're going "most to least evil" through that list. I won't call any of them saints or perfectly moral. That's not the bar!

I don't actually want to replace Google's dominance with Mozilla dominance and I don't think most pro Firefox people do either. We want competition in the space. I don't want any one entity controlling the internet. I don't want any 2 or 3! I want healthy competition with more actors than we have today because any dominating player risks jeopardizing the entire internet. So at this point it doesn't matter how good or bad Mozilla is, it really only matters that someone is fighting Google. Its priorities. We're so far gone that we don't have the liberty to have that discussion because frankly Mozilla has no teeth. Let's talk when they can bite or when they're close to having that capacity. Until then, stop sharpening Google's teeth!

[ajkjk]

the point of taking a big moral stance against Mozilla -- in fact, against anyone is

> if not Firefox, who?

Firefox! But run well!

The point of complaining about someone fucking up, or shaming them, is to get them to stop. They're the ones who should be doing good; they're in the position to do so; they know how; their hubris/capture by money/interests/class/ignorance/something is preventing it. They need only listen to solve this problem. And maybe wholesale replace leadership, I dunno. But replacing bad leadership is way easier than writing a new browser for scratch.

(a secondary purpose of complaining is to promulgate good norms to everybody else so that everybody's on the same page about what respectable behavior would look like)

> Let's be honest here, Firefox is only alive because Google needs them to avoid monopoly regulation.

sad to say, I agree.

[metabagel]

I don't understand why anyone would choose Chrome over Firefox. I get that it's performant, but it's developed by a dominant advertising company. Why would you trust Chrome if you care about your privacy?

Firefox is excellent, despite the grumbling of people who want it to have a narrower focus (which I'm not disagreeing with).

[DaSHacka]

> if you care about your privacy?

I think you just answered your own questions.

[godelski]

Then explain Brave then. They market as privacy but it has similar issues being chromium. The most critical being that by being chromium Google still gets to dictate how the internet works

[s3p]

I'm not sure they did. What do you think is the answer to "Why would you trust chrome if you care about privacy?"

[DaSHacka]

GP said:

> I don't understand why anyone would choose Chrome over Firefox. I get that it's performant, but it's developed by a dominant advertising company. Why would you trust Chrome if you care about your privacy?

I believe the vast majorty of people do not care about their privacy, answering GP's question.

[tim333]

I tend to use Chrome over Firefox although I have both. Plus points - better translate, google lens, slick and consistent. Minus points - Firefox containers are good.

Re privacy it comes across to me as a bit tin foil hat worrying about the evil doers tracking my thoughts. I mean sure I don't want criminals to know my home address and bank account details but re Google knowing say I use mac and advertising some Apple stuff to me - what's the problem?

[mac-attack]

> re Google knowing say I use mac and advertising some Apple stuff to me - what's the problem?

The issue is that the data isn't limited to device type and Google uses this data to sell to marketers. The more data they have on you, the more money they make which is why they're incentivized to break the rules and vacuum up as much data as possible even if it breaks the law. Hence, less than 6 months ago they paid over a billion dollars for "unlawfully tracking users’ geolocation, incognito searches, and collecting biometric data without proper consent"[1]

They're incentivized to abuse your data and owning the browser allows them for unchecked access to your internet browsing and information about you.

1. https://euroweeklynews.com/2025/06/01/time-to-uninstall-goog...

[tim333]

Well, we'll see. Google have all my info really, including emails and photos and in ~25 years of using them I haven't heard of anything particularly bad happening. They used to have my full location data but offloaded it to my device slightly to my annoyance so they don't get hassled by law enforcement asking where people are. I think people sometimes people worry about the wrong stuff.

[thesuitonym]

The same reason people used to choose Internet Explorer over Firefox, because it was already installed on their device. The device of the masses has changed from desktop computers to Android phones, and those have Chrome.

[0manrho]

> All the comments I read always highlight how they keep wasting time and money instead of working on more important things.

Nail on the head. Longtime Firefox user. All the way back to when it was called Netscape in fact, though I did roll chrome for a few years before coming back.

It was sometime around Mozilla's acquisition/integration of Pocket that shit started going sideways. Though, aside from the ad/privacy bullshit recently, their decisions haven't necessarily been "bad" ones so much as strange ones, and are all too often opt-out by default instead of opt-in. I just constantly find myself asking "Why?" more than actively being against what they're doing.

These days I use waterfox as it's Firefox without all the weird decisions (and telemetry), but truth be told the only reason I recommend Water/Firefox to anyone these days is by-and-large when they're bitching about ads and why their adblock doesn't work as well as it used to because of chrome and their MV3 chicanery. There are other reasons to use firefox, but for the average/casual user that's the main differentiator between it and chrome.

[dimal]

> every time I see news about it is because its developers are trying to push something that users dislike

Don't blame developers for management decisions.

[simianparrot]

Every time I try Firefox it’s slower than Chrome or Safari. Every time. And since that never seems to improve, I suspect that’s why its market share keeps dropping because all the fluff doesn’t matter if the core feature is just worse.

[mattthebaker]

Personally, I don't really see the value proposition in being able to load and serve you ads faster, compared to a browser with a proper ad blocker.

[simianparrot]

I don't know what you mean; uBlock Origin Lite blocks every ad on any page I visit in Safari and Chrome, even YouTube ads. Safari also blocks tracker cookies by default, and is significantly faster than Firefox in my use.

[mbonnet]

The average user does not care about ads being present. Speed is paramount.

[thfuran]

Shouldn't getting rid of all the ads make things notably faster?

[1718627440]

It does. Fundamentally.

[moooo99]

I disagree. I have installed adblockers on different relatives machines. Without fail, they mentioned how much better surfing now is.

They did not not mind the ads, they just didn‘t know there is an easy way to get rid of them

[munificent]

You are radically underestimating how much slow web performance is caused by the massive volume of ads and user tracking data attached to each site.

[thesuitonym]

I hear this complaint all the time, but I just don't see it as having any basis in reality. I use Firefox, Chrome, and Edge side by side all the time, and I never experience any difference in page load times except on YouTube, where we all know that Google purposefully delivers a slower experience for Firefox users.

[mikestorrent]

The performance is fine and has always been fine for me, across multiple OS, since it was called Phoenix onward. No issue. Never had a very top-of-the-line machine, either.

Slower than Chrome? That's like looking over at the sports car next to you when you're driving and being jealous, IMO

[benatkin]

Amen. Friends don't let friends use Firefox in the manner prescribed by Mozilla in its current state. It's horrid.

I have LibreWolf and Chrome installed, but not Firefox, and I like part of Firefox in spite of, not because of, the rest of Mozilla. I'd be interested in Ladybird except they threaten to use Swift.

[pessimizer]

Exactly. I've never stopped using Firefox, I've stopped recommending it because I can't support it (literally, meaning guide the people I recommend it to through annoyances and problems.) I only use it myself through Debian, I cram it with extensions to get old functionality back and give me some measure of privacy, and make tons of userChrome changes to get everything to look halfway sane (i.e. like it looked out of the box in 2010.)

I'm not helping somebody non-technical with that, and without that, I can't really recommend it over Chrome; they're both controlled by Google. I can tell them that Firefox is better for adblocking, for now, until they gaslight everyone and revert to following Chrome's tail on absolutely everything again.

But if Firefox were a real public service browser, they would have brought uBlock in-house a long time ago by employing gorhill (along with a bunch of other extensions, especially Tree Style Tabs.) Instead, they danced around shutting down its APIs just like Chrome until they decided not to (or until Google decided for them, because Firefox doing that would have annihilated Google in antitrust hearings.) There is absolutely no reason to be confident that Firefox won't be "regretfully" or "unfortunately" right in on "Manifest V4."

[k1musab1]

Excellent point. Google can point to this browser with sub 5% market penetration as an alternative in anti-trust hearings, so keeping it on life support is beneficial.

[mikestorrent]

What's horrid? I have been using stock Firefox for half my lifetime and it's fine. One is already being esoteric enough using a 2% market share browser; do I have to be even more esoteric and use a 2% of the 2%?

[DaSHacka]

Exactly this.

I use librewolf, but for non-tech savvy, relatives where that would not be an option, I'm not exactly gonna recommend barebones vanilla Firefox either.