[Larrikin]

There is always a pile on on Firebox for not being perfect. Sometimes with valid complaints. But if you dig deeper nearly always the commenter is using a version of Chrome and justifies it over Firefox for a very shallow or outdated reason. Firefox would do well to listen to some of the criticism about the browser and ignore the noise about anything else

There's also the cohort of bad web developers that only test on Chrome

[morcus]

As someone that uses Firefox as my main browser on desktop and mobile, I am curious here - what exactly are the complaints with Firefox?

I'm using 3+ year old hardware that was mid-range even when it was new and it seems to do everything I would want with reasonable performance.

[LunaSea]

> what exactly are the complaints with Firefox?

If you are a (the) leading browser like Firefox once was, the "what are the complaints?" is the right question.

If you are a minor browser like Firefox currently is (~2.5% market share), the "what is it doing better?" is the correct question.

[pluralmonad]

Supporting a proper ad blocker makes it automatically superior than any of the more popular browsers. The fact most people don't mind being fuel for the machine is another issue.

[pessimizer]

There was a long period of time during which firefox users weren't sure whether they were going to follow chrome (like they did on every single other thing.) They're still user-hostile and their values are inscrutable; I have no trust that they won't kill ad blocking next year, or the year after. Requiring add-ons to be signed was a more radically hostile leap than moving to ManifestV3 would be.

The people still complaining about firefox are its most faithful users. The reason some are vicious is because they are trapped - they'll consider cutting their use of the internet before using an non-FOSS browser. 90% of firefox's users left. People who could stand a closed browser have already decided to use one. You're in an extreme minority if you even know anything about firefox to complain about. This year the Linux desktop, of all impossible things, has become more popular than firefox.

Yet there's still this confidence and attitude about even the remaining users that comes from being spoon-fed cash by your direct competitor in return for nothing.

[jampekka]

The Firefox market share was eaten largely by the enormous and legally dubious marketing campaigns by Google and Microsoft. Hard to see how Mozilla could compete with constant forced nags and defaults in the most widely used websites and operating systems.

[zamadatix]

It was a big factor, but so were things like the way they treated their mobile browser for years and years, which is the platform 2/3 of browser traffic now originates.

According to statcounter's stats, Firefox never cracked 1% of monthly mobile traffic any month from when stats started in 2009. Even Opera and UC have more than double Firefox's average for the last year and they are just Chromium forks users are downloading off the stores.

[Yoric]

For context, I recall that for years and years, Firefox was the highest ranked mobile browser. Mozilla invested a lot in mobile, Firefox devs had to rewrite the Android linker, invent new ways of starting binaries on Android, etc. just to make Firefox work (all of which were later used by Chrome for Android).

It still didn't make a dent in mobile browser shares.

Sure, Mozilla could have invested even more in Firefox mobile, but at some point, this would have come at the expense of Firefox desktop, which was the source of ~100% of the funding.

[zamadatix]

What Firefox was doing 4 months after Android 1.0 GA'd would indeed been unlikely to have made a dent in mobile share compared to what effort was going on once Android had a billion users. Why put all of that effort in before something is even used to just then let it rot for years anyways? In the end, they ended up spending the resources to refresh it in 2019 anyways - by which time billions had already decided Firefox was just a battery hog and slow on mobile.

It's a sad story because Firefox was so good on mobile when nobody had a chance to use it then it was crap when they did. On desktop Firefox is still the #1 non-bundled browser, things went so poorly on mobile they can't even come close to that today. In a parallel universe timings were inverted and Firefox may have even had more users on mobile than it does desktop today.

[LunaSea]

The Firefox market share was eaten by being worse than Chrome, especially around the developer tools and extensions market places at the time.

[glenstein]

It was eaten by Google flexing their search and mobile monopolies, to advertise it on one of the most visited websites in the world, and coming pre-installed on over a billion devices. Distribution lock in leading to market share dominance is a tale as old as computing to the point that we now have decades old case law specifically on the issue of software monopolies being the cause of browser market share dominance.

Interestingly the most recent anti-trust case against Google, one proposed remedy was spinning off the Chrome browser into its own company, but that option was judged to be unrealistic, because how would a browser survive on it's own without distribution advantages and all its costs subsidized by other revenue drivers? A great question.

[WorldMaker]

There's a lot of opinions and anecdata in that. Firefox was almost never as bad as it was marketed to be (by its competition), and Chrome was certainly never as good as it was marketed to be (by an evil ad company pretending to be a good, well adjusted internet benefit company).

[LunaSea]

Firefox used to be the first browser with decent developer tools thanks to the Firebug extension.

Then Chrome pushed heavily the development of its own development tools and crushed Firefox in the process. Chrome has now been the best browser for developers for the last +10 years.

The consequence is also that when the new generation of headless browsers were developed (Puppeteer) they were based on Chromium because it is so hackable and developer friendly.

This means that Firefox lost a big chunk of the developer community which constituted also a non trivial amount of their user base and advocates.

[dandellion]

I don't know why people left Firefox, but I know why *I* did. And it was three or four years ago (after using it for 15 years) because I got annoyed at them for removing many features that I used over the years, and because I tried a Crommium based browser and it just had better performance and better ad-blocking. That's just one anecdote, but feel free to correlate it with other anecdotes to find some patterns and reach your own conclusion.

[sunaookami]

No, Chrome was genuinely better than Firefox back then. Firefox didn't have multiprocess until many years later and Flash constantly crashed the browser.

[duped]

> what is it doing better

adblock is the single most important feature of a web browser to me. Firefox has the best adblock support.

[LunaSea]

I agree, although Chrome has extensions like uBlock Origin Lite and Privacy Badger which are decent enough for most people and uses.

[morcus]

> decent enough for most people and uses.

Except for the very big use case of mobile browsing, where only Firefox allows extensions.

[hedora]

I’d argue they aren’t, but the number one threat actor in the privacy space is Google.

I occasionally have to use Chrome to test with it. Can someone explain concisely how it manages Google logins? They clearly bolted it in at some low level to help violate privacy, and or shove dark patterns.

Also, the out of the box spam and dark patterns are over the top. It reminds me of Win 95 bundled software bullshit.

That’s to say nothing of their B-tier properties, like Google TV or YouTube client:

When the kids use this garbage it’s all “Bruh, what is this screen?”, or “I swear I’m not touching the remote!”

(The official YouTube client loses monitor sync(!!) as it rapid cycles through ads on its own now. I guess this is part of an apparent google-run ad fraud campaign, since it routinely seems to think it ran > 5-10 ads to completion in ~15 seconds. We can’t even see all the ads start because each bumps the monitor settings around, which has the effect of auto-mute.)

[evilduck]

My primary complaint is that they have a bunch of ad placements on the product out of the box when it's opened for the first time and any time I set up a new system I have to go configure Firefox to not be annoying by default. It makes the Firefox experience feel subversive and untrustworthy because this freshly installed application is obviously bedfellows with advertisers. I know I can't trust advertisers with my data or browser behavior, so why should I trust Firefox with it? If I stop using Firefox for a little while, they _so helpfully_ offer to reset my configuration back to default so those ads will get shown again. It's a hostile experience.

Additionally, my perception (from posts and discussions like these, I'm not a financial analyst and I have no meaningful insights into their business) is also that they probably receive enough funding through non-advertising means that they don't actually need to do this if they were to pare back the nonsense spending they're so greatly known for.

[Yoric]

> Additionally, my perception (from posts and discussions like these, I'm not a financial analyst and I have no meaningful insights into their business) is also that they probably receive enough funding through non-advertising means that they don't actually need to do this if they were to pare back the nonsense spending they're so greatly known for.

Last time I checked, Mozilla received 90%+ of its funding from Google. This is a situation that nobody likes (except Google, of course). These ads are an attempt to diversify income streams.

People are really unhappy that Mozilla gets money from Google, but also extremely vocally unhappy whenever Mozilla attempts to find other sources.

I haven't seen anyone suggest alternate solutions yet.

[evilduck]

I don’t actually mind their money from Google but why is charging money for a quality product an unfathomable business model? Ads or bust it seems.

[Yoric]

Because pretty much nobody is willing to pay for it.

[soganess]

Major problems with Firefox include:

  - full uBlock support

  - the ability to still be themed

  - first-party isolation

...Okay, okay, I’m being too cheeky.

The common wisdom is that overall Firefox can feel bottlenecked at render and draw times (“less snappy”). That could be a result of a slower JavaScript engine (takes longer to get to drawing), or a result of poorer hardware acceleration (slower drawing), or a less optimized multiprocessing/multithreading model (more resource contention when drawing).

I honestly can't see it in the real world, but synthetic benchmark are pretty clear on that front.

[Yoric]

Hum.

I have at home 13 year old hardware running Firefox and no performance complaints.

[pjmlp]

Including everyone that ships Chrome with their application as "native" app.

VSCode gets a pass, because apparently it is the only programmer's editor that many only care about providing plugins nowadays.

[no_wizard]

The ubiquity of their plugin model is why. Near all editors have a VS code plugin compatible layer

[pjmlp]

Yeah, and with it Eclipse wins a second time, especially on embedded where Eclipse CDT forks were replaced by VSCode forks.

"Project Ticino: Microsoft's Erich Gamma on Visual Studio Code past, present, and future"

https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/28/erich_gamma_on_vs_cod...

[embedding-shape]

> Near all editors have a VS code plugin compatible layer

Huh, never heard about this before, and took a look at emacs and vim/neovim as those are the two most popular editors I know of, neither can run VS code plugins, that'd be crazy if true.

[WorldMaker]

If you count LSP (Language Server Protocol) as a VSCode plugin-compatible layer as LSP was built and standardized by the VSCode team (so many do), then Emacs and Neovim are full of VSCode-compatible plugins today. One of Neovim's selling points right now over bare Vim is better/more direct LSP support.

[embedding-shape]

Ah, if LSP is what parent meant with "VS code plugin compatible layer" then what you say makes sense, I personally also moved from vim to neovim mainly because of better LSP support.

But I understood "VS code plugin compatible layer" to mean there is something that lets you run VSCode plugins with other editors, which is what I haven't seen anywhere (yet?).

[iLemming]

Except Emacs doesn't have "plugins". They are called "packages" and not plugins for specific reasons - they are more like libraries than plugins. In Emacs, one can change/override the behavior of any function (built-in or third party) with some enormous flexibility not easily achievable in other editors.

[freedomben]

Very long time vim/neovim user here. I can't remember names atm and can't check, but I have definitely seen plugins that run a headless or subset of VScode in the background to pull info from it. It may not be super common, but it is being done

[devsda]

You are probably referring to language support plug-ins.

IIRC, debugger support for java needed a component from one of the official plug-ins.

[lamontcg]

It really seems like all the complaints about firefox are mostly ego-deflection.

People know it is wrong to stay on Chrome and empower Google to the extent that it is, but they're stuck on that workflow and don't want to change, so they find nits to pick about firefox and get very LOUD about that. Then it becomes Mozill's fault that they're still using Chrome, and you can't blame them for anything.

[hu3]

> all the complaints about firefox are mostly ego-deflection.

Sorry this is too handwavy for me.

According to this logic, Mozilla is likely going to die believing it did nothing wrong.

[lamontcg]

It is going to die because it won't ever be perfect enough, while Google will win because the vastly more important problems with Google's control are just the status quo.

[wolvoleo]

I use Firefox almost exclusively on desktop and android and I'm still pretty critical of it.

Especially because I know I'm one of very few people that uses it that much.

[EvanAnderson]

> There is always a pile on on Firebox for not being perfect.

I don't have a problem w/ Firefox not being perfect. I have a problem with the Mozilla Foundation spending money on seemingly random other stuff and not on Firefox.

[pessimizer]

> There is always a pile on on Firebox for not being perfect.

Nobody has ever complained about anything not being perfect. That's just something dishonest people say when they want to avoid mentioning specific criticisms.

[account42]

> But if you dig deeper nearly always the commenter is using a version of Chrome

Pure cope