[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.

[WorldMaker]

My father, who is very non-technical has never left Firefox and stuck with it for decades, even against Microsoft and Chrome's tactics to try to claim default browser and constantly install them into his face. My father particularly hates Chrome because he never understands how it keeps reinstalling itself despite his best efforts. His taskbar is often a mess of all three browsers because he can't figure out how to keep Edge and Chrome unpinned. My father sees Chrome installing itself and auto-pinning to his taskbar and Start Menu as the exact same IE-level adware/spyware shenanigans that led to him fleeing to Firefox in the first place.

I returned to Firefox again after years of IE8+ and Spartan Edge. I've never liked the "mouthfeel" of Chrome, have generally felt it to be bloated and slow and ad-heavy adware (though not as strongly as my father and I often do know how Chrome gets backdoor installed through shameful adware deals like with Adobe), and when Edge switched to being just another Chromium I still felt the same in my dislike of Chromium and I went back to Firefox. (Spartan Edge had so much better performance and battery usage than Chromium. It's death was not mourned by enough people.)

Feel free to correlate these two counter-anecdotes with more and see if you find some patterns to reach your own conclusion. That's the fun of anecdata and marketing, there are patterns on every side, you can interpret it how you want. "Popularity" isn't facts, pattern matching based on popularity of certain anecdotes can lead to incorrect conclusions. Especially when Marketing is involved. Marketing is about making popular things that aren't necessarily facts, especially when an advertiser is unscrupulous and no one is busy enforcing truth in advertising laws.

[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.