[Vinnl]

At the same time, Firefox last year gained tab groups, vertical tabs, a user-friendly profile switcher. Split view and tab notes are under development. It sometimes feels like it's moving faster than ever, and that's disregarding all AI features.

(Disclosure: I work at Mozilla, but not on Firefox.)

[giancarlostoro]

I kept up with it a lot during the Oxidation years and it felt like Firefox was getting a LOT then, while I'm sure its still getting attention (I was testing Firefox Quantum the second it come out), and I still use it daily, I'm just expressing the overall of how I and others feel, I dont feel they're ALWAYS messing up with Firefox, but it definitely feels like Mozilla does too many moonshot things that fail and it leaves anyone wondering if the money was better spent invested in Firefox itself.

[7bit]

You must be joking! The user profile switcher is NOT user friendly. It's lacking in every aspect of UX compared to Chromes profile switcher. And it has ads in it. Of all places, why the heck did they put ads into the user profile switcher.

[Vinnl]

Are you talking about the new one, or the old one? The old one was indeed horrible, but the new one is pretty nice IMO. I have no idea what you're talking about when it comes to ads though, I don't think either has that.

[7bit]

The old one doesn't have ads. I'm talking about the new one.

The ad I'm talking about is for a different Firefox service. I think it asks to you try your VPN or something. I'm not at home so I can't exactly tell you. But I just want to switch profile not getting bugged or judged to a different service.

Chrome makes this right. You click on the profile icon and instantly switch to a different profile.

Mozilla fucked that completely up.

[Vinnl]

Ah, I think you're referring to the account menu, which has been there for a while (indeed with links to Relay, VPN, and Monitor), and to which the profile switcher got added. If you're signed in to your Firefox account, it also includes menu entries to send tabs to different devices, access your tabs from other devices, and update sync settings.

I guess that's true, and that the profile switcher is in a submenu of that menu, so that's one extra click. Still a lot better than the old one though. But I agree that I wouldn't mind the profiles being in the top level menu, especially if you have, say, max. three.

[criticalfault]

all this should have been developed in 2000s

different point of view: tab grouping took 20+y to develop (since opera had it in 2000s).

in 2026 firefox should have: - fast ui - fast js - fast rendering - hw acceleration for video - same look and feel on all platforms - faster adblocker

just the basics, no? didn't add more advanced features here.

and let's see what is actually here: - UI rendered via HTML/xul. an abomination. a slow abomination at that. right clicking something can show you stagers of rendering of a menu. - check any Js benchmarks, you will see how FF stands - rendering,... there was a talk in one of the conferences explaining timing requests and time-to-picture. this may be blamed on the standards, but chrome does it better - video hw acceleration on Linux? is this actually working? and I don't mean 3/100 relevant codecs - same look and feel - done - AdBlock is the only advantage you have over other platforms. it would make sense to implement this in the browser and not rely on Js and extensions

it's sad and funny that people with only a couple million are going to soon catch up to Mozilla and make it obsolete, by building a Bowser engine, not only a shell around blink/WebKit.

[glenstein]

Look at what happened to Opera. They fell apart, abandoned their Presto engine for Chromium and sold to an outside investment group and now they serve ads based on user data.

There was, in my opinion, no better browser company past or present than Opera in the 2000s and 2010s (sorry Mozilla). But their example exposes the fallacy of assuming that building out great features guarantees market share gains.

[criticalfault]

opera had a different business model. I don't think they had millions upon miliona that Mozilla gets from Google for antitrust reasons.

opera had to earn their money.

this aside, Mozilla just now implemented tab grouping. does that mean they are going to, because of the added features, follow opera's path?

my point was that someone said how they increased development speed. and I'm saying they are breaking record in how slow it is. it's not 1y, it's since the feature appeared anywhere and it's 20y ago. what the f was Mozilla doing since then? obviously they didn't work on the features. but also they didn't work on the other list of things I mentioned since only one is fully delivered (look and feel on all platforms) and those are non-features like fore mentioned tab groupings, but core capabilities for a browser.

in everything else they are so much behind it's really a wonder they still have market share as much as they do.

[glenstein]

What are you talking about? Opera and Mozilla are both in the business of trying to deliver a good browser, which means good features. Different financing doesn't change the mandate to deliver good browser features, and Opera most definitely did rely on search licensing as their primary income stream anyway, despite attempts to diversify (for years they relied on Google and Yandex and got more money from that than other forms of financing).

As I said, my opinionated hot take is that Opera was probably the best ever at delivering features and performance beloved by users, but that wasn't enough to move the needle on market share, which is why Opera perfectly exposes the fallacy of assuming better features = better market share. In this context appealing to "business structure" is a deflection.

Also, this tab grouping argument is mistaken both on its own terms but more broadly as a stand in for the argument that the Mozilla team has supposedly done nothing. Firefox had native tab grouping years before Chrome ever had it, had arguably the best tab grouping extension of any browser due to an intentional choice to invest in an extension ecosystem that made that functionality possible, and for the most part, Firefox has never not had tab grouping. What's new is that it's back as a baked-in default rather than merely present as a best in class extension.

The idea that Firefox has done nothing is an unfortunate impression that comes from looking at a serious of unfortunately critical tech headlines and losing sight of nuts and bolts development. I don't have the patience to recite everything here, but every year they push millions of lines of new code, thousands of patches, and deliver measurable improvements to major browser components like webGPU, javascript rendering, shipping production quality rust code, and more for a browser with 30 million lines of code.