I have contacted local authorities twice about anti competitive behavior from Chrome.
If two - three other Norwegians do the same that should start to look like an earthquake ;-)
Same if ten - twenty Germans or Brits or French do the same.
I would mention:
1. that some of their web properties (calendar and YouTube) have been intentionally incompatible with Firefox as evidenced by how well they work in Firefox if one changes how the browser identify itself.
2. How they have pushed Chrome as a "better browser" on the front page of Google (were no one else have been allowed to advertise) to Firefox users since way before Chrome was anywere nearly as good as Firefox, making it both a lie and - more importantly - a massive abuse of dominance in one market to gain monopoly in another just like Microsoft did with IE.
As we saw yesterday with AWS authorities are willing to punish rampant abuse if they have a good case and this definitely is one.
Edit: since this comment is getting a lot of attention the relevant authority in Norway is Konkurransetilsynet with web address https://konkurransetilsynet.no
(Finding the exact correct form on that site and for this purpose seems to be an art and/or science it seems but if you can't find any just submit somewhere and explain the situation.)
It would be beautiful if everyone could post underneath with the address to the equivalent office in your jurisdiction.
My child's school uses Google Classroom. The Google experience is unusable in Firefox. Meet doesn't work (e.g. he sees nothing when the teacher screenshares). This seems really quite anti-competitive.
My child cares about privacy and switches browsers. Chrome for Meet, Firefox for most non-Google things.
I was having crazy issues in GDrive and GDocs where I could download nothing using FF - no PDFs, no .docx files, none of my other backed-up files, you'd click download and nothing would happen. Do the same in Chrome, Edge, Safari, Opera, even changing my user-agent to Chrome, and it works flawlessly.
My solution to this problem was move everything off GDrive and into self-hosted options. If Google is going to intentionally hinder usage on non-Google software when no real technical roadblocks exist, I'll gladly use literally anything else.
Meet absolutely works in Firefox, there's nothing anti-competitive going on. As do Google products generally (though there are occasionally performance issues where Firefox simply doesn't provide an API that Chrome does and the polyfill is slower, but then Firefox catches up).
But try disabling browser extensions and see if that fixes it -- a majority of the time that's the culprit. With videoconferencing specifically, it's often an extension or setting to block videos from autoplaying.
I believe Chrome also has better support for new technologies/APIs thus the reason firefox doesn't work that well. But as others said that's not always the case.
The "Change background" feature was not "supported" in Firefox, then suddenly I could use it so I thought they finally implemented it for Firefox as it was working perfectly.
Two days later the feature disappeared, and I keep getting that "your browser doesn't support this feature" popup since.
That sucks, but take the time to imagine what might be going on on the other side.
There's a dev running an experiment to whitelist more combinations of the huge space of (Device, CPU, GPU, OS, OSVersion, Browser, BrowserVersion) to use that feature.
What would you do after seeing that the metrics show that most of the users on your experiment had a bad experience? In that case you'd want to rollback your experiment right away and figure out what's wrong. You really expected all, if not most of the combinations you selected to actually work well, but it's apparently not the case.
Have you used Firefox with Google Docs Calendar or YouTube over the last ten years?
(Multiple more examples exist for those willing to dig: at one point the search results page would peg one processor core briefly every 30 seconds as long as you stayed on that page - and used Firefox)
Edit: and as you mention, the situation with Chrome on mobile is basically a 1-1 of IE on Windows.
Even if just mobile I'm still not sure how they get away with it. They have 71% of the global mobile marketshare, my phone came preinstalled with chrome, I cannot remove it, only disable it.
How is that any different at all to what Microsoft was doing with IE in the 90's?
Youtube on iOS is deliberately changed in a way that it breaks playing video/audio in the background. iOS is capable of that by default with HTML5, but Youtube sells background play as a paid feature.
I remember when gmail outright crippled itself when I used it some 5 years ago. I also remember other Google services disabling some features only on Firefox.
To be fair Google's products are not great as they were. GDrive sometimes does not work at Chromium. You can't disable 3rd party to download cookies. Console is a pile of errors. UX is not consistent. And new services don't integrate properly even with Google services.
> How they have pushed Chrome as a "better browser" on the front page of Google (were no one else have been allowed to advertise) to Firefox users since way before Chrome was anywere nearly as good as Firefox, making it both a lie and - more importantly - a massive abuse of dominance in one market to gain monopoly in another just like Microsoft did with IE.
Microsoft’s primary offense was illegally tying Internet Explorer and Windows. They refused to sell the two products separately, and instead required OEMs to buy the bundle. Windows was the product everyone wanted, and Microsoft abused its dominance in operating systems to increase its share of the browser market by refusing to sell you Windows unless you also took Internet Explorer.
By contrast, Google does not condition the use of Search on the use of Chrome. There’s nothing wrong with promoting a product to customers who use one of your other products (or we’d have to break up pretty much every multi-product company).
>Microsoft’s primary offense was illegally tying Internet Explorer and Windows. They refused to sell the two products separately, and instead required OEMs to buy the bundle.
Nope. That's what some people complained about, but it wasn't their legal issue (which is why today every OS vendor still does it).
The actual complaint, which is pasted below, shows it in much greater nuance, as it wasn't that they "required OEMs to buy the bundle" (in fact, there wasn't any buying, IE was free part of Windows).
No, Microsoft's primary offense was making non-Microsoft tools awkward. Windows without IE was awkward. Windows wasn't done until it gave odd error messages on DR DOS. Borland always seemed to have incomplete documentation, late. Etc.
Google works poorly enough on non-Chrome browsers that it's the same thing.
Microsoft's crime was doing it in the 90s. What Apple has done with iOS and OSX takes Microsoft's bundling, third-party lockout and lack of consumer choice to an exponential level, and it's celebrated as a feature now. iOS literally disallows any other browser technology from running, requiring them all to use less-featured versions of the first party tool. Microsoft must be jealous seeing them get away with that.
How do you know this is because of Chrome in the first place? Another explanation is that it could be Edge or even users moving to use mobile (browsers) more?
Genuinely curious where the market share and total number of users in the market (broken down) has shifted.
It may also not exclusively be anticompetitive behavior from Chrome, but just Mozilla's stewardship of Firefox. They constantly manage to generate shitstorms around updates (how does this never happen with Chrome?) and then the plain disregard/making fun of user feedback [1] is just a kick in the teeth. For me at least, that's in large part why I moved to Chrome.
Mozilla is killing firefox by introducing hostile behaviour, breaking user expectations, not delivering on promises and ignoring voices of MANY users.
I used to be firefox user since Phoenix, but I gave up on it after 89 when context menus were broken, megabar was still as shitty as when introduced first tie, and new stupid mobile look on my 4k screen? It's almost like they are killing firefox on purpose, but I realised that loyalty to a software product is stupid and moved to Brave.
Why do you care about Firefox and not Safari or Samsung browser?
thanks for the info. Will also report this issue to the authorities.
I love keyboard driven browsers and had also some issues with nyxt and qutebrowser. I want to avoid installing chromium on my linux box and I just can't.
Recommending others also to report it.
If some googlers are reading this, please push the chrome team to be more interoperable. "Don't be evil!" :-)
> If some googlers are reading this, please push the chrome team to be more interoperable. "Don't be evil!" :-)
Second this.
I want to like Google and did for the longest time.
You do so much great stuff but some stuff like this is so damaging for both the ecosystem and for you, because as long as this is going on my best hope is a giant fine.
Are problems of the first world a priori invalid because they are of the first world? What makes you think that non-first world people also don’t care about these things. Even the concept of first world seems a little data anymore. Between urbanization and the internet a lot of those categories have blurred in the last few decades.
I've been using Firefox daily for over 15 years now.
My experience with Firefox over the last 2-3 years in particular leaves me very disappointed and frustrated.
The constant nonsense UI redesigns that come about with every new update. The instability, and ridiculous resources consumption. The slowness and slugishness.
I want a browser that works, respects my privacy, stays out of my way and lets me get shit done. A browser built for professionals, by professionals. I want a consistent UI that remains stable over time. I'm easily willing to pay for such a browser.
Firefox used to be it, but I no longer feel like it is. Any suggestions for what to try next?
Just to give a contrasting data point: I always see people complaining about resource consumption in Firefox in these threads, but I have honestly almost never had trouble like this and I use it for hours every day with lots of tabs and lots of rich media websites open. It happened more in the past (maybe 5+ years ago), but I am sure some of the blame in those cases would have been down to Flash. Now that I think more about it, that whole time I've also blocked ads, which surely helps too.
A friend of mine has over 4,000 tabs open in Firefox at the moment - they just never close a tab, ever. Their Firefox' memory usage is only a little higher compared to mine with 3 open tabs.
This might not be the fault of Firefox. The problem is that Chrome is the most used browser even amongst web-devs, so you tend to profile/benchmark your site in that browser and optimize for it.
Try using Firefox on the world's most popular streaming site Twitch.Tv and report back, let it sit there for a while and try for example use multiple streams to check different perspectives. It slows down to a halt.
Also I can't for example leave Firefox alive while playong some games or it starts to create stutter in the games.
I tried profiling but the Firefox profiler just hangs all the time or uses so many resources it becomes unstable ironically
The constant nonsense UI redesigns that come about with every new update.
Ive been using Firefox since it was called Phoenix, and this is my biggest complaint. Stop hiding menu options, my monitor is bigger and you're suddenly trying to save real estate.
The only reason Firefox got as popular as it did is because technical people liked it, and they encouraged their non technical friends to use it. If you're going to dumb it down then technically inclined users will not feel as pationately about it.
I was personally responsible for hundreds, maybe thousands of people switching from ie to Firefox when I worked at the help desk of a small ISP. I don't think I would do the same now. It's still my main browser, but it feels like an abusive relationship.
Mozilla has a nice tool to help identify sources of "slowness and slugishness"[1], you may want to give it a try -- oftentimes it's found that the issue is not Firefox itself, but some extensions, external processes, or undesirable modifications in `about:config`.
That is indeed a powerful tool that gives you the god view of everything what could happened.(Which normal web devtools definitely can't) However, it is also sometimes really hard to interpret the results. There are so many data there, some of them comes from Firefox internal, some of them comes from 3rd extension. Something in different thread actually chains together, but the ui does not show. I think it need some improvements to help the user reading the results.
I've been a Firefox user for at least 15 years as well, and the recent UI updates in v89 is the first instance of me refusing to update Firefox.
I updated my user prefs file to permanently disable updates, so I'm remaining on pre-ProtonUI v88. Of course, I don't know how much longer I could sustain that because I'd also not receive security patches, but in the short term it's what I'm doing.
The new Firefox UI is incredibly frustrating, and feels like it walks back sensible UI principles. Removing icons in the main menu was celebrated as "de-cluttering" [0], when in reality icons improve ease of use. The "floating" tabs feel more distracting [1], when they claim the opposite. Heck, even user prompts no longer colorize the "primary action" button [2].
Also, what's with modern UIs becoming increasingly childish and watered down? The word I'd use to describe the new proton UI is "blurry".
Not updating a web browser is a fantastic way to make your computer very insecure.
I understand the desire to keep things the same but personally I would value security above that.
I have a theory why people have dissenting views on the performance of Firefox. I have a laptop dedicated to doing business online. Firefox has no addons on that machine. Some websites are painfully slow and my laptop fans kick on. I have debugged these issues and in every case it was javascript bogging down the CPU's, all 8 cores! gaming laptop I am not a web developer, so it is perhaps unfair for me to pick on the quality of the javascript.
Disable javascript and well... the site isn't usable any more for business transactions, but the slowness and CPU load vanishes. The website becomes snappy, highly responsive and easy to browse. The fans spin down and memory usage goes way down.
I've never used Chrome. Does chrome not ever get bogged down by javascript? Do they have a different javascript library/engine? I assume they must. Can you change the javascript libraries used by Firefox and Chrome? Apologies in advance if this is a dumb question.
> Does chrome not ever get bogged down by javascript?
Yes. This is pretty subjective as a user, but I'd classify Chrome as slightly better here. They're close enough that it doesn't usually matter unless you're playing JS based games or have a potato for a computer.
> Do they have a different javascript library/engine?
Yes, Chrome uses V8, Firefox uses SpiderMonkey
> Can you change the javascript libraries used by Firefox and Chrome?
No, not easily. It's all open source so technically you could with enough effort. But for example Chrome relies on some shared GC code between Blink and V8 [1]; I expect various feature needs like this would make swapping for SpiderMonkey infeasible.
Chrome uses V8, which is the same JS engine that Node is built on top of. As the name implies, it’s sort of wicked fast.
IIRC Firefox uses their own engine called Spider Monkey. I don’t know of anything outside of Mozilla which uses it. I have a hard time imagining it being faster than V8, but I actually have no idea — will need to go look at some benchmarks.
My understanding of the current browser landscape is that you've got Firefox; browsers that build upon Google's browser engine (Chrome/Chromium/Edge/Brave/Vivaldi/Opera/etc); and Safari.
There are a number of good options, but very few that don't further cement Google's control over the world's browser-engine code.
(Yes, I know there are some other very minor players that lag behind on features and standards support. I don't think that's what the parent commenter is looking for.)
In terms of "browsers that actually matter", there's just Chrome/chromium at a combined 70% and Safari at a little over 18%. Everything else is a side mention at best and as a browser at least, is basically irrelevant on the world stage. Even if the companies behind them aren't (e.g. Mozilla or Samsung). [1]
They are of course highly relevant for their user bases, but in terms of "browsers that might break the Chrome hegemony through normal competition", there are none. You'd need to pull a Microsoft IE-on-Windows on Google and enact laws that forbid them from loading Chrome as default and only browser on all first and third devices associated with their brand. A few administrations ago, that might have still been a possibility, but it's not going to happen unless the EU does it first, and even then, the US might pull one of those idiotic "how dare the EU punish a US company for outcompeting everyone else" and instead enact reactionary laws that loosen the rules for them instead.
>The constant nonsense UI redesigns that come about with every new update. The instability, and ridiculous resources consumption. The slowness and slugishness.
>I want a browser that works, respects my privacy, stays out of my way and lets me get shit done. A browser built for professionals, by professionals. I want a consistent UI that remains stable over time. I'm easily willing to pay for such a browser.
>Firefox used to be it, but I no longer feel like it is. Any suggestions for what to try next?
That's my experience as well. I was using FF from v 1.0 back in 2004. Upgrade to Quantum almost gave me a heart attack because it ruined majority of addons and disabled custom themes. Upgrade to "megabar" was a final straw for me. I've spent ~ 3 hours, but finally migrated to Pale Moon ... and it's like I'm back in 2004. Even Noia theme is working again.
FF, in my opinion, went full circle: from being the most functional and the most customizable browser to being the new IE6. There are no redeeming qualities left really.
Funny, I’ve used it on and off for 12 years, switching to other browsers when they started doing rapid release since it was noticeably slower than the competition. But since 2017 when the Quantum update came out I’ve completely switched to it because it’s speed became comparable to the competition. I like it even more when they added container tabs so I can switch between accounts easily. Reading this thread is really strange based on my experience. I do agree that Google makes it hard to use their products like Meet or Drive outside of Gmail and Calendar (the only Google products I use).
Between Firefox and Chrome, the performance is almost identical. What is different is the smooth scrolling behaviour: it is far smoother in chrome than in Firefox, and that has a dramatic impact on how performant the browser “feels.” If Firefox tinkered with that a bit, it would be game changing.
(The few times I’ve had perf issues in Firefox were all either addons or sites designed to work only in chrome)
At least we can override UI redesign changes with userChrome.css and userContent.css. I'm sticking with Firefox as long as its problems have workarounds, because the only options left are Chromium and Safari (or forks like Librewolf), and I find its pros still outweigh its cons.
You can override things with userChrome.css and userContent.css for now. Mozilla has made it clear that this will be removed in the future by already putting it behind an additional about:config flag - it is only a matter of time till they are axed once their privacy-disrespecting analytics tell them that "noone uses those features".
Slowness could come from several different sources. One quick improvement is to use AdBlocker, or even block Javascript if your workflow allows it. This makes browsing extremely fast.
Another one is missing support for upcoming and non-standard web technologies, that usually are implemented in Chrome (Blink) first, that leaves Firefox (and other browsers) using slower performing polyfills.
As much as I hate the direction Firefox UI is going, there are no decent browser alternatives, especially those who support adblockers at such low lever as Firefox.
I used Firefox since it released. I changed to chrome after they broke all my extensions for the 2 time in five years. Austrailis change is where I dropped. I use edge now and it’s fine, just fine.
Same boat. Used to be a big Firefox fan back in the day but even if it's not bad for me these days it doesn't do anything special. Edge works just as well and feels slightly less cumbersome.
> The constant nonsense UI redesigns that come about with every new update. The instability, and ridiculous resources consumption. The slowness and slugishness.
I think this drives many people off Firefox. I am willing tinker with Firefox's internal CSS to tame some of the UI nonsense, but the rest of people just want a browser to get their work done; not to spend a couple hours every month to get rid of Firefox's new UI overhaul.
I'm in the same boat as you -- a Firefox user (and evangelist) from the beforetimes. But Firefox stopped meeting my needs when the revamp occurred.
I haven't really found a modern browser that is acceptable, though, but it's not for lack of looking. In the meantime, I stick with an older release of Waterfox.
If you want to customize your browser (as far as using your own CSS) you can try Vivaldi. I've been using it for years and after the 3.7 update it feels fast and snappy (at least on my computer). It has tons of custom settings around tabs, commands, windows, toolbars, etc.
At least on Linux it gets out of my way quite nicely. Things like easily accessible Profiles help me quite a lot with my workflow.
If you're really strict about privacy there are browsers like ungoogled-chromium, Bromite (Android) and Orion Browser (only on Mac, iOS) which promise 0 telemetry, connections against their services, etc. Brave is nice but has connections against their services (internal addon updates, safe browsing, updates).
If there were someway to sync Vivaldi with an iOS browser, I'd have already switched. I've really been quite impressed with it, and it seems better every time I check, but I get a lot of use about the cross-device features of Firefox/Chrome, and while that's possible on Android, Vivaldi still don't have an iOS version.
Are you perhaps not using an adblocker and thereby being trapped into wrongly believing that the slowness induced by ad+tracking Javascripts is the fault of Firefox?
Never ran in to a problem with Chrome, despite the wider internet calling it a memory hog.
Firefox struggled after 4/5 tabs, couldn't even playback video on YouTube or Vimeo reliably..
Don't run into these issues on desktop, and the Android version seems somewhat competent. But I've lost a lot of trust in Mozilla the last few years thanks to middle management.
Atleast with Google I know their motives and I'm not locked in to their platform relying on any particular proprietary thing they have.
It's honestly a pity. Firefox is it perfect but the Internet is becoming worse because of chrome. Google is able to fast track any non standard Web tech and the hordes follow. Soon after, that become the standard. I don't want to cheer for a broken browser, but only Safari is able to stop this madness now.
Also, Firefox on the Desktop is really good and still let's you do so much more than chrome clones. But it suffers specially when using Google websites.
I dont worry. I have seen these cycles with IBM and Microsoft. And they all blow up eventually because the unintended consequences keep increasing.
So Google has got itself locked into that same trajectory for a long time now. "Features" are total bullshit. Its all about making sure every small thing is in the cloud or eventually gets pushed into it.
That vision is as dumb as moving the DNA in every cell in your body into a nearby lake and visiting the lake everytime you want to read 1 bit. With a Google toll booth at the lake entrance. Its doomed to fail.
Just look at the consequences. If you have a webpage on your local hard drive and want to use the browsers javascript to access it to make it look better, the Google Chrome team will come running like well programmed alert robots to call it a security violation and disable api access to your own disk.
Chrome is being used on the browser (with a mobile footprint Microsoft never had), the desktop (VS Code, Slack, etc), and v8 is driving a substantial part of the web's backend (Node). Even the smaller use case of web scraping is moving towards Puppeteer.
Yeah chrome features stopped being features a long time ago. Why else would they force upgrades to be so persistent yet secretive? Because that's what you have to do when people value the existing feature set over security updates, if they're attached to new features like cookieless tracking.
Chrome is already the standard. Firefox usually works, but more and more often nowadays I encounter a glitchy or poorly performing page, which I switch to Chrome to use properly.
I use Firefox to not be part of the Chrome monopoly, not because it's actually a fundamentally better browser.
Chrome is not better because you witness some pages to render better in Chrome. It is actually the opposite: pages are more and more built for and with Chrome in mind.
And that omnipresence of Chrome allows Google to force their own moves as de facto standards, which is dangerous overall.
Firefox is better because it follows standards and it is open-source and it is not tied to a behemoth like Google.
The authors of pages you see perform better in Chrome are indeed not building for the web but rather building for Chrome.
I have used Firefox for about a decade now and I can't think of a single page that did not work. I'm not saying it's impossible, but incredibly rare. I'd be more inclined to just give up on the site than install Chrome.
That's my experience too. Unfortunately I don't think it's possible for complex standards to be well specified in human language instead of in code so a reference implementation is what will always win in the end.
At least chromium is open source. The best we can hope is maybe that organizations adopting chromium other than Google can wield more influence over it.
The ideal language for a specification might be a mix of natural language and code with a test suit, something like Literate Programming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming) or its descendants along with modern pull request based discussions that are tied to version controlled code.
I wish Mozilla or a similar organization adopted the chromium core. We really need a well funded non-profit managed release of the reference browser.
I'm curious. I'm not "frontend", but I do write code that runs in the browser, and write parts of the visualization UI for our products. I do get to determine how we build our products. I've gone with vue/typescript, and that hasn't caused any problem so far. A part of our software has to be able to run everywhere, and that unfortunately still includes IE11, so there I do take care of using a minimal feature set, but I can't remember the last time Safari caused me a problem. What problems does Safari cause?
The past few years I've been saying "Safari is the new IE" in terms of web development. I can't tell you how many bugs I've had to fix because Safari was doing something weird with JS/CSS.
IE11 is going EOL "soon" and at that point Safari is really going to be the odd one out. Chromium and Firefox are at least _mostly_ consistent with each other, save for when Chromium adds some crazy new feature that's nonstandard (but at that point only niche websites are usually using the new feature).
I keep using Firefox on the desktop as a kind of resistance factor,. however the truth is that the war is lost, the Web has turned into ChromeOS for all practical purposes.
Specially since Microsoft has always been on the same boat as Google, remember that such kind of features go back to Active Desktop.
Additionally, everyone pushing Electron apps is basically contributing to Chrome market share.
Exactly. They just shipped a UUID implementation to stable chrome before it was even finalized. They barely discussed and now it’s live. But hey they wrote a proposal so it’s all good.
I keep seeing this rhetoric, but I've never experienced this myself. I use Firefox as my main driver and use Google Search, Docs, Mail, Sheets, Slides, YouTube, and whatever other Google products literally every day and everything works just fine. I've tried them out in Chrome/Edge/whatever and they all work exactly the same.
The only thing that doesn't work 100% is search on Firefox on Android, but there's no reason for it and changing the user agent fixes all the problems (Google intentionally makes it bad to try and drive you to Chrome).
I strongly disagree with this statement. My opinion is that it's the opposite.
I always get sad when I think about modern Firefox. I loved Firefox dearly before the transition, and I tried really hard to love it after the transition, too. But it failed me and lost much of what I loved about it. Then every subsequent release was just a little worse, excising more of what made Firefox great.
And that is the price they pay for trying to be Chrome clone UI wise and not listening to to the "power users". I hate to use the words "power user" but it is the small group of very active and enthusiastic users that you need to give the appears to every one else that they are missing out on something cool.
I still use Firefox because it works reasonably for my usage but I stopped promoting it to other people around me. For the average user Chrome is good, very good even. And Firefox lost its uniqueness and UI differences that made it stand out. And if nobody talks anymore about your product then you are done.
We shouldn’t just look at power users. Google and Microsoft, for example, constantly advertise to use their browser when you visit their properties. I imagine this has an impact.
But if Firefox was genuinely better it could win via word of mouth; whether it’s power users recommending it or people having it on their work computers (because their IT mandates it) and wanting the same great browser at home.
The problem is that Firefox is basically a Chrome clone at this point, all the way down to the privacy-invading features such as telemetry, so using it nowadays is more down to ideology than actual technical merit.
Oh come on. "Power users" are both negligible in market share _and_ do not contribute to spreading the software around. Nobody in your family is going to use Firefox because you tell them "Look, I can customise my UI to arrange my windows in the form of a poop emoji when my custom sideloaded extension detects I'm on a Google owned website". "Power users" however are very good at yelling loudly when their never-used-by-anyone-except-them feature is removed, because they're such power users they opt out of usage tracking and never contribute to anything except maybe a bug report sometimes.
Fun fact: Under current conditions (200M users) it looks like Google is paying $2-2.25 per active user annually to be the default search engine in Firefox.
"Mozilla renewed its search deal with Google in 2020 for three years. The organization will receive an estimate of $400 to $450 million per year from the deal alone. "
Come 2023, pray that Google doesn't alter the deal further, with the remaining FF user base in the low single-digit figures. It's a matter of when, not if, Mozilla goes down given this trajectory. Or, Mozilla get's actually paid for working with Google on "web standards" and producing a browser as a fig leaf for the monopoly the WWW has become and counter measure against antitrust (with US antitrust a lame duck anyway), in a Mafia-esque way. It's not like we haven't been telling this all the time, with the HN crowd however cheering Mozilla's erratic ventures into Rust, WASM, and whatnot.
(For the record: I'm using FF and actually prefer it over Chrome, especially their DevTools for CSS which I find pretty meh on Chrome, and of course for ad blocking).
Mozilla pays millions of dollars per year to their CEO, despite the decrease in usage and user base. Could be a symptom of a larger problem in the organization.
> how on Earth is Mozilla not swimming in cash?! How high can their expenses be?
Mozilla launches a new idiot side project like once a month. As a Firefox user, it's deeply frustrating to watch bug tickets go unfilled while a multimillion-dollar rebranding rolls out.
That is a very good deal for google. As ads on the search results are looking more and more like normal results any user without adblocking will click multiple times on these ads in a year. And the cpc prices depending on the topic are really high.
Chromium project became the cpython of JavaScript and web browsers, because you could package it's components and embed them in your own applications. Firefox does not have competitive equivalents or better features. Therefore it loses users.
This was a big topic years ago when FF started removing XUL and any ability to extend the browser. You need a reason for people to use your tech, not just your product.
> Chromium project became the cpython of JavaScript and web browsers, because you could package it's components and embed them in your own applications. Firefox does not have competitive equivalents or better features. Therefore it loses users.
XULRunner was Electron before it was cool. Though they werent prevalent there was a small but promising variety of applications based on XULRunner [0]
Then of course Mozilla administration axed it in their infinite wisdom.
The big issue I see with Firefox is that they lost a lot of power user's when the removed XUL extensions and the underlying engine doesn't have good third party wrappers like QtWebEngine (that I know of) so creating reskined browser's is pain.
I don't pick a browser for the Firefox or Chromium engine (unless a site needs it), I pick a browser based on the UI and configuration management. So I use Qutebrowser that is keyboard based and a declarative configuration. It happens to use QtWebEngine but that is not why I picked that browser.
Since I don't use Firefox... I don't really recommend it to anyone. Firefox's early success was driven by educated user's telling other people to drop IE for the better product. It also means a lot fewer developer's are using the Firefox engine when developing websites... especially the developer's that would put in the effort to submit bug reports & patches.
(At least last I checked, recreating a Qutebrowser like experience in Firefox was at best just really annoying and would still lack features).
The end of XUL was necessary to make Firefox faster. Doenload an old XUL Firefox version and surf the web. If you don't notice a difference in page load speed, startup time, and overall responsiveness, you might have a very, very fast computer, which most people around the world don't have.
The 3 or 4 thousand power users that needed native interop were (and still are) of no interest compared to the then bad performance of Firefox in relation to Chrome. Even HN was full of people who complained about Firefox' performance. Now it's full of people who recommend to give Firefox another shot because it's fast again.
Firefox is also currently the only browser where uBlock Origin can use all of its features, Chrome is intentionally limiting APIs. Are people using Firefox because of it? No. So XUL add-ons would not have helped Firefox.
If you still want XUL, there are many forks out there that claim to support it.
Anyone who’s been around /r/firefox this last year or so knows that Mozilla systematically ignores users feedback.
Even someone like me that uses Firefox since it’s inception just gave up. I feel like Mozilla is alienating its userbase to cater for new users. It’s a failing strategy as it will never be able to compete with the hand that feeds (google).
My hope is that Mozilla fully dies and Firefox is able to continue as a community project like arch or Debian. It will never be popular but the community will have some control.
Readit News
If two - three other Norwegians do the same that should start to look like an earthquake ;-)
Same if ten - twenty Germans or Brits or French do the same.
I would mention:
1. that some of their web properties (calendar and YouTube) have been intentionally incompatible with Firefox as evidenced by how well they work in Firefox if one changes how the browser identify itself.
2. How they have pushed Chrome as a "better browser" on the front page of Google (were no one else have been allowed to advertise) to Firefox users since way before Chrome was anywere nearly as good as Firefox, making it both a lie and - more importantly - a massive abuse of dominance in one market to gain monopoly in another just like Microsoft did with IE.
As we saw yesterday with AWS authorities are willing to punish rampant abuse if they have a good case and this definitely is one.
Edit: since this comment is getting a lot of attention the relevant authority in Norway is Konkurransetilsynet with web address https://konkurransetilsynet.no
(Finding the exact correct form on that site and for this purpose seems to be an art and/or science it seems but if you can't find any just submit somewhere and explain the situation.)
It would be beautiful if everyone could post underneath with the address to the equivalent office in your jurisdiction.
My child cares about privacy and switches browsers. Chrome for Meet, Firefox for most non-Google things.
My solution to this problem was move everything off GDrive and into self-hosted options. If Google is going to intentionally hinder usage on non-Google software when no real technical roadblocks exist, I'll gladly use literally anything else.
But try disabling browser extensions and see if that fixes it -- a majority of the time that's the culprit. With videoconferencing specifically, it's often an extension or setting to block videos from autoplaying.
If google devs code doesn't run as fast in firefox why should google take the blame ?
or maybe google is using non html5 apis to tap into chrome for faster perf in which case things are muddy.. since whatwg kinda allows unofficial apis
The "Change background" feature was not "supported" in Firefox, then suddenly I could use it so I thought they finally implemented it for Firefox as it was working perfectly.
Two days later the feature disappeared, and I keep getting that "your browser doesn't support this feature" popup since.
There's a dev running an experiment to whitelist more combinations of the huge space of (Device, CPU, GPU, OS, OSVersion, Browser, BrowserVersion) to use that feature. What would you do after seeing that the metrics show that most of the users on your experiment had a bad experience? In that case you'd want to rollback your experiment right away and figure out what's wrong. You really expected all, if not most of the combinations you selected to actually work well, but it's apparently not the case.
Have some examples? On Desktop, I don't see any, but I would get if you mean Mobile since Chrome is still the default browser there for Android.
https://support.google.com/docs/thread/18235069/google-sheet...
After i found that spoof browser agent fixed it. They locked the thread coincidentally and the bug is also fixed coincidentally a few days after.
I don't know if it is really a coincident, but I definitely have 0 trust of them after it.
(Multiple more examples exist for those willing to dig: at one point the search results page would peg one processor core briefly every 30 seconds as long as you stayed on that page - and used Firefox)
Edit: and as you mention, the situation with Chrome on mobile is basically a 1-1 of IE on Windows.
How is that any different at all to what Microsoft was doing with IE in the 90's?
That 5 people wrote to them?
Microsoft’s primary offense was illegally tying Internet Explorer and Windows. They refused to sell the two products separately, and instead required OEMs to buy the bundle. Windows was the product everyone wanted, and Microsoft abused its dominance in operating systems to increase its share of the browser market by refusing to sell you Windows unless you also took Internet Explorer.
By contrast, Google does not condition the use of Search on the use of Chrome. There’s nothing wrong with promoting a product to customers who use one of your other products (or we’d have to break up pretty much every multi-product company).
Nope. That's what some people complained about, but it wasn't their legal issue (which is why today every OS vendor still does it).
The actual complaint, which is pasted below, shows it in much greater nuance, as it wasn't that they "required OEMs to buy the bundle" (in fact, there wasn't any buying, IE was free part of Windows).
Google works poorly enough on non-Chrome browsers that it's the same thing.
Genuinely curious where the market share and total number of users in the market (broken down) has shifted.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20200731211652/https://twitter.c...
I used to be firefox user since Phoenix, but I gave up on it after 89 when context menus were broken, megabar was still as shitty as when introduced first tie, and new stupid mobile look on my 4k screen? It's almost like they are killing firefox on purpose, but I realised that loyalty to a software product is stupid and moved to Brave.
Why do you care about Firefox and not Safari or Samsung browser?
I love keyboard driven browsers and had also some issues with nyxt and qutebrowser. I want to avoid installing chromium on my linux box and I just can't.
Recommending others also to report it.
If some googlers are reading this, please push the chrome team to be more interoperable. "Don't be evil!" :-)
Second this.
I want to like Google and did for the longest time.
You do so much great stuff but some stuff like this is so damaging for both the ecosystem and for you, because as long as this is going on my best hope is a giant fine.
My experience with Firefox over the last 2-3 years in particular leaves me very disappointed and frustrated.
The constant nonsense UI redesigns that come about with every new update. The instability, and ridiculous resources consumption. The slowness and slugishness.
I want a browser that works, respects my privacy, stays out of my way and lets me get shit done. A browser built for professionals, by professionals. I want a consistent UI that remains stable over time. I'm easily willing to pay for such a browser.
Firefox used to be it, but I no longer feel like it is. Any suggestions for what to try next?
Also I can't for example leave Firefox alive while playong some games or it starts to create stutter in the games.
I tried profiling but the Firefox profiler just hangs all the time or uses so many resources it becomes unstable ironically
Ive been using Firefox since it was called Phoenix, and this is my biggest complaint. Stop hiding menu options, my monitor is bigger and you're suddenly trying to save real estate.
The only reason Firefox got as popular as it did is because technical people liked it, and they encouraged their non technical friends to use it. If you're going to dumb it down then technically inclined users will not feel as pationately about it.
I was personally responsible for hundreds, maybe thousands of people switching from ie to Firefox when I worked at the help desk of a small ISP. I don't think I would do the same now. It's still my main browser, but it feels like an abusive relationship.
Mozilla has a nice tool to help identify sources of "slowness and slugishness"[1], you may want to give it a try -- oftentimes it's found that the issue is not Firefox itself, but some extensions, external processes, or undesirable modifications in `about:config`.
---
[1] https://profiler.firefox.com/
I updated my user prefs file to permanently disable updates, so I'm remaining on pre-ProtonUI v88. Of course, I don't know how much longer I could sustain that because I'd also not receive security patches, but in the short term it's what I'm doing.
The new Firefox UI is incredibly frustrating, and feels like it walks back sensible UI principles. Removing icons in the main menu was celebrated as "de-cluttering" [0], when in reality icons improve ease of use. The "floating" tabs feel more distracting [1], when they claim the opposite. Heck, even user prompts no longer colorize the "primary action" button [2].
Also, what's with modern UIs becoming increasingly childish and watered down? The word I'd use to describe the new proton UI is "blurry".
[0] https://www.mozilla.org/media/img/firefox/releasenotes/note-... [1] https://www.mozilla.org/media/img/firefox/releasenotes/note-... [2] https://www.mozilla.org/media/img/firefox/releasenotes/note-...
It's arguably not the same as a sensible out-of-the box design, but far better than sticking to old versions just because of the UI.
Disable javascript and well... the site isn't usable any more for business transactions, but the slowness and CPU load vanishes. The website becomes snappy, highly responsive and easy to browse. The fans spin down and memory usage goes way down.
I've never used Chrome. Does chrome not ever get bogged down by javascript? Do they have a different javascript library/engine? I assume they must. Can you change the javascript libraries used by Firefox and Chrome? Apologies in advance if this is a dumb question.
Yes. This is pretty subjective as a user, but I'd classify Chrome as slightly better here. They're close enough that it doesn't usually matter unless you're playing JS based games or have a potato for a computer.
> Do they have a different javascript library/engine?
Yes, Chrome uses V8, Firefox uses SpiderMonkey
> Can you change the javascript libraries used by Firefox and Chrome?
No, not easily. It's all open source so technically you could with enough effort. But for example Chrome relies on some shared GC code between Blink and V8 [1]; I expect various feature needs like this would make swapping for SpiderMonkey infeasible.
[1] https://v8.dev/blog/high-performance-cpp-gc
IIRC Firefox uses their own engine called Spider Monkey. I don’t know of anything outside of Mozilla which uses it. I have a hard time imagining it being faster than V8, but I actually have no idea — will need to go look at some benchmarks.
There are a number of good options, but very few that don't further cement Google's control over the world's browser-engine code.
(Yes, I know there are some other very minor players that lag behind on features and standards support. I don't think that's what the parent commenter is looking for.)
They are of course highly relevant for their user bases, but in terms of "browsers that might break the Chrome hegemony through normal competition", there are none. You'd need to pull a Microsoft IE-on-Windows on Google and enact laws that forbid them from loading Chrome as default and only browser on all first and third devices associated with their brand. A few administrations ago, that might have still been a possibility, but it's not going to happen unless the EU does it first, and even then, the US might pull one of those idiotic "how dare the EU punish a US company for outcompeting everyone else" and instead enact reactionary laws that loosen the rules for them instead.
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/
>I want a browser that works, respects my privacy, stays out of my way and lets me get shit done. A browser built for professionals, by professionals. I want a consistent UI that remains stable over time. I'm easily willing to pay for such a browser.
>Firefox used to be it, but I no longer feel like it is. Any suggestions for what to try next?
That's my experience as well. I was using FF from v 1.0 back in 2004. Upgrade to Quantum almost gave me a heart attack because it ruined majority of addons and disabled custom themes. Upgrade to "megabar" was a final straw for me. I've spent ~ 3 hours, but finally migrated to Pale Moon ... and it's like I'm back in 2004. Even Noia theme is working again.
FF, in my opinion, went full circle: from being the most functional and the most customizable browser to being the new IE6. There are no redeeming qualities left really.
I’ve really enjoyed Brave as it is just a simple browser that works (and has lots of privacy features).
Is that firefox or Google pulling a Shadow Dom v0 where they use an API only Chrome implements and fall back to software emulation on everything else?
(The few times I’ve had perf issues in Firefox were all either addons or sites designed to work only in chrome)
Not entirely, unfortunately.
I think this drives many people off Firefox. I am willing tinker with Firefox's internal CSS to tame some of the UI nonsense, but the rest of people just want a browser to get their work done; not to spend a couple hours every month to get rid of Firefox's new UI overhaul.
It is behaviour that has earned many recent one star reviews.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.android.ch...
2 column tabs sadly no more...
Why they think this is better UX is beyond me
I'm in the same boat as you -- a Firefox user (and evangelist) from the beforetimes. But Firefox stopped meeting my needs when the revamp occurred.
I haven't really found a modern browser that is acceptable, though, but it's not for lack of looking. In the meantime, I stick with an older release of Waterfox.
At least on Linux it gets out of my way quite nicely. Things like easily accessible Profiles help me quite a lot with my workflow.
If you're really strict about privacy there are browsers like ungoogled-chromium, Bromite (Android) and Orion Browser (only on Mac, iOS) which promise 0 telemetry, connections against their services, etc. Brave is nice but has connections against their services (internal addon updates, safe browsing, updates).
I really miss Firefox but the memory leaks were just a deal breaker.
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/90.0/releasenotes/
Dead Comment
My old uni laptop, an Intel T4400 with 4gb RAM.
Both chrome and Firefox have adblock.
Never ran in to a problem with Chrome, despite the wider internet calling it a memory hog.
Firefox struggled after 4/5 tabs, couldn't even playback video on YouTube or Vimeo reliably..
Don't run into these issues on desktop, and the Android version seems somewhat competent. But I've lost a lot of trust in Mozilla the last few years thanks to middle management.
Atleast with Google I know their motives and I'm not locked in to their platform relying on any particular proprietary thing they have.
Also, Firefox on the Desktop is really good and still let's you do so much more than chrome clones. But it suffers specially when using Google websites.
So Google has got itself locked into that same trajectory for a long time now. "Features" are total bullshit. Its all about making sure every small thing is in the cloud or eventually gets pushed into it.
That vision is as dumb as moving the DNA in every cell in your body into a nearby lake and visiting the lake everytime you want to read 1 bit. With a Google toll booth at the lake entrance. Its doomed to fail.
Just look at the consequences. If you have a webpage on your local hard drive and want to use the browsers javascript to access it to make it look better, the Google Chrome team will come running like well programmed alert robots to call it a security violation and disable api access to your own disk.
This is how empires fall.
Chrome is being used on the browser (with a mobile footprint Microsoft never had), the desktop (VS Code, Slack, etc), and v8 is driving a substantial part of the web's backend (Node). Even the smaller use case of web scraping is moving towards Puppeteer.
I use Firefox to not be part of the Chrome monopoly, not because it's actually a fundamentally better browser.
And that omnipresence of Chrome allows Google to force their own moves as de facto standards, which is dangerous overall.
Firefox is better because it follows standards and it is open-source and it is not tied to a behemoth like Google.
The authors of pages you see perform better in Chrome are indeed not building for the web but rather building for Chrome.
For me there is - in addition to not wanting to support Chrome - still a few things that Firefox does better.
As for websites that only support Chrome I consider them broken which means I don't use them or if I have to I try to notify the operator.
When you have the time, you should note it here: https://webcompat.com/
At least chromium is open source. The best we can hope is maybe that organizations adopting chromium other than Google can wield more influence over it.
As I point out here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27222818 human language is not precise enough to write good specifications. Natural language words are polysemic and contextual. See the meaning of "break" for example: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/break
Kolmogrov showed that fully specified information distills down to computer programs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_description_length
The ideal language for a specification might be a mix of natural language and code with a test suit, something like Literate Programming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming) or its descendants along with modern pull request based discussions that are tied to version controlled code.
I wish Mozilla or a similar organization adopted the chromium core. We really need a well funded non-profit managed release of the reference browser.
Safari is usable on less than 20% of machines, it absolutely will not be stopping anything. It's also the bane of my existence as a web developer.
https://brave.com/25m-mau/
You forgot mobile, iOS users are big chunk of it and websites want to work on iOS browsers.
IE11 is going EOL "soon" and at that point Safari is really going to be the odd one out. Chromium and Firefox are at least _mostly_ consistent with each other, save for when Chromium adds some crazy new feature that's nonstandard (but at that point only niche websites are usually using the new feature).
I would say as a Chrome developer then.
Specially since Microsoft has always been on the same boat as Google, remember that such kind of features go back to Active Desktop.
Additionally, everyone pushing Electron apps is basically contributing to Chrome market share.
I keep seeing this rhetoric, but I've never experienced this myself. I use Firefox as my main driver and use Google Search, Docs, Mail, Sheets, Slides, YouTube, and whatever other Google products literally every day and everything works just fine. I've tried them out in Chrome/Edge/whatever and they all work exactly the same.
The only thing that doesn't work 100% is search on Firefox on Android, but there's no reason for it and changing the user agent fixes all the problems (Google intentionally makes it bad to try and drive you to Chrome).
I strongly disagree with this statement. My opinion is that it's the opposite.
I always get sad when I think about modern Firefox. I loved Firefox dearly before the transition, and I tried really hard to love it after the transition, too. But it failed me and lost much of what I loved about it. Then every subsequent release was just a little worse, excising more of what made Firefox great.
Eventually, I just had to give up on it.
Apple stopped developing Safari for Windows nine years ago.
Safari is a hard sell when one can't install an ad-blocker on it (work on the street is you can but not easily)
I still use Firefox because it works reasonably for my usage but I stopped promoting it to other people around me. For the average user Chrome is good, very good even. And Firefox lost its uniqueness and UI differences that made it stand out. And if nobody talks anymore about your product then you are done.
The problem is that Firefox is basically a Chrome clone at this point, all the way down to the privacy-invading features such as telemetry, so using it nowadays is more down to ideology than actual technical merit.
Microsoft does keep asking me to use Edge on my Windows gaming machine, although it's the only browser I have installed...
But I guess the point is... where is Mozilla going to ask people to use Firefox?
I still remember the days of vimperator and treetabs in xul.
firefox did this to themselves. they dont deserve support.
I'm quite happy with Vivaldi, which, while based on Chrome, at least seems to understand what users need.
Vimperator replacements exist: https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl
Additionally, XUL was a steaming pile of shit, and there was no saving it. Multithreading was only possible by ripping out XUL.
Dead Comment
"Mozilla renewed its search deal with Google in 2020 for three years. The organization will receive an estimate of $400 to $450 million per year from the deal alone. "
https://www.ghacks.net/2020/12/10/mozillas-revenue-jumped-to...
(For the record: I'm using FF and actually prefer it over Chrome, especially their DevTools for CSS which I find pretty meh on Chrome, and of course for ad blocking).
It's almost like the Mozilla execs get paid the big bucks no matter how badly they do their jobs. Go figure.
But also, the answer to your question is at https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2019/mozilla-fdn-201... and https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2019/mozilla-2019-fo... (the 2020 numbers are not up yet because the audit starts when the tax return is filed and lasts for several months, so isn't completed yet).
Just for comparison, last I checked Chrome's marketing budget was estimated to be in the ballpark of Mozilla's total budget.
Disclaimer: used to work for Mozilla.
Mozilla launches a new idiot side project like once a month. As a Firefox user, it's deeply frustrating to watch bug tickets go unfilled while a multimillion-dollar rebranding rolls out.
Deleted Comment
Firefox - Firefox, Torbrowser, spidermonkey.
Chromium project became the cpython of JavaScript and web browsers, because you could package it's components and embed them in your own applications. Firefox does not have competitive equivalents or better features. Therefore it loses users.
This was a big topic years ago when FF started removing XUL and any ability to extend the browser. You need a reason for people to use your tech, not just your product.
XULRunner was Electron before it was cool. Though they werent prevalent there was a small but promising variety of applications based on XULRunner [0]
Then of course Mozilla administration axed it in their infinite wisdom.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Software_that_uses_...
I don't pick a browser for the Firefox or Chromium engine (unless a site needs it), I pick a browser based on the UI and configuration management. So I use Qutebrowser that is keyboard based and a declarative configuration. It happens to use QtWebEngine but that is not why I picked that browser.
Since I don't use Firefox... I don't really recommend it to anyone. Firefox's early success was driven by educated user's telling other people to drop IE for the better product. It also means a lot fewer developer's are using the Firefox engine when developing websites... especially the developer's that would put in the effort to submit bug reports & patches.
(At least last I checked, recreating a Qutebrowser like experience in Firefox was at best just really annoying and would still lack features).
The 3 or 4 thousand power users that needed native interop were (and still are) of no interest compared to the then bad performance of Firefox in relation to Chrome. Even HN was full of people who complained about Firefox' performance. Now it's full of people who recommend to give Firefox another shot because it's fast again.
Firefox is also currently the only browser where uBlock Origin can use all of its features, Chrome is intentionally limiting APIs. Are people using Firefox because of it? No. So XUL add-ons would not have helped Firefox.
If you still want XUL, there are many forks out there that claim to support it.
Even someone like me that uses Firefox since it’s inception just gave up. I feel like Mozilla is alienating its userbase to cater for new users. It’s a failing strategy as it will never be able to compete with the hand that feeds (google).
My hope is that Mozilla fully dies and Firefox is able to continue as a community project like arch or Debian. It will never be popular but the community will have some control.