I know there are plenty of more serious issues people have with Mozilla's direction and focus, but patronizing stuff like this really grinds my gears.
> Which animal best represents your Firefox browsing style? [List of emoji animals]
The marketing/PR trend of speaking to communities as though they're kindergartners is distracting and off-putting. This is the most egregious part but the whole post has a similar tone.
I'll note that I'm not saying outreach should necessarily be professional or devoid of fun/humor. There's just a sterile, saccharine way about Mozilla's community engagement that evokes artificiality.
"Last year we upleveled our Private Browsing mode."
Hah, perfect. I recently got a contract to "upskill" a team. I mean, I kinda get it: training, right? But I was not confident that I really did understand it, specifically. I asked what the hell that meant and was met with a lot contorted phrases to describe it. Sure enough, training.
while i agree that mozilla is silly for thinking they're bring about positive social impact, it's also concerning for the author to call DEI (as a sentiment, not as a flawed implementation) "divisive politics" when it's just basic recognition of being a decent human. It makes me think the author is an "all lives matter" person.
I think the root problem here is that the communication isn't genuine. It's marketing trying to craft a certain brand image instead of actual stakeholders being open about the what is going on with the project.
Don't forget colorways, the non-feature that still needed to be force-fed to us. I assumed people who wanted to change the color theme already could, and that the limited time and ebergy available were being spent on things like compatibility and escaping from Google.
> Don't forget colorways, the non-feature that still needed to be force-fed to us. I assumed people who wanted to change the color theme already could
Most average users don't ever change settings or otherwise customize stuff, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't enjoy a different theme. Colorways saw good adoption according to our internal Telemetry. In fact, three years later colorway themes combined remain more popular than either Dark, Light, or Alpenglow, despite not being offered or advertised directly in Firefox anymore.
What do you mean non-feature? What do you mean force-fed? It’s literally just themes my dude, they just had a first run dialog for users to select one.
Agreed, this just looks really tone deaf and amateurish. And it's avoiding the bigger issues. There are plenty and they actually need dealing with. Even just acknowledging some of those issues would be progress.
There must be internal discussion on this. I imagine more than a few shouty meetings might have happened. This indicates to me that management doesn't know how to deal with that and clearly isn't dealing with anything effectively. If anything this makes me more worried, not less worried about how things are going at Mozilla.
More rust/C++ writing, less cuddly animals please. Firefox needs more people that work on the product and are allowed to work on the product not people that do busywork like this and just get in the way.
I'm an actual user BTW. The product is fine for me. Performance is great and steadily improving. My main concern is that the developers are allowed to stay on mission and empowered to do that. Which means doubling down on making sure I never get confronted with shitty ads, popups, and other advertising abuse. And that it keeps up technically with Chromium and Webkit in terms of standards support.
This all started with the "Engagement Team" like … 15+ years ago. I was there (part of the team). They started with mascots, being cute, having this infantilizing attitude towards users.
Kinda hard to be inclusive if no one uses your browser. The greatest thing Mozilla could do for inclusiveness is to have more users. Not treat your users like children.
> This all started with the "Engagement Team" like … 15+ years ago. I was there (part of the team). They started with mascots, being cute, having this infantilizing attitude towards users.
Having mascots is fine. It's like having a logo. Having multiple mascots is not good. What does a dinosaur have to do with a Firefox? The dinosaur was supposedly Mozilla's logo, as in Mosaic and Godzilla. Firefox is one of the many projects under the Mozilla umbrella. Keep the fox theme in Firefox communications, leave dinosaurs for Mozilla's one.
It doesn't have em-dashes and although a list where each line starts with an emoji is very LLM-coded, the lack of capitalization after the dashes does not feel like LLM output. And if something isn't plainly LLM generated, I do not want to accuse it of such. That's incredibly insulting to the author if they didn't actually use an LLM.
I agree that it feels LLMish (though the LLMs learned it from humans and it's always possible that whoever wrote it just has that sort of style) but the dashes there are en-dashes rather than the longer em-dashes that LLMs seem particularly fond of.
I will be sad if en-dashes come to be seen as LLM fingerprints, because I rather like them.
> This is for those who insist they can easily spot AI-generated text. Many of us old farts were using bulleted lists and em dashes and en dashes long before artificial intelligence was no more than a (usually) reliable plot device for sci-fi, much less the fever dream of tech bros. So, for God’s sake, stop using those as “proofs” that some text is AI-generated. As for my own writing, I reiterate what I said over two years ago: “... although the stuff on this site ... may not be any good, it always has been and will be written by a human, namely me.”
Stop this. I use em-dashes all the time. Em dashes are cool and I don't want some knob to eventually accuse me of being "an AI" because of this kind of thing. :{
>> The marketing/PR trend of speaking to communities as though they're kindergartners is distracting and off-putting.
I think this is just changing with the times. Go back a bit further and the idea of communities around products is the new cool thing. Personally I find that a bit weird. We have a whole generation of people who find social media managers talking to each other hilarious.
That's insane :/. But, maybe, "on the bright side", The Mozilla Foundation is unrelated in some sense to Firefox? AFAIK, they don't spend any of their money on it anyway.
The whole Mozilla situation is even more of a scam than how the Wikimedia Foundation uses sob stories about paying for Wikipedia to get people to donate money to an entity which spends almost no money on Wikipedia... but, at least it does run Wikipedia! lol :/.
There is another interesting detail from your reference that makes it seem even worse to me: it says the CEO's salary is "paid only by a related for-profit"; at first, I was thinking "ok, at least the Foundation in fact is spending the money it is being donated (though, not on Firefox)"... but then I realized that means the Corporation is, in fact, spending $7m that it could have spent on Firefox.
I don't really understand the angst against the Wikimedia Foundation.
They are transparent. No one's being conned into donating. As long as Wikipedia is running fine, and is not degrading, and they're not actively harming it, I don't care. People routinely spend money on much worse things. Is donating $3 to Wikimedia once a year really worse than giving 50-100x more to Starbucks?
> AFAIK, they don't spend any of their money on it anyway
The glass-half-full take I heard a while back was: at least every dollar they take from the foundation donations for these causes is a dollar that they could have found a way to take from Firefox development instead.
> The whole Mozilla situation is even more of a scam than how the Wikimedia Foundation uses sob stories about paying for Wikipedia to get people to donate money to an entity which spends almost no money on Wikipedia... but, at least it does run Wikipedia! lol :/.
I don't think these are comparable at all or how it's a scam. The CEO of the entire wikimedia foundation makes half a million a year. The foundation is considered a GREAT charity to donate to by Charity Navigator. https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703
It says "PAID ONLY BY A RELATED FOR-PROFIT", which looks to be the Mozilla Corporation. Donations are not directly paying the CEO, although I agree more of the profits from the Corporation could flow into the non-profit.
The reasonable assumption here is that without any donations, most of that money from Mozilla Corp would have had to cover what the donations paid for instead. So in practice, every dollar donated might have increased the CEO bonus by say 90 cents, which feels like donating to the CEO.
I currently still use Firefox but stopped donating to Mozilla after that.
If you cut that compensation in half you could have funded a small team of devs to have finished Oxidation of Firefox and have a really interesting browser, and potentially a really rich GUI stack, JavaScript Engine and who knows what else for Rust itself as a result, on top of it all being production ready and proven because of the nature of Firefox's reach.
There were major noticeable speed differences in Firefox when they implemented key component in Rust. I say this having used Firefox since 2004.
> If you cut that compensation in half you could have funded a small team of devs to have finished Oxidation of Firefox and have a really interesting browser, and potentially a really rich GUI stack, JavaScript Engine and who knows what else for Rust itself as a result, on top of it all being production ready and proven because of the nature of Firefox's reach.
I'm not sure exactly what you have in mind here but this really isn't true for basically any plausible value of "finished Oxidation of Firefox".
As context for scale, during the Quantum Project, Mozilla imported two major pieces of Servo: Stylo and WebRender. Each of these involved sizable teams and took years of effort, and yet these components (1) started from pre-existing work that had been done for Servo and (2) represent only relatively small fractions of Gecko. Replacing most of the browser -- or even a significant fraction of it -- with Rust code would be a far bigger undertaking.
The new CEO isn't any better. According to their first CEO (Brendan Eich) "Mozilla is being looted now, mitchell taking $38M+ out over 9 years was just a start"
I mean if you reduce something enough you can say “x pays for y” in almost any case for anything since it’s all technically one big pot for one group. Even earmarked money.
If I give you $500 to help pay for your medical bills and a few months later (bills have been paid by then) I see you bought a PS5, can I say, “not cool you used my money to buy a PS5”?
Don’t get me wrong I think Mozilla/FF has been very poorly managed. But I have just never liked these kinds of “transitive property” arguments or whatever we want to call it. Unless they’re straight up funneling donations into the CEO’s bank account I just don’t see it that way.
Money is fungible. There's no such thing as funneling. There is ring fencing though - that's when a certain budget cannot exceed a certain source of revenue, some countries do this with road tax I think. Afaik Mozilla is not doing any ring fencing. It is perfectly appropriate to compare the fraction of their income as donations to the fraction of their costs as CEO salary.
Let’s be honest, the only advantage Firefox has over other browser and especially chrome is its extension support. And it’s not even Mozilla merit, it’s Google who removed MV2 support.
Same for Android, the only advantage it has is its extension support because Google is stubbornly not adding extension support to Android chromium even though such support was already done by an indie developer (kiwi browser) and open sourced.
They hang on by a thread.
The web need Firefox to be thriving but it’s been a sinking ship since a while.
They know perfectly what users want, what makes a good browser : speed, good user interface, low on energy, block ads,..
These are universal things.
Have you taken a look at Android Firefox user interface ? It’s horrendous, the url box for instance is already small but now there is 3 buttons (share, reading mode, translate) on top of it. I got to put the phone on landscape mode to see the url.
And it’s not even that I want to see the url every second, but it just looks and feel bad.
On computer, there are 4 different browser history. The traditional one that opens in an outdated window, the « recent one » that shows only the 10 or something last links , a better looking browser history when you go in the top left button where there are synced browser tabs, synced history ,.. and an history in the sidebar.
Most people happily give away their privacy to these companies for very little or no benefit, on the other hand being able to block ads is a big thing. Everyone is annoyed when a pop up on how to enlarge your penis show up.
I'm not using the containers extension, since it only goes about 20% of the way and then they lost focus and stopped developing it. I think most people don't use it. It could have been a differentiator.
how are you doing that btw? apparently I'm incapable. I tried different container extensions, some of which crash zen completely. I just want some domains to be automatically opened in a specific container.
They have legacy extensions. Mozilla is very hostile to new extensions. When Gorhil - creator of the most popular Firefox extension uBlock Origin (honestly the main reason Firefox still has users) wanted to add his manifest 3 extension uBlock Origin Lite to firefox Mozilla told him to get bent. Same with "Enhancer to Youtube" (number 11 extension by user count) it is stuck on old version because of Mozilla
> Have you taken a look at Android Firefox user interface
So I opened the same page on both, my comments page on HN.
Firefox Android UI:
Home button, SSL padlock, URL, reader mode, tabs, hamburger menu. URL displays extends from 20% of the screen to 70% of the screen. I see news.ycombinator.com/thre(a) [the a is partially faded].
Chrome Android UI:
Home button, settings icon (shows cert details), URL, new tab button, tab list, hamburger menu. Icons have like 50% more padding that firefox icons, so URL extends from 20% to 60% of the screen. I see "news.ycombinator.com/t"
The only difference in icon count is firefox gives reader mode a dedicated button while Chrome gives new tab a dedicated button. Given how often I use reader mode (as a paywall bypass, or poorly formatted sites) that's... fine?
There is a stylistic difference where the coloured area for the address bar encompasses the reader mode icon so it looks like it's deducting space for the URL but it appears that Firefox actually has more URL space. By like... 3 characters, so it's not a huge difference.
---
As for the desktop history example:
Firefox history views:
- Firefox View: Full page view of your account including history, synced tabs, etc.
- Sidebar history: Useful to see with less disruption to browser
- Overflow menu recent items
- Legacy "Manage history" popup
Chrome history views:
- chrome://history as a full page modal (with sync and other stuff, so closest to Firefox view)
- recent history in the overflow menu
- "grouped history" which is a sidebar history with way too much padding.
So the only extra view of history that Firefox has is the legacy one, which is buried in the UI for power users who don't want to let it go (or more likely the bookmark manager that it lives with).
Firefox's WebExtensions implementation still has service workers disabled and no File System API. MV3 requires service workers, so Firefox extension ecosystem is on a countdown.
> Have you taken a look at Android Firefox user interface ? It’s horrendous, the url box for instance is already small but now there is 3 buttons (share, reading mode, translate) on top of it. I got to put the phone on landscape mode to see the url.
At least on my phone, an Poco X3, Firefox for Android url box it's BIGGER that Chrome for Android. Chrome shows 4 buttons on my phone.
That update that added the unremovable share button to the address bar on Android really pissed me off. I was hoping an update would come that would allow the stupid home button to be toggled on/off, but instead they add yet another unremovable button. Like wtf, I can't even see the URL now on any sites.
> Let’s be honest, the only advantage Firefox has over other browser and especially chrome is its extension support. And it’s not even Mozilla merit, it’s Google who removed MV2 support.
What are you talking about? Firefox pioneered the whole concept of browser extensions. Can you try to explain to me your train of thought?
> Same for Android, the only advantage it has is its extension support because Google is stubbornly not adding extension support to Android chromium even though such support was already done by an indie developer (kiwi browser) and open sourced.
What point do you think you're making? Firefox works perfectly well on Android, as well as Firefox Focus might I add.
Your comment reads like you're trying to grasp at straws.
So... Here's an idea: stop wasting time and money on things like that, listen to the community, hire engineers, and make a browser that can be at the same level as Chrome. We already told you what we want and need, no need to keep asking.
Mozilla and the story on "How to waste money and resources" is getting tiresome at this point.
It's wild how often Mozilla asks for feedback, gets clear answers (less bloat, better performance, fix regressions), and then drops something like another random experiment no one asked for
The market often rewards bloat (more features) not technical excellence. I think a big marketing push or pre-install partnership would help them a lot. Their marketshare is now so low that web developers unironically state “Best viewed in Google Chrome” like it’s 2003 when IE6 had 95% marketshare.
Maybe because as from another comment: "Firefox is an antitrust litigation sponge". They also absorb some useful users feedback. But do they have a real intention to increase market share (which could be done easily)? They are well paid - see in other comments how much its CEO is earning. So, "antitrust litigation sponge" sounds plausible?
Mozilla develops a better browser than Chrome in a lot of ways, and they do it with a tiny fraction of their budget. I would not describe that as "money wasting".
To be fair, most of Chrome’s budget is spent on developing ever more complex web standards to stay ahead of the competition, and to make sure no one will ever catch up to them.
Just two personal experiences of why the quality of Firefox is far from Chromium's: downloads, and creating an extension.
A few years ago, they changed their interface for downloading. This introduced more than a dozen of bugs. Some were cosmetic, e.g. hover was the same color as foreground. Some were rare but caused a file loss. Some were performance related, e.g. deleting the history of downloads could take a minute with no visible change until the end. Most of these regressions are now fixed, but that made me lose confidence in the quality of Firefox.
This year, I had to develop a cross-platform extension for Chrome and Firefox. I started using Mozilla Documentation Network, but many pages seemed unmaintained. The relationship with extensionworkshop.com is unclear. The status of manifest v3 is poorly documented (most pages are for v2 only). The page about the compatibility with Chrome is incomplete. After a few struggles, I switched to Google's documentation. Then I lost time and energy on a severe bug with the Firefox tool that publishes web-extensions: https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/webexterror-unsupported-file...
So just think how much greater the browser could be if Mozilla put more of the money they get into improving Firefox instead of into pointless UI redesigns that only slow things down, or breaking existing functionality - not to mention all the other frivolous nonsense they seem preoccupied with instead of being a credible competitor to Google.
With how they've been in recent years it's almost as if they're trying to be inept competition, as if they're being paid by Google to suck - in fact, that is all but established by now.
> > stop wasting time and money on things like that
> What do you mean? The AMA?
I’m not the parent but it’s not the AMA, it’s paying multi-million dollar salaries to CEOs that layoff engineers and divert money to political campaigning.
We could have had a Servo based Firefox by now if the team hadn't been canned in 2020 instead of Mitchell Baker giving herself a $3 million pay increase every year.
It's shameful to then come cap in hand for donations after that.
I had an email from Mozilla last week on how to prepare my phone for participation in violent political demonstrations.
I have to ask myself, what does this have to do with web browsers?
Straight to under 0.5% usage no doubt. Making a mockery of all the unpaid people who have committed code over the years. The Mozilla foundation have shirked their responsibility as a bastion against commercial interests.
The kneejerk Mozilla hate on HN gets so fucking tedious.
Google's marketing budget for Chrome is greater than Mozilla's entire budget. They sponsor a Formula 1 team FFS. They spent a decade paying off Adobe, Java, AVG, Avast and all the other shitty free AV softwares to auto-install Chrome. They targeted Firefox users with Chrome ads on the homepages of Google and YouTube. That's literally billions of dollars worth of marketing alone that they don't even have to pay for.
Mozilla's competitors (Google, Microsoft, Apple) are collectively worth the GDP of three entire continents combined (Africa, South America, Australia) with a couple trillion USD to spare. Each controls an operating system (or two) with more than a billion users each on which their browsers are pre-installed.
No shit they struggle to compete on brand and marketshare. They're basically forced by the economics of the market to do search deals with Google, and whenever they try to develop independent sources of revenue people shit on them for that too. People shit on them for making deals with Google and make insinuations about them being "controlled opposition" because of that dependency, but also shit on them for pursuing any other independent sources of revenue, like the branded VPN service or the innocuous cross-promotion of that Disney movie with the Red Panda.
People shat on them for trying to compete with Android via FirefoxOS because the bet didn't work out, even though it was probably the only way they could have avoided this outcome and gained real independence, had it worked out.
"Just focus on Firefox", they say - unless that means laying off people that work on Rust, or AV1, or Opus, or WebAssembly, or Let's Encrypt, or experimental browser engines that wouldn't have been production-ready for a decade. According to HN, Mozilla should focus but also keep churning out and spinning off research projects, but only successful research projects, not ones that fail. Anything Mozilla does is always retroactively terrible if it fails but if it works out great they never get credit for it anyway.
Keeping up with web standards, and dropping the advertising rubbish that's making them somehow atrophy users faster than they were before.
Otherwise, they'll be gone. Thunderbird has proven people are willing to donate millions if they know their money will go directly to the software. In 2022, Thunderbird collected ~6 million in donations (~20 million users) compared to Mozilla's ~9 million (from >200 million users)
Mozilla made $826.6M in 2024. If they got thunderbird levels of support $6/20 firefox would bring in $60 million. Aka 7% of current revenue. Idk all their revenue sources so idk what the overall picture would be, but my gut says $60mil wouldn’t cut it and firefox will never get the support thunderbird gets because of different user bases.
Eh... I'm not too sure about Thunderbird. For example on Android, they bought a very good product (K-9 Mail), rebranded it to Thunderbird and then proceeded to break every feature which made it stand apart.
Sadly "I'd like Firefox to not be owned by an advertising/surveillance company" is unlikely to be considered in that forum (even if I were prepared to sign up to comment).
Everything else is minor details compared to that.
(Yes, this was posted using LibreWolf, but I often wonder if I can even trust that, having the vast majority of it's code written and managed by Mozilla.)
This is the key differentiator Mozilla seems to deliberately avoid understanding. Chrome is a perfectly okay browser from almost every perspective: standards, functionality, performance, etc. What Chrome is not good at and can never be good at while it's owned by an advertising company is respecting user choice to disable advertising and choose privacy models that exclude the browser company.
Features and bugfixes are important, but they're table stakes for an everyday browser. They aren't enough to sell it.
> Features and bugfixes are important, but they're table stakes for an everyday browser. They aren't enough to sell it.
One of the reasons I've moved to Chrome is because of the memory problems with Mozilla that I've been experiencing for years. Every so often I look up other people who've been having the same issues. They seem to have been reported for years, but there's often a surprising amount of hostility from Firefox fans whenever they get mentioned.
As an aside, both Firefox and Chrome made their browsers significantly worse when they changed the order of windows in the windows menu from chronological to alphabetical.
> Chrome is a perfectly okay browser from almost every perspective
No, it isn't. They killed adblock, and have a business model of throttling other browsers to force people to Chrome (Youtube throttling) and doing digital fingerprinting with exclusive-only Chrome finger prints as seen here on HN the other day.
Firefox has anonym, where it sells your 'anonymous data'
I just looked, go to Settings -> type advert and you'll see
Website Advertising Preferences
Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement
This helps sites understand how their ads perform without collecting data about you. Learn more
It comes pre-checked for you.
I use Chromium for dev stuff, but now; there's no ublock origin.
Firefox should focus on privacy, keeping extensions viable, and implementing standards, so they don't get swamped by competition.
No one really cares about a majority of the UX sugar, IMO.
I personally find the LLM context menu useful and reading mode awesome, but these are not features that by themselves would drive me to use the browser.
Agreed -- I'm using the hell out of Zen browser on Linux and Windows. It's missing a couple things, but it works pretty great as a Firefox wrapper.
The reality is that with so many different users, there will be lots of opinions about the best way to do things, and especially in OSS communities, it's literally impossible to keep everyone happy.
Mozilla should let others do UX experimentation (like Zen, which is an Arc copy), and focus on the core performance and compatibility of the engine itself. Keep FF itself more streamlined as a core browser, and empower others to build fancy stuff on top.
And ditch literally anything related to ads & sponsorships, which have no place in a piece of tech so foundational to the open web.
Honestly, the Firefox feature-set it what prompted me to pick it up again after years of not using it.
- I wanted ad-blocking on Android, so I tried out Firefox on mobile.
- Then there were times I wanted to sync browser history/tabs between mobile and desktop, so I picked up Firefox on desktop again.
- I fell in love with reader mode (and using the narrate feature to listen to articles when my eyes get tired)
- I flirted with Zen browser, but now that Firefox has vertical tabs and tab grouping, I'm having trouble finding a reason to use Zen
Firefox basically does everything I want it to do, and it's incredibly rare that I need to open a chromium-based browser to handle something Firefox can't do.
I feel like the addition of LLMs is an introduction to finding another source of revenue. That Perplexity pop-up we've been shown lately seems like an experiment in that.
Readit News
> Which animal best represents your Firefox browsing style? [List of emoji animals]
The marketing/PR trend of speaking to communities as though they're kindergartners is distracting and off-putting. This is the most egregious part but the whole post has a similar tone.
I'll note that I'm not saying outreach should necessarily be professional or devoid of fun/humor. There's just a sterile, saccharine way about Mozilla's community engagement that evokes artificiality.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33293892
Hah, perfect. I recently got a contract to "upskill" a team. I mean, I kinda get it: training, right? But I was not confident that I really did understand it, specifically. I asked what the hell that meant and was met with a lot contorted phrases to describe it. Sure enough, training.
We're inventing work...
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More than not being genuine, it's condescending and patronizing.
It's because those entire departments are daycare for the people working in them.
8-9, snacks. 9-10, tweeting. 10-11, snacks and socializing. 11-12, nap time. 12-2, lunch. 2-3, tweeting. 3-4, socializing.
Most average users don't ever change settings or otherwise customize stuff, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't enjoy a different theme. Colorways saw good adoption according to our internal Telemetry. In fact, three years later colorway themes combined remain more popular than either Dark, Light, or Alpenglow, despite not being offered or advertised directly in Firefox anymore.
There must be internal discussion on this. I imagine more than a few shouty meetings might have happened. This indicates to me that management doesn't know how to deal with that and clearly isn't dealing with anything effectively. If anything this makes me more worried, not less worried about how things are going at Mozilla.
More rust/C++ writing, less cuddly animals please. Firefox needs more people that work on the product and are allowed to work on the product not people that do busywork like this and just get in the way.
I'm an actual user BTW. The product is fine for me. Performance is great and steadily improving. My main concern is that the developers are allowed to stay on mission and empowered to do that. Which means doubling down on making sure I never get confronted with shitty ads, popups, and other advertising abuse. And that it keeps up technically with Chromium and Webkit in terms of standards support.
Playing devil's advocate: how does that help your average Joe adopt Firefox?
They killed the dino logo:
- https://imghost.online/GBswvjTZ38PtAnf
- https://imghost.online/0HTX7YVnImu49qc
We were hackers, we became "cute and inclusive" (nothing wrong about inclusive… it just became the brand).
Fuck this.
Edit: I said 10+ years… but actually, it was more like 15 years ago.
Having mascots is fine. It's like having a logo. Having multiple mascots is not good. What does a dinosaur have to do with a Firefox? The dinosaur was supposedly Mozilla's logo, as in Mosaic and Godzilla. Firefox is one of the many projects under the Mozilla umbrella. Keep the fox theme in Firefox communications, leave dinosaurs for Mozilla's one.
I will be sad if en-dashes come to be seen as LLM fingerprints, because I rather like them.
> This is for those who insist they can easily spot AI-generated text. Many of us old farts were using bulleted lists and em dashes and en dashes long before artificial intelligence was no more than a (usually) reliable plot device for sci-fi, much less the fever dream of tech bros. So, for God’s sake, stop using those as “proofs” that some text is AI-generated. As for my own writing, I reiterate what I said over two years ago: “... although the stuff on this site ... may not be any good, it always has been and will be written by a human, namely me.”
Also, I think we can sense where Firefox is going. Mozilla is a mismanaged company. A victim of itself and Google's monopoly/life support.
I think this is just changing with the times. Go back a bit further and the idea of communities around products is the new cool thing. Personally I find that a bit weird. We have a whole generation of people who find social media managers talking to each other hilarious.
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/a... ”$7.8M in donations from the public, grants from foundations, and government funding” in 2023
[2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-990... $6.9mm in 2022, page 7
[1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...
Firefox is an antitrust litigation sponge, but you have to keep it rudderless and ineffective.
The whole Mozilla situation is even more of a scam than how the Wikimedia Foundation uses sob stories about paying for Wikipedia to get people to donate money to an entity which spends almost no money on Wikipedia... but, at least it does run Wikipedia! lol :/.
There is another interesting detail from your reference that makes it seem even worse to me: it says the CEO's salary is "paid only by a related for-profit"; at first, I was thinking "ok, at least the Foundation in fact is spending the money it is being donated (though, not on Firefox)"... but then I realized that means the Corporation is, in fact, spending $7m that it could have spent on Firefox.
They are transparent. No one's being conned into donating. As long as Wikipedia is running fine, and is not degrading, and they're not actively harming it, I don't care. People routinely spend money on much worse things. Is donating $3 to Wikimedia once a year really worse than giving 50-100x more to Starbucks?
The glass-half-full take I heard a while back was: at least every dollar they take from the foundation donations for these causes is a dollar that they could have found a way to take from Firefox development instead.
I don't think these are comparable at all or how it's a scam. The CEO of the entire wikimedia foundation makes half a million a year. The foundation is considered a GREAT charity to donate to by Charity Navigator. https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703
I currently still use Firefox but stopped donating to Mozilla after that.
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There were major noticeable speed differences in Firefox when they implemented key component in Rust. I say this having used Firefox since 2004.
I'm not sure exactly what you have in mind here but this really isn't true for basically any plausible value of "finished Oxidation of Firefox".
As context for scale, during the Quantum Project, Mozilla imported two major pieces of Servo: Stylo and WebRender. Each of these involved sizable teams and took years of effort, and yet these components (1) started from pre-existing work that had been done for Servo and (2) represent only relatively small fractions of Gecko. Replacing most of the browser -- or even a significant fraction of it -- with Rust code would be a far bigger undertaking.
If I give you $500 to help pay for your medical bills and a few months later (bills have been paid by then) I see you bought a PS5, can I say, “not cool you used my money to buy a PS5”?
Don’t get me wrong I think Mozilla/FF has been very poorly managed. But I have just never liked these kinds of “transitive property” arguments or whatever we want to call it. Unless they’re straight up funneling donations into the CEO’s bank account I just don’t see it that way.
If that person had the money, they should have spent on medical bills. If they got it after, they should have paid you back before buying a ps5 maybe.
Or if you just gave them the money and don’t expect any accountability, it is ok.
Fungibility [1].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility
Money is fungible. There's no such thing as funneling. There is ring fencing though - that's when a certain budget cannot exceed a certain source of revenue, some countries do this with road tax I think. Afaik Mozilla is not doing any ring fencing. It is perfectly appropriate to compare the fraction of their income as donations to the fraction of their costs as CEO salary.
Same for Android, the only advantage it has is its extension support because Google is stubbornly not adding extension support to Android chromium even though such support was already done by an indie developer (kiwi browser) and open sourced.
They hang on by a thread.
The web need Firefox to be thriving but it’s been a sinking ship since a while.
They know perfectly what users want, what makes a good browser : speed, good user interface, low on energy, block ads,.. These are universal things.
Have you taken a look at Android Firefox user interface ? It’s horrendous, the url box for instance is already small but now there is 3 buttons (share, reading mode, translate) on top of it. I got to put the phone on landscape mode to see the url.
And it’s not even that I want to see the url every second, but it just looks and feel bad.
On computer, there are 4 different browser history. The traditional one that opens in an outdated window, the « recent one » that shows only the 10 or something last links , a better looking browser history when you go in the top left button where there are synced browser tabs, synced history ,.. and an history in the sidebar.
Seriously ? 4 different history.
There need to be one clear, working history.
Have you seen how much data Chrome collects for Google? Especially on Android. That's another massive advantage of Firefox.
I get it, it's very useful to understand what and how features are used. But it's a fine line to walk for a browser playing market share catch-up.
Most people happily give away their privacy to these companies for very little or no benefit, on the other hand being able to block ads is a big thing. Everyone is annoyed when a pop up on how to enlarge your penis show up.
So I opened the same page on both, my comments page on HN.
Firefox Android UI:
Home button, SSL padlock, URL, reader mode, tabs, hamburger menu. URL displays extends from 20% of the screen to 70% of the screen. I see news.ycombinator.com/thre(a) [the a is partially faded].
Chrome Android UI:
Home button, settings icon (shows cert details), URL, new tab button, tab list, hamburger menu. Icons have like 50% more padding that firefox icons, so URL extends from 20% to 60% of the screen. I see "news.ycombinator.com/t"
The only difference in icon count is firefox gives reader mode a dedicated button while Chrome gives new tab a dedicated button. Given how often I use reader mode (as a paywall bypass, or poorly formatted sites) that's... fine?
There is a stylistic difference where the coloured area for the address bar encompasses the reader mode icon so it looks like it's deducting space for the URL but it appears that Firefox actually has more URL space. By like... 3 characters, so it's not a huge difference.
---
As for the desktop history example:
Firefox history views:
- Firefox View: Full page view of your account including history, synced tabs, etc.
- Sidebar history: Useful to see with less disruption to browser
- Overflow menu recent items
- Legacy "Manage history" popup
Chrome history views:
- chrome://history as a full page modal (with sync and other stuff, so closest to Firefox view)
- recent history in the overflow menu
- "grouped history" which is a sidebar history with way too much padding.
So the only extra view of history that Firefox has is the legacy one, which is buried in the UI for power users who don't want to let it go (or more likely the bookmark manager that it lives with).
At least on my phone, an Poco X3, Firefox for Android url box it's BIGGER that Chrome for Android. Chrome shows 4 buttons on my phone.
Google Is An Advertising Company. Honestly, this is more significant.
You are the product, for Google Chrome.
Google's MV3 replacement for MV2 means you are their product and will be served Ads regardless of your preferences.
What are you talking about? Firefox pioneered the whole concept of browser extensions. Can you try to explain to me your train of thought?
> Same for Android, the only advantage it has is its extension support because Google is stubbornly not adding extension support to Android chromium even though such support was already done by an indie developer (kiwi browser) and open sourced.
What point do you think you're making? Firefox works perfectly well on Android, as well as Firefox Focus might I add.
Your comment reads like you're trying to grasp at straws.
Mozilla and the story on "How to waste money and resources" is getting tiresome at this point.
I guess they don't want to listen to things they need to pour money into.
A few years ago, they changed their interface for downloading. This introduced more than a dozen of bugs. Some were cosmetic, e.g. hover was the same color as foreground. Some were rare but caused a file loss. Some were performance related, e.g. deleting the history of downloads could take a minute with no visible change until the end. Most of these regressions are now fixed, but that made me lose confidence in the quality of Firefox.
This year, I had to develop a cross-platform extension for Chrome and Firefox. I started using Mozilla Documentation Network, but many pages seemed unmaintained. The relationship with extensionworkshop.com is unclear. The status of manifest v3 is poorly documented (most pages are for v2 only). The page about the compatibility with Chrome is incomplete. After a few struggles, I switched to Google's documentation. Then I lost time and energy on a severe bug with the Firefox tool that publishes web-extensions: https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/webexterror-unsupported-file...
With how they've been in recent years it's almost as if they're trying to be inept competition, as if they're being paid by Google to suck - in fact, that is all but established by now.
What do you mean? The AMA?
> listen to the community
Huh? Isn't that exactly what they are doing with this?
> What do you mean? The AMA?
I’m not the parent but it’s not the AMA, it’s paying multi-million dollar salaries to CEOs that layoff engineers and divert money to political campaigning.
We could have had a Servo based Firefox by now if the team hadn't been canned in 2020 instead of Mitchell Baker giving herself a $3 million pay increase every year.
It's shameful to then come cap in hand for donations after that.
I had an email from Mozilla last week on how to prepare my phone for participation in violent political demonstrations.
I have to ask myself, what does this have to do with web browsers?
Better web compatibility and speed, be more lean (higher dev to admin ratio) and no more shenanigans / distractions.
To keep asking the question when you know the answer is at best incompetence according to Hanlon.
Google's marketing budget for Chrome is greater than Mozilla's entire budget. They sponsor a Formula 1 team FFS. They spent a decade paying off Adobe, Java, AVG, Avast and all the other shitty free AV softwares to auto-install Chrome. They targeted Firefox users with Chrome ads on the homepages of Google and YouTube. That's literally billions of dollars worth of marketing alone that they don't even have to pay for.
Mozilla's competitors (Google, Microsoft, Apple) are collectively worth the GDP of three entire continents combined (Africa, South America, Australia) with a couple trillion USD to spare. Each controls an operating system (or two) with more than a billion users each on which their browsers are pre-installed.
No shit they struggle to compete on brand and marketshare. They're basically forced by the economics of the market to do search deals with Google, and whenever they try to develop independent sources of revenue people shit on them for that too. People shit on them for making deals with Google and make insinuations about them being "controlled opposition" because of that dependency, but also shit on them for pursuing any other independent sources of revenue, like the branded VPN service or the innocuous cross-promotion of that Disney movie with the Red Panda.
People shat on them for trying to compete with Android via FirefoxOS because the bet didn't work out, even though it was probably the only way they could have avoided this outcome and gained real independence, had it worked out.
"Just focus on Firefox", they say - unless that means laying off people that work on Rust, or AV1, or Opus, or WebAssembly, or Let's Encrypt, or experimental browser engines that wouldn't have been production-ready for a decade. According to HN, Mozilla should focus but also keep churning out and spinning off research projects, but only successful research projects, not ones that fail. Anything Mozilla does is always retroactively terrible if it fails but if it works out great they never get credit for it anyway.
Otherwise, they'll be gone. Thunderbird has proven people are willing to donate millions if they know their money will go directly to the software. In 2022, Thunderbird collected ~6 million in donations (~20 million users) compared to Mozilla's ~9 million (from >200 million users)
Otherwise I 100% agree.
Everything else is minor details compared to that.
(Yes, this was posted using LibreWolf, but I often wonder if I can even trust that, having the vast majority of it's code written and managed by Mozilla.)
Also- what kind of animal are you?!
Features and bugfixes are important, but they're table stakes for an everyday browser. They aren't enough to sell it.
One of the reasons I've moved to Chrome is because of the memory problems with Mozilla that I've been experiencing for years. Every so often I look up other people who've been having the same issues. They seem to have been reported for years, but there's often a surprising amount of hostility from Firefox fans whenever they get mentioned.
As an aside, both Firefox and Chrome made their browsers significantly worse when they changed the order of windows in the windows menu from chronological to alphabetical.
No, it isn't. They killed adblock, and have a business model of throttling other browsers to force people to Chrome (Youtube throttling) and doing digital fingerprinting with exclusive-only Chrome finger prints as seen here on HN the other day.
Firefox has anonym, where it sells your 'anonymous data'
https://lifehacker.com/tech/why-you-should-disable-firefox-p...
I just looked, go to Settings -> type advert and you'll see
Website Advertising Preferences Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement This helps sites understand how their ads perform without collecting data about you. Learn more
It comes pre-checked for you.
I use Chromium for dev stuff, but now; there's no ublock origin.
No one really cares about a majority of the UX sugar, IMO.
I personally find the LLM context menu useful and reading mode awesome, but these are not features that by themselves would drive me to use the browser.
The reality is that with so many different users, there will be lots of opinions about the best way to do things, and especially in OSS communities, it's literally impossible to keep everyone happy.
Mozilla should let others do UX experimentation (like Zen, which is an Arc copy), and focus on the core performance and compatibility of the engine itself. Keep FF itself more streamlined as a core browser, and empower others to build fancy stuff on top.
And ditch literally anything related to ads & sponsorships, which have no place in a piece of tech so foundational to the open web.
- I wanted ad-blocking on Android, so I tried out Firefox on mobile.
- Then there were times I wanted to sync browser history/tabs between mobile and desktop, so I picked up Firefox on desktop again.
- I fell in love with reader mode (and using the narrate feature to listen to articles when my eyes get tired)
- I flirted with Zen browser, but now that Firefox has vertical tabs and tab grouping, I'm having trouble finding a reason to use Zen
Firefox basically does everything I want it to do, and it's incredibly rare that I need to open a chromium-based browser to handle something Firefox can't do.