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Comment by calamari4065 | Hacker News Reader

Now, right now, this is the moment for Mozilla to pull their heads out of their asses and really push to improve Firefox. Google is cranking up the user hostility, but if there's no viable alterative, people are gonna be stuck being spied on and tracked everywhere by chrome.

If we had an alternative, this would be the time for an organized push to get people on it. But Mozilla has either become complacent or been quietly bought out behind the scenes and Firefox isn't really competitive anymore.

Sure, you can still use Firefox. I do, begrudgingly. But it's not good enough to convince people to switch. It hasn't been for a very long time which is why we're in this mess in the first place.

I expect nothing will change and everyone will suffer for it.

Maybe people will get offline more. The internet as a whole is becoming exponentially shittier as time goes on. How much longer before it's completely intolerable?

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Nothing is substandard in Firefox. Manifest 3 in Chrome is actually giving Google the ability to make Chrome substandard. I know it annoying to hear but I really think its better if people switch to Firefox.

Sorry but lots of things are substandard in Firefox. On the rare occasion that I do use it the first thing I'm always promted with is "there's an update available - click here to restart" like it's 2003 again. Numerous pages have rendering problems with Firefox. Performance is not good enough. Dev tools have fallen behind. It aggressively pushes shitty "value-adds" like that lame bookmarking service (Pocket Mark or something). And the never ending UI refreshes are exhausting.

Show me these pages that Firefox doesn't render well.

Show me pages that tank Firefox performance.

How many of them will have -webkit-* and other engine-exclusive markup/CSS?

Firefox updates every 6 weeks, just like Chrome.

What do you want in the devtools that Chrome has and Firefox doesn't?

I've been using Firefox for nearly two decades and aside from the WebExtensions and some UI changes, it's been solid.

I find most criticisms of Firefox on websites are lacking links and profiling data.

> Show me these pages that Firefox doesn't render well.

I'm not doing homework for you. Lots of pages don't render well in Firefox, it's a well known issue which is why it comes up in every thread about Firefox.

> Show me pages that tank Firefox performance.

Firefox in general performs poorly. Again, known long-term ongoing issue. Look at this thread where almost every top-level comment is sceptical that Firefox is even close to Chrome in performance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36770883

You can find ongoing performance benchmarks between Chrome and Firefox here, and it's not flattering for FF: https://arewefastyet.com

> How many of them will have -webkit-* and other engine-exclusive markup/CSS?

I don't care, at all. It's not my job, as a user, to debug performance problems.

> Firefox updates every 6 weeks, just like Chrome.

Ok? I didn't say anything about update cadence.

Check the y axis labels on arewefastyet. When FF is winning, it is often by a large multiple. When chrome wins it is usually by under a factor of two. It wins by a factor of three on one benchmark that I could find.

I don’t think many users will notice a factor of 2-3 in page render time, even if the benchmarks where firefox wins are all somehow not representative of real world use, but the chrome ones are.

As for pages that don’t render, I simply don’t see this problem at all. One bank I use refuses to let you log in if Linux appears in the user agent string, but that hits Chrome too. Do you have a single example?

>One bank I use refuses to let you log in if Linux appears in the user agent string, but that hits Chrome too.

So why do you do business with this bank? I have a bunch of accounts at different banks and other financial institutions, and have never had this problem. I'd never open an account at a bank this incompetent with IT issues.

They're paying me to deal with their bullshit.

They offer the only credit card that offers 5% cash back at a retailer that I spend lots of money at.

I don't use them for anything other than that card.

Open and use more than 10 aws console tabs actively on Linux and Firefox will crash (all tabs). Chromium can do more than double without crashing. I still use ff whenever possible

Chrome is the standard. Any feature in Firefox that is not 1:1 with chrome is by definition substandard.

And I didn't say it was substandard, I said it wasn't good.

I find the UI to be bad. When you ask for customization, like disabling excess tabs from scrolling off the edge of the screen, forum users treat you like an idiot. Performance has always been worse, particularly on mobile. Session state is less reliable. WebUSB is missing. Microphone support is unreliable. Updates under Linux cause any link you click to softlock the browser with an error page until you manually restart. Linux support in general is very poor. Firefox recently fixed a bug with tooltip rendering that's been reported for what, 15 years?

Chrome has been better than Firefox for a very long time. That's why we all switched to chrome in the first place.

Now that chrome is the scourge of the internet, there's really just one alternative. Unless you count safari, but that's a different story.

We're in a bad situation and Mozilla isn't doing enough to make it better. They haven't been for a long, long time.

Firefox is perfectly usable, and in fact already superior to Chrome. It is a very viable alternative. Best browser I've ever had.

The fact that they choose not to implement some apis because they're harmful to privacy doesn't seem to hurt me in any way.

What exactly do you think is substandard about Firefox?

https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%...

Microsoft Teams (which I don't think many people use voluntarily) in particular breaks in stupid ways - and then in others if you spoof your user agent.

I use Microsoft Edge - have added their apt repository so updates are automagical. Edge, though based on Chrome's engine, still supports manifest V2 so adblockers such as UO still work fine. Even better, Edge let's you "appify" sites like Teams and Outlook - perfect for work. I use Edge for all my WFH needs, turning off UO for most MS sites (to avoid any subtle issues), and Firefox for all personal needs. Works for me. Oh, and Teams on Linux using Edge works a treat.

Absolutely not. I've gone great lengths about my attempt at using Edge here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38430102

In short: It has zero respect for the user, so little that it regularly gaslit me into thinking I had agreed to things I did not.

They also signaled intent to simply merge the ripping out of MV2, so as soon as Chrome drops it, Edge will too.

There are several web apis that Mozilla refuses to support, for example webhid or webusb, which all chromium browsers have had for years at this point. Same for little css features and some bits in the webaudio and webrtc implementations.

Mozilla refusing to support webhid in any way: https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#webhid

Chrome adding it to stable in 2021: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/new-in-chrome-89/

This, they refuse to implement it claiming privacy reasons.

The sad thing is, if FirefoxOS would still be a thing they wouldn't bat an eye.

Can you defend the proposition that Firefox isn't a viable browser for lack of these APIs by listing popular websites that won't work without them?

Serious question, because I can't think of any.

https://suite.trezor.io/web/

https://pixelrepair.withgoogle.com/

Are 2 that pop in to my head

Trezor is... a crypto hardware wallet? I can't imagine this sort of thing is popular enough to block firefox from mainstream adoption.

The pixel repair site is an interesting example, but AFAIK, Pixel phones have about 2% of the US market share and this website is only useful to a small number of those users (those who encounter a serious error) and isn't something even those users would be using often. If I had to use this website and couldn't get my phone fixed another way, I could install and use Chrome (or I presume another Chromium browser) and use it for this single purpose. It would take me only a few minutes/hours(?) and then I'd be done with it. Why would a site like this keep me using Chrome permanently? I just can't imagine that.

I think this is pretty typical of these niche web features. Like most users have no need for web midi and most likely don't even own a midi device that it would work with. But niche websites can find great value in the api being available and offer sites to users which bring them value without having them install a native app. Also I'm not sure if it's a good idea to give people a reason to install and use a competitors browser.

I don't think either of these are examples of websites that might plausibly be holding Firefox back from mainstream adoption. I was expecting something like "[popular feature] of facebook or youtube doesn't work"

I'm sure I'm not the only person who has Chrome installed as a backup, just in case I run across a site that doesn't work right in Firefox, or if I just suspect such a problem exists. Having an alternate browser installed is trivial; it's not like using a different OS.

Never heard of those and I doubt 99% of the population have either.

Not being compatible with those sites is definitely not the barrier to widespread adoption of Firefox.

I doubt your average user cares about whether WebHID or WebUSB are implemented. What popular sites (popular enough to cause significant browser market share disruption) use those APIs? (For the record, though, I fully agree with Mozilla's rationale behind not implementing them.)

Not sure what little CSS features you mean, but I haven't found any mainstream websites that don't render properly in Firefox. It's possible that the website maintainers have to do extra work to get them working in Firefox, but regular users don't care about that.

I do recall some things missing from WebAudio and WebRTC, but in practice I'm not sure I've run into any issues with Firefox's implementations. And, again, if website maintainers are doing extra work to make things behave properly with Firefox, regular users aren't going to notice or care.

I use webusb every time I power on my modded Nintendo switch. Only works in chromium

You really do not want to enable WebHIB, WebUSB, WebGL, WebRTC, canvas, `blob:` nor any of Google's 8 APIs for privacy and security reasons.

This is Google's attempt at our privacy thru Embrace, Engulf, and Extinguish strategy.

https://www.creativebloq.com/features/google-apis

The second E is usually Extend. Where'd you see one about Engulf?

That's a Microsoft strategy.

That excuse from Mozilla for webusb is ridiculous. You already need to setup udev rules to access a device via webusb

Lots of people here disagreeing with you that Firefox is worse, but I'm with you. I'm on an M1 MacBook Air, been a Chrome user forever, but when they started getting aggressive with adblocking on YouTube, I switched over to Firefox, both on macOS and iOS.

Boy, it is...worse. I really gave it the old college try. Brought over all my extensions, dove into the really good ones (some of which really are incredible), even customized the Firefox interface, etc. I went hard.

But eventually I ended up back on Chrome, purely due to performance. Firefox is simply very slow and choppy. It's not a good experience.

I'd love to go Safari full time, but I use so many Linux and Windows machines in addition to my Macs that I really need something cross-platform, and so Chrome has always been the best solution for me. It's a bummer but I think I'm on Chrome for the foreseeable future.

A majority of Firefox's funding comes from Google. I doubt they're willing to aggressively market their browser as "the one to use to get around Google's ads". I'm not sure of the exact figures but as I recall, losing Google's funding would be a company-ending event.

In other words, we might need a browser that’s actually an Open Source project, as opposed to something built by company and released with source.

Good luck with that. This kind of approach might work with some projects where you don't need responsive updates and continuous development to keep up with changing standards and new vulnerabilities being continuously found, such as vim, but for a really big software project I'm not aware of this working at all. The Linux kernel is maybe comparable in size and scope, but it's developed by a bunch of corporate developers too, though they're scattered across different companies that all need the kernel. A web browser isn't really like a kernel; how many companies are going to contribute developers to a project like that?

Is there any possibility of forking Visual Code and adding extension and profile support?

VS Code, the IDE? It may use Electron but that doesn't make it a browser.

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