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Comment by mvdtnz | Hacker News Reader

I know what he's talking about. Firefox has constant nag screens. I just restarted Firefox and got two separate nags[1]. I am certain that within the next week it will nag me for at least one more thing. Maybe it'll want me to try Pocket, or sign in with a Mozilla account, or set up sync, or the absolute worst offender - when I launch the browser it will say "heyyyy I gotta update and I treat this like it's 1998 so you'll need to wait, and then I'll need to restart". Firefox is VERY naggy.

[1] https://imgur.com/a/dLr6E0C

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Ok, but obviously in this case you can check the "Don't show me this message again" checkbox and, like me, you'll have had to endure the burden of responding to this nag just once in years of using Firefox.

I may be forgetting about nags that don't allow themselves to be disabled, but if so, they're infrequent enough that they seem insignificant and obviously non-memorable.

Edit: I should add, when I had to have Chrome installed I really didn't like the fact that it updated itself automatically via a daemon process. I don't think having a constantly running background process for a browser, especially one from a giant advertising company, is a good alternative.

> in this case you can check the "Don't show me this message again" checkbox

I had literally just installed Firefox minutes ago (inspired by this thread). During the install it asked me if I wanted to make it the default browser, and I had said no. This is what we mean by nagging. Firefox needs to know when to shut up and get out of the way.

> you'll have had to endure the burden of responding to this nag just once in years of using Firefox.

Twice. For this one particular nag. Next time Mozilla releases some shitty VPN or AI program, it will nag me again. If I don't log in to a Mozilla account, it will nag me to. If I don't try Pocket, I will be nagged to try it.

And Chrome does this too. They want you to know about new features, and they're easy to dismiss.

The only reason Safari doesn't is because they aren't developing it because it's too broken already. So much doesn't work with Safari.

That's just comically false.

Safari is under active development, gets new features all the time, and has a dev blog you can subscribe to over RSS [0].

You may not like Safari, and you're welcome to your opinion about it, but you're not welcome to your own facts.

[0] https://webkit.org/blog/

Maybe his personal experience was how he learned that Safari doesn't work with several websites.

Well, Firefox hasn't nagged me in a long time and you've just installed it, so why not give it a try for a while?

> shitty VPN

The Mozilla VPN is a rebranded Mullvad VPN, AFIK which I understand is very good.

Even if there are a few more nags than Chrome or whatever, I guess, I'm happy knowing that I'm making it a bit harder for Google to know what I'm doing online.

Me as well. Firefox doesn't annoy me with any popups. I've used it for 5 years now as my daily driver on windows and macOS. Sure, I've gotten maybe TWO popups in that time asking me to try the VPN, but I honestly can't think of any other popups that genuinely annoyed me. Compared with Chrome it is a clear winner.

That's literally a dialog that every browser gives you after installing/on start if not permantly disabled (and there is a convenient button, there), and you are calling out FF? Also regarding pocket, as an almost exclusive FF user I didn't know what pocket was until some years ago when it was in the news, similarly Mozilla VPN I found out about through the news, not a single nag. This compared to lots of "the web works best in Chrome..." nags I got when visiting google websites over the years.

Let's not even talk about Apple and their dark patterns (the whole green bubble messages as one example).

This is after installing and after I had already said "no" during the install.

Firefox for many versions now has no way to disable update notification messages, which will repeatedly appear as a popup from the addressbar on every launch, unless one creates a new file with particular content.

Even if one wants a particular version for testing. Chromium doesn't do this ime. And this isn't to say it's a reason not to use FF but it is a counter-example to simply being able to dismiss something without it being annoying.

Not just every launch, but also if you leave it long enough, it'll pop up again during the same session. This was what made me finally uninstall it.

And while Firefox has lots of flags and ways to tweak things like this, it's not straightforward and requires time to interrupt my workflow to address. Definitely not worth it for me on macOS. I might change my tune if I switch to Linux, but at that point I'll likely look into something like LibreWolf.

This is asking you to make it the default browser, like every other browser does. How is that noisier?

I have found it quite easy to turn those features and their accompanying nagging off. I do it precisely once when I set up on a new OS install and never see them again after updates. Never understood these stories.

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