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Comment by reissbaker | Hacker News Reader

Why does Mozilla always spin their wheels releasing random side projects? Cloud-hosting an outdated tiny LLM that you can't swap out or run locally, to do basic summarization? This just doesn't feel like an area of strategic focus that makes sense for Mozilla. GPUs are expensive, talent to do inference well is expensive, and the actual product they're shipping seems pretty marginally useful at best.

If they shipped vertical tabs I'd probably switch back to Firefox. But that would require focusing on actual browser UX instead of random offshoots. What's their actual product differentiation from Chrome these days?

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For me, the product differentiation of Firefox is a bunch of small convenience features which Chrome in its monolithism refuses to provide, such as:

Allowing Backspace to go back a page.

The built-in screenshot tool.

Being able to turn off smooth scrolling.

Support for a menubar, so that I can navigate the features I want quickly.

Being able to choose page encodings (I use a non-Latin charset language).

A usable/useful bookmark manager with things like sorting, tags/labels, timestamps, etc.

"Restore Previous Session" feature.

These are just a few features off the top of my head, I know there are many more.

Of course, for certain sites like Google Docs and YouTube, I have to use Chrome for obvious reasons, but for most browsing I use Firefox (and qutebrowser.)

Don't forget the option for sane, standard behavior with shift+tab. Chrome refuses to let you customize shortcut behavior like that

Out of curiosity, what "obvious reasons" issues have you had with Docs and YouTube. I use Firefox for everything, including those, without problems. (Though not in any kind of advanced way.)

Depending on how beefy of a machine you're using, they're much slower in Firefox.

I use Firefox on my HTPC, running a 6700K with 24GB of RAM. Not new, but not “slow”. Clicking a YouTube video will cause a three second page load, even if the actual “page” says it’s finished loading. Videos will start to play audio before the page is rendered. Navigating back and forth causes issues like this too. Sometimes I can get it to show a video but not change the title or comments that it renders. If I accidentally click the “Shorts” hyperlink I basically have to close the tab to stop it from endlessly playing shorts in the background of the SPA.

It’s awful. The best example I experience on a day to day basis that the SPA as a concept is utterly flawed. YouTube is a fucking webpage that fails to work like a webpage and an app that behaves like a students rough alpha. An utterly painful experience, continually made worse by likely skilled devs who are managed by complete bozo losers. But at least the progress bar has an ugly pink hue now.

Docs just almost entirely does not function for me on Firefox on Linux. As in, I've had it crash the entire browser while just trying to type in a document. In general, Google just aggressively seems to be hostile to any non-Chrome browser using any of their sites. I'm sure they cloak it in "well Firefox just hasn't implemented this spec yet" but when it's functionally enforcing their browser monopoly I have to assume malice at this point.

Too many Google sites behave worse on any non-Chrome browser for it not to be intentional.

I wouldn't call them "obvious" reasons but I recently discovered that in Google Sheets under FF I couldn't duplicate a tab or copy a tab to a new sheet. I had to fire up Chrome to do that.

Oddly enough, Chrome had somehow lost my settings since the previous time I started it a few months earlier, as if it were a new install. :-?

I've not noticed any problems under YT Premium so far.

> Allowing Backspace to go back a page.

I mostly agree, but whoever came up with this shortcut should get choked.

You may not like it, but I don't think it's a good reason to remove the option of enabling it for those who rely on it for daily work, which is what Chrome did.

It was added with IE and cross pollinated.

> Allowing Backspace to go back a page.

Easily solved by https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/go-back-with-backsp... their first party webext.

> Being able to turn off smooth scrolling.

Can disable as easily as Firefox -- chrome://flags/#smooth-scrolling

Actually, Firefox lately introduced a bug that will reset smooth scrolling everytime I remote desktop to my Windows machine. Which is annoying AF and they haven't fixed it for months.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1912246

> Being able to choose page encodings (I use a non-Latin charset language).

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/set-character-encod...

> "Restore Previous Session" feature.

You can do it since.. forever?

Settings -> On Startup -> Continue where you left off

Or just press Ctrl+shift+T when you restart Chrome to restore it manually.

There are some more feature-rich session manager extensions, but they're usually available across Firefox and Chrome.

>Easily solved by https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/go-back-with-backsp... their first party webext.

This only works on pages where extensions are enabled, and only after the extension is successfully activated, so about 30% failure rate for me.

>Can disable as easily as Firefox -- chrome://flags/#smooth-scrolling

This has not worked for me reliably, and the flag has been renamed several times.

For example, on my Mac, it reads "Not available on your platform."

>Actually, Firefox lately introduced a bug that will reset smooth scrolling everytime I remote desktop to my Windows machine. Which is annoying AF and they haven't fixed it for months.

I'm blessed to not have experienced this.

>https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/set-character-encod...

Same as the other extension comment above, only works once extension activates successfully.

>Settings -> On Startup -> Continue where you left off

This is not the same feature.

I use all the extensions I mentioned for years, claiming it has 30% failure rate is bullshit. They don't work on internal special pages, sure, but they work flawlessly on any "normal" webpages with close to zero load time.

And no, disabling smooth scrolling works totally fine as I use it for more than 10 years.

If you're going to exaggerate your points to make a statement instead actually trying to find solutions, I have nothing for you, then.

What is more likely that they are lying or it doesn't work as well in their configuration as yours? The good faith answer is that it is probably the latter.

Yes, it is more likely he pulled 30% number out of thin air, I'm confident about that.

I did pull the number out of thin air, so let me replace that with "often enough to be annoying and make the browser unusable for me.

Chromium has "restore previous session" - I use it every time I start my browser (I've had a session going for months if not years).

It does not have a command for it. I don’t want it to happen every time I reopen Chrome, but only when I call the command.

> Of course, for certain sites like Google Docs and YouTube, I have to use Chrome for obvious reasons

Yes, obvious.

But left unsaid is that those reasons should lead to the breakup of the (deeply evil) Google ad machine.

I struck a case where Googe Meet is the only website I have found that will not work with Firefox and my headset.

I am so disappointed by Google, I can taste it

> A usable/useful bookmark manager with things like sorting, tags/labels, timestamps, etc.

which bookmark manager can do that ?

Firefox’s built in bookmark manager can do that, Chrome’s is very basic.

Mozilla is almost totally dependent on payments from Google to survive. If Google stops the payments, Mozilla probably goes out of business.

I think it’s pretty clear why they keep on doing this type of side project. They are trying anything they can think of to diversify revenue.

> from Google to survive. If Google stops the payments, Mozilla probably goes out of business.

> I think it’s pretty clear why they keep on doing this type of side project.

It’s not clear to me. I agree they would have some problems if Google declined to pay them because the next best offer would be lower.

But the best way to keep these payments, or to increase them, is by making a better browser and giving people a reason to use Firefox. After spinning off Servo I lost the last hope I had.

It seems everyone is stuffing AI summary tools into everything, is this something that will retain users or bring in new users? I doubt it.

Browsers are a means to an end for other major providers excluding for Opera. They can be loss leaders even, as long as they do their job of steering users towards proprietary ecosystems

Most non-tech "normies", which is to say 95% of the population, barely know what a browser is. They couldn't describe the function of one, or discriminate what makes one better than another. They certainly won't give a crap about Servo, or extremely marginal improvements in page load time (at best).

Given that web browsers are the heaviest application most users are running, and they are running them on low end 10yr old laptops with 8gb of RAM, I think an ultra modern lightweight web browser would be noticeably better.

Web browser crawl on these low end laptops.

This is how Firefox became popular in the first place, by being better.

The “we need an alternative to the “WebKit/blink/chromium” monopoly is what the majority of people will never care about.

Web slowness has much more to do with sites than with browsers. Where sites have accumulated Everest-sized balls of JavaScript mud, web engines have only become more optimized. If you visit “old web” style pages (Macintosh Garden for example) on old machines with modern browsers there’s no speed problem at all.

In the face of all that JS, there’s only so far a spiffy new browser can improve the situation, aside from maybe drop large chunks of legacy web standards but then you’re breaking large chunks of the web.

Most of the new features on the web are corporation driven. The only web site I reluctantly give microphone access is Google Meet and this should have been a desktop app. We have so many layout engines in a browser while layout for both documents and GUI have been solved for decades. Every new feature is just reinventing the wheel to solve a non problem.

From my experience observing and interacting with “normal” non-tech users, slowness of apps and long loading times are simply ignored. I would think “how the hell can you live like that?!”, and they would at best say “yeah it’s kinda slow”.

They also wouldn't use Firefox - they'd use Chrome, Edge, or (more likely) Chrome/Safari mobile. People who use Firefox are already tech people or the family of.

The least cynical view, in my opinion, is that Google is an ad company, which ultimately means they are a data company. They don't need Mozilla to build a better browser, they need Mozilla to increase the amount of user data Google can collect and ad spots Google can sell.

The more cynical view is that Google doesn't care at all about Mozilla because the investment is nothing more than a hedge against regulatory pressure.

A hedge that didn’t pay off despite the Mozilla CEO doing their part at trial and then promptly retiring on a huge pile of GOOG bucks.

You bring up a great example. Mozilla poured tons of resources and had very smart people working on Rust, Servo, and related tech projects to improve Firefox. Where was the surge of market share?

We’re at a point where the core functionality of browsers is very mature. It’s unlikely that any amount of investment will produce a browser that is significantly faster at things like JS execution or rendering compared to Chrome.

So alternative browsers add things like better ad blockers, more privacy protections, or maybe LLM summaries to enhance the core browser experience instead.

For some of the stated reasons this seems like a terrible way to diversify and add any revenue. What if they take a page from Silicon Valley? If the US Government makes Hooli, I mean Google, divest Chrome could Mozilla acquire it?

That would give Mozilla $20B of debt and an even bigger dependence on Google for payments, at least initially.

Though in the long term, maybe they could use the market share to make money in other ways.

But if they can’t manage to make money in other ways with Firefox, I’m not sure that they’d be able to do it with Chrome either.

They seem to feel that they will be marginalized if Google stops paying them to set their default search engine to Google but, the way they have handled it is to focus on everything else other than their browser. At this point since browser engines are dominated by Blink and Webkit what exactly does Mozilla have? Their market share just keeps on going down.

They should have become the Rust company and built services around it.

Whatever happened to Servo?

Mozilla laid off everyone they had working on it. The project is still going on a volunteer basis, but it's obviously not progressing anywhere near as quickly as it was when it had people working on it full time.

Some parts of it, the parts that were production-ready, were merged into Firefox years ago and live on there. Other parts that weren't production-ready were canned and the staff laid off.

Someone will pay to be the default though. Browsers print money.

> What's their actual product differentiation from Chrome these days?

Providing monopoly protection to Google.

They have no interest in actually competing for market share.

Firefox has only a few percents of market share - how is it a protection?

The swindled their 90% share down to <9%, but Google can point to Firefox and try and claim they aren’t a monopoly.

The monopoly protection is provided by Apple and to a lesser extent Microsoft. Mozilla is completely irrelevant at this point.

> If they shipped vertical tabs I'd probably switch back to Firefox.

about:config, sidebar.revamp = true, sidebar.verticalTabs = true

It's getting there.

It's such a waste of resources. They should just focus in making a better browser.

It should be clear that Mozilla Co has far more interest in social issues and galas than browsers.

Truly one of the most self-sabotaging companies I’ve ever seen.

For me:

- continued support for manifest V2 (primarily because ublock origin would stop working if forced to V3 only)

- the firefox address bar is way smarter for any given string i type in than chrome's. it's ability to surface the most relevant deeplinks from my history, vs top level site, vs perform a web search, is night and day difference from the randomness that other browser search bars offer.

- I have the opportunity to use Zen (a Firefox fork) [0] and it's 100% interoperable with my vanilla Firefox instances across devices -- i can even send tabs from my Firefox Nightly on Android to my Zen instances on Windows or Mac. BTW Zen has vertical tab support, (more) first-party multi-profile support, and preserves the address bar behaviors of vanilla Firefox.

[0]: https://zen-browser.app/

Building a browser is hard. Building a proof of concept of the current tech fad is easy and fun. Sometimes developers need to do easy and fun things to keep themselves motivated and happy.

You could build an AI Assistant, or you could spend a month bikeshedding some design details of vertical tabs.

Yeah I doubt this took a huge amount of resources away from other development. It’s a fun little optional feature that might end up being cool.

>Sometimes developers need to do easy and fun things to keep themselves motivated and happy.

I tried this line on my boss. Didn't fly. Back to bikeshedding with the rest of the team. I wonder if the difference is we have to earn our money, and our customers expect an roi. Or, at least something that doesn't mess up what already exists.

Zen Browser is based in the newest Firefox version and does have vertical tabs

Well, you're in luck, sort of. Mozilla has vertical tabs in a new sidebar experience. It's the worst implementation of vertical tabs and a sidebar I've seen in a browser. Complete with typical Firefox UX, it's completely inconsistent and unintuitive to disable. A complete farce compared to Sidebery.

I've been using Zen recently - it's a fork/skin of Firefox that includes vertical tabs.

Google doesn't pay them to be competition. Only to appear as such to keep regulators distracted.

Surely there’s an extension that does vertical tabs…

There is, but hiding the tabs on top — IMO the entire point of vertical tabs, since almost all screens have more horizontal than vertical space — isn't supported without maintaining your own custom CSS. It's a pain.

If anyone is curious, the following seems to work:

0. Install the Tree Style Tab extension (or whatever vertical tabs extension you prefer).

1. Enable userChrome.css: set toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets=true in about:config.

2. Set browser.tabs.inTitlebar=0 in about:config so the title bar buttons (and, on some OS's, the title bar itself) remain visible.

3. Create =chrome/userChrome.css= in your Firefox profile folder and write the following to it:

  @namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul");

  /* hides the native tabs */
  #TabsToolbar {
      visibility: collapse;
  }

I use sideberry. Once you get it set up (not super user friendly) it’s amazing.

> Why does Mozilla always spin their wheels releasing random side projects?

Because some project manager had "AI" on his performance goals this year.

Firefox is buggy as hell - which is incomprehensible given its age, but older brother Netscape had the same problem 20-ish years ago. The Netscape 4.x days were absolute hell and you could go hardly a day without the browser crashing.

Despite this, it's packed with nonsense no one asked for like Pocket. Which is a coincidence because "AI assistant for Firefox" is the dictionary definition for redundant things no one asked for, with better alternatives preexisting.

At this point Firefox needs to die and something new and manageable - with energetic developers - needs to take its place. Maybe Microsoft could open source the original Edge engine? The one before they bent over for the long dick of Google Chrome.

> Because some project manager had "AI" on his performance goals this year.

Same reason Logitech did it, it's a totally arbitrary waste of resources

> Firefox is buggy as hell

Don't you worry, I'm sure their new AI Assistant will generate a ton of bugfix code!!11 AI gonna take all teh jobs, or so I hear

But, as a more serious contribution: the sentiment "At this point Firefox needs to die and something new and manageable" is the same one which generates the infinite JavaScript treadmill akin to: "I don't like all those bloated JS frameworks, I want one slim and fast and manegable ... well, except this one other feature ... and this other ... oh, shit, this needs to die and have something new and manageable take its place ..."

It's not that I think Gecko is the bees knees, but I do think it has stepped on more than its fair share of real life landmines, and the Great Rewrite Theory means someone needs to spend all that time re-discovering them

As a counterpoint I'm a heavy firefox user and haven't had crash in many months, and even that was because I was testing some experimental webgpu thing which I had to manually enable. It has its fair share of odd bugs but what kind of big piece of software nowadays hasn't? It's honestly no less cromulent than Chrome.

I said Netscape, not FF, was crash prone.

I would, however, agree FF has many "odd bugs".

> What's their actual product differentiation from Chrome these days?

Not being the progenitor and linchpin of surveillance capitalism.

That and Firefox can run a full-grown version of uBlock Origin that actually works... at least for now.

uBlock Matrix, not Origin, if you actually want fine-grained control.

*uMatrix is unmaintained, and uBlock Origin can do fine-grained control – it just requires the “advanced user” setting for some reason, even if you expand the panels all the way. https://github.com/gorhill/ublock/wiki/quick-guide:-popup-us... (see “I am an advanced user!” expanding section at the bottom)

And I can actually build and package it from source in about 2 hours, unlike the other monstrosity, which surely must lower the barrier to contribution. Almost as much as Bugzilla raises it, I guess :-(

What are vertical tabs? Firefox has some tab reorganizing extensions, FWIW.

Agreed that it would be nice if they had better focus though.

Their product differentiation is that they aren’t fucking Chromium.

Sidebery does just that, and works super well!

I'm sympathetic to the viewpoint but the idea that Mozilla would attract more users via vertical tabs than by an AI assistant strikes me as flat out wrong.

Mozilla's brand is "pro privacy", it does make sense for them to launch an AI product with that brand position. I doubt it'll be successful because I don't think enough people actually care about privacy, but still.

I feel like it's a common HN sentiment to say "why don't Mozilla just focus on the browser?!"... the answer is because barely anyone is using it and there's very little they can do to move the needle on that. IMO they're an organization looking for a purpose.

Depends. If they start with this and then use it as iterative development before going local-only as the models and hardware improve, that could be a good move.

Sidebery does vertical tabs on Firefox better than any other browser/extension imo

Looks like money washing lol

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