Hacker News Reader

Comment by Larrikin | Hacker News Reader

What flaws exactly?

People on here love to moan about Firefox because Mozilla did one thing at some point in the existence of the company they didn't like. But then just cede the Internet to Google and chromium clones because at some point when they were a crappy junior JS dev, Chrome had some better tooling over Firebug so they just got used to testing in one browser. Maybe they also like to remember how Firefox, a decade ago, couldn't handle 1000 tab sessions.

I hope Firefox keeps up the fight but HN loves to crap all over them for not being perfect.

View on HN

> What flaws exactly?

For starters, they notoriously make configuration a difficult and shifting game of whac-o-mole to do simple things such as disabling the AI that nobody asked for:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45926779

It's also become more unstable in recent years, and I'm not even talking about 1000 tab sessions. It will crash with only a handful of tabs fairly regularly on linux.

For more flaws, look at everything LibreWolf, Waterfox, etc do to make up for them.

I don't think the AI is part of the core. You know you get to change all that stuff when you make a fork, right?

But you would still be left with all of the other issues pointed out by me and others. Plus, the parent seemed to be referring to FF, not just its core, so I replied accordingly.

> What flaws exactly?

It's not modular, for example. You can't just use the Gecko engine in your project. To do so, you have to deal and hack through the whole codebase of the Firefox browser.

Well for years HN was complaining that Mozilla was trying to fix that, because it broke XUL extensions.

It's been many years since Firefox dropped support for XUL extensions and XUL itself. It even lead to Firefox being forked, and Palemoon browser (amongst other forks of it) now carry the legacy of XUL ( https://udn.realityripple.com/ ). Also, that hasn't stopped Firefox from offering stand alone Gecko on Android ( https://mozilla.github.io/geckoview/ ) now, has it? If they can do it for Android, why not all the other desktop platforms? Start redirecting the 300+ million dollars they have earned from Firefox to the developers instead of the CEO et al and maybe we will see some good innovation happening in Firefox ...

People complain about Chrome as often as about psychopaths, because it can't be fixed.

> What flaws exactly?

Look how few people use it. Do you still want to claim that firefox is perfect? Because if not I suggest to read up on the last 15 years why people stopped using Firefox. Not all of which has to do with Google.

> I hope Firefox keeps up the fight but HN loves to crap all over them for not being perfect.

This shows a total lack of understanding. You assume that Firefox is perfect. It is not. It is a pretty bad browser. There is a reason why adChromium won. I wish it would be different but it is not.

Can’t speak for all users, but at least as of about six months ago, there appears to be a bug in Firefox in NixOS where the shader cache doesn’t appear to be able to write properly, and as such video acceleration doesn’t work. It became most evident when I was trying to watch 360-degree videos in Immich.

Entirely possible that this is an issue specific to NixOS or my machine, but because of that issue I switched over to Brave.

I would like to go back to Firefox at some point. Maybe I’ll see if I can make a patch to fix video acceleration on NixOS.

the obvious thing to do is keep using firefox as your daily driver, and load up the other browser as needed for the video etc.

I'm being tongue-in-cheek here because it seems most people just give up on safari/firefox if one thing doesn't work and go to some chromium-based browser as their default driver. That's sad.

What you say is what I do, Firefox is open all the time, I switch to brave or edge if ff won't load something. I use adnauseam as adblocker.

I have never had chrome on windows 10 or 11; nor chromium.

For a year chase.com wouldn't allow me to login from Firefox. Dumb.

Did you go to your local Chase branch with Firefox on your phone and pretend you have no idea why it doesn't work?

I don't understand it. I do keep an ungoogled chromium install around for the few times when I suspect a site is intentionally breaking itself for firefox, and it's not a big deal to open on occasion. Otherwise, if you value customization at all, you have to use firefox.

Thats what I do - that 1 page in 100, if at all, goes to chrome. But basically 100% of pages I ever use work fine.

They will have to pry with significant force firefox with ublock origin from my old dusty finger bones... fuck the rest for selling us all out.

Even if it won't move the needle a bit, I can look at myself in the mirror in this specific regard and be content that I didnt bow my head like bland masses did and didnt work towards massive enshittification of our global society from now on.

Because thats what its all about, nothing less. With our choices, we shape future for our kids and grandkids. Shame on you, all you rich faangs who are directly helping this. Godwin's law is never too far in such cases and history wont be kind to you, no reason to be

I am not going to use two separate browsers purely so that a larger percentage of my time is spent in Firefox. That’s not a solution; the solution is to fix Firefox.

I would rather spend 100% of my time in Firefox but that’s not doable right now.

Aw man, one issue you don't even know is Firefox's fault?

Regardless of whose fault it is, it still makes the browser unusable for me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com