
Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014) - jonotime
http://robert.ocallahan.org/2014/08/choose-firefox-now-or-later-you-wont.html?repost&m=1
======
moxie
What always strikes me about these pleas is how familiar they sound. They're
reminiscent of all the things we "should" \-- eat better, exercise more, lower
our carbon footprint -- and I suspect they all see just about the same level
of long term success.

Firefox did well when their only real competitor (MS) was actively trying to
make their own browser bad in order to preserve the relevance of the desktop
OS and their dominance in that area.

Now that they have a competitor (Google) which is actively trying to make
their own browser good in order to increase the relevance of online services
and their dominance in that area, Firefox hasn't fared so well.

I don't necessarily disagree with the author of this post, but it doesn't seem
like moral high ground alone is going to make Firefox any more successful than
the other things we "should."

What I wonder about is what larger systemic or structural shifts would have to
occur for Firefox and the other "shoulds" of the world to have a chance.

~~~
emn13
This is a misleading comparison. You imply that firefox is far behind chrome
in terms of general quality. Although I use chrome a lot, I also use firefox
daily. And the quality difference is essentially nil(1). In many relevant ways
firefox was at times better; but the details shift from release to release. I
certainly isn't true that typical users would run into huge problems by using
firefox.

1: on a desktop. I also regularly use FF/chrome/edge on a laptop, where FF's
slowness+ power usage is possibly slightly noticeable (not very), and I also
use multiple browsers on mobile, where FF clearly is behind (though it's not
clear how much of that is due to FF+chrome, and how much is due to websites
simply only ever testing on mobile chrome and possibly iOS - not that it does
the end-user any good)

The difference between the browsers is overstated. If it weren't for vendor
lock-in effects, you could use FF today and barely notice the difference.

~~~
yAnonymous
For starters, Firefox lacks in speed, security and stability compared to
Chromium and this is not a matter of opinion, but hard facts. Sandboxing is
not fully implemented, there's no process/tab separation and Webkit renders
most pages faster than Gecko.

The developer tools are slow, lacking in features and can reproducibly be
crashed. FF is relying on broken extensions for things that should be core
functionality. The "Awesome bar" is so mediocre, I wonder how it got its name.

I've been using FF for about 10 years and tried to stick with it, but there
are so many quantifiable things that it's worse at that I recently switched to
Chromium and it did make my life and work faster and easier.

If your statement was true, I'd still be using Firefox.

~~~
emn13
I suspect you're using many extensions. Most users do not, at least according
to FF's stats.

Process sandboxing is not a user-visible feature; it's (1) a largely
hypothetical security feature (hypothetical in the sense that it's not
empirically obvious that complete sandboxing is better than alternatives), (2)
a means to discourage locking and make the browser snappier.

Note that by now, firefox _does_ use process sandboxing, and indeed has used
process sandboxing for the most critical bits (plugins-i.e. flash) for years.
Benchmarks do not back up your claim that Firefox is a lot slower than
chromium; nor is that my experience. For a long time, scrolling was smoother
on firefox than on chrome - I often read long webpages in auto-scroll, and
chrome was janky on some pages firefox was not - and the reverse was true too
(although to this day, when it works, it never works as well on chrome as it
does on FF, for some reason).

The FF developer tools have at times lacked some features, but there have also
been features they've had before chrome, e.g. the rendered font display. I
can't right now think of a devtools feature in chrome that I'm missing in FF.
I certainly debug in both all the time.

For a very long time, font rendering on windows was better, and hi-dpi worked
while it didn't on chrome.

Chrome's a good browser, and it's still snappier today. But the difference is
really splitting hairs at this point. There are much larger differences in
day-to-day usability that people put up with all the time. I don't buy that
chrome's undeniable strengths are sufficient to be noticeable unless you're
actively looking for them; and chrome also has bugs and issues other browsers
don't; it's not a pure win.

------
apatters
This article convinced me personally to switch back to Firefox, but I'm
disheartened by seeing a number of comments here which amount to "Firefox is
fine," "Firefox is just as good," "The Foundation is fine," and so on.

That attitude is a recipe for shrinking market share. FF is competing against
extremely well funded, extremely aggressive and competent competitors. You
don't get to stop listening to the market in an environment like this. It will
run you out.

~~~
blub
Firefox is good. It has support for modern standards, is performant, has
tracking protection built in and plenty of extensions.

Google is winning because it's bundling its browser just like Microsoft used
to and is aggressively advertising it on all of its web properties, which
might have a reach of close to 100% of the web-using population. Firefox also
has a reputation for being slow, gotten probably from people doing ridiculous
things as keeping tens of tabs open and not restarting it for days - learn to
use bookmarks!

Silly Mozilla thought they were fighting hand in hand with Google for web
standards when Google was fighing for ad money all along.

~~~
chrismorgan
Firefox can cope with _hundreds_ of tabs just fine. _Way_ better than Chrome
can cope with a similar workload, both in terms of memory usage and UI (Chrome
winds up with tabs only a few pixels wide, with no information visible!).

Firefox’s reputation is because of its history: when Chrome was new it _did_
perform really well and Firefox _did_ have serious performance issues. Chrome
has been marvellous for Firefox. The sad thing about it is that these past
several years Firefox has been better than Chrome in those departments than
Chrome, but people aren’t aware of it.

~~~
jplayer01
Hundreds? No way. It runs like crap with a few dozen tabs and I always have to
restart it so it doesn't start slowing down and behaving badly.

~~~
sharmi
I am a chronic tabber. Chrome can barely handle 20 tabs at a time on my
machine (A T410 - nearly 5 years old). Firefox can chug along fine with more
than a hundred tabs may be a 200. it starts to show problems only when the
session restore file reaches 300mb or more. (Yes that is as far as I have
pushed firefox.)

Firefox is much much better than Chrome. Only chrome can put it's foot in the
door and sneak in anywhere due to Google peddling it on all its webapps as the
best browser for optimal performance for google apps. Just the search and
gmail page is enough to convert the unsuspecting population to think Chrome is
better than Firefox.

How many of the common masses are actually aware that Firefox exists? How many
of them would actually try out both browsers on their systems and evaluate and
decide which is best?

There are still people who are swayed by endorsements by huge corporations as
signals of quality. In their eyes, Google, which is their window/gateway to
the internet, saying Chrome is good would just seal the deal.

~~~
FreeFull
I've pushed Firefox over to 650+ tabs before, and it has performed well enough
(It has been a while since I've actually had that many tabs actually open.)

------
indlebe
As someone who manages a 450-user IT department (academic), supporting roughly
50/50 BYOD/supplied computers, and staring at my stats, Firefox is the most
reliable browser. We see %300 more problems with Chrome than Firefox.

Reading the comments my suspicion is that what shortcomings it does have
affects the hacker news crowd a disproportionate amount more than usual, or
affects the academic crowd disproportionately less

~~~
newscracker
I prefer Firefox over Chrome for several reasons, including usability,
flexibility and freedom. Could you list down a few things that are
problematic, in your experience, with Chrome but are not so in Firefox?
Although it could be construed as purely anecdotal, it may provide some
insight and understanding into the strengths and weaknesses of the two
browsers.

~~~
indlebe
Printing and PDF viewing are the most common issues we see with Chrome, doing
either often crashes the whole browser. Windows 10 seems to be the most
problematic OS for Chrome, we see quite a few unresolved cases where Chrome
crashes before it can print on this platform. Fillable PDFs with Chrome,
fuhgeddaboudit!

Those are the top 2 issues by far, with legacy web app issues as a semi-
distant third. This is our fault for using legacy php 3/4 apps that still
work, but firefox doesn't produce any issues and is reliable for this purpose.

------
Perceptes
I generally agree with the sentiment here, but somewhat similar to using Linux
over macOS, my experience has been that it's just a worse user experience in
exchange for "doing the right thing." In the end, it's about how much you're
willing to sacrifice convenience and user experience for an ethical ideal.

For me, the last time I attempted to switch from Chrome to Firefox, it drove
me nuts after a few days because of one behavior: When you click a web link in
another application, it opens it in your non-incognito (or whatever that's
called in Firefox) window, even if the incognito window is the one on top.
Instead, you have to copy the link from the other app, tab over to Firefox,
and manually paste it into the incognito window. This is a flow I use many
times a day, and having to do this workaround was really annoying. I found a
thread about it on Firefox's issue tracker, but it was closed with a response
that basically amounted to the developer telling the user that reported it,
"this isn't a valid use case."

I may be able to switch back to Firefox when they implement that feature where
each browser tab is essentially an isolated "incognito" context, which is
really what I want. The distinction between "incognito" and "not incognito"
windows has really just been a proving ground for the idea of concurrent
browser sessions isolated from each other, which is a much overall solution to
controlling your privacy on the web.

~~~
aluhut
If this is your only or main issue with FF, it can't be that bad.

I tried Chrome from time to time and the endless processes eating up an
immense sum of RAM (I had to add together first to realize) as well as the
missing addons drove me away.

I never considered myself a participant in the ideological browser war and
whenever I have to fix a computer somewhere around my friends and family
(besides my parents) I left Chrome on their computers. It somehow always is
there. Installed through Avast or similar. This annoying and disgusting
behavior and the fact that Chrome wasn't anywhere faster or better led me to
the conclusion that there is no better browser for me then FF.

~~~
Waterluvian
I've never experienced ram issues with chrome. Is it a tangible problem that
noticeably hurts experience or do you kind of have to be looking at the RAM
stats to perceive that there's a problem?

I wonder if I'm missing something or am just not the exceptional case where
chromes use of memory matters.

~~~
barnacs
I too switched from chromium to firefox a few years ago when my system ran out
of its 8GB RAM regularly.

Chromium was using about 7.5GB, it was quite noticable. I then reopened the
exact same tabs in firefox, made sure they are all loaded to make a fair
comparison and it came out to less than 1.5GB RAM usage. I've been a happy
firefox user since then and never looked back.

~~~
seba_dos1
Same here. Chromium with more than just a few tabs open is almost unbearable
on 8GB RAM, while Firefox works well with hundreds.

------
s9w
My neutral (?) view on firefox/chrome:

\- Firefox uses way less RAM

\- Chrome is usually faster/smoother, even if not by much. For very odd or
intensive sites. And for things like dragging a tab into another window and
how long it takes until inspect element loaded.

\- Firefox has Tree Style Tab, Chrome doesn't and will never have. This alone
makes FF the only usable browser for me

\- I find the non-optional non-native and childish look of chrome silly

\- Some google sites like the play store and youtube just work better on
chrome

For me, I use FF because of the memory, the styling and Tree Style Tabs. And I
hope they keep on fighting. I understand the chrome users though.

~~~
cygned
Also using Firefox (Developer Edition) as my primary browser.

But my observations are quite different:

\- On my machine, Firefox uses more RAM than Chrome (Canary) for the same
workloads and is slower

\- Chrome is way faster. As a web application developer I notice that all the
time. Chrome renders faster and the JavaScript engine also processes faster.
Firefox likes to crash when reloading a page that uses WebSockets.

\- I don't know your platform, but on OS X the default UI of Firefox is awful.
That's the primary reason why I use the Developer Edition.

~~~
NTripleOne
Another thing people don't seem to understand is that Chrome uses as much
memory as it sanely can for the task provided. There are situations where it
will use more, or less than Firefox, but I guarantee you in 99% of those
situations, Chrome will be the one performing faster.

~~~
seba_dos1
Not true in my case. Chromium often makes the system start feeling
unresponsive by causing a lot of swapping, while Firefox deals well with way
more tabs open and still keeps some RAM free for other apps to use. When
Firefox catches some memory leak and also starts to swap, restarting it fixes
the issue (but I have to say that it has become very rare nowadays), but when
I restart Chromium, I have to quickly clean up unused tabs to prevent them
from eating whole RAM again.

On my 8GB RAM machines, Chromium performs faster when there are up to 10 tabs
open, but otherwise Firefox easily beats it.

------
microcolonel
Chromium is actually a good browser. Until Servo picks up the technical slack,
Mozilla will not have a browser I can afford to waste my time running. Firefox
is completely unusable for me. The UI is slow, ugly, clunky, and complex. The
rendering performance is abysmal. The extensions ecosystem has collapsed from
a decade of API breakage, and now total deprecation. The organization is
hostile and political because Mozilla lets people push their personal
ideological agendas on foundation dollar.

Compared to Chromium, Firefox is a slow, confusing, incompatible security
liability with no consistent wins. Even when they do uniquely good things
(like the WebGL live shader editor) they are held back by the general
inadequacy of the product.

No amount of pleading will change any of this.

~~~
hubert123
Yep, Firefox cannot play the moral superiority card when it pushes good people
like Brendan Eich out for political reasons.

------
viraptor
Unfortunately Chrome/ium has the best security story at the moment. Mainly due
to good separation/sandbox. Firefox is only now catching up, slowly. So while
I'd like to use FF, it's simply not a reasonable choice for me.

~~~
rvern
What makes you believe Chromium has better sandboxing than Firefox? That may
have been true in the past, I doubt it has much truth to it today.
Furthermore, if you use GNU/Linux it should be trivial to give your web
browser better sandboxing than what it does by itself. (You can use AppArmor
or SELinux, you can run it in a systemd-nspawn container, you can use
Firejail…)

~~~
AgentME
Chrome has a process for each tab that's sandboxed so that most exploits would
be trapped and unable to escalate out of the sandbox. Firefox has nothing like
that yet, but it's coming eventually with the new multiprocess architecture
that they're ramping up.

~~~
rvern
Firefox has sandboxing for tabs as well, and has had it before e10s.

~~~
esprehn
What sandbox are you referring to?

------
anotheryou
I love the Firefox extensions! (I hope they will stay for a while, using tons
of quite old extensions)

Extensions that have no even chrome extension:

\- tree style tab: nested tabs on the side of the screen

\- Imagus: elaborate image preview on mouse-over

\- FF Rocker: click right+left for history back and the other way around for
forward (there is a chrome extension, but it's no fun)

\- grab and drag: I hold right click to scroll as if I was dragging the scroll
bar handle (only works for single-core FF :/) (there is a chrome extension,
but it's no fun)

\- All-in-Sidebar: bookmarks, downloads etc in a sidebar

\- tab grenade: store all open tabs in a link list and close them (might have
a chrome equivalent)

\- Link Alert: hover to see if you are going to an external page or pdf or
image (might have a chrome equivalent)

\- Vimperator/Pentadactyl: vim style shortcuts for everything, no more
clicking. Currently both projects struggle to stay compatible with recent FF
versions, can't recommend to switch to it now :/

~~~
clappski
What vi-mode extension would you recommend? Vimperator always seemed worse
than Vimium (on Chrome), mainly because the scrolling is jittery.

~~~
anotheryou
I scroll full pages or with the mouse. But I'd really like to have a scroll
marker. My not quite working attempt at one:
[https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/20937-red-read-
line](https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/20937-red-read-line)

With that in working I wouldn't need smoothing much anymore and could scroll
half pages without confusion.

I'm currently stuck to pentadactyl, would try vimperator again, but don't want
to set it up. Would have to see how to port my pocket script and such.

------
gbog
Keeping choices open for the future is one good reason to use Firefox. My main
reason to use Firefox on all my devices is because it is much better than
Chrome. It has more predictable behavior, it does not require to be connected
to a major cloud, I can tweak it to my liking and I do, I can backup the
configuration, and I can do advanced but necessary things such as "text
reflow" on my phone.

I have switched back to Firefox one year ago, and never looked back.

------
anilgulecha
The only reason chromium is my primary browser is the developer tools (it's a
pain to use Firefox for normal browsing, but Chromium for debugging.)

I can only hope for chrome's devtools to be ported to firefox. (firebug is
close but slow).

~~~
rvern
For every person who says Chromium's developer tools are better than
Firefox's, you can find another person who will say exactly the reverse. It's
possible one of the two positions is correct and the other is not, but I find
it more likely that people are just used to particular developer tools and
that there is no significant difference between the two. People get work done
with Firefox and Chromium's developer tools equally, you just have to learn to
use them.

~~~
apatters
No, he shouldn't have to learn to use them. When open source fails this type
of thinking is often why. _Firefox makes a product and therefore should
improve that product so that more people want to use it._

Vendors in a market are rarely in a position to tell the customers in that
market what they should and shouldn't do. We don't want them to be in that
position either, even Mozilla. They have to improve their offering.

I for one also think that Chrome's dev tools are better and am 100% in the
camp of wanting to see Firefox gain market share.

~~~
vectorjohn
I think you missed the point. I for one can't stand the chrome dev tools. I
use Firefox largely because i prefer the dev tools there.

So, the point is, it's possible there is no real difference and it just comes
down to personal preference or what you're used to. At least, that was the
commenter's point which you didn't address.

~~~
apatters
You could say the same about Coke vs Pepsi, but that doesn't stop either one
from trying to maximize their market share.

I think the dev tools in Firefox and Chrome are much more distinct from each
other than Coke vs Pepsi, though. The last time I used the FF dev tools (which
was admittedly over a year ago) they were much slower and their support for
changing attributes on HTML tags inline was more limited. I think the Net tab
had fewer features too but this is going back a while so my memory is fuzzy.

Even if the only difference is personal preference, what's wrong with Firefox
trying to accommodate more users' preferences?

~~~
pitay
_Even if the only difference is personal preference, what 's wrong with
Firefox trying to accommodate more users' preferences?_

Neither of the comments you replied to said anything about 'Firefox trying to
accommodate more users' preferences'. So I don't think they had anything
against Firefox accommodating more users preferences. They were just saying
what people prefer is different, some people like Chrome's web developer tools
more, some people like the web developer tools in Firefox more.

------
nanis
You might want to point out this is from 2014.

~~~
pisipisipisi
This shows that the story behind is still even more relevant today. Looking at
what rubber-stamping is happening with "web standards" ....

------
raverbashing
Android is winning but the percentage that still use Apple is significant.
Thank "the sheep" I guess...

The winners mentioned are the ones that require the most resources, so I guess
they'll keep being that even with Bing, etc

I do use Firefox, sometimes it seems Chrome has more issues, sometimes it's
FF, but I'd say they're pretty comparable (though FF has better dev tools
builtin and it is easier to configure a proxy, because Chrome depends on a
system config, which is not what I want to change usually)

~~~
phs318u
Not offended, but I don't consider myself a sheep. While some see no
difference between mega-corps, there are a few key things that I value Apple
for over Google.

1\. The seamlessness of the ecosystem.

2\. The low rate at which products are introduced only to be unceremoniously
knifed when you least expect it.

3\. The fact that I'm the customer not the product.

4\. The public stance they've taken on their customers' security & privacy,
backed by concrete design decisions.

I still remember switching to Google from Altavista. I'm currently midway
through disentangling my online presence from Google.

~~~
CyberShadow
That's a false dichotomy. You can use Android together with any degree of
Google integration that you find comfortable, with one extreme being the stock
Nexus ROM, and the other being AOSP or derivative ROM, with no Google apps
(such as Play Store / Gmail / Maps). There are open-source / self-hosted
alternatives to many of those.

~~~
softawre
Great point. You can also engineer your own cell phone if you want.

But I've got enough to do. Apple phones just work.

------
the_duke
I never understood why Mozilla has allowed their main product and their only
money maker to fall so far behind.

They have a lot of income.

I don't mind them going of on various edgy projects.

But FF has been inferior to Chrome for many years. They should really refocus
their efforts to concentrate on delivering the best browser again, as it was
before Chrome came along.

~~~
reitanqild
> But FF has been inferior to Chrome for many years.

Can we please stop fueling this myth?

Maybe for some of you Firefox lacks something _you_ actually _need_.

For others, like me and a bunch of others it is completely the other way, -if
I was forced to use any other browser it would annoy me to no end (not tree
tabs, etc etc).

So while I think it is totally fine to point out where other does better,
telling everyone that Chrome is _better_ isn't even true except for very
specific cases.

Edit: clarify _need_

~~~
Springtime
Once accustomed to browsers with more comprehensive customization it does
feels rather limiting using anything else. It's the customization aspect that
keeps me with Firefox coming from Opera Presto, in addition to a host of other
functionality that thanks to its far more moddable nature is possible.

One of the things I love about Chromium though is the responsive and device
modes of the web inspector. Top quality.

~~~
reitanqild
I don't responsive or mobile at the moment but I guess there is some kind of
extension for that.

Remember FF extensions can be quite a bit more powerful than other extensions.

------
rvern
Chromium is free software too, but that does not justify any usage of Chrome.
If you use Chrome, you can't justify it on Chromium being open source. As for
Chromium itself, it is very obvious that it is not actually meant to be used
by anyone: it has no stable releases, no binary downloads (except the
nightlies published by the build system), and its website is hosted on nothing
else than… Google Sites.

~~~
Tharre
Chromium _does_ have stable releases, they are the same as for chrome. And
about every linux distribution out there ships chromium binaries, so what's
your point?

~~~
ffggvv
His point is that nobady uses chromium, google never promotes it, and on
windows you can't install a chromium binary. His point is that if chromium is
that good why google is pushing chrome down peoples throat? (hint: its the
ads-game).

The only reason chromium is "open-source" is that google attracts lots of
talent, saying users have a choice between chromium and chrome, when in
reality this isn't true.

------
free2rhyme214
I think the most effective way to get people to change browser habits, is
through something compelling over a period of time. So far I don't find
Firefox compelling enough nor this post. (Keep trying please, we really do
need competition here)

------
fuzzy2
As much as I like Firefox, it’s not usable on my “eco” PC (Celeron N3150, 8 GB
RAM). Chrome is.

It’s really unfortunate that developers of many interesting products (or
websites!) seem to be forgetting about CPU efficiency. The Atom editor is
another example.

------
blubb-fish
I absolutely believe that there is no way around the described future of
Alphabet dominating the web sooner or later.

But I also believe that this is not going to be the end but instead will make
it desirable again to create something new - there will be a new breed of
hackers and power users creating new and alternative web based on P2P- and
blockchain-technologies, meshed-networks ... I think it's going to be cool :)

(Though I'd be in favor of simply reducing Google's power - but that is simply
not going to happen - no matter what browser I use and how many people I
convince to use FireFox.)

------
robbrown451
I will switch back when it has what I need. Currently my biggest need that
Firefox doesn't support is MIDI access (i.e. hook a digital "piano" to it and
Javascript in a page can talk to it). It's been in development for who knows
how long in Firefox, I'm not holding my breath.

------
dman
This thread on reddit captures many of the reasons why I stopped using firefox
-
[https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/3hugul/the_future_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/3hugul/the_future_of_developing_firefox_addons/)
. Extensions are what made firefox great for me, with the constantly evolving
story for extensions over the years the community around building extensions
appears to have dissipated.

~~~
Grangar
They're implementing WebExtensions though, which is 99% compatible with FF!
There's a solution coming in that regard :)

~~~
dman
To quote Linus - "WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE!".

------
cyberpunk
The only thing I miss after switching Safari->FF (moved away from OSX) for
regular browsing is that all 'incognito' tabs in safari are completely
isolated from each other and share no cache, cookies, bla. This seems like a
small thing and I barely noticed it at the time I switched _TO_ safari for all
non-devtools related tasks (battery and perf was better on my lappy) but now,
I do miss it.

Otherwise, I've no probs with FF these days. 49 seems solid on BSD, at least.

------
anoplus
If money can help Firefox, I think the community needs to rethink
crowdfunding. A crowdfunding system should be implemented and taken to a new
level. I imagine a system where features/issues are organized and funded case
by case in a way a _simple_ person can "vote with the wallet" for the desired
FireFox.

This is an idea for open source in generally. I know BountySource try to do
it.

------
mrmondo
Interesting that this blog post is hosted on googles 'blogger' domain. Not
that it means much, just that it's slightly ironic.

------
j-pb
Firefox lost me when they conspired to kill WebSQL. They were the ones used
the vast marked share they had to push the trendy thing of the day, namely
nosql and IndexeDB, a technology which is bemoaned by web developers today.

I think the fact that there is another post about SQLite on the front page
right now, attests that it would have been better to just standardise that.
But then all those greenfield "spec hackers" wouldn't have had the fun of
building cloud castles.

As a web developer and a browser user I'm tired of things not working. And if
that means less options in terms of browsers I don't care as long as the
browsers that are there give me a solid foundation to work with.

I'd rather have less options with more freedom of choice because all the
different options are compatible and interchangeable, than many options but
little choice, because their features sets are all disjoint and nothing is
compatible.

~~~
robin_reala
WebSQL was never a spec. It was literally implemented as ‘be bug compatible
with this specific version of SQLite’. There was no way that that was going to
be accepted by Mozilla and Microsoft.

~~~
j-pb
There was actually an offer to turn SQlite3 into a spec under the condition
that Firefox agreed to implement it. Firefox declined since they didn't want
to "confuse" developers with too many options.

------
tbrock
I wish Mozilla would refocus efforts on making Firefox best in class again.
It's been at least 5 years since Firefox was truly relevant.

Interest started to wane when Chrome's JavaScript execution blew it out of the
water on release but continues to erode mindshare as the development tools
languish.

~~~
ryan-allen
My interest waned when Mozilla fired Brenand Eich over a political donation.

~~~
Sylos
He stepped down himself...

~~~
6nf
At least that's the official story. Perhaps he was given a choice: resign or
get fired.

~~~
jcranmer
Having had some (albeit very few) actual interactions with both Brendan Eich
and a few members of the board, I do not think that the board was considering
firing him, and I think that Brendan decided to resign entirely of his own
volition.

------
warcode
Did Firefox fix their performance degradation over time yet?

Every time I try to switch back its fine for 2 weeks and then starts to get
slower, like the internal database breaks or something. This is two weeks with
2-3 windows, with 5-20 tabs each, without restarts.

So far Vivaldi has been the best chrome replacement for me.

~~~
gcb0
did you report it?

for regular users i don't give this kind of assine reply, but here on hacker
news, i expect everyone used Firefox for a good decade before switching to
chrome now, so i expect you did the minimum to the project and have at least
abugzilla account to say "me too" on some bug.

~~~
fixermark
For Firefox, that's really not sufficient. I've reported FF bugs in the past
that sit unfixed in the queue for 13 years. It has disincentivized me from
bothering to continue reporting them.

Yes, it's open-source and I could in theory pop it out and fix it myself (ha,
because I have a spare weekend to burn on setting up a Mozilla dev environment
and dependency stack). No, there's no incentive to do so when Chrome simply
doesn't have the bug.

Chrome has bugs that languish too, but so far I can't name any that I've
tripped over. I'm sure when I do, it'll be incentive to consider switching to
Firefox.

~~~
gcb0
and when you trip on that chrome bug you will move to what? IE?

btw, try to disable referrer on chrome ;) ... or even set it to only send to
the same domain

~~~
fixermark
As I said, it'd be incentive to switch to Firefox (or actually set up that
Mozilla devel dependency stack and fix the 13-yaer-old bug).

For referrer in Chromium, I think there's a flag?

[https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/content/public/common/c...](https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/content/public/common/content_switches.cc?q=no-
referrer+flag&sq=package:chromium&l=660&dr=C)

------
BrendanEich
Surprised to see this on HN again.

BTW, Rob left in early March:

[http://robert.ocallahan.org/2016/03/leaving-
mozilla.html](http://robert.ocallahan.org/2016/03/leaving-mozilla.html)

------
super_mario
Firefox was all about extensions and user control. But Mozilla has essentially
decided to destroy their extensions eco system, and as a consequence lost me
as their user and supporter.

I really loved and used Pentadactyl, but it's now gone and dead and so is
Firefox as far as I'm concerned.

~~~
coldpie
Can you elaborate? I've used Firefox for well over a decade, and while I'm not
a heavy extension user, I haven't noticed any change in extension support for
the handful I use.

------
fpoling
My primary browser is Brave with in-built ad-blocker because Mozilla does not
want to ship ad-blocker with Firefox. As ads is the most likely vector of
malware distribution channel, that means that safety of users stopped to be a
priority for Mozilla unfortunately.

------
mikekchar
I'm genuinely curious what the perceived threat is. I'm not happy about having
a handful of browsers being dominant, but Chromium is legitimately free
software. I'm very slightly worried that most people choose the Chrome branded
version (which is not free-as-in-freedom), but there is so little between the
two that I'm not sure it matters. V8 is forked into Node now so it would be
pretty difficult to do horrible things even though Google controls the parent
project.

The only thing that I can think of that seems like a risk is the amount of
influence that Google has on things like whatever the replacement of CAs will
be. But the situation is already so bad, it's hardly going to get worse.

~~~
llukas
You must have missed recent HN news about google stripped build of Chromium -
one that doesnt use binary blobs from Google.

~~~
mikekchar
I certainly did. Searching for it doesn't seem to bring anything up. Care to
post a link? I even did a duckduckgo search for binary blobs in Chromium and
only found the 18 month old discussion of Chromium installing hotwords (which
has been resolved now).

You're not, by any chance, thinking of the Chromium OS are you?

~~~
Jaruzel
You can't miss it - it's riding #1 on HN right, and has been for a few hours
now:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12577787](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12577787)

~~~
mikekchar
Odd... That's _not_ on my front page at all... Interesting. It must be
different for each person.

------
oolongCat
I remember I used to be a huge fan of Firefox until a large sum of the plug-
ins I had installed stopped working becuase the browser upgraded, this was
several year ago and it was then I first decided to use chrome.

I used chrome for a long time, and I am now starting to slowly move back to
firefox. One complain I now have about FF is it feels a bit sluggish compared
to chrome when rendering web pages. The nightly build is however a lot better.
(I am using ubuntu btw).

\---------edit-----------------

Another thing I wish ff works on is screen real-estate.

[http://imgur.com/OGWfgDo](http://imgur.com/OGWfgDo)

------
ccanassa
Am I the only one who doesn't seem to care about how much Google knows about
my life? I am personally okay with the idea of giving away some information
about my life in exchange for using some of their products (Search, Gmail,
Chrome, etc) without paying anything.

Besides that, the more they know about me, the better their products get. I am
personally thrilled when I open Google maps and it magically whos where I
live, where I work, etc. It just makes my life easier.

I think this might be a cultural thing though, people from some third-world
countries (like me) may not take privacy and freedom for granted.

------
sebouh00
Chrome has a tab activated search feature for websites and custom search
engines. This is super convenient and must for me. I honestly tried firefox
for a month, but it wasn't as stable and I missed this feature.

------
blencdr
Even if I'm in web development I use Firefox on a day to day basis. When it
comes to debug a large SPA Chrome has nicer features, but companies are not
working for the commun benefit and Google is no exception.

------
starky
I was a long time user of Firefox, mostly because I despise how Chrome is so
inflexible and has terrible interface design. Unfortunately, Firefox has
continually gotten worse and worse over the last few years. I was tired of the
browser slowing down over time, and extensions constantly breaking for no
other reason but the fast release cycle.

I ended up switching to Vivaldi. Not only does it fix the majority of things I
hate about Chrome, but it supports Chrome extensions which are good enough
(but not as good as Firefox).

------
Steko
I keep Gmail and a couple other permanent logins open in Chrome and do 99% of
my other browsing in Firefox.

------
inian
The article is from 2014. Though I understand the sentiment, most of the facts
are false now

IIRC, Chrome was using the FileSystem API which was supported only in Chrome -
hence the partial support for offline functionality in Google docs..Only
recently have the specs behind Persistent Storage API and Service workers have
matured. I would love to see Google docs to make use of these APIs to make the
functionality available across browsers.

Also, PNacl -> Web Assembly which Google has supported.

Of course Android OSes are going to ship with Chrome as a default browser - at
least you have the choice of installing a different browser if you want to.
Unlike Apple, where all browsers are forced to use the same JS engine provided
by Apple.

Google has been pushing web standards for a long time now - instead of
platform specific APIs and saying that the internet is going to be only
accessible from Chrome is stretching it quite a bit..

------
vamur
Gnome Web works great on Linux+Wayland now, apart from lack of 1080p on
youtube. Meanwhile Firefox still does not work on Wayland and is generally
slow on Linux and one has to enable multi-process flags to speed it up. And
even then its speed barely compares to speed of Chromium or Gnome Web.

Given that this performance disadvantage is not new it is clearly caused by
lack of focus and manpower. As a result Firefox usage continues to decline and
they cannot compete with fast moving competitors like Chrome or Webkit.
Mozilla should discontinue 32 bit, Windows XP+Vista, ESR releases, Flash/GTK2
support, other side projects like the HTML editor. That should free up enough
focus/developer time for Mozilla to improve their core product.

------
yhylord
China will become the last shelter against Google's evil domination.

------
leksak
What does Chrome offer that FF cannot match currently? What kind of
convenience improvements would you need to start using FF? Developer tools not
withstanding.

~~~
sammularczyk
I find the design of Chrome to be nicer in general. Feels like there's less
going on.

------
chiefalchemist
I'd use FF a lot more if it has multiple users as Chrome does. Without the
ability to easily switch personas (read: projects) FF is a no go.

~~~
quesera
FF calls them "profiles" and they actually work better than Chrome's.

------
Noughmad
After years of trying, it still looks very bad on KDE, and even worse with a
custom color scheme. Fix that, and I'll switch immediately.

~~~
Sylos
How does it look bad for you? Or rather to say how does it look worse than
Chrome, as both browsers do differ completely from the native toolkit...

Well, unless you're using something like QupZilla or Konqueror, but then this
blog post doesn't really apply to you anyways.

What I personally do to make Firefox fit in more into KDE is to use the
Developer Edition Theme [0], which has a Light and Dark variant, so looks
reasonably not-out-of-place for Breeze and Breeze Dark.

[0]: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/devedition-
th...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/devedition-theme-
enabler/)

There's also this user-style to fix theming issues, which is what I guess
you're saying when you refer to a custom color scheme making it look even
worse: [https://userstyles.org/styles/96657/fix-kde-theming-
issues](https://userstyles.org/styles/96657/fix-kde-theming-issues)

------
jplayer01
It's too bad Firefox becomes more terrible each year. Just today I was
struggling with the god awful history sidebar.

------
b4xt3em4n
I stop use Firefox due to Brendan Eich story.

~~~
vacri
Did you stop using javascript as well?

~~~
b4xt3em4n
I started using FF since 0.7 version guy, I switch to chrome after the
internal Mozilla stupid polemics for Brendan marriage position. Open web?
please, do me the favour..

~~~
vacri
So even though Eich stepped down over the issue, and gay developers said that
the work culture at Mozilla did not represent Eich's position at all, you
switched browsers?

The LGBT folks won that battle. If you don't switch back, then you've hurt
their cause. OkCupid did this - they made a big song and dance about
boycotting FireFox, intruding their political message into all their users'
lives... and when the LGBT side won, not a peep out of OkCupid to repair the
damage they'd done. Some others did similar things - appearing righteous was
more important to them than actually being mature. If you don't stop the
boycott _after you 've won_, then the problem is with you.

(note: I am actually very pro-gay rights, but the actions of some around the
Eich debacle were as deplorable as he was)

~~~
BrendanEich
Are you seriously contending that collective punishment (I mean punishing a
group based on judgments against one of its members; and the corollary
collective reward) is moral, efficacious, or both?

So all the lemmings who dropped (or just said they would drop) Firefox while I
was CEO were obligated to rush back on board once I left? What about the
various right-wingers who #nozilla'ed and otherwise boycotted after I left?

How about using the best browser in the market, built by people of diverse
opinions and high ability who come together to do excellent work?

There's a good idea that seems to appeal to many people, of whatever various
and diverse beliefs.

Try [https://brave.com/](https://brave.com/).

~~~
vacri
Don't put words into my mouth - I made zero comment on the morality of the
initial action, only on the morality of people who don't clean up after
themselves.

I think that your position that gave rise to the debacle was indeed
deplorable, but at the same time, boycotting Mozilla was the wrong thing to
do. I didn't support the boycott, because it was striking at people unrelated
to the issue at hand.

Finally, if you're conducting a specific action _on the basis of a moral
position_ , then yes, you are _morally_ obligated to reverse yourself when you
win. It's the point of taking a moral position in the first place.

~~~
BrendanEich
I didn't put words in your mouth. Your words were "If you don't switch back,
then you've hurt their cause." Or now, a negative judgment on "the morality of
people who don't clean up after themselves."

Thanks for writing more about your position. I appreciate that you don't
endorse collective punishment. However, I still do not agree with your
collective judgment of those who may have boycotted Firefox on account of me
for not returning after I left. They could have found other reasons not to
switch back, having tried another browser. I heard directly from some people
who had exactly that experience.

It seems to me we disagree on obligations based on reactions. That's ok,
peace. I suggest that cause and effect, action and reaction, are not as simple
and Newtonian as you seem to say. Not only might people who left Firefox while
I was CEO have found the grass greener -- some might have changed their minds
and then become appalled by post-me Mozilla, and not come back on that basis.

As with the grass-is-greener cohort, I know a few folks in this category. One
example:
[https://twitter.com/theHirad/status/547588240895528960](https://twitter.com/theHirad/status/547588240895528960).
Here is another point of view, but I'm not sure whether a change of mind
preceded it: [http://jeremiahlee.tumblr.com/post/81652982229/9-quick-
thoug...](http://jeremiahlee.tumblr.com/post/81652982229/9-quick-thoughts-on-
equality).

I think such thoughtfulness over time, rather than hurting "their cause", does
it individual/piece-wise credit.

People are not simple machines, ya know! :-)

------
jay_kyburz
Anybody know if there is an Electron or NW.js for Firefox.

Also, when is Firefox going to let me style scrollbars?

------
rachkovsky
Firefox Reader View feature with audio narration is the best! And no other
browser has it!

------
goalo
Most people I know that use iOS stay with Safari itself. They dont even
install chrome.

------
known
I think it's an extreme pov; Since Chrome is Open source we need not worry :)

~~~
robin_reala
Technically, Chromium is open source, but Chrome isn’t.

------
_Codemonkeyism
Switched to FF back some time ago (from Chrome).

Still a CPU and power hog on Windows 10.

But still love Tab Tree.

------
epse
But Firefox is soo slow on Linux...

------
cdelsolar
but i like Chrome

------
justinlardinois
Question: In this future without Firefox, what becomes the default browser in
Linux distributions? I won't claim that I know what every distro uses, but
every one I've ever installed has had Firefox or some derivative of it
included.

~~~
anotheryou
Konqueror or something. But in Linux there is no shortage in sweet little
browser projects. Interesting would be which engine and if it can profit from
a big enough audience for a variety of extensions.

------
barpet
I use Safari on Mac because it's good enough and I use Chrome anywhere else
because I am used to it and it's also good enough.

I need simple,stable and fast. I do not really care about features or security
at this point.

------
andrewclunn
To all the Firefox apologists.

I'm a front end dev. I run linux. I also run chromium because it is a superior
product to Firefox. The market agrees. Wake up. Want to win me back? Make
Firefox better.

------
lightedman
We don't have a choice anyways - FireFox is now Chrome. Even if you don't have
Chrome installed on your computer, the second you open FireFox, you'll see
plenty of chrome processes spawning.

------
gremlinsinc
I can't take anyone serious who rants about google's marketplace dominion but
can't seem to migrate from blogger to wordpress self-hosted. Sorry, it's just
overly ironic, and it's also hard for me to take bloggers on blogger serious
as there's a lot of crap blogs on there. Every dominant player eventually
falls, Microsoft owned the browser, search, email, docs, and os back in 2000
-- now they're practically irrelevant.

