
A shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status - jalanco
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2893514/an-incredibly-shrinking-firefox-faces-endangered-species-status.html
======
kaolinite
The problem I feel with Mozilla is that they mistook why they were successful.
They attributed the success of Firefox to the openness of the browser and the
company and have doubled-down on that. In reality though, that wasn't why it
was successful at all.

Firefox was great because it was a great browser at a time when other browsers
weren't so good.

The fact that it was open-source was a huge plus for people in tech but it
wasn't the main (or even a significant) reason for its success. As a result,
as soon as Chrome comes out which many people consider to be better (or at
least a better experience) people abandoned it.

~~~
batiudrami
I don't think Mozilla is naive enough to think that your average user cares
about open source. But it is one of their core philosophies and not something
that they will abandon.

~~~
IgorPartola
Then why spend the time and money producing videos about being open and
choice. I am a person that is knowledgable about OSS, free software, etc. and
even I don't care to watch them. Instead, maybe they should worry about user
experience a bit more. For example, can they make the browser look a bit
slicker by default? Less buttons, no separate search bar? It's just so 2006.
Honestly, most users care far more about a nicer back button than your
license. And if they want to stay relevant they have to appeal to the average
person, not just the OSS activists.

~~~
Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd
The separate search bar is for privacy reasons. Mozilla doesn't want to send
all key presses in the url bar to a search engine, yet search suggestions are
useful enough to show them when users actually want to search.

~~~
IgorPartola
So does it actually accomplish any privacy protection? There are two cases:

You blindly type in your search query into the Awesomebar and it works
correctly. For users that do this, it works just like Chrome, no privacy
protection.

You use the provided search bar for searches, and Awesomebar for URL's. Your
searches are in no way protected. This does protect the URL's you type in,
such that example.com is not sent to Google/Bing/Yahoo/DDG/etc. as you type
out "example". Did Mozilla actually show that this is worth protecting, and
that most people don't just type in "example", hit Enter, go to Google, then
click on the first link? This is what I see 99.9% of users doing already.

Note that the autocomplete can pick up the difference between a URL and a
search by the presence of a pattern that doesn't follow a URL. Chrome does
this. Type in "example.com" vs "?example.com". The "?" is specifically there
to indicate that you want search. Perhaps privacy conscious FF users could
learn this shortcut, and everyone else can get the convenience they expect?

I am not trying to downplay the importance of privacy in browser
implementations, just questioning the privacy implications of this feature.

------
corford
The latest FF builds have been rock solid for me (Win7 x64 with 4 or 5 big
name extensions and that's it).

I've currently got about 130 tabs open, FF is using ~ 1.1GB of RAM and has
been sitting open & running in this state for 3 or 4 weeks with no problems or
slow downs whatsoever. The plugin container also finally works reliably so
shitty sites with buggy flash code don't take the browser down when flash
decides to blow up. FF's PDF implementation has also gotten better and it's
now rare (as in I can't remember the last time) that I need to jump out to
Acrobat reader to get a properly rendered view of a PDF.

FF starts faster than Chrome, font rendering is a lot better and it seems most
of the "weird" HTML issues I encounter these days doing webdev stuff are with
Chrome rather than FF.

I don't understand why Firefox isn't crushing Chrome.

Edit: Latest FF mobile on Android is awesome too.

~~~
cookiecaper
Google has put a lot of time and money into getting Chrome mainstreamed. IE
Tab was a big help for enterprise adoption and that made more normal people
accept it as a "normal" browser. Most people use Gmail, Google Search, and
YouTube, all of which heavily promote Chrome.

Firefox has responded well to Chrome for the most part, but when Chrome was
released, Fx had some long-standing problems that Chrome obviated, and many in
the tech community have been Chrome devotees since. Mozilla sometimes gets
confused and makes bad choices, like manually reviewing all code that gets
published in its addon store and refusing to ship patent-encumbered H.264
codecs, that further hurt adoption and reinforce the reputation that Firefox
makes it "harder" than necessary to use the web.

Google made a deal with Adobe to fix up some of the stability and performance
issues in Flash and they ship the improved plugin as "Pepper", part of Chrome;
Mozilla still doesn't have a good solution for this, though it has a small
start in Shumway.

Google built an internal PDF reader so that people didn't have to worry about
Adobe Reader popping up as they clicked around. Mozilla eventually copied
them, though Mozilla's reader is written in JS, and Chrome's is written in
C++.

Google systematically attacked the most annoying things about internet
browsing and dispatched of them effectively in Chrome, didn't make excuses
about how the bad experience was Adobe's fault. Mozilla is less effective
because it's usually too busy with infighting over what technically counts as
"open" and what doesn't to get the real work done, or at least to get it done
before Google has already shipped the change to their users.

I used Chrome for about 18 months full-time but have been back on Fx since
version 4, so I'm not a Chrome apologist, but these are the reasons why
Firefox isn't crushing Chrome.

~~~
Mahn
> Mozilla sometimes gets confused and makes bad choices, like manually
> reviewing all code that gets published in its addon store

To be fair, extension malware runs rampant in Google Chrome, so it wasn't
necessarily a bad idea per se. Just perhaps not a great execution.

~~~
dankohn1
Could you please give some examples of extension malware running rampant?

------
ep103
I really don't want to develop web code in a world where the only two popular
browsers are one developed by and for Google, and one by and for Microsoft.
But every time I come to a thread that mentions Firefox on this website, there
are people claiming (usually wrongly) that it doesn't implement x, y, or z
that someone else does. I really think the development community needs to wake
up a bit, and start promoting FF internally, instead of just following the
Google hype train.

~~~
threeseed
Actually there will be three Google, Microsoft and Apple.

Whilst it is better to have some competition there really does need to be an
open alternative.

~~~
mytochar
Doesn't Apple use Webkit, same as Google? Isn't that functionally the same,
except for Google's optimizations?

~~~
bdisraeli
No Google forked Webkit into Blink[1] about two years ago.

[1] [http://www.chromium.org/blink](http://www.chromium.org/blink)

------
wtallis
Firefox is and for the forseeable future will continue to be the best browser
for those concerned with privacy. It may be marginalized, but it won't go
away. With Electrolysis coming along nicely and Servo on the distant horizon,
Firefox can probably also retake the crown as undisputed most secure browser
at some point. They're also doing a decent job of keeping performance
competitive.

Overall, Firefox seems about as healthy as you could expect given that it's
competing against Microsoft, Apple, and Google.

------
protomyth
You have to seek out Firefox, so it has to be worth seeking out. Chrome comes
with Android, Safari comes with Mac and iOS, and IE comes with Microsoft. So,
as mobile increases, Firefox is not a default player.

Here's a question: "Why would a System Administrator take the time to install
Firefox on all the company machines?"

~~~
nobleach
A system administrator is going to most likely be using some sort of push tool
or have Firefox in the default image - if they care enough to use it at all.
In all my years of doing Network/Sysadmin (1999 - 2010), Microsoft always told
us their browser was the best and easiest to configure with system policies...
so the higher ups just bought it, hook, line and sinker. Never mind that
Microsoft had never PROVEN that claim.

~~~
protomyth
or deploy a package with some 3rd party... but it still takes effort, what are
the reasons for spending it?

------
mrspeaker
I recently switched back to Firefox as my primary browser because it's the
company I distrust least. Turns out it's as exactly the same as Chrome now
anyway - I keep forgetting which browser I'm using.

The reason I switched back was because Google's updater ping (according to
Lil' Snitch) is very aggressive (several times a day) and also a long time ago
I vowed to switch to the browser that first implemented ES6's arrow function
syntax ;)

------
kenrick95
When someone asked me why I use Firefox, I always pointed out this feature
(Tab Groups) which is very good but not publicized widely by Mozilla.

[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups-organize-
tab...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups-organize-tabs)

------
moonchrome
Chrome bundles flash - which, despite HTML5, still runs half of sites I visit
- stream/video. Installing/updating flash manually is a chore, especially on
Linux. And it's yet another thing any non-tech person has to do if they want a
replacement for IE - which is why I just recommend Chrome.

Chrome integrates all of my stuff in to my gmail account - don't need to have
yet another "Mozilla cloud" account.

GMail works better on Chrome (faster loading/rendering from my experience).

Writing this from FF on Fedora 21, I still use FF from time to time to see
what they are up to and test stuff.

At this point I don't see the purpose FF serves - Chrome ate their lunch as
the portable "better than the default browser" replacement and native browsers
are becoming decent. With Win 10 IE should get even better (evergreen AFAIK),
there is plenty of competition between Microsoft/Apple/Android and they all
seem to be behind the standardization effort and Chrome is there to provide a
cross platform solution those not satisfied with native browsers.

The only inspiring tech from Mozilla that I know about is Rust - which is
(ironically) a native/statically compiled language. Even Microsoft has done
bigger stuff for web dev than Mozilla (TypeScript, OSS/cross platform ASP.NET,
VS web dev tools + free VS) and Google shouldn't even need mentioning. The
ASM.js stuff is iffy/niche - I'm much more hopeful things like Sane/Sound
script. I don't see how Mozilla is going to stay relevant in the future -
maybe if the Servo yields real gains with the experimental stuff they are
doing and it gets integrated in to FF - but that's years out in the meantime
it's just going to keep sinking.

------
mdm_
I've just recently switched back to Firefox as part of an effort to eliminate
as many Google products from my life as possible, and it's a really nice
browser. I had no idea Firefox's market share had fallen so far.

------
CodeWriter23
My choice to dump Firefox has absolutely nothing to do with Eich's
termination. Or his comments.

Firefox on the Mac has gotten increasingly slower for me, since about version
28. Version 36 is when it became absolutely intolerable, where the pinwheel
pauses during navigating to a new page or opening a new tab achieved a
duration of 10 - 30 seconds. I could handle 1-2 seconds. Even 3-5 seconds was
annoying but not enough to get me to stop using Firefox. Version 36 did it for
me. Some may have a lower threshold for pain than I, and exited earlier.

Yes, I disabled ALL of my add-ons, which consisted of Firebug and ABP, and
while the performance improved slightly, it still exceeded the 5-second
annoyance barrier all too often. I finally gave up and started using Chrome,
which BTW, runs like a banshee even with ABP installed.

~~~
sjwright
To add another data point, I'm using Firefox on the Mac with a half dozen
plug-ins and I have never experienced pauses remotely like what you describe.

Furthermore, Firefox has been consistently smoother than my near-virgin
install of Chrome. It's weird -- while Chrome definitely finishes loading
pages a bit faster, it performs incomplete page repaints in the process,
causing unpleasant whole-of-screen flashes as I jump from page to page. With
Firefox, moving from page to page is butter smooth.

------
guylhem
Unless you want bloatware that sucks RAM and battery, what else are you
supposed to use?

I went from Firefox to Safari to Chrome and back to Firefox. Firefox was
bloatware before. Now it's acceptable when compared to Chrome and Safari.

Either Firefox was improved, or wasn't improved while hardware was, and while
Safari and Chrome added useless feature after useless feature.

In any case, I do not see any alternative to Firefox for 'power users'. I'm
very happy to use it. The report that Firefox marketshare is shrinking is
weird. I've seen more and more people using it recently.

Maybe I'm just odd but I love firefox on MacOS, Linux and android because it
just works at a decent speed.

~~~
sjwright
I had moved to Chrome, then switched back because I just couldn't stand it any
more. Sure, at its best, Chrome is a bit faster than Firefox. At their worst,
Chrome bogs down more heavily and more often than Firefox ever has for me.

------
yabatopia
Mozilla doesn't have the same leverage as other players to push their browser.
Apple has OS X and iOS to push Safari, Microsoft has with Windows the most
popular desktop OS to promote IE and Google can use its search domination and
Android to advertise and push Chrome. Mozilla tries to create its own mobile
platform with Firefox OS and I hope they succeed with that, because they can
use all the leverage. I really like Firefox. It's fast and stable, has some
very useful plug-ins, it's well supported and I trust Mozilla more than the
big 3. That last bit may be naive, I know.

~~~
ep103
That last part isn't naive at all. The last time all of the browsers were
owned by private corporations, was called the browser wars, and we all know
had bad that was for innovation and development.

------
batiudrami
My mum always told me not to extrapolate so I'm not very worried about
Computer World's alarmist forecasts of Firefox going the way of the typewriter
and Smallpox.

That said, while I'm a fan of Firefox - I have used it since it was called
Phoenix and I had unzip it off a CD I got with a magazine - I can't help but
think this is partially their own fault. Sure, Google has a massive
advertising budget for Chrome, and they do their best to ensure that Google
products perform best on Chrome - but Firefox is slow to react, and slow to
implement - and perhaps unsure of what people actually want?

We continually get useless features - the social API, the "share" button (no
one can look at me with a straight face and tell me that shouldn't be an
addon, surely), a redesign which takes away features - while actual useful
features that Chrome has had for seven years - like per tab processes and
chromeless app windows - are still nowhere to be seen. It took Firefox years
to get private browsing, and then years again for it to let us do it at the
same time as regular browsing. They really need to be faster moving.

~~~
nandhp
> per tab processes [...] are still nowhere to be seen.

Electrolysis (separate content processes) is available now in Nightly, and
"The e10s team estimates e10s with a single content process will be enabled in
Firefox Release by the end of 2015."

[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis)

------
_wmd
Its pretty naive to think present market share is any kind of reliable
predictor for the future viability of Firefox. Its most recent ideologically
compatible competitor, Chrome, has recently (<12 months) been shown to have
deeply rooted problems relating to its independence that in a post-Snowden
age, Tech community aside, have become factors in the decisionmakng processes
of regular people. Accounting for those that accelerate adoption most, the
tech enthusiast community, sites like HN show Mozilla still has a (potentially
growing) great deal of love from the decision makers that matter.. there is a
strong and still valid sheppard/sheep network effect in play here (the same
that originally caused Mozilla's 90s/00s popularity) and it's still far too
early to discount its value just yet.

------
unknownian
The comments on that site are sickening. Yes, I do not agree with Eich's
views. Mozilla owned up to it. Someone should tell them to disable JS
everywhere because of Eich.

Plus, Firefox is a community project with more momentum than almost any FOSS
project. It won't die.

edit: read that in reverse

~~~
tatterdemalion
The comments I read took rather a different position I thought - that they
believe people should not use Firefox because Mozilla "fired" Eich. Still a
sickening position.

~~~
brighteyes
At the time, Mozilla was savaged by both the far left and far right. Both
sides called for boycotts.

The comments in this story appear to be from the right in this case. I guess
the left lost interest (not surprising since they got what they demanded, for
Eich to be removed - or maybe just leftists don't read that website).

------
alfiedotwtf
This is a shame - Browser Wars II...

Having any company have dominance (be it Microsoft, Apple, Google, whatever)
is dangerous for the open web. I don't look forward to walled gardens again
where "This site only works with X" becomes prevalent.

------
pipeep
Even if you don't use Firefox, if you value diversity in the browser
ecosystem, you should consider donating to Mozilla.
[https://sendto.mozilla.org/](https://sendto.mozilla.org/)

~~~
whyenot
I donated code, time, and money to Mozilla in those early days when they were
just scraping by. To me, in recent years they seem to have become bloated and
wasteful thanks to the Google and now Yahoo money. Yes, they have accomplished
great things, but right now Mozilla doesn't feel like an organization that
needs my help or would even appreciate my help.

------
monochr
Computerworld faces endangered species status, tries to regain lost ground
with click bait articles.

So let's actually read the article:

>the iconic browser dropped another three-tenths of a percentage point in
analytics firm Net Applications' tracking, ending February with 11.6%.

That seems a lot less serious than is actually made out. Lets find out some
more about Net Applications:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Applications](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Applications)

That says to read this:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20081205105936/http://www.thestan...](http://web.archive.org/web/20081205105936/http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/12/02/safari-
tops-7-global-browser-market-share-sort)

>The company tracks browser usage -- how many hits are coming from browser A
vs. browser B. In November, several factors skewed the results toward Safari.
Thanks to the presidential election (which kept people visiting news sites)
and the Thanksgiving holiday, an unusually high percentage of overall browsing
in November happened outside of the office. So it's no surprise that browsers
with higher home usage, such as Safari, would do better. (Firefox also did
better, gaining more than 20%, while Internet Explorer -- popular in corporate
environments -- dropped below 70% for the first time.)

>Net Applications tracks usage across its more than 40,000 client websites.
Although these sites are located all over the world, they're skewed towards
Europe and North America. That happens to be where Apple has a strong
presence. Vince Vizzaccaro, the Net Application's Executive Vice President for
Marketing and Strategic Alliances, acknowledged the problem and informed The
Industry Standard that they will start weighting their statistics by country
in January. "We need to better represent Asia and Africa," Vizzaccaro said.

Oh right, so they get access to the logs of "client websites", of which
microsoft and apple seem to be some of the largest. So scientifically lets
open the logs of my sites and see what browsers are represented there. Oh
dear, it looks like safari has a 30% market share on mine over the last week.
But what's this? Virtually all those hits are from the same IP address group.
Oh it turns out that a whole bunch of mac scrappers hit my sites. And look!
The same user shows up both as a internet explorer hit, a safari hit, and a
chrome hit, turns out the same person uses different devices and the default
browser that comes with each. This would be three different people according
to Net Applications.

------
izietto
If Firefox dies I will go with him.

------
ironsides
Its not about Eich - or, gasp, open source. Neither of those words capture the
attention of your 'mainstream' users staring at their mobile phone as they
walk down the street. Don't believe me, ask the next 20-something you see.

"Back in the day" (read: when the world relied on internet explorer) tabbed
browsing was not a mainstream feature. Nor was pop-up blocking, containerized
scripting(active-x anyone?) and browsing not being tied to window managers.
Times have changed and now while we have diversity, we also strangely have
more of the same. Aside from interface, Safari, Chrome and Firefox all offer
very similar experiences. Those game changing features that made Firefox
popular are now mainstream.

The stats mentioned above are interesting but should not be surprising to
anyone here. Google has heavily promoted Chrome and built it in to the android
platform. Apple has done something similar with Safari and iOS. No surprises
here. Also, keep in mind that Mozilla walked away from an entire market of
mobile users. (Source:
[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=firefox+ios](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=firefox+ios)
)

Wrt moving forward, what about listening to current trends in the market?
Security, privacy and speed all seem to be popular buzzwords these days (now,
if more than ever). Why not focus here first?

Users have proven time and time again that unless there is a major compelling
reason to change they will stick with what they know and what has worked in
the past. With the built-in browsers being 'good enough', what reason(s) do
they have to change?

Man, it almost seems like we've been here before..

~~~
smhg
Mozilla "walked away" from a platform that doesn't allow Firefox. I don't
think you can blame them for not doing what Google did with Chrome for iOS.

~~~
ironsides
First, I don't blame them, but wonder if more could not have been done.
However, I do appreciate how that is your only take away. Kudos.

------
aurora72
No other browser can beat Firefox, because all the others including Vivaldi
are RAM hungry, GPU and CPU abuser show-offs. I don't even talk about their
dictative approaches such as minimal feature UI, unauthorized update daemons
runnin on background, etc. Firefix does have an Android version and it works
great on my 2010 HTC phone, it doesn't dictate a minimum version of Android or
something.

If the majority of users aren't familiar with such concepts than I don't need
to worry on Mozilla's side because they don't do something fundamentally
wrong.

------
tarminian
Only thing I use chrome for is netflix and web testing. Otherwise it is
Firefox all the way baby!

------
byuu
Who knew that continually ignoring your userbase and changing things in ways
they don't like for roughly a decade could have negative consequences?

The list is getting too long for me to even remember, but I'll try: they moved
tabs to the top (can't even toggle it via about:config anymore), they killed
regular download dialogs, they killed the regular status bar, they removed the
ability to keep browser history but not keep download history, they radically
changed their address bar search function (Awesomebar) and appearance and
provided no option to use the old method people were used to, they made
accepting a self-signed certificate more difficult than filing your taxes,
they fought Debian over petty license branding issues (that other software had
no issue with) giving many of us "iceweasel", they radically altered their
interface to be a poor Chrome clone and killed all customization (can't put
refresh button on the left, can't unmerge back/next buttons, etc), they
started putting adware onto their new tab page, they made it so that
extensions must be signed by Mozilla to be installed with no ability to
override, they turned HTTP/2 into an agenda by making TLS mandatory in spite
of the IETF's decision on that. They continue to blow off per-tab process
support, and 64-bit Windows builds are _still_ not mainstream. And that's off
the top of my head, I'm sure there's more. Eich doesn't even have to factor
into this, no matter which side of that you're on.

You can like or hate any one of those, and yes if you want 20 extensions you
can mostly make it look and act like it used to. (Plus, they talk about
removing all that stuff to simplify and unbloat the UI, and then they add
useless crap like Firefox Hello in its place.) But each time they changed
things and completely ignored their user's feedback, they lost a few more
users to Chrome. I don't really like Chrome all that much either, but at least
it's not a constantly changing target, where you never know what feature
you're going to lose because of an auto-update.

Firefox's decline wasn't any one great catastrophe: it's been death by a
thousand papercuts.

It's really simple: if you offer a feature at one point, and you want to keep
your users happy, then you don't completely remove that feature from them in
the future. You can default to something else, fine, but you make an effort
for people who liked the old way. Microsoft understood this up until Windows
8. And it looks like they're relearning that lesson again a bit with Windows
10's changes.

~~~
IgorPartola
Funny, the list you provide are all the changes I really like. I wish they
made these sooner and more of these types of changes. Awesomebar, tabs on top,
all that just makes good sense to me.

~~~
byuu
Which is why I specifically pointed out that it doesn't matter whether you
personally like any specific change or not. (I actually like some of those
changes too, eg dropping the status bar in favor of hover hints.)

Every single one of those had a very vocal minority protest the change. Nearly
every single one was very easy to leave as an option; at least as an
about:config toggle. And every time they didn't, they lost a lot of those
vocal users to another browser. And this happens so often that, well, this is
why Firefox's market share is currently at 11.6%.

You can either have a browser that your users think is pretty great with a 50%
market share; or a browser that your users think is absolutely fantastic with
a 10% market share. Firefox has chosen the latter. It's no surprise that the
few remaining users love it: it's a browser highly customized to exactly what
they like, to the exclusion of everyone else.

I've done and seen this exact same thing with my own software. It's not nearly
at the scale of Firefox, but the effect has been the same. I went from
catering to what my users wanted and having tons of options, with about
100,000 downloads per release; to now doing things the way I want, with few
options, and about 10,000 downloads a release. Many people now insist on using
a release I put out three years ago; kind of like how I insist on sticking
with Firefox 28.

It's fine if you want to go the route of making the software _you_ want,
rather than the software _your users_ want, just don't act surprised about the
inevitable result.

------
jccalhoun
I never stopped using firefox but I've started using it more recently
including on android. It isn't perfect but no browser is which is why i have
chome, ie, and old opera around.

------
jeremyt
Well, I quit using firefox after the Eich ridiculousness. Chrome is quite
good...wasn't difficult. Doesn't seem all that hard to believe that others
might have, too.

------
vinod1073
Are not people afraid of Chrome being backed by Google?

------
sarahj
I am still a firefox user...but I don't want to be.

I will admit the whole Eich thing, when we was promoted I quickly lost my
attachment to Mozilla - they clearly were not the organization I thought they
were. But aside from that Firefox seems to be the worst of all choices - the
only thing keeping me attached to it is the lack of an open source
alternative.

Chrome seems to be far ahead in terms of security (XSS protection, Sandboxing
etc.) and in many cases appears to be faster - but I don't trust an
advertising company with my browser.

I think we need a fresh contender - an open browser, built from the start with
an understanding of the security and privacy lessons we have learned over the
last 30 years. I'm not sure how realistic that dream is, but I believe it is
worth the thought.

~~~
pakled_engineer
Servo is that project, when it's beta I'll go back to Mozilla as I feel like
I'm ushering in the Stallman dystopia by supporting proprietary software. I
dumped FF when they almost cloned Chrome's UI. If I'm going to use the same UI
might as well apt-get install browser-chromium and get a sandbox with it.

------
millietaint
I dumped Firefox ages ago, when I first heard of Eich's hatred towards the gay
and lesbian community.

It is inconceivable that his colleagues at Mozilla did not know about his
bigoted beliefs and the financial support he gives to similarly bigoted
organisations. Yet they decided he was the best person to run Mozilla, a
company that only pays lip service to equal rights - clearly at the top levels
of management it is a vile, homophobic, racist organisation.

There is no way I am using a homophobic web browser on any of my desktops, so
off it went.

I now happily use Safari for my everyday browsing, knowing that Apple is in
the safe hands of Tim Cook, a proud gay man who I admire greatly.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Eich resigned less than two weeks after being made CEO after the outcry from
both outside and within Mozilla.

Mozilla isn't homophobic. They put him in that position because they thought
he was the best candidate - clearly they were wrong, but I expect this is a
_Hanlon 's razor_ case.

I was saddened that he was made CEO, but he was only CEO for a very brief
period and Mozilla has learned its lesson.

(Speaking as an LGBT person myself)

------
bobcostas55
Apart from the ridiculous slowness (in real world usage, not specialized
javascript benchmarks), I think the biggest issue is the single-thread design.
Every serious problem with the browser (well, apart from the UI) stems from
that. The fix has been in the pipeline for what, half a decade at this point?
Probably more, even.

Firefox apologists say the silliest things about it ("I don't like process-
per-tab because it pollutes the task manager"), but really at this point there
are no excuses.

