
The Firefox Dilemma - tannhaeuser
https://blog.tawhidhannan.co.uk/tech-zoomed-out/industry/firefox-dilemma/
======
olejorgenb
1\. I like firefox's omnibar/awesomebar more than chrome's. It seems to read
my mind better [1]. It also have some features [2] I think most people are
unaware of.

2\. Firefox have bookmark tags.

3\. Firefox scroll the tabs instead of compressing the width until they're
unusable. (It's also possible to set the minimum tab-width)

4\. It's much simpler to get ctrl-tab MRU behavior [3] in Firefox last time I
checked.

5\. Firefox have a built-in reader-mode. I don't use it much on desktop, but
on on mobile it's very useful for pages that doesn't reflow.

6\. There's an ad-block extension for firefox-mobile.

[1] Could of course be because I'm more used to it and have more history in
firefox :)

[2] [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-
fire...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-firefox-
bookmarks-history-tabs#w_changing-results-on-the-fly_2)

[3] [https://support.mozilla.org/en-
US/questions/1193670](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1193670)

~~~
politelemon
I like that Firefox Test Pilots often produce interesting, visible
experiments.

I'm a fan of Firefox Color:
[https://color.firefox.com](https://color.firefox.com) \- which allows you to
express the UI color scheme in a shareable/saveable URL.

There's also Side View: [https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/side-
view](https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/side-view) \- which allows a
persistent column to the side regardless of which tab you're in. Useful on
widescreens.

~~~
morsch
I was about to try Side View yesterday -- I usually run two Firefox windows
side by side anyway -- but I couldn't be bothered to find out what data
exactly they would extract from it[1], and I'm not giving them the benefit of
the doubt. I fully expected to find it as a standalone extension, but if it
exists, I couldn't find it.

[1] _By proceeding, you agree to the terms and privacy policies of Test Pilot
and the Side View privacy policy._

~~~
Vinnl
> I fully expected to find it as a standalone extension, but if it exists, I
> couldn't find it.

It can be installed from here: [https://testpilot.firefox.com/files/side-
view@mozilla.org/la...](https://testpilot.firefox.com/files/side-
view@mozilla.org/latest)

(From their GitHub page.[1])

Also note that the Test Pilot page [2] contains a summary of the data they
collect. Most notably:

> Side View does not collect any information about sites you visit.

The data is does collect seems related to whether and how you use it - it _is_
an experiment, after all.

[1] [https://github.com/mozilla/side-view](https://github.com/mozilla/side-
view)

[2] [https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/side-
view](https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/side-view)

------
dTal
>I think about Chrome’s usurping of Internet Explorer (IE), and I wonder
(antitrust and all aside) would Chrome have usurped IE if it wasn’t for IE
stagnating? I remember when I was younger and jumped ship to Chrome -
personally, it wasn’t about using Chrome because it wasn’t IE, it was about
Chrome beating IE in a foot race and offering me a clean user experience.

Chrome ate Firefox's lunch, not IE's. Firefox was the first browser to take a
chunk out of IE, in large part because of the stagnation of IE6. People were
switching away from IE at a fairly consistent rate. When Chrome came along,
the rate remained the same, but people started switching to Chrome instead of
Firefox.

This graph shows it clearly (starts a little late to catch Firefox's initial
bump but you can see the trend):
[http://i.imgur.com/7bP2pmj.png](http://i.imgur.com/7bP2pmj.png)

~~~
toyg
I agree, and Chrome did that in one simple way: marketing and monopoly power.
They leveraged their position in search and webmail to push people to switch,
and hammered the message in mainstream advertising (on buses and newspapers,
even in Europe). If they had pushed FF instead of building their own browser,
now FF would be in that position - regardless of technical merits (which were
minor, and basically boiled down to a single one: process-per-tab, which meant
the browser never crashed if a single website misbehaved).

FF was not without responsibilities (they got bogged down in backend work on
gecko that never really delivered, then got distracted by side bets like FFOS
and friends), but without Google's other properties and market share, this
would never have happened.

~~~
jcbrand
> I agree, and Chrome did that in one simple way: marketing and monopoly
> power.

When Chrome came out, it was much faster than Firefox.

IIRC, it was also an evergreen browser from the start and you could install
plugins without restarting.

It was in many ways a superior product.

~~~
toyg
That is not my recollection. When Chrome debuted, some people had bazillion of
FF extensions that were bogging it down, installed an extension-free Chrome,
and went "much speed so wow". _Later_ Google started pushing JS performance.

It doesn't matter that much anyway - Google didn't make the difference by
converting FF users, but by being better than Mozilla at pushing IE users to
switch. Which, again, was not a technical issue at all. I would bet that 90%
of those users never even tried FF. A lot of them installed Chrome on Windows
so they could synchronize settings from their main device, i.e. an Android
phone.

~~~
tapoxi
V8 and multiprocess were a huge part of the original announcement comic:
[https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/](https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/)

At the time I remember this was a huge performance gain on my machine with my
workflow (dozens of tabs), since you could easily open up the Chrome Task
Manager and see which tab was causing problems. It was also the first browser
to make updates invisible, so I installed it on every family member's PC.

------
Konryan
I think there's another factor at play that isn't often mentioned: Google uses
the dominant position of its services, as well as the strength of their
brands, to promote Chrome as the better browser, in not-so-subtle ways.

One is often repeatedly prompted to install Chrome when visiting Google on
other browsers[1][2]. Most normal users would just give up and install just to
get rid of the pop up.

Microsoft has been doing the same (e.g. trying to trick you into keeping Edge
when trying to select another browser as default on Windows 10), but their
product wasn't good enough for it to work, it seems.

[1] [https://superuser.com/questions/1192441/is-it-possible-to-
te...](https://superuser.com/questions/1192441/is-it-possible-to-tell-google-
to-stop-nagging-me-about-chrome) [2]
[https://support.mozilla.org/it/questions/922025](https://support.mozilla.org/it/questions/922025)

~~~
Jonnax
Also Firefox for Android gets a shit version of Google search. But if you
spoof your user agent it works perfectly.

That definitely is using their dominance in search to make people.use their
web browser.

~~~
simfoo
Can you give more details?

~~~
dessant
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=975444](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=975444)

------
rlv-dan
A big problem is that the web standard is too complicated. Browsers are pretty
much a virtual os that can do almost everything. For anyone to make a browser
from scratch today is not feasible. We will move towards a monoculture,
because there is no alternative unless we make a drastic shift in rethinking
how the web should work.

~~~
dmos62
Yeah. In the early days of internet, web won, because of its relative
expressiveness and lack of -rigidity- structure, compared to gopher for
example. Now we see that the same unbounded expressiveness led to a monolithic
system within a system, that is only feasibly maintainable by large
organizations. One program should do one thing, (and do it well): that's what
leads to healthy systems.

For me, it's not the bloated browser centric computing experience that's the
biggest problem. In my eyes, it's eclipsed by the armies of web developers
whose only professional purpose is to work with this technological mishap. If
our only document delivery system, i.e. web, wasn't such a mess, the same
could be accomplished by a fraction of the current workforce.

~~~
claudiawerner
But the web has also allowed for things which are way more than document
delivery; imageboards, for instance, weren't around before the web, and the
fact of carrying images made them unsuitable for previous technology.

~~~
dmos62
Yeah, it became hard to define. That's pretty cool for users in the short run,
but pretty bad in the long run, from a systems point of view. In other words,
web surely had its moments, but unfortunately the biggest one is this peak-web
thing we're talking about.

------
hpaavola
1\. Send tab to device

2\. Reader mode

3\. Addons on mobile (pretty much just for blocking unwanted requests to make
things way faster on slow connection and to protect my privacy)

4\. Facebook container (same for Google would be nice)

5\. Taking screenshots

6\. Always enable zoom on mobile

[1] [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/send-tab-firefox-ios-
yo...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/send-tab-firefox-ios-your-
computer)

[2] [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-
clu...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clutter-free-
web-pages)

[4] [https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/facebook-container-
extensio...](https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/facebook-container-extension/)

[5] [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-
screenshots](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-screenshots)

~~~
Vinnl
> (same for Google would be nice)

There's a third-party one: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/google-contai...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/google-container/)

------
austincheney
Hands down there is one objective thing that Firefox does well and nobody else
comes remotely close. DOM access. For some reason Firefox is thousands of
times faster than other browsers when it comes to executing the standard DOM
API methods.

I know that is a bold statement but it is easily verified with numbers using a
perf tool. Chrome is faster at executing JavaScript than Firefox, but even
still Firefox leaves everybody completely in the dust when executing the DOM
API.

DOM access is so incredibly important to how the web works and nobody really
talks about. For some unknown reason most developers are deathly afraid of the
DOM and will do everything possible to hide from it. It is common in every job
I have worked to see mountains of querySelectors and 10mb of supporting
framework code so that developers don't have to fear the DOM buggy man. I
could sympathize if the DOM were complicated, but it isn't.

I really believe if Firefox goes away and that competition is gone the web
will get fundamentally slower. Everybody will see this slowness and yet very
few people be able to diagnose why, and that is tragic.

~~~
Waterluvian
My understanding is that DOM manipulation and queries will always be far far
slower than the logical equivalent in JavaScript. Does "thousands of times
faster" challenge that?

Ie. React's virtual DOM is a phenomenal idea because it greatly reduces actual
DOM interaction. Is it not really saving us much in Firefox?

~~~
bzbarsky
> DOM manipulation and queries will always be far far slower than the logical
> equivalent in JavaScript.

That really depends on what you're doing.

Reimplementing querySelector in JavaScript (even if you do it on top of JS-
only node representations, not on actual nodes) is likely to be slower than
the built-in version, for example.

If you're doing a "modify-read-modify-read" cycle, then things are different
because the contract is different: the DOM promises that reads will see all
modifications, while some of the other systems built around it don't.

> Is it not really saving us much in Firefox?

It really depends on the shape of your workload. There are various cases where
React's virtual DOM is pure overhead and just makes things slower.

[Disclaimer: I work on a browser rendering engine, and have done a fair amount
of performance work, so I may have my biases about what I see in profiles.]

------
chrismorgan
I’ve been using Firefox since about 0.93, with about a year in the middle when
I used Chrome as my primary browser, because it ran from a USB disk much
better than Firefox did at the time, and that was what I needed at the time.
(I am glad that Chrome came along, because by showing how bad Firefox was in
some areas it spurred Mozilla on to improve it, so that it’s no longer bad
like that.)

I look at the sessions of people that use Chrome, and I wonder how they ever
manage to get anything done: tab management is uniformly hopeless. Firefox, on
the other hand, copes with hundreds of tabs with perfect equanimity. (I
currently have 165 tabs spread across three windows—one for personal stuff,
one for work stuff, and one for a particular work project; this is a fairly
typical number; I might have less than twenty once a year or so, and I’ve had
as many as 450 before.)

I use the Tree Style Tab extension for a vertical tab bar with hierarchy. I’ve
suggested it to family members once or twice each, and my dad and two of my
sisters use vertical tabs (two via Tree Style Tab, one via some other
extension) and wouldn’t be without ’em. Most of the rest of the family uses
Firefox too, and I believe Firefox is the leading browser used by my coworkers
at FastMail by quite a margin.

Firefox’s awesome bar is aptly named. It’s _way_ more useful than Chrome’s.

I am an idealist and not fond of Google, and while that’s a factor, it’s not
the primary reason I use Firefox. I use Firefox because I find it simply
_better_. (Same deal with using DuckDuckGo over Google. It’s more usable with
keyboard shortcuts and bangs, and finds results every bit as good as
Google’s.)

I also use Firefox on my phone; there, it’s more of a mixed bag: it’s markedly
slower than Chrome in general, but I can install regular extensions like
uBlock Origin and Stylus. There, my dislike of Google is more of a factor.

~~~
tarruda
> I currently have 165 tabs spread across three windows

How do you manage this setup? I'm specifically interested in how you can
assign tabs to different windows and have this information persist across
restarts.

~~~
chrismorgan
It’s all purely done manually. There’s _almost_ no overlap between things that
could go in my general personal and general work windows (exceptions: HN
threads where FastMail comes up and I respond, or the very occasional article
from HN or RSS feeds that is directly tied to something I’m doing for work). I
store them on different virtual desktops, too, so when Firefox starts I just
move the windows to the appropriate desktops, and then keeping it all separate
is straightforward.

I do also use container tabs a little with some automatic assignment
(automatic assignment to container, that is, not to window, useful as that
would be), but I don’t think I actually _need_ them any more; I think that
FastMail is now the only thing where I need actively different sessions for
personal and work, and it supports multiple logins just fine.

Then sometimes there’s a particular project that I want to focus on, and so I
create a new window just for it, and shift it and any other related stuff into
another new virtual desktop.

P.S. I just closed 50 tabs because I had finished something and deferred
another thing.

~~~
calvinmorrison
One thing we ran into while debugging a few weeks ago is lack of support in
firefox for debugging open streams. That is a feature I would like to see
implemented, because it works beautifully in chrome.

For me I am using firefox-esr with noscript, privacy badger, https-everywhere
and vimium. I'm extremely happy with my web workflow.

Another thing for me is that firefox seems to be easier to lock up. Twice this
week I had issues where firefox locked up. The first was trying to render a
dropdown select with several thousand items (blame the prom explorer for that)
and the second was rendering some graphs, which while not fast in chromium,
certianly did not cause problems.

I shared this link earlier internally on slack because I think it makes a fair
point that applies to many David-and-Goliath marketplaces, namely that "not"
being Goliath isn't a compelling argument. Having a brand based around F.U.D.
is an easy thing to slip into, but really Firefox and other small competitors
should focus on beating the competition with features, not fud.

------
fireattack
I fully agree with this article.

I respect people choosing products based on ideality, but I personally will
just use what suits my demand/preference best.

When I first switched from IE to Firefox 1.5, it's because it has tabs. And I
loved it more and more once I figured out how well-built it is and how
powerful addons can be.

When Chrome firstly came, it was pretty bad in term of functionality. The
extension system is weak (compared to what Firefox can offer at the time), it
lack TONS of what I personally consider as "essential features" (font settings
for different languages is a big one for me as a non-Latin character user, for
example), so I continued to use Firefox.

But Chrome catched up _very quickly_. Today, the features of two browsers are
basically on par in my user case, especially after Firefox switched to WebExt
(which I think is the right direction, by the way). I started to use Chrome
more and more due to some small details, like better sync experience etc.
Again, purely personal choice based on my heavy use of both.

Another thing that pushed me away from Firefox is my personal experience in
bug reporting. I'm not a software developer, but I do report bugs semi-
frequently. I feel like I was treated better in Chromium project than
Firefox's one. I have lots of unhappy experiences there (the one that I still
can't get over is that they won't fix a video playback bug that affects _all_
Win7 + nVidia GPU users [1]). I think in Chromium everytime you report a bug
with clear repro steps, there will at least an employee (or volunteer? Not
sure) that will attempt to repeat your steps and attach a screencat of that in
1-2 days. It feels good.

[1]:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1410693](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1410693)

~~~
sametmax
People always say "we can't do anything about it" when some bad situation
happen.

Except it happens because it emerges from the collective behavior.

Now, one can't fight a all the fights, and I don't think somebody that decides
to avoid this one is a bad person. But one should definitly pick up some
fights. Choose some things to pay for, decide some things to consume or be
part of, not just by the nature of it, but by the consequences of doing so.
Although I do think like in the article that it's better to fight _for_
something than _against_ something.

Anyway, if one doesn't makes, on daily basis, regular, endless, conscious
choices, one is not taking part of the world but is just passively living in
it.

And that's how we fail to build a society.

~~~
fireattack
We don't necessarily agree on "what is bad" in this case, so I will leave that
alone.

~~~
sametmax
Nobody agree on that. Bad and good doesn't really exist, it's just a line we
draw so it's ok. That kinda of my first point really.

------
artificialidiot
Mozilla lacks the financial strength to shove their merchandise down people's
throats. Microsoft used OS market share, Opera used small device market share
and Google used web search market share to promote their offerings. Mozilla
never had a similar advantage, only technical superiority for a while, which
others caught up in a few years and average users didn't care about that
anyway.

~~~
bugmen0t
Of all people, the folks here on hacker news, are in the best situation to
change that.

Be vocal! Use your influence!

And if you have the means: donate!

~~~
bfrydl
> Be vocal! Use your influence!

When I tell people to use Firefox they just laugh like it's a quirky
personality trait that I use the underdog browser instead of the one everyone
knows is best.

------
Jnr
I use Firefox not because I am scared of Chrome or Chromium. I mainly use it
because it has Tree Style Tab extension and it's mobile version allows
installing Ublock Origin adblocker. And then to get sync and all the nice
things across the board, I use it on all my devices. I don't see the bad power
consumption on my MacBook as some have mentioned and it doesn't feel slower
than Chrome.

------
kodablah
> I think this kind of conversation is naturally fatiguing, and creates a
> particularly negative means of ushering new users into the platform - almost
> as hostages, rather than excited participants.

Definitely true. Asking users to respect certain principles is tantamount to
guilting them which doesn't work.

> It’s time we analyse what Firefox does better than Chrome, and sing those
> praises.

From the perspective of a non-technical user, the differences are not
noticeable. Firefox and Chrome have continued to converge (...er...maybe one
following the other) to the point that the differences listed are not real
differentiators.

Oddly enough, you could argue that telemetry and the constant push for user
happiness and adoption is what is hurting FF. FF looks like Chrome. I'm not
saying stop listening to your users, but in general it's ok to differentiate
yourself in ways that don't appear to be immediately beneficial to adoption.
The primary way this can be done is in the UI. We can all recognize that there
are still lots of efficiencies to be gained around the current state of
internet navigation. Other approaches may not be better, and I understand the
maintainability fear of multiple UI paradigms in the same software, but at
least it's a way of differentiating yourself.

------
josteink
> With the news about Edge switching to a foundation using Chromium a lot of
> the conversation has centered on browser engines slipping into something of
> a monoculture.

Not to come of as dismissive, but if this is the first time you picked up this
conversation, you simply haven't been paying attention the last half decade.

If we've addressed things properly back then (with web developers using more
than the Ad-company's browser), we wouldn't be in the situation where we are
now with only 2 real engines remaining, down from 4, and mobile more crippled
than ever.

And now it's going to be much, _much_ worse encouraging web developers to
actually adhere to the standards for a diverse browser-market.

------
Sahhaese
Given that web usage stats typically come from third party tracking and
firefox is better at tracking protection, is there a 'hidden' market share?

~~~
simfoo
Good question! Looking at
[https://netmarketshare.com/methodology](https://netmarketshare.com/methodology)
(the source of the 9% figure), you seem to be mostly right

------
daliusd
I like idea to list what Firefox does better.

My addition to the list: Firefox has better kerning support while Chromium
team ignores the problem (e.g.
[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=888374...](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=888374#c_ts1544002305)
and
[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=912052](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=912052)).

For the context: I'm software developer working in printing.

~~~
chrismorgan
My experience with reporting these sorts of things: in Edge, fixed in about a
month; in Firefox, normally fairly quickly, but sometimes months and
occasionally never; in Chromium, I don’t even know why I bother filing bugs
sometimes.

[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=639223](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=639223)
is a good example of my experience there: a fancy typography thing that is
just _completely_ broken in an uncommon but by no means unreasonable
situation, and it just sits for years untouched.

But Firefox is still definitely not perfect: as an example that has sat
unfixed for ten years,
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=479829](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=479829)
is about hyphenation and ligatures not mixing well (you can get half your ﬀ
ligature on one line and half on the next). I tend to see the effects of that
once or twice a year.

------
fogetti
Chrome is full of bugs and getting slower by each release. Also regarding how
they force people to log in just to use profiles it's pretty clear that we
need good alternatives.

------
cyberjunkie
I wonder if there is a term to describe the sheer ignorance of the (tech-
aware) masses. Sadly, Firefox is fighting a hard battle that it's possibly,
and slowly losing.

~~~
Delmania
Perhaps Firefox should research why Chrome is so successful and adopt that? I
use Edge, Safari, FF Dev Edition, and Chrome, and I consistently return to
Chrome because of the smooth user experience. In my uninformed opinion, FF is
losing for the same reason the FSF's products never went mainstream, which is
they're focusing too much on their message than delivering a solid product.
Which is sad, because I do remember when Firefox was released just how good it
was.

~~~
toyg
They could have the best browser on the planet and they would still be a bit
player. Google owns mobile and webmail like MS owned the desktop, and most
people will use what the platform owner tells them to use. As long as the
ruler doesn't fall asleep at the wheel, like MS did with IE, everyone else
will be a bit player.

I think market share is the wrong metric to fixate on. FF market share has
never been particularly big, that shouldn't be the target and it never really
was. The target used to be improving the web and being the most innovative and
reliable engine for web standards. This is what Mozilla was good at, before
they started thinking like your run-of-the-mill big company ("we need to find
the Next Big Thing! Market share! Leverage! Competitive advantage!"...) and
wasted years in pointless side-bets.

~~~
bzbarsky
Market share is important for two reasons:

1) If your market share is too low, sites don't bother testing in your
browser. Since most sites are not written based on standards but rather by
trying things until they work [1], this means that sites will start breaking
in your browser and it will become harder and harder for anyone to actually
use it. This is what happened with Opera and Edge.

2) If your market share is too low, you don't get much say in standards
discussions.

It's not about having "big" market share. Having 90% market share or whatnot
is a not really a goal for Firefox. But it does need "enough" market share
that it can actually meaningfully achieve its mission [2]. Producing a browser
that no one can actually use in practice and having no impact on the evolution
of the web would both be failures in mission terms. 0.01% market share is "not
enough". 20% is "enough". Where the line is in between is hard to tell.

[1] Hard to fault web developers for this; the standards are so complex that
writing "to the standard", which requires understanding it, is hard. It
doesn't help that recent web standards have had a tendency to be over-
engineered, partly due to being created by a large company at the behest of
other parts of that large company, so having a tendency to be designed to be
usable by large companies but not necessarily worrying about anyone else.

[2] [https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/](https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/mission/)

------
soniman
The best thing about Firefox is that the browser is separate from your Google
account so you don't have to worry about your bookmarks/extensions getting
synced behind your back by Google and messing everything up. Google requiring
browser/Google account to be the same is a nuisance that you don't have to
worry about with Firefox.

~~~
bugmen0t
What's also amazing, is that if you sign up for a Firefox Account you get
privacy preserving sync: The data is encrypted & decrypted on your devices.
Mozilla doesn't get to see your data.

~~~
nallerooth
This.

I get the whole "You are the product" thing when using Google services for
free, but it still bugs me that anything I bookmark might/will end up in a
profile somewhere.

------
mjlee
I'm not sure even technical users care what engine their browser is using. I
think most web devs would prefer a smaller number of engines.

I use Firefox mainly for privacy and containers. Is there a good reason
Firefox couldn't provide features based on Chromium/Blink too (like Brave)?

~~~
Yoric
Yes, there are many reasons. I'll give a few examples.

If Firefox adopts Chromium, there becomes effectively no way for Mozilla to
shape the futures in manners that are not blessed by Google. For instance,
Google doesn't seem to be interested in WebVR/WebAR, so there is no way to
bring a Chromium-based browser in this direction until Google says so. The
same thing happens with compression formats, for instance.

Also, as Google controls Chromium, a monopoly of Chromium also means that
Google can decide to deprecate and/or customize web features without any
counter-power. For instance, Google could decide to restrict WebPay to
GooglePay, effectively leveraging their monopoly against PayPal and credit
cards. There are also a number of manners in which Google could, in theory,
make Netflix or Facebook or any competitor less usable or entirely unusable on
the web. No Chromium-based browser can do anything against this.

Don't forget that Mozilla is also working on a next-gen rendering engine,
Servo, that is expected to kick the ass of both Gecko and Blink on recent
platforms, in terms of both performance, battery use and security. Making
Chromium the only web browser means abandoning any hope to switch to this new
architecture, as everything would need to be bug-for-bug compatible with
Chromium, instead of following the standard.

(edit) typos

~~~
mjlee
All good points, thank you! I think I underestimated the level of control
Google holds over Chromium.

------
AndrewDucker
My main reasons for using Firefox are side tabs and being able to prevent tab
reuse when searching or using the address bar.

Chrome simply isn't configurable enough to make it nice to use for me.

~~~
onion2k
I suspect this is partly why Firefox is losing the battle. By concentrating
resources on nice-to-have user functionality rather than implementing core
technologies that web developers actually build sites with, we end up with
more and more websites that only work in Chrome. Far fewer users care about
browser config than "does my internet banking site work?". Firefox probably
needs to work on that, _even if it means making the browser work with Chrome
's non-standard implementations of things_, to retain users.

I suspect that would be easier than persuading web developers to target more
browsers unfortunately.

~~~
chupasaurus
> rather than implementing core technologies that web developers actually
> build sites with

Like a Shadowdom API v0 (v1 is standartized by W3C) used by Google in Polyfill
so Youtube is way slower?

> even if it means making the browser work with Chrome's non-standard
> implementations of things

How good the compatibility between Internet Exploder's features and FF/Chrome
was?

------
ubercow13
After enabling webrender, Firefox is the smoothest scrolling and most
responsive browser on android that I have used

~~~
asituop
Webrender hasn't shipped on Android yet did it ?

~~~
Yoric
Not yet, no.

~~~
ubercow13
Ah yep you're right. It has definitely become much much smoother at some point
recently, but apparently for other reasons.

------
amelius
> By making people excited to use Firefox rather than wary of using Chrome, I
> believe we can more effectively galvanise support for Firefox, and improve
> the health of the browser ‘market’ all round.

No, because Google can just copy those features (except for the privacy
respecting ones; but almost nobody cares about them)

------
TuringTest
AFAIK, Firefox is positioning itself as the only open source, standards
compliant web browser for Virtual Reality, including 3D support (not just 2D
floating windows). Chrome is neither there, nor expected.

------
bad_user
For what is worth I think Firefox is the best browser for reasons already
discussed here, but here’s the list of what I like ...

Sync, awesome bar, tab management, multi-account containers, trustworthiness
in the add-ons I install (better reviews by humans) and resource usage
especially with many tabs.

Firefox went through a very painful transition with Quantum due to
invalidating many old extensions that people liked. However they managed to do
the impossible imo, Firefox being better than ever and the ecosystem of add-
ons is not in a bad shape either.

I also believe it was the right thing to do, because technically speaking it
was inferior to Chrome’s multi-process architecture. The old add-ons system
also had a big problem from the user's point of view ... Firefox had no
permissions system in place and I like their review-based approach, but it
doesn’t scale well.

So now after Quantum, I'm pretty sure Firefox will move on to innovate in its
internals way past Chrome or Safari.

As a software developer I'm super psyched about what they are doing with Rust.
Having a browser with components built in Rust, a super safe language, doesn't
mean much for regular users, but it should translate in a more stable, safer
and performant product.

And I don't know how many people appreciate this, but building a better
language than C/C++ and then re-building components with it in an old and
popular product, without breaking it, is super hard.

------
sydd
I'd love to use Firefox, but always go back to Chrome because couple of small
issues:

\- Pinch zoom using the trackpad or the touchscreen is not smooth, it doesnt
zoom the whole page just elements. Chrome/Safari/Edge does it well.

\- Tab tearing is clunky compared to Chrome.

\- The UI for bookmarks/history is awkward. For example it takes 4 clicks to
reopen a recently closed tab compared to 2 in Chrome. When I add the history
button its still 3 clicks...

~~~
efraim
Right click the tab bar and click "undo close tab" to reopen it with two
clicks, or use ctrl-shift-t to reopen it without the mouse.

------
Queenie_15
The only reason I use Firefox is because it allows me to automatically delete
all browsing history after I close it. Does Chrome allow this as well?

------
olejorgenb
One thing Chrome does better than Firefox is third-party coookie blocking:
It's MUCH simpler to whitelist certain cookies in chrome - simply go to the
site's cookies dialog, open the blocked tab and whitelist the cookie..

Somewhat ironically since many people say Firefox is better at blocking
tracking.

When it's hard to whitelist the cookies I need, I might cave and simply allow
all third-party cookies.

------
rl3
An incredibly interesting alternate reality would have been one where
Microsoft used Quantum/Servo to power Edge instead of Chromium.

~~~
robin_reala
As much as I would have liked them to, it doesn’t fix the problem of people
not testing in Edge, which is why they’ve gone for Chromium in the first
place.

~~~
nikbackm
They also want to have synergy with Electron.

------
m4r35n357
Why not try Seamonkey [https://www.seamonkey-
project.org/](https://www.seamonkey-project.org/). Since Mozilla split the old
application into the "lean & mean" Firefox and Thunderbird, they have both
become so bloated that the old navigator combo is looking svelte by
comparison!

------
hugh4life
I wouldn't rush into it, but with webassembly I can't help but think that a
browser rendered mobile OS is a concept worth reviving at some point. And
google is unlikely to pursue that since they have Android.

~~~
Yoric
A new Firefox OS? I'd love to see this happen.

------
pvinis
Imagine if Firefox used webkit/chromium underneath.

Would that allow Mozilla to make Firefox more awesome by freeing up dev time
that was taken by servo and gecko, and now can be used to make great UI and
extensions and features?

~~~
hkt
No, they'd spend their time pruning all the google telemetry crud out of
chromium. The fact is that Mozilla's next gen stuff is going to be streets
ahead of Chrome, and I suspect their efforts will be rewarded in the end.

~~~
pvinis
I know and I agree. I was more of a thought exercise. I would prefer for
Mozilla to keep doing their thing.

If they were to put webkit on Firefox, and after the initial de-googling, they
would start working on webkit and contribute there, or somehow merge some
servo things in webkit. I guess in the end it would still take a few years
until it's complete, but it is an interesting thought to me.

------
hkt
Reader mode is awesome.

I haven't used chrome for years, so actually don't know. Maybe I'd prefer it
but I make a policy of not using google software and services (where the
choice still exists).

------
jerrre
A strange differences between OSes and Browsers, is that Browsers need/want to
conform to standards.

No-one expects Windows programs to work on macOS or Linux. But with the web
that's different.

~~~
codezero
This is indeed what people expect but it’s still pretty far from true. There
are still a bunch of CSS quirks that are vendor specific. Also if you want to
have fun read about the history of the innerText API - it even works different
in different versions of IE! And wasn’t adopted by Firefox until about two
years ago. These are only a few of the myriad mines you dodge when developing
a library for the web at large. Have a look at caniuse.com for a journey down
a compatibility rabbit hole. :)

------
thomasedwards
Firefox Multi-Account Containers

------
baybal2
Mozilla directors are wholly responsible for turning Firefox into what it
became now. They have no moral right whatsoever to plead for mercy now.

~~~
llampx
So we should just let the Google hegemony control the web and suck up all our
data along with doing the same to our phones?

~~~
baybal2
No, but you can't move Mozilla forward without firing incompetent directors
flying chartered jets and getting $1M USD remuneration for nothing.

All success Mozilla ever had was due to hard work of volunteer developers who
pulled out Firefox, and all the money Mozilla directors scored was due to them
slicing off the project piece by piece for last 10 years.

P.S. There is a whisper going around that Google's only reason to keep paying
Mozilla so generously is just to keep them down, and quiet — a kind of
unwritten non-aggression pact

~~~
metildaa
Could I get some citations?

What I've seen coming out of Mozilla over tthe past few years, from DeepSpeech
to Rust and Servo appears to be foundational technology written by Mozilla
engineers. This tech has the potential to do a lot of good, having it be a
public resource is important IMO.

Mozilla's intentions and fears seem to be very reasonable, driving what they
do from AV1 to fighting DRM, though they have hit dead ends with Firefox OS
(now Kai OS) and other side projects, the organization is still doing work
that is in the best interest of the common person, unlike what the tech giants
have been doing.

~~~
baybal2
> What I've seen coming out of Mozilla over tthe past few years, from
> DeepSpeech to Rust and Servo appears to be foundational technology written
> by Mozilla engineers. This tech has the potential to do a lot of good,
> having it be a public resource is important IMO.

Many things been coming out of their house, but not a usable browser — a
raison d'etre stated in their charter.

~~~
metildaa
I asked you for citations for your claims, yet instead I get diversion...

Wrt having a usable browser, I'm literally using Firefox for Android to talk
to you right now. Firefox has been a usable browser for years, seems your
salty tho.

Please provide citations for:

\- Incompetent directors flying chartered jets and getting $1M USD
remuneration for nothing.

\- All success Mozilla ever had was due to hard work of volunteer developers

\- All the money Mozilla directors scored was due to them slicing off the
project piece by piece for last 10 years.

~~~
baybal2
>
> [https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2016/2016_Mozilla_Fo...](https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2016/2016_Mozilla_Foundation_Forms_990_Public_Disclosure.pdf)

Page 7.

Mitchel Baker 1,054,536.

Jim Cook 985,899

And a list of 8 people with six digit salaries, out of whom 4 have their roles
not even tangentially related to Mozilla's charter activities. And this is for
Mozilla Foundation only. Mozilla corporation (M. F. Technologies) is keeping
really below the water in terms of publicity.

> All success Mozilla ever had was due to hard work of volunteer developers

All popularity Firefox had gained was in time of it being a community project,
when Mozilla did nothing but provide a CVS server and a bugzilla. You
should've seen how they bled user share the more they turned into a commercial
business for the past 17 years.

> All the money Mozilla directors scored was due to them slicing off the
> project piece by piece for last 10 years.

First take their revenue from getting generous payouts from Google, then from
all others affiliate programs, including the ill famed pocket. $300m is a not
a joke sum, very generous, more than they pay to any other affiliate
[http://allthingsd.com/20111222/google-will-pay-mozilla-
almos...](http://allthingsd.com/20111222/google-will-pay-mozilla-
almost-300m-per-year-in-search-deal-besting-microsoft-and-yahoo/)

------
zecg
Firefox would do well to remove Pocket integration and stop placing ads.

~~~
vinay427
Regrading Pocket, why? I was ready to pull my torch out for Mozilla when I
realized that Firefox included first-party Pocket support, until I learned
that Mozilla now owns Read It Later (the developers of Pocket). I see no
problem with Firefox including support for a product that Mozilla has complete
control over, especially as a browser extension is a natural use case for
Pocket.

------
fimdomeio
Crazy idea. what would happen if firefox would also become chromium based? You
would now have a browser as fast as chrome but with better privacy features
that chrome will never compete against. If chromium is open source other
companies could share the control over code right? I suspect this is a
terrible idea but still trying to find out why.

~~~
oAlbe
Firefox as it is now is much faster than Chrome already.

~~~
Semaphor
Not even close. I wrote a comment [0] with my examples recently. I like FF
(though besides Containers, most reasons boil down to "it's not Chrome"), but
fast is a word I'd only use in comparison to IE/Edge.

[0]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18620671](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18620671)

------
TAForObvReasons
Out of curiosity, before Chrome came along, why didn't Firefox eat IE's lunch?
The Microsoft anti-trust case was 1999-2001 but Chrome came out in 2008.

~~~
lmm
Firefox was always slow - the GUI felt slower than IE to me - and while it
theoretically had better standards support, there were no websites that didn't
work in IE.

(Personally I was using Konqueror in that era - even then it felt like a much
better browser - and wish the open-source community had rallied behind it. But
the US open-source folks never seemed to pay much attention to anything that
had been implemented in Europe)

~~~
toyg
Konqueror was "suicided" by KDE themselves, right about the time Apple picked
it up to make WebKit.

The truth is that working on browser engines is hard and unfashionable work,
nobody in opensource really wants to do it. Every desktop environment made its
crappy half-baked reimplementation when it looked like deep desktop
integration was inevitable and Netscape was a black-box (the IE 4/5 era), then
dropped it when Firefox came about - it was good enough, and the integration
fashion had passed.

I do agree that KDE was (still is) ridiculously ignored in the US. The licence
schism generated a certain tribalism that is now difficult to overcome. Which
is funny, considering GPL is now The Devil in the US.

~~~
lmm
> Konqueror was "suicided" by KDE themselves, right about the time Apple
> picked it up to make WebKit.

How so? The browser kept working nicely the whole time. Eventually Webkit was
offered as a rendering engine option when development overtook mainline KHTML,
but that was long after Apple first adopted it.

~~~
toyg
It was basically deprecated as a file manager, in favour of Dolphin, and all-
around de-emphasized. It started lagging in development efforts. I have not
really followed after about 4.2 (iirc), but at that time it already looked
fairly dead in the water, at least in the attitudes emanating from the
project.

~~~
lmm
> It was basically deprecated as a file manager, in favour of Dolphin

Well sure, but I saw that more as splitting out the file manager and browser
into separate apps, which seems perfectly sensible.

> It started lagging in development efforts. I have not really followed after
> about 4.2 (iirc), but at that time it already looked fairly dead in the
> water, at least in the attitudes emanating from the project.

Shrug. It was always a shoestring project in terms of how many developers they
had, but the browser kept working well, was my experience.

------
baybal2
Mozilla Corporation put foundation stones for WhatWG, and was betting to use
it to bury W3C, but instead Google took WhatWG and buried Mozilla.

