Firefox's tiny market share is all that stands between all the W3C and WHATG publications going from "standards" to "what Chromium does".

Google is a giant corporation. One day they're going to do an IE6, and shift their focus away from the project, and the whole web will suffer.

Today when you navigate to google.com from Microsoft Edge, there's a barrage of popups urging you to use Chrome instead.

When Chrome is completely dominant, maybe those popups will be on non-AMP sites urging you to "get the best experience"? It's guaranteed that there will be a lot of internal pressure to use Chrome to promote the goals of other divisions at Google.

Chrome already does this.

And a key UI target for a huge chunk of their applications and services, including search.

If "web browsing" doesn't work in Chrome, that's kind of a big deal for Google.

It only needs to make sense in the minds of a handful of high-level managers, and we all suffer.

Would you mind briefly elaborating on this? I wasn't aware that Mozilla had done anything apart from behave well.

I'm a long-time Firefox user, FWIW.

Why is that a problem? I never got the furore over it. When it appeared, I removed the icon and just went about my business.

Annoying yes, but certainly not "shady". From what I understood / stand it was a mozilla app they included with the browser, not that different to how firefox comes with a bookmarks app.

It's two clicks.

It took me a few months before I realized that the page was customizable at all, especially since the triple-dot menu doesn't even show up until you hover or focus the element.

> resetting default search provider back to Google on updates Never happened to me. Was this a specific update I might have missed?

https://github.com/mozilla/doh-rollout/issues/125

Don't get me wrong, DoH is great if you have a shady ISP. But it should be opt-in, not opt-out, since those of us who don't have shady ISPs don't want all our DNS queries centralized in the same place, to be scooped up with just one FISA warrant. And dark patterns like this are a pox on the web and Mozilla shouldn't be perpetuating them.

So what's shady here? That the process is working?

https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/09/06/whats-nex...

If you live in the US or EU your ISP logs dns queries and sells them on [0] encryption is the only solution.

[0] https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2019/04/big-uk-broadba...

It's inconvenient, but it turns out the "open, anonymous" web has huge trust issues that bad actors use to exploit and attack the unknowing. Some of that is most readily solved by nudging users to trusted third-parties.

You can have issue with whether that third party should be trusted, but the larger issue is that the user has to trust some third party for DNS to work at all, and most don't even think twice about that question.

> since those of us who don't have shady ISPs don't want all our DNS queries centralized

If you don't hae a shady ISP, disable protection. You're already protected by your ISP not being shady, right? ;) The average user has no idea if they should trust their ISP's DNS.

This would still be preferable to if they became the only browser and all web developers were subject to breakneck paced new features and discontinued compatibility as Google makes their characteristic impulsive lurches with zero long term vision.

Bad decisions does not imply evil decisions, nor does it imply death. Pocket? A convenience people may want that might have provided money, hat didn't invade privacy. DNS over HTTPS? The horror! They are trying to enhance privacy on the Internet but haven't done it perfectly!

I usually suggest die-hard Chrome users use a plugin to spoof their user agent so product managers and developers are more likely to tread non-Chrome as a first-class browser.

Not to be that guy, but if you take a look at the bug a fix has been merged into 77

Top voted comment couldn't bother to read bug report. I often see inconvenient truths buried in downvotes meanwhile misinformation that apeases a vocal minority gets catapulted to the top.

I'm also not a comment, I'm a person. Thank you.

I'm not sure that this issue illustrates the case you're trying to make here.

A Google account integration issue would always be more important than web pages being broken in many subtle ways. This wasn't the case when they didn't hold the browser monopoly.

Did Mozilla take 21 days to fix that issue, push it off for a future release, and only reprioritize it as a hotfix after being hounded?

GP isn't complaining that Chrome has bugs, every browser has bugs. They're complaining that Chrome doesn't prioritize bug fixes unless users raise a stink.

I am somewhat sympathetic, because I've worked with issue triaging, and I understand that everyone wants their issue to be #1. I am less sympathetic than I otherwise would be though because Google owns the dominant browser in the marketplace and is owned by one of the biggest companies in the world. My standards for them are higher.

If you think a bug is easy to fix, pleasez consider providing a patch.

It used to be ridiculously hard, back in the days of hq merge queues or even cvs, I give you that, but the general build stuff improved a lot since then.

The build system is hg clone/git clone + ./mach bootstrap + ./mach build... And there is a lot of docs for it too. I wouldn't call that "borderline insane".

Submitting a patch for review is a only moz-phab command away (after you set it up once, which took me under half an hour).

A full build on a slow machine can take hours indeed (on my 2015 macbook it takes about about 2 hours I think, but my beefy desktop finishes in under one hour). But you often do not even need a full build, but an artifact build[1], which brings it down to a few minutes and just a few seconds on rebuilds (./mach build faster).

>and most importantly people who can approve your changes clearly have more important things to do and regularly fail to answer.

Now that's actually a problem. It's usually not that they are too busy to respond, but that they do not read their bug mail (because they get thousands of emails a day). That's why you either have to actually request a review or need-info them on bugzilla. That usually draws their attention, simply because review requests are listed in a neat list and need-info-s are listed in another neat list, and if that still fails to grab attention, there is enough folks on the irc channels who can either help you directly or point you in the right direction.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...

./mach bootstrap will usually help you set up your environment mostly automated after some confirmations, and will ask you if you want to do full builds or artifact builds, too

A general build guide is available too: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...

I have no trouble believing that contributing to Chrome is even harder, but then again I didn't hear someone from Google saying "If you think a bug is easy to fix, pleasez consider providing a patch."

Is that a good thing?

I'll take Mozilla over Google every day, but if Mozilla presents itself as open to community, it also lends itself to criticism that Google avoids altogether.

So yes, that happens, and if that's not as easy as we could have hoped, probably help is welcome with that as well.

Big and complex projects generally have higher standard of effort necessary to get the leg in. The comparison to Chrome was that it's a project comparable in complexity, and yet Firefox is easier and faster to build.

I've submitted many browser bug reports to Google, Microsoft, Apple and Mozilla over many years. I only bother to submit issues for "important" bugs, I write clearly, I simplify, and I spend significant time ensuring that the bug report is useful to developers and relevant for users.

Google respects my efforts, and often fixes my reported issues, or at least explains why it can't be fixed (usually with well reasoned answers, usually the actual developer is communicating with me).

Microsoft/Apple/Mozilla waste my time, ignore my efforts, and generally that results in a poorer user experience in the browser.

The Chrome team is one of the most amazing software teams I have ever been tangentially involved with - and the product quality shines.

Maybe someone from Mozilla's community outreach can comment and ultimately make some improvements.

Specific examples of said bug reports would probably help, though.

Ideally take a subsample and talk to the submitters, and see what they think.

If Mozilla agree that Google do a better job than Mozilla, then benchmark against them.

I eventually stopped reporting bugs to Mozilla, Microsoft and Apple unless I absolutely had to. I recently stopped working with browsers, so I no longer have much appetite for helping.

I would put the number more at 99 with a 1% error in that figure

I stopped bothering raising Chrome bug reports years ago.

If it's a js/css/html/xul-only fix (and chances are good it is, when it's a usability issue, as the frontend/UI code js on a high level), then you do not even have to really build Firefox but can use artifacts mode[1], which takes a few minutes for the initial build and only a few seconds for subsequent builds.

Then find a reviewer. I usually look at the recent activity of files I touch (or related files, or related bugs), find functional changes and just add whoever reviewed those most recent changes. Even easier when it's regressions, then you can see who reviewed the regressed changeset and who wrote it and CC them as well.

If the person(s) you picked do not want to review it or cannot review it, they will tell you, and usually suggest who else to ask. If this doesn't work, then you can always ask/nag on IRC.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...

https://github.com/mozilla/webcompat-addon

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Compatibility/Go_Faster_Addon/Overr...

https://webcompat.com/

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/07/firefox-68-bigints-contras...

Good to see this in action already.

Embarrassing, sorry, and thanks for pointing it out.

When they are blocking other browsers explicitly despite the fact that the other platforms work that is a whole different level.

Of course it doesn't have to be that black and white but they certainly makes it easy to dislike them at the moment.

Edit: it doesn't work.

I use it, instead of different methods, because it's just a few clicks away and for me it's one of the top results for "firefox skype".

this just worked. Onto Firefox!

Heh. It's the same old web app from the works-in-firefox days.

I'm using Firefox so it doesn't work for me either. I was using their web app before they decided to ditch Firefox. Now I am forced to use their stupid desktop app. If they decide to push ads I will just tell my colalborators to contact me via e-mail or switch to Wire.

The text selection in the dev tools is woeful as well

And in Firefox ? someone still needs to prioritize issues, and issues affecting more people will get more attention in both browsers.

As an immigrant struggling with a new language personally I need Chrome's right click to translate a page functionality in Firefox before I'll fully move

Simply select text, click the popup and done. I just wish there was option to quick change the output language (currently you can have like 2 target languages).

For what it's worth, I've found them responsive to my bug reports, and even my feature requests.

I just can't get past the font weight rendering and the scroll bars. Is there any way to make them not look terrible?

The bug is already fixed and has been released. What other issues are you talking about?

I trust Mozilla less because they’re more desperate and desperate people are dangerous. They’re also ideologues who I don’t agree with, who often say one thing and do another. They preach privacy/control for users while simultaneously selling them out, removing control and inserting ads where there should be none.