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A comment on Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products. Parent comment

Re:Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on comm... by spanhandler on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @04:21PM (#24125507)
You're right. Phoneix/Firebird were basically a clone of the obviously-best-to-copy Opera features but without the ad bar, with a more native-feeling UI, and maybe (IIRC?) even lighter and faster to launch. Built-in popup blocking, very lightweight and snappy, tabs, free, no ad bar. Those were the selling points, and aside from the last two and slightly odd-feeling UI widgets, Opera had them already.

We lost "lightweight and snappy" way back in FF 2.0, and every browser blocks pop-ups now. Today's equivalent would be making ad blocking built-in and on by default, which it isn't. The advertising and constant "we updated!" tabs opening up (yeah, great, I don't give a shit, stop telling me) are at least as annoying as Opera's adbar was, IMO. Hopefully we get a spin-off browser eventually that gets back to FF's roots, and then eventually eats it, like FF did Mozilla Browser.

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Re:Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on comm... by xxs on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @04:48PM (#24125794)
>"we updated!"

Well "we updated" mobile firefox to 79, and broke almost all add-ons, forgot the bookmarks, most visited sites, effective homepage and made it crash every hour or so. I can't recall more broken version of Firefox since the times it used to be Mozilla Suite.

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Re:Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on comm... by spanhandler on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @04:51PM (#24125836)
Modern FF makes Mozilla Suite look svelte and respectful. It's heavy and loud. I use it when I'm not on macOS or iOS and need a full-fat (and then some) browser, but I'd have a hard time recommending it to anyone.
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Re:Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on comm... by discardable_dan on Wednesday August 12, 2020 @01:52PM (#24134755)
> The advertising and constant "we updated!" tabs opening up (yeah, great, I don't give a shit, stop telling me) are at least as annoying as Opera's adbar was, IMO.

This was actually the last straw for me. I had 30 tabs open, and Firefox decided to take an update. Any time I opened a new tab, it demanded I restart my browser, closing everything, and refused to function. That level of interruption was so unacceptable I switched (back) to Chrome.

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