OT, but I think this is an interesting psychological phenomenon that occurs in a lot of settings, in particular politics: People, services, products etc are not judged by objective (or even just common) standards but by the standards they announce for themselves.

So someone who claims strict moral integrity and then falls short of that is seen as less trustworthy than someone who is upfront about being shady and then surprisingly acts less shady than expected.

If anyone knows a name for this effect, I'd like to know.

> If you can't tolerate Firefox because of Mozilla's problems, how can you possibly stomach Chrome/Chromium with Google at the wheel?

It's because it's not enough to be wrong about something (according to certain people), but you must be punished for being wrong. And narcissists can't handle a company not being "100% right" so they punish them by going to their competitors, with no regard if their competitor is objectively worse for their causes. The intent is to cause harm to get your own way.

The larger issue is there shouldn't be a war. There should be as many browsers as people have the hearts desire to create, and it shouldn't matter because they all follow the same standards.

However, in the real world, we've seen the noble goal of open standards get tarnished by the same bullying corporatist tactics. What we need is open and democratic standards, not just a few voices in the room running the show.

I'm pretty sure these subtle but numerous usability issues are on purpose from up high, because the usability could be fixed so easily. Still Google isn't paying 95% of Mozilla's and Moz's executives bills for them to beat Chrome, but rather to provide a lightning rod for monopoly concerns. From Google's point of view it's a bonus that it wastes the time of the market segment that cares about open systems!

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28107103/

I don't think this effect exists at all. Google broke "don't be evil" and people still massively choose to use Google services as if nothing ever happened.

Mozilla has to live up to ethics norms we assume for nonprofits in the free software domain which might be Apache or FSF? Google has to live up to UX(?) norms for corporate tech giants, maybe MS and Apple?

Killing people's browser sync / safe-browsing / search suggestions / spell-checking / etc is pure evil.

Throw the anti-trust book at them. Make them spin-off YouTube and the rest of the alphabet (ha!).

(I am a Mozilla employee)

This is what I know about what happened there:

There were two enterprise IT teams with similar duties but different purviews. When management was deciding on layoffs, they decided to unify those two teams. Unfortunately that meant that there were redundancies.

My heart goes out to those who lost their jobs, and they have every right to be upset.

But the inferences being made as a result of the resulting tweets just weren't true: this notion that all security teams were wiped out is false. And there are now others assigned to threat management.

Furthermore, the security teams that work on Gecko and Firefox were left mostly if not entirely intact.

I work on security hardening for Gecko on Android, and I’m still here. So is our entire hardening/sandboxing team: https://twitter.com/gcpascutto/status/1293519587967983616

TL;DR: Don’t base your understanding of an organization’s capabilities off of one tweet.

A very key point. I may rage against the occasional anti-user decisions Mozilla makes every now and then, but objectively Google and thus Chrome are 100x worse in every aspect. Mozilla still does respect privacy and user choice mostly, even if they blunder sometimes. Google is an advertising company with a mission fundamentally contrary to privacy. No way I would ever run Chrome.

And that's before considering the monoculture risk of a single browser which is an even larger threat. Maybe some are too young to remember when IE was dominant and there was a real fear of them closing off most the popular web to be Windows/IE only.

Today Google's control over interoperable web traffic is larger than Microsoft's ever was, through things like the curse of recaptcha that makes browsing more difficult on non-chrome. Another reason to vote with my mouse clicks and never run Chrome.

e.g. By realising that Mozilla has better (than Chrome, but still flawed) privacy, but also issues with usability, a nice solution suggests itself: another user-focussed organisation could maintain patches to Firefox to produce a better browser fixing the regular anti-user things Moz does.

And Firefox is honestly still quite good. I have to open up another browser once in a while, but I use Firefox for 99% of my browsing on macOS, Linux, and Windows (mainly Linux these days), including a lot of web apps.

Totally agree. You'll see me criticize Mozilla harshly but I still use FF because

1. the alternative is worse

2. secondary: technically speaking Firefox has always had an edge one way or another

Containers are really nice too.

No immediate risk of ad blocking api getting neutered.

So yeah, using a non Chromium browser is the only way to ensure that the Web is still healthy (i.e.: not controlled by only Google) in the long run.

Looking back at WebKit, Google forked that into Blink. I don’t know why Firefox couldn’t do the same.

I suppose in a couple years we’ll be able to check this post to see if Microsoft has done a hard fork or not. Will be interesting to see.

Forking isn't cheap if you want to make significant changes to that fork. We'd be better off staying with Gecko.

(Oh, and we're still all-in on Gecko)

Just using some other browser isn't enough. Unfortunately not all webmasters take this seriously, I reported many website issues as a Firefox user to many orgs, even university departments, the most common answer is "Just use Chrome". The ignorance is enormous.

Or at least if I was going to take a moral stand I would start by spending at least 50% more time & money for clothing/ other products not manufactured immorally.

Strangely foo/ works (goes to http://foo/) while foo/bar does not (instead does a web search for foo/bar).

Ultimately this is a super minor issue (and turns out there's a way to fix it, per the sibling comment), but everyone just has their own pet excuse why they "can't" change to a browser that is objectively better for the web in every way.

Tragedy of the commons, I guess.

Aside from that I don't think Firefox is particularly good for the web. Their license is no better than that of Chromium, and Chromium has proven time and again it's a good starting point for a fork.

Mozilla employees are paid with search ad revenue, to an even greater extent (95%) than the subset of Blink developers employed by Google -- so their incentives aren't even any better.

You'll have to prefix your searches with a key (in my case it's w for wikipedia, g for Google, and so on), but that's what I prefer personally anyway.

Also set browser.fixup.alternate.enabled to false to prevent Firefox from retrying whatever you have typed in with a .com suffix.

Less usable ctrl+tab behaviour for managing lots of tabs

20 second pause to start if not already running on many of my locked down systems over the years, seems to have been fixed in last year or so but perennial problem that was infuriating in the same way nag-ware delays are

F** with the extensions

Ongoing 'minor' user-unfriendly decisions to the actual users of the products to the point where it seems motivated to provide a not-quite-ideal result. In basketball there's a saying, watch the waist not the ball, which translates as watch what they are doing not what they are saying, and by doing this I've begun to realise the regular nature of these snafus is probably intentional (at a high level) and I theorise it's to keep Google's money flowing in by not being a serious competitor to average users who want the best usability.

etc etc

Perhaps this is just muscle memory and I would think oppositely if I never switched to chrome.

    about:downloads

    chrome://browser/content/places/places.xhtml

2. keyboard shortcuts

3. moving around tabs/ windows

4. crashes/ memory issues

Surf, Midori, and Qutebrowser are all good options (webkit-based) that I'd encourage others in similar situations to explore.

If you have time, please file it: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi . If you're willing, include a profile ( https://profiler.firefox.com is pretty easy to use). You can look at about:performance (or in newer versions, about:processes, but I don't think that's in release yet.) When you file the bug, you will probably be asked if it still happens in safe mode (which would probably blame an addon).

That's not normal Firefox behavior. I run multiple windows (one in each monitor), each of them with many dozens of tabs and only time I ever quit Firefox is if I have to reboot the machine for an update, so it runs for many months on end. Never seen this runaway CPU consumption.

Danger. You want to restart it more frequently than this for updates.

I agree that browser diversity is a good thing for the web, and I’d love it if Firefox was more popular. But I’m not going to let that motivate my reasoning about whether it’s a good web browser.

I want to use Firefox, but when I use it, mobile or desktop, I notice a lot of page-induced crashing bugs or severe rendering errors (e.g., things that absolutely look like pointer discipline issues, blocks copied into the wrong area, etc.), which makes me extremely uncomfortable using it, as those crashes may be exploits in waiting, and there are a lot of them.

But what good is it if it won't deviate from Google's vision of the web? It will go toe-to-toe with Chrome at being Chrome, and almost nothing more.

Mozilla is fine with DRM being a core part of the web, and they completely validated and enabled EME extensions. They deprecated useful technologies that have not been replaced.

I can't forgive them for validating the direction that the web is going in. They had enough leverage to slow it down, and they didn't. They have the same arrogance as Google but they don't have any of the success.

Firefox (then Firebird) didn't beat Microsoft and IE6 by trying to implement half-baked Windows ActiveX and Janus DRM support. They didn't even bother implementing stuff that they didn't think should be part of the vision of Microsoft, Adobe, etc.

I wish they would aim for the web they want, not just follow in the footsteps of others.

I for one use Palemoon, alongside Chrome for sites that need it. There are incredibly useful XUL based extensions that I rely on still, and Palemoon is much friendlier to sandbox and modify. And for modern web garbage, I have Chrome. I don't need Firefox.

By all means, criticize Mozilla. I'm not even saying people should use Firefox. Like I said, I don't want Firefox to become dominant. People just shouldn't use criticisms of Mozilla as justification for using a browser developed by a demonstrably worse organization.

I've seen a few people respond with examples of poor experiences they've had with Firefox. I haven't shared those experiences, but if people have found that Chrome/Chromium is a significantly better product than Firefox that's at least a valid reason to consider sticking with Google's browser.

If people are comfortable using a completely different browser like Pale Moon with no ties to Firefox or Chromium, that's even better.

I mostly like where Firefox is going, I like it's multiple identity tabs and it's general look. But it might help Mozilla to work out various ways to make sufficiently "skinnable" that someone else could maintain a Chrome-like version for all those people who like whatever it is about Chrome that's cool.

I'm not advocating for Firefox here. It's the browser I use, but there are other options out there. Safari is obviously an option for people in the Apple ecosystem and another user suggested Pale Moon. I think there are even justifiable reasons for using Chrome/Chromium. Like I said, I don't want Firefox to become dominant. I want browser diversity.