But is Firefox an inferior browser? I think it used to be, but over the last couple years, it has made massive improvements in features and performance. I use it in both desktop and mobile, and I prefer it over Chrome.

As a software engineer, I rely heavily on my browser for work. For me, the multi-account containers in Firefox are the must-have feature. No other browser can offer the ease of separating multiple test accounts, and multiple gmail/gsuite accounts for multiple enterprises separate.

Also, I like how Lockwise on mobile is divorced from the browser, making it easy to use it to manage passwords across websites and apps.

Maybe the problem with Mozilla, then, is marketing. Maybe not enough people know that Firefox is much, much better than it used to be. Or maybe the general sentiment is echoed in your post. People don't feel that Mozilla is focused on writing good software, so they don't expect Firefox to be good.

Personally, I think the biggest cause for the loss of market share is simple: Safari is the default on iOS and Chrome is the default on Android, and population of mobile devices is exploding, and there are no mainstream mobile devices that are carrying Firefox with it.

I agree with you on marketing and mobile - if the defaults are good enough on mobile then people are going to mostly use that. And while Firefox used to be hugely popular Chrome has really taken over its market share. Butnow Chrome has gone from a lean and simple browser to a bloated mess that chokes when you have too many tabs and starts using gigabytes of ram.

It has problems with memory, performance, rendering and battery drainage.

Every year I switch to Firefox and use it as a main browser. It usually goes for a month and then I need to switch again because Firefox has too many glitches.

Firefox has had a bad policy of not fixing the basics first before new features.

I do use Firefox as my main development browser still but that is because I’m more used to the developer tools than the alternatives.

In my experience, Chrome has problems with memory, performance, rendering and battery drainage. Every now and then I try to use Chrome (or a derivative) as secondary browser and I give up because it has noticeably higher latency for simple web page loads, and more likely to suffer irritating repaint flashes.

You're both right.

It's a common story -- people use browser A, start noticing a variety of problems, switch to browser B and everything is so much better. After a while, they start noticing a variety of problems, switch to browser A, and once again everything is so much better.

Those people are not being stupid, that is their real experience.

Sometimes the problem is in a web site (an update starts leaking memory, for example) and whatever browser is running gets blamed.

Sometimes it's just natural human bias—we want to see patterns, and we want there to be a solution ("just switch browsers!"), so we get selective in what we notice and don't notice.

Sometimes it's because profile cruft piles up, and resetting would fix it.

Sometimes the problems really are in one browser and not the other. There are plenty of legitimate problems to be found, and things change pretty rapidly.

But the comparison point is switching browsers, which also loses lots of state.

(In both cases, you can import a subset of your state into your new profile, and you'd probably get most of the performance advantages.)

I believe all browsers have been improving in their resistance to the accumulated state problem, but I also believe that all browsers are still susceptible to it.

Any time I've tried switching away it's more to see if I'm missing out on something... and it turns out I'm not.

My biggest issue was (maybe still is, I quit using Firefox last year) is that on wide color gamut displays, like every MacBook Pro, it renders colors completely wrong. So it would render literally every website, save black and white website, completely incorrectly.

My main browser these days is Safari (so I’m still enjoying a lot of browser bugs). When I really need something to work or need specific de tools I switch to Chrome. For me Firefox is in a middle ground between those two browsers, resulting in me never actually using it anymore.

I liked that too. That was before they decided to shut it down...

Several APIs that make powerful web applications possible are missing (e.g. WebUSB, various filesystem access APIs) and Firefox generally tends to lag behind Chrome when it comes to new APIs/web features.

The lower market share means that many web sites don't support it properly. For example, I need to keep a Chrome profile around for Zoom since the button doesn't even show up on Firefox, and when I tried to join a Teams meeting with Firefox, it failed in some non-obvious way, causing me to be late to a job interview (may have been due to some extension misbehaving or some config issue). I don't know if that's just because the sites don't test and do user agent sniffing, or whether Firefox is actually missing some APIs that would be required, but from a user perspective, it doesn't really matter, I can't use the browser for things I can do with Chrome.

I also still have occasional crashes.

WebUSB may not be the best example, as it was disabled by Chrome because there is no way to secure it. Though I agree in general that some APIs (WebGL) were experimental and behind a flag for too long in FF.

As a counterpoint, Firefox is/was ahead on some important APIs (WASM, U2f)

I have not shared your experience with Teams or Zoom. I use them both daily from FF on OSX.

Sometimes that is because chromium just implements anything they want and it's not in the spec.

There's a bit of discussion about it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25838861

That's certainly no indication that Firefox is first and foremost a social justice blog.

- https://lmgtfy.app/?q=mozilla+blog+social+justice&iie=1

- https://blog.mozilla.org/en/?s=social+justice

- https://blog.mozilla.org/en/?s=gender

- https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/first-steps-toward-lasti...

- https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozilla-racia...

- https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/the-removal-of-the-dissenter...

- https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/mapeo-helps-marginali...

- https://www.theverge.com/2015/8/24/9202067/mozilla-ceo-chris...

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28018772

https://diversity.google/

https://www.apple.com/diversity/

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/diversity/default.aspx

Have any browser vendors came out as strongly pro-bigotry?

I'd suggest Brave Browser

As it stands now, even if techy people, who might be put off by the things you mention, were to be made perfectly happy again, if they recommend Firefox without a significant practical justification, non-techy people simply will not change from Chrome back to Firefox again.

Importantly, more and more people have just grown up with Chrome, never having used Firefox or IE even once. Even if Firefox stays as good as Chrome, more and more people will start their web browsing experience never having considered Firefox and just always having organically used Chrome. This alone will lead to Firefox losing market share over time, even if all existing Firefox users keep using it and loving it.

In my mind, it's clear that the reasons Firefox lost market-share are technical/practical, and the way it might regain market-share is also technical/practical improvements. That will be hard though, especially given Firefox would probably need technical/practical dominance on Android as well as on traditional computers.

It sounds like you do give a shit that they care about "social justice" and you don't want to use their browser because of that?

Or are there specific features / functionality / performance / security issues that prevent you from using Firefox and are somehow caused by the worldview of the developers?

There is one thing I think is worth noting. There's always all of this talk about, "It's the talent that matters, not the social justice stance of a developer. Keep the talented assholes; don't hire for social justice posturing!"

Well, I'm waiting to see all of those displaced "talented assholes" band together to create a product so compelling it will *prove* they were replaced by inferior developers for "social justice" reasons. By now there should be so many uber-talented people who aren't given their fair shake because of their abhorent political/social beliefs.

Or maybe... just maybe... those assholes talk a big game (as assholes often do), but aren't as indispensible as they believe themselves to be?

So, I've worked for a lot of effective asshole in my life, I may not have always liked them but I almost always respected what they were achieving.

So, sure someone is against gay marriage, i'm sure if you look carefully you can find uncomfortable things about anyone. I mean for some people just flying a US flag is a uncomfortable because it represents a country that still hasn't come to terms with genocide against the native people and imported slavery, as well as an economic system that rewards people for behaviors far more offensive than whether someone believes in gay marriage.

I've been sitting through my own companies D&I training for the past year or so, and the most important takeway I've gotten is something one of the trainers said, taken out of context... "We all need to get more comfortable with being uncomfortable"

So, if you damage your org over something did on their own time serving their own opinion your no better than them. Yes people trying to tell others what to do with their own personal lives (in their own personal bedrooms) is pretty sick, but so is getting into peoples private beliefs that they aren't wearing on their shoulder.

At the time this was pretty divisive, because it was a candidate with objectionable social opinions but great technical chops getting ousted by a candidate who was uncontroversial but seen as more business-minded and more inclined to broad-spectrum activism outside the confines of Firefox's typical free software and online freedom work.

[0] he was the creator of javascript, among other things

If Firefox is missing specific capabilities that make it noncompetitive, and those deficits are traced to the asshole purge, then @rpnx might strengthen their argument by citing those examples.

Now, there are of course parts of politics that are pertinent to the tool in question - privacy issues for browser developers, for example, or tracking.

Both the Brave and Vivaldi teams have people I know I disagree with politically. But I like their products, and I like the companies? Why? Because whatever the companies' employees views, the two companies' politics are about user control and privacy, and they walk the talk. Both in their own ways that reflect the people making the tool, but insofar as the companies are political, they are political in a very, very narrow way.

Basically, they understand their job is to make hammers and not to sermon about flower arrangement. Mozilla (and much of the tech sphere, sadly) is increasingly the reverse.

The guy literally invented Javascript and cofounded Mozilla. So he made a few political contributions that the Twitter mob didn't like. Maybe if Mozilla focused its efforts more on fixing actual bugs instead of countless UI/UX changes and seemingly purging their ranks of wrong-think, maybe more people would use their browser and we wouldn't be asking these questions.

I personally despise that we have a browser monoculture, but there are few legitimate reasons to use Firefox on platforms that support Chromium.

I'm fiercely, fiercely pro-mainstream-science, and there's no doubt that proper N95 masks (or better) are very effective against respiratory disease transmission. But mask mandates almost always permit basic cloth masks which lack strong evidence of efficacy. If we're not going to mandate an effective mask, I honestly don't see what the point of the mandate is.

If we're not going to mandate an effective mask, I honestly don't see what the point of the mandate is. It makes as much sense to me as seatbelt mandates accepting a knitted scarf as an acceptable seatbelt.

-------

"Cloth face masks show minimum efficacy in source control than the medical grade mask. The efficacy of cloth face masks filtration varies and depends on the type of material used, number of layers, and degree of moisture in mask and fitting of mask on face."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7497125/

"The use of cloth masks during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic is under debate."

"Until a cloth mask design is proven to be equally effective as a medical or N95 mask, wearing cloth masks should not be mandated for healthcare workers."

"In 2015, we conducted a randomized controlled trial to compare the efficacy of cloth masks with that of medical masks and controls (standard practice) among healthcare workers in Vietnam. Rates of infection were consistently higher among those in the cloth mask group than in the medical mask and control groups."

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/10/20-0948_article

"Your cloth face mask isn't protecting you against the coronavirus variant omicron, health officials say. As common as cloth face masks have become, health experts say, they do little to prevent tiny virus particles from getting into your nose or mouth and aren't effective against the new variant."

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2022/01/05/cloth-...

"They found that the effectiveness of the masks varied widely: a three-layer knitted cotton mask blocked an average of 26.5 percent of particles in the chamber, while a washed, two-layer woven nylon mask with a filter insert and metal nose bridge blocked 79 percent of particles on average. Other masks scored somewhere in between."

https://www.epa.gov/sciencematters/epa-researchers-test-effe...

Yeah, and I'm wondering if you have any evidence to back up this belief of yours that masks don't work.

You've so far provided a LOT of evidence that masks work. I'm puzzled why you would assume that others don't work, like that is your base assumption.

There coworkers do though, assholes have a right to exist and others have a right to not want to work with them.

This can't be true, unless you have extremely unusual new reading habits.

The problem is when some assholes are actively engaged in denying basic rights from others. If you say "well those assholes have a right to exist", you're effectively saying "the assholes have more of a right to exist than the people they're trying to erase."

There was a big huff about it in the tech space for a while when it happened and he ended up secluding himself after that for a while.

It was really not a good look. In the years since, we've seen a much larger push to shine the spotlight on behaviour that would have previously been swept under the rug or hidden behind technological "tenure".

>I don't give a shit how nice the developers who made my web browser are.

I dont either, but do their coworkers care? If so, they should be disciplined or fired depending on behavior.