The Mozilla Foundation is arguably mismanaged. Firefox does ok, but could go further if the Foundation invested more in FF development and less on… other things.

I sparingly run into sites that don't render properly on Firefox but they do exist. As an example, Ticketmaster's account page has problems on Firefox that I don't get on Chromium.

Firefox is helping you, Ticketmaster is evil.

Maybe so, but asking somebody to not go to shows of their favorite bands anymore as a form of protest against Ticketmaster and/or Google is a bit much. Unfortunately, some venues seem to be Ticketmaster only at this point. Sometimes you’ve got to choose your battles.

Yes, because the ones who owns the venues also own Ticketmaster.

Live Nation is the name.

I never used ticketmaster and it is not a monopoly. Choose the right company to sell you tickets.

Ticketmaster is the only company selling tickets to several venues, there is no choice of who to buy from available there.

The only choice is to boycott your favorite artist because their record label made a deal with the wrong company. That's too many layers of indirection, for many fans.

Surely you've been to shows at every possible venue to be able to extrapolate that bold of a claim from your personal experience?

No but appart from festivals (which were not relying on ticket master) I haven't seen tickets sold by only one company. Usually there are different ones and also some plain old in person in ticket office of department stores.

There are venues that are Ticketmaster specific because Ticketmaster's parent company owns the venue and some acts just use Ticketmaster because they are the most popular ticketing service. If I want to go to UFC 292 for example, I have to get my tickets through Ticketmaster. UFC isn't using some service that shows up on indiehacker

A fraction of a fraction of a fraction of all tickets/venues available. So hard to boycott.

I have the same - not sure if its related to many privacy plugins in my Firefox but e.g. google maps still doesn't render as sharp as in Chromium browsers - seems like using rasterized tiles.

This is going to be a problem which compounds more as Google gains more ground. “Oh, I love internet freedom, but I really need to visit website X.” As more and more websites adopt Chrome’s standards, Chrome will be the only browser that works.

Some Google services I regularly depend on (like YouTube and Google Meet) don't work as well on Firefox as they do on Chrome, in ways that actually matter. Besides that I think most websites work fine.

I haven't noticed any issues on YouTube after subscribing. Before that it used to glitch once in a while possibly to penalize the ad blocking. But that may have been the behaviour in Chrome too for all I know.

Google Meet does have some key features missing on Firefox such as blurring / changing video background.

What's wrong with Youtube? I haven't noticed anything.

TBF YouTube has gotten better (see sibling comment), but Google Meet is really what matters here for me. There's also offline mode in Google Docs, which I use regularly because I'm not guaranteed a good-enough connection wherever I go.

Firefox does some things better (like PiP video playback on most websites, like YouTube!) but others are so poorly done (like Profiles) compared to Chrome that it overall makes Chrome my first choice browser.

I never used Firefox profiles, but Firefox container tabs work really well IMO. I much prefer them to Chrome's profiles for managing work vs personal logins.

Yes. Google uses chrome-only APIs in a few of its own products and falls back not so gracefully.

Which sort of underscores the monopoly point. There’s no universal free/cheap alternative to Meet, further entrenching Chromium.

How about Jitsi? https://meet.jit.si/

It's free and open source, works everywhere, has stuff like background replacement, and doesn't require signup at all.

Jitsi is super easy to use, and I still can't get older people to use it. They just hear "Zoom" on CNN so they think, "I'm supposed to use Zoom. Other things are weird." So much behavior is just driven by anxiety and habituation.

Well Zoom also isn't Meet, so for the purposes of this conversation that seems like an advantage actually?

I've watched Louis Rossmann's video on Jitsi a couple weeks ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nzt0tzsaWDE

He provides a nice piece of anecdata there: for one-on-one meetings, you can just send people a link and usually they just join. Even if they've sent a link to Zoom or Meet or whatever, you still can say “hey, join this instead” and it will work. I haven't tried this yet, but sounds plausible to me.

I believe google has intentionally made google maps near unusable in firefox. It's been consistently working worse and worse every year. I feel like about 8 years ago there used to be parity between them.

I rarely use google maps so haven't noticed. Only thing I really miss from OSM based services is street-view.

Its really bad, it takes almost a minute for the site to "stabilize", and even then, default text in the search bar is overlaid with whatever you're typing, a good 30 seconds to load a destination.

A chrome browser on the same device has maps behave almost instantaneously.

That really sounds like intentional.

I am using it regularly without issues on firefox so I am not sure what you are talking about and definitely not in the "unusable realm". Can you be more specific?

I think this example is weirdly informative to me.

I mostly use maps via an app (Apple or Google, they seem to be the same for basic use). Usually if I’m using a map, I’ll be using it in my car for navigation, so Firefox doesn’t even come to mind.

I suspect, on top of the “maybe it is internal apps” thing I mentioned at first, some of the really bad sites are the really interactive ones, I probably just use the app without even thinking of it.

I like to explore maps a lot, and its simply better on a full desktop screen compared to a phone.

So its a regular drag for me. If I really need to move quick to find something, I'll begrudgingly open chrome.

I'm surprised not to see more love for Librewolf here on HN.

It's just the latest Firefox release, recompiled without all the Mozilla telemetry, and with all the settings flipped to more secure/private defaults so all the tracking features are opt-in instead of opt-out.

Honestly I think the name of the project might be limiting its adoption. It’s sometimes annoying for the more technically inclined among us, but branding matters a lot. You need a name that’s snappy and memorable, which “Librewolf” is not.

Firefox is actually a pretty good example of good branding. It’s short, rolls off the tongue, has pleasant alliteration, and evokes mental imagery.

Unfortunately on the whole techies are absolutely poor at marketing, which is a skill all by itself.

I wonder how those ‘use GNU IceCat’ conversations went, if they ever happened.

It's behind by some weeks on major, contributing new features is difficult because most dev effort seems to be on integrating upstream. It is a great easy path for the less technical to 'more privacy', but pretty much if you are a developer just harden it yourself IMO.

I've been using FF as my default browser on desktop and mobile for at least 4 years. I've had zero issues. In fact, if I need to use their dev tools, I find them superior to chrome. I don't understand the shade Mozilla gets thrown at them.