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I never notice that it is in any way slow, except for those sites that need infinity cpu on any browser, like jira.
What specifically is the issue? To my mind it quietly just gets on with things.
The Mozilla org continues to produce a very capable browser, but it's now 3rd or fourth fiddle on a stage their misteps helped orchestrate in their demotion.
Edit: clarification
Firefox is a little slow for an internal application we have that loads 40,000 rows of data into a grid but otherwise all our stuff works with it because I develop Firefox first and I think a few of us are all that really stands between Firefox and oblivion and probably are doing more work than a lot of the people they have on the payroll.
If you have specific sites that aren't working, please let us know and we can investigate and try to fix them.
The usual reporting channels are using https://webcompat.com or the "Report Broken Site" tool in the Firefox menu. Of course I"m also happy to take bug reports here if you (or anyone else) have them.
1. The inability to set a specific page for new tabs to open on. That is ridiculous.
2. The mobile version sucks, specifically because bookmarks are buried under an absurd number of menu levels. And they're also broken up (without user approval or any way to stop it) into "mobile" and "desktop" bookmarks. WHY? The entire point of syncing is to have them all the same.
I want to like Firefox. I went back to Firefox for the first time in decades last year and gave it up after a couple months because #2 was that annoying. So brain-dead.
Oh yeah, and another one was that "never remember history" does, in fact, remember history. What Firefox really does is "stop adding to history." And the bug report on it resulted in several YEARS of debate over how to "fix" it. The latest I saw is that they're actually NOT going to fix it, but rather add more text (somewhere) to say basically, "This doesn't do what you think it's going to do."
If fixing a defect like that requires years of committee back-and-forth, the product is finished.
I've been using the "New Tab Override" extension for almost a decade at this point. Sure, it would probably make sense to have as a baseline feature, but I installed it so long ago and it's continued working the whole time that it's not really something I think about anymore.
While it is meant to be an alternative to Chrome's profile switching, it is more a workaround than a complete replacement. I need entirely different sets of extensions for personal, work, and school environments, something containers can't do.
Firefox's actual profile support is beyond terrible. To launch a separate instance, Firefox requires many more clicks than Chrome, all within a Windows-2000-style UI. Not to mention that there are weird glitches in their implementation.
Firefox is not usable for me until they actually spend time improving their multiple profile support.
None of those have required me to install a particular extension..
Of course thats not to deny your experience!
The only time profiles ever come into it, for me, is using web driver, playwright, or whatever.
I guess maybe the usage stats dont support making the profile selector better.
But also, maybe its a thing they would accept a change for?
For those few applications where I really would need profiles I will just open a different browser, so I still keep Edge/Chrome/Opera around for that rare situation. I don't need something that complicates my life every single click but it is the whole ideology of the Google Economy that they want you to spend 1% of attention on things that matter to you and 99% on things that don't.
As you yourself mention, Firefox has actual profile support, which may not be as good as Chrome's, but at least compare like for like.
And Firefox now needs 2 click to switch profiles.
What's wrong with Firefox? There are several things Firefox does that it's annoying to live without in other browsers (video pop-outs, competent ad blocking, etc). Is there some core feature that's missing? I'm subjected to Edge at work and I couldn't tell you a single thing it does that I'd want FF to do.
> and our standards bodies as entities distinct from corporations
Ok, I buy that.
If you want to play "no trust to a 3rd party dev", you should not use Brave's adblocker either. Or at least turn off all the lists inside it, and use your own lists. Your security risk is in those stock lists.
It seems like every thread talking about Firefox always has someone asking that question, so if you search back you should find plenty of reasons. Unfortunately, it’s been my observation that valid and polite criticisms always get downvoted. I don’t understand why. It’s not like downvotes are going to make the problems disappear.
Most of us would like Firefox to succeed, and it’s none of our faults that Mozilla is constantly neglecting it and going off on wild goose projects which get promptly abandoned.
The question keeps getting asked because people say they have problems. Answers (if any come) tells everyone what the problem is for this one user that raised it.
In aggregate we can all see that the problems are not very real for the vast majority of users.
The biggest problem users actually face with using Firefox is that web devs don’t want to support more than one browser and they have picked Chrome now. Or IT departments have blessed one and only one browser on corporate machines and it is the one most corpoware developers build extensions for.
Chasing web standards is a second order problem and will not make the user experience better in a relevant manner for end users. If web developers want an open web, they have to work to support open browsers.
Yeah the criticism is not invalid, but it is also often half-relevant soapboxing and I would wager that is why it tends to get downvoted.
Debugging the extension on Chrome, it works great. On Firefox, it is nearly impossible. There are a litany of compatibility issues that make it "different" than Chrome, despite the extension being very much standards based. It is really frustrating and makes me dread getting bug reports.
To be fair, Safari is even worse and I haven't even touched Edge yet.
As much as I'd love to have options in the marketplace, standards based compatibility between offerings should be a top line requirement.
Yeah, it really undermines their ability to compromise user security and privacy.
I used something similar in the past. It was a legitimate use case for web usb which changed my mind on it quite a bit.
https://www.charachorder.com/ sells ergo keyboards and allows you to update their firmware directly in the website, through web usb. No local apps at all. Also an improvement in overall security from having to download some .exe / .dmg and running it locally.
Somebody also recently shared an awesome project which let's you use an usb printer regardless of your OS driver.
Half the thread impunes Mozilla for taking so much money from Google and imply that they are controlled opposition, and the other half gets upset when Mozilla doesn't implement every standard that Google tries to steamroll through the standards bodies because of objections to how they can be used for fingerprinting, or complains that the attempts at anti-fingerprinting break websites, etc.
Sometimes it's not even different people, it's the same people punching them for contradictory reasons.
Mozilla is not perfect but they get all the downsides of being methodical and privacy focused alongside none of the benefits. Everybody hates the "side projects" unless it's Rust, Servo, LetsEncrypt, Thunderbird, contributions to Opus/AVI, etc. and you can be sure they'll be criticized if they "focus" by touching investment in any of those by the same people.
Yeah, double standards at its max. Firefox inputs every privacy concerns for these APIs that Google puts 0 Vietnam Dong to care about users' privacy. And those people cry about why Firefox doesn't implement it.
That number can be down to any number of different factors on reddit itself. Having an autoplay video running, etc.
It was the same page, both on old.
Not saying there isn't a difference, but you'd need to measure (e.g.) a fresh install viewing only one tab with no extensions, etc.
As for HEVC, that particular licensing trash fire continues to burn bright. VVC had an opportunity to learn from the situation, and decided what they really wanted was a trash fire that burned even brighter.
So, we might be stuck with H264 for a little bit.
- PWA support on Linux
- better performance
- devtools should be able to handle sites with large amounts of js with sourcemaps
- fix a number of bugs that have been open for a long time
- don't lag behind standards as much (I'm not talking about things where they intentionally don't implement problematic "standards" pushed by google)
- make it feasible to embed gecko in other projects similar to how chromium is used by electron and webkit is used in "webviews"
I see Firefox now as the new Opera, a technically good browser making dubious extensions that no one asked for until it dies a slow, spiraling death. My plea is simply to not go down that road any further...
https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbolt/blob/main/docs/fa...
> Thunderbolt is funded through a grant from Mozilla.
Is there any way that that's not taking dollars out of the same organization that's funding Firefox or thunderbird?
This reads like a kid trying to give business advice to an adult. “You could do THIS, then THIS, it would also be cool if you did THAT but please don’t do THAT!!”
C’mon now.
The fact that is being run like one, albeit poorly is exactly the problem.
I don't think you realize the irony in calling my post childish here. "C'mon" I guess?
These AI products, along with all previous failed attempts, are just them trying to gain enough revenue to remove that dependency on Google.
> ... please stop working on projects distracting from the complex and necessary work of browser and web standards stewardship.
> Ditching any direct financial ties to Google or any other browser vendor is both important and necessary...
are inherently contradictory. If you do not want Mozilla to have revenue from search vendors that also have browsers, it has to come from somewhere else. Or are you suggesting they switch the default search engine back to Yahoo [0]?
I am not trying to defend the projects they have chosen to work on, but you have to understand that reducing dependence on Google is exactly why they are working on them [1].
[0] Even when they did that, it was for the US only, and Google was still the default for most of the world.
[1] Although in this case, this appears to come from the Thunderbird organization, so unrelated to the browser. Money is fungible, though.
In 2026 the rules to making a good browser are (1) already be a trillion dollar company, (2) use Chromium, (3) have some form of distribution lock-in over billions of devices. Otherwise you're cooked. Mozilla swims against the stream better than anyone.
Take look at Ladybird
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladybird_(web_browser)?wprov=s...
Ladybird will be dead in a few years.
I wouldn't discount ladybird or others simply because they haven't shipped their mvp just yet. They're closing in on a usable product. Maybe they never make it, but servo and others may. Saying they'll be dead in a few years isn't contributing much besides pessimism for anything but the status quo.
Besides, the one thing Mozilla could do to be relevant to 99.9% of web users is to move somewhere other San Francisco and turn their office their into a homeless shelter. They should go to Dublin or Frankfurt or Barcelona, anywhere.
Build your own browser engine and see how you can pay the devs to make them work on it.
The license or patch cycles of either project is irrelevant in this example. The money changing hands between the original product and it's competitor is the issue at stake here.
I'll spell it out in Mozilla's case:
If money is provided by a direct competitor, and that same money is _critical to the continued existence of the original project_ as it is in Mozilla's case, that project and it's staff now have a vested interest in avoiding _anything_ that could endanger that flow, as it now poses a very real existential risk. This is the game they play and the conflict of interest I'm merely pointing out.
Google gets to keep slowly eating the entire browser pie. Should regulators come calling, they can even point at Firefox and say "see, we're not monopolizing this space! there's Firefox over there" To me it appears as a sick form of puppetry.
What is the chromium of OS world but Linux doesn't depend on them?
I truly don't grok the point you're trying to make, but that's likely a me problem. Your points appear to all be asides to the core issue at hand.
Do you want people to pay to use Firefox?
Some quick hits just from reading recent release announcements from December '25 through April 26:
- Hardware acceleration for faster performance with PDFs - Expanded WebGPU support - Faster page loading with compression dictionaries - Deeper hardware integration for faster video playback on AMD hardware - Better GPU stability and performance on MacOS - Faster local translation
And I'm only picking out bits and pieces. "Web platform" improvements are so abundant that reproducing them from any single release would be a massive wall of text, but for a few examples just from one recent release:
>Service worker support for WebGPU has been added, making it available in all worker contexts. Service workers allow WebGPU to run in the background, which is particularly useful for extensions and other pages that can meaningfully share resources across multiple tabs and time periods.
>Firefox now supports the Iterator.zip() and Iterator.zipKeyed() methods from the joint iteration proposal. This allows zipping together underlying iterators into an iterator over values grouped by position, similar to zip in many other languages.
>Firefox now supports the Trusted Types API, which is primarily aimed at preventing cross-site scripting attacks.
>Firefox now supports the Sanitizer API, which provides new methods for HTML manipulation. The element.setHTML() method enables developers to insert HTML content similarly to element.innerHTML, but without the security vulnerabilities such as cross-site scripting (XSS). A complementary method, document.parseHTML(), is also available for parsing HTML safely.
And on and on it goes with APIs, CSS and so on, and that's every release, and that's still not covering feature requests and cosmetic updates, or the constant security updates.
Guys, this is millions of lines of code and thousands of patches every quarter. While you were reading about AI features or poorly worded terms of service, they studied the blade..er.. they worked on real performance improvements. It should be a scandal that anyone in the comment section gets away with claiming they're not working on anything.
Mozilla's continued existence in recent history has relied on money from their primary competitor to stay in operation. Some have argued that doing seemingly unrelated projects like the one announced today is an effort to buy their freedom as it were. I'm arguing that's a distraction and that something closer to Linux or wiki foundation model would allow them to concentrate their efforts where it makes the most sense, as their current governance model is inherently based on a conflict of interest.
Opera was also a technically excellent browser, and we've seen that that alone is not enough to justify its existence in the long term.
I implore ANYONE about to write a similar post to avail themselves of the search bar to not Groundhog Day us. Someone should do a "History of HNers railing ignorantly about Mozilla and Firefox" coffee table book; would link the buy page in my group chats.
I implore ANYONE at Mozilla org to please, please stop working on projects distracting from the complex and necessary work of browser and web standards stewardship. That alone should be the very reason for your continued existence if you have any. Focus on anything outside that purview will lead to the furthering of the, already painful and readily apparent, stagnation of your browser and our standards bodies as entities distinct from corporations.
Ditching any direct financial ties to Google or any other browser vendor is both important and necessary at this point, as this clearly represents a conflict of interest in your overall mission.
The web as a platform should belong to us all, not just the few corporate leaders of the day. I've watched in real time, saddened by the persistent errosion of our commons that is the web. I see it becoming nothing more than a corporate playground should trends continue, if it's not already too late. There may have been a time when your mission took precident over product launches of seemingly unrelated domains, but that is not what Ii observing today.
I think I speak for many in the community in these regards (please correct me if not the case.)