Management blabla without any real outcome as always.
People, THIS is where your donations go to.
Much better than management blabla with really bad outcomes as is the norm, though 🤷
I stopped donating a long time ago, mozilla has proved time and time again to squander it. Firefox is on the brink of death despite having a large amount of funding available, and they keep focusing on other trash endeavors.
Kinda love it how Mozilla went from being about a good browser to a corporate sponge for Google money. Truly enshittified.
I’m pretty sure they are not making much in the way of money. That’s part of the problem.
They make lots of money, Mozilla publishes their tax returns. Between mozilla nonprofit and mozilla corp they are very healthy in funds. In 2021 mozilla foundation, and the corporates it owns, had 1.1 billion USD in assets
I looked at this at first and thought “What? 1.3 million? That’s crazy low what the heck” then I saw “in thousands” and I can’t help but agree.
500 million per year from Google is “not much”? Or are you referring to something else?
Well, think of the poor CEO… /s
that’s cool, try making a better browser tho
In which ways do you feel Firefox should be improved and what would you prioritise?
Honestly I think that desktop FF is pretty good, with only minor annoyances like:
- default tabs need to he hidden through CSS
- setting a page to always open in a container means that, if you want to open it in a different container, you need to change that default container
Mobile FF though? Soo bad, the only redeeming quality is that you can install ublock origin.
To be fair, being able to install uBlock Origin immediately makes it one of the best mobile browsers for that feature alone.
Please share your thoughts on mobile Firefox as that’s my primary browser. My issues are
- lack of tab grouping
- tabs are too easy to swipe away
- you can swipe tabs away when in OS overview mode
- no mechanism to close duplicate tabs
- lack of Material Design 3 (Material You)
- inability to disable password management
- everything about Places, it feels like history is always the lowest priority and the reality is that I want history as the top priority, synchronized tabs second and search engine suggestions last
- lack of pinned tabs in the tabs tray
- getting to picture in picture is stupid
- now, the iOS-ification of the design
- edit: forgot but terrible share sheet.
- open tabs can take 20+s to load a cached version, when a full refresh takes 1-2s
- when you open FF, you spin a wheel for what screen will be shown
- limited extension selection
- pages are randomly zoomed in
- closed tabs reopen after you relaunch FF (I’ve had situations where I’d close the same exact tab 20+ times)
- tab sync is janky as hell (doesn’t show all open tabs, sometimes you need to send the same tab 5 times before you get notifications for all of them at the same time)
- it sometimes saves your position on the pages, but sometimes not
That’s what I can think off the top of my head.
when you open FF, you spin a wheel for what screen will be shown
Not sure if it’s helpful, but you know there’s an option for that right? Settings -> Homepage
Other than that, a few of your issues sound like memory issues, so hopefully they can slim the browser down a bit to improve things for you. But your last item reminded me of this bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1872511
Not sure if it’s helpful, but you know there’s an option for that right? Settings -> Homepage
Thanks, but I’m pretty sure it’s bugged. I’ve had FF open, receive a call, go back to FF, see the homepage instead of the last tab.
Other than that, a few of your issues sound like memory issues, so hopefully they can slim the browser down a bit to improve things for you.
I really need to get a new phone, 2gb of RAM is not enough, but I’m having a really hard time finding a pixel in my country.
But your last item reminded me of this bug
I think that’s for tab selection. I forgot to list that as well, I’ve got 100+ tabs open and it occasionally jumps to showing the first instead of the last one.
What I meant is: you read an article, and when you’re halfway through you close FF. When you open it, it might continue from where you left off, or it might show you the top of the page.
There are lots of ways I could see it happening. Firefox is still heavy on resources on low end systems. GPU is heavy, it has poor hwdec support on things like v4l2 last time I tried it (though they do at least support it now). They don’t push the envelope in any way. Firefox STILL doesn’t have JXL support despite safari supporting it (various forks of firefox support it thanks to patches firefox refuses to look at). HEVC support when platform support is available would be nice too. And these are just the issues off the top of my head.
What to prioritize? all of it. They have enough resources to do so.
Which browsers are better on low end systems and is there a trade-off for optimising for lower end systems?
They have enough resources to do so.
They actually don’t
Which browsers are better on low end systems and is there a trade-off for optimising for lower end systems?
Chromium has preformed better on every single one of my systems, from core2duo and pentium linux machines, Intel Atom machines, Old arm devices. Chromium performs better in the forms of
- higher fps in youtube at higher resolutions
- greater FPS in emulator.js games
- Greater battery life on mobile devices during jetstream2 test looping https://browserbench.org/
They actually don’t
They do, in their 2022 report, mozilla foundation and corporations had a large amount of both total assets and liquid cash. I’ll let the financial statement do the talking here
They have the resources, they just actively refuse to use them for firefox.
https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-2022-fs-final-0908.pdf
You know Librewolf?
Just do that
My only gripe about this is that they’re not committed to being open. Literally every link from the UX team is locked behind a login.
No matter how stupid the management is, I’ll still use FF over Chrome. Even so, Mozilla is lost in their own bullshit. They can’t get it through their thick skulls that the browser isn’t the destination, it the means to getting there.
Pretty please fuck off Mozilla, I always click on this bullshit in trepidation it’s another mandatory pocket or something, I am actually happy these days when it’s just this milquetoast corporate rolplaying
We plan to run programmatic research to reduce risk in decision-making so that users benefit when our stakeholders translate user insights into product development.
What the hell is that supposed to mean?
It means they want to use telemetry to understand which features are used, to change how they deploy features. Since it’s related to investment I wouldn’t be surprised if it means more intrusive stuff like Pocket rather than their subtly irritating changes to bookmarks being worked out better.
I don’t need feature developement streamlining based on user surveillance. I need options to disable features which are built based on a serious user feedback system if I don’t need them.
Best thing about Floorp is how it lets you swap between layouts of the browser itself to me
You got me curious, but now I’m puzzled:
The source code for Floorp is mostly public
What does it mean by “mostly”?
You’re gonna want librewolf most likely
Fake open source idk. Look i put up with a lot of shit from cutting edge japanese developers
Sounds like extremely veiled speak for “we are going to test things out on random users to see how much bullshit they can accept”
They’re going to be doing more A/B testing.
I mean it pretty clearly says that User insights will be put into development and user benefit is first.
…will that happen? Well. Probably not. But I hope so.
It’s similar to AI regurgitated crap.
They’re going to use LLMs to analyse user usage data to make things better?
I dont think LLMs are used for that
What the Firefox User Research team is doing: Translating team-focused product development insights into human-centered global public expert strategic knowledge to reduce risk.
What I would rather see it do: Whatever is necessary to get the url bar selection behaviour on linux fixed.
They really could use some better leadership
People use Firefox because it isn’t Chrome. That’s the biggest usecase.
What a silly thing to stay.
Crafting a team mission statement was much less of an exercise in wordsmithing than I might have assumed. Instead, it was an exercise in aligning on the bigger questions of why we exist and who benefits from our work. I walked away with a better understanding of the value our team brings to Mozilla, a clearer way to articulate how our work ladders up to the organization’s mission, and a deeper appreciation for the individual perspectives of our team members.
This is exactly what “better leadership” looks like, and it’s how Firefox will remain a compelling alternative to Chrome.
What they need is a business plan. Right now they aren’t inspiring confidence
Nonsense, they have a business plan, it’s just not what you personally would like to see.
It’s just plain arrogant to presume you know better than an entire team of people with the tech and business acumen to develop a “business plan”.
At least any time they waste workshopping pointless mission statements is time they can’t spend inflicting UX pseudo-science on us.
