As Firefox turns 20, Mozilla ponders how to restore it to its former glory

&gt; What I love about Firefox is that it really provides users with an alternative choice of a browser that is just genuinely designed for them<p>they can&#x27;t seriously think this can they?<p>who was asking for telemetry, mr robot, pocket, VPN ads, &quot;use our email&quot; (relay) ads, &quot;check your accounts!!&quot; (monitor) ads and built-in AI slop generators<p>and soon, more built-in ads: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;advertising&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;advertising&#x2F;</a><p>I don&#x27;t think a single user wanted any of that<p>at least Chrome doesn&#x27;t actually show you ads directly throughout the browser&#x27;s interface

With the manifest v3 debacle they have a golden opportunity in their hands. They can promoting the fact that they work for you rather than advertisers, they could explain what true privacy looks like, regardless of what device you&#x27;re using.<p>Firefox on Android used to be a really good product--it supported basically every popular extension there was for desktop, then in 2018-2019 they appeared to start a new revamped project for some reason. I downloaded the beta for it--it was rough around the corners, it had a quite short whitelist of extensions, most of the functionalities were absent, but there were a few improvements here and there. And out of nowhere, a few weeks later they made it the default.<p>It&#x27;s been way too long and the app still feels unfinished. It crashes way too much and I can&#x27;t even move around the icons for the websites in the start page. They&#x27;ve enabled the list of extensions recently but it&#x27;s a mess. I only use it since it&#x27;s where I can have uBlock origin.<p>It feels that every couple of years they have a golden opportunity, but somehow they never seem to know what to do.

This is silly. Just pay the CEO more money, cut the dev team in half, and the problem will fix itself.

It&#x27;s kinda over. Firefox is a dying browser on desktop, desktop is a shrinking platform, and mobile is app-based, not browser-based. Mozilla almost exists because of the endowment effect. If it didn&#x27;t exist today, would someone fork Chromium or port Konqueror to Windows?<p>Mozilla&#x27;s leadership might have even made the right move by dabbling in other platforms and with other value propositions, but it neglected the browser to the point that it doesn&#x27;t matter.<p>And I&#x27;m still a Firefox user.

Become a non-profit. If GNOME can alienate all of its users yet still be the de facto default desktop Mozilla can figure out how to do whatever everyone else is doing abd just do it.

I still use Firefox, but on macOS it&#x27;s a second class citizen. There was a HN post months ago about Safari being the new &quot;IE6&quot; (sorry, can&#x27;t find that one). But when it comes to UI, on macOS, Firefox is the new IE6. And people see the UI, and web devs test against Safari even with its flaws, so they experience is still good.<p>In general, my UI gripes:<p>* Bookmarks dialog from the 90s, various usability issues<p>* History dialog, same<p>* Lack of Tab Groups, still, and no plugin has given me the experience as Safari<p>* Profile switcher UI is also terrible<p>* Still no vertical tabs<p>* Still nothing like Safari &quot;tab overview&quot;<p>* Miscellaneous UX fails like not being able to hover over a Tab preview and close it without switching to it (like the &#x27;x&#x27; on List All Tabs) or close a tab by hovering over a persistent x without switching to it<p>* Create bookmark dialog is limited so a small size and can&#x27;t fit more than a few location folder entries<p>* macOS : after all these years, still can&#x27;t full-screen like a normal macOS app (all app bar toolbars &#x2F; chrome shift when mouse)<p>I can&#x27;t remember an interesting UI feature in at least several years.

Dupe of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42096225">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42096225</a>

The only site that runs better in chrome for me is YouTube.<p>I use Firefox on my android almost completely because the URL bar is at the bottom, which is simply way better.<p>And also reader mode is awesome.<p>Plus I want to support Mozilla.

Firefox&#x27;s problem seems to be that it&#x27;s roughly as good as Chrome, with some weird advertising partnerships thrown in the mix. Yes, you can disable it, but—barring massive changes in public sentiment toward Chrome&#x2F;Google—the browser needs to be more than &quot;as good as&quot; the market leader.<p>What that looks like, I don&#x27;t know. Maybe Arc (or Zen, which is like Arc for Gecko) has the right idea.

The last few times I have tried Firefox, it has been a pretty bad experience.<p>Some websites are inexplicably slow. Sometimes the whole UI freezes up for half a second.<p>Some of it can be explained by Google and other giants not testing their stuff on Firefox. But it really does seem like they don&#x27;t have enough development bandwidth to keep up with the modern web.

Firefox got market share by having the best debugging experience, which I don&#x27;t think it has anymore.<p>When developers had an incentive to develop Firefox-first, then users had a better experience using it.

Just ask the people what they want. Companies and governments do NOT send out enough effective polls.

Maybe it’s time that they stop trying to follow and lead.<p>What about supporting a better hypertext meta language under a `moz:` protocol that’s only guaranteed to work with their browser?

Firefox needs to deliver a privacy focused browser with fantastic security and push open standards. This alone delivers more than enough value to _everyone_ for every cause.<p>It seems though Mozilla fell into the “go woke go broke” trap and lost focus on their core mission.