Years ago, Firefox WAS my favourite browser. No longer (part 2)

Firefox Development
#1

The original post was locked (see original link at bottom), stating that if others needed assistance, they could open a new topic as the info in the link below was potentially outdated. I could be wrong, but not it’s not outdated, and was relevant for the last two years. I have personally used FF a few weeks back, and none of my complaints were ever addressed. In fact, I have uninstalled Firefox. Not because I hated Firefox, but because I hated what it HAS become.

It became a watered down version of Chrome, with a new inferior engine. Recently, I have started using Vivaldi (I also use Palemoon, which resembles the old, good, stable Gecko engine that Firefox used). Vivaldi is based on Chrome, but looks nothing like it and provides a far superior experience than either Chrome or Firefox ever did. So… if a forked version of Chrome does a better job at it than a well known company (Mozilla), there is an issue.

The biggest problems I have had with Firefox was how they screwed the noscript addon, forcing the developer to find one of the worst workarounds he could find. But, that is not the developer’s fault. It was that, or scrap it on Firefox altogether. My Point is that this has been true for many respectable addons. The FF dev team has not listened to the community, nor most importantly, to the addon devs who numbers in droves.

What do I want? An acknowledgement that they messed up. Who knows. For all I know, maybe they did (but who could tell? The discourse website is the worst form of forum I have EVER seen. So, maybe an apology has been buried somewhere deep down). In any case, what I want… what most of us want: The Gecko engine. And Firefox only addons in the spotlight, making Chrome users envy that platform; did you know that Palemoon offered its own adblock addon? As far as I know, FF has never offered that, but offered third party ones. What we do NOT want: a watered down version of Chrome, and we certainly do NOT want F-Us to the addons devs. Those people are amazing and have awesome app building abilities.

We want Mozilla to acknowledge their errors in their ways, and to apologize to the community on their main website, as well as an apology to every single addond dev out there.

At this rate, Firefox will sink. Chrome owns around 70% of the global browsing experience. Firefox has less than 10%. There is no comeback, no Rocky story, no underdog tale. Nothing. When Firefox once ruled with an iron fist with a great Gecko engine, Mozilla then ignored what its users wanted, and has failed to listen to what people said. Which is why Google took over.

There is a reason why Google is massive. At first, it was a damn search engine!!! A search engine. That is what Google was: WAS. Google now has a search engine, email inboxes, the Chrome browser, laptops, YouTube, Google Home (or whatever they call it) and SO much more. What did Mozilla start off it? A browser. What does Mozilla have now? A browser. It is unrealistic to believe that Mozilla has done anything concrete or positive. Hell, even Porsche has a laptop (I don’t know why), but a frigging car manufacturer has a branded laptop. What does Mozilla have? A browser. sigh

I have ZERO respect for Google. Sure, I have email accounts with them, but that was when they originally came out. It would be unrealistic to believe anyone would/could change their account and modify every single email on websites they’ve registered on. But aside from that (and YouTube which predates most people’s account creation), I do not trust Google, and never will. Firefox once held our trust, but no more. When IE/Edge is almost beating Firefox, there is a real problem. A bond that had once been formed was broken, and other browsers eventually took over that trust.

They offered innovative browsing experience, while not pretending they were better. Vivaldi knows it never will be Chrome, and it doesn’t pretend to, and gives its users a good browsing experience. To me, Firefox is dead, because Mozilla failed to listen to what WE want. Unless Firefox can give me the addons I want and how they were intended to be used, like when Gecko empowered the addon devs, there is no reason for me to use Firefox. What is an addon? It is an app made to make your experience better. Mozilla made this experience worse.

Here is the original link to the original discussion:

#2

In what way? Genuinely want to know so that we can improve it.

Firefox has tracking protection built-in. It’s not built to be an ad blocker, but it blocks ads as a result of how it, and ads, work. The Pale Moon ad blocker looks to be just a fork of AdBlock Plus.

I don’t think it’s reasonable to compare Mozilla to Google. Google is a multi-billion dollar company. Like any company, their main purpose is to deliver profits to their shareholders. They’ve been an ad company since their early days. Yes, they built a good search engine that gave them a platform to serve ads. This gave them the capital to experiment with a lot of other things.

Mozilla is a non-profit. Their goal is to further the Manifesto. There’s presumably not as much wiggle room to just throw these big new products every year just to see what’ll stick. Mozilla does, however, do a lot more than just a browser. They were the first investor in Rust. There’s Common Voice, the annual Privacy Not Included gift guide, Pocket. They’ve been a huge part of Let’s Encrypt… And then there’s all the advocacy.

lol. The Web would be a very different place if people just sat back and let Microsoft keep their monopoly.

Edge is installed by default on a vast majority of PCs sold. Chrome is installed on most Android phones.

What add-ons do you want, and how do you intend to use them?

1 Like
#3

To answer your questions:
The forum itself has so many subforums that it’s impossible to know where to post what where. On top of that, it’s impossible to know what to look for if you have an idea of what you’re looking for.

Ideally, we need a forum with main forums, like regular forums that have main subforums. Then, if you click on “General” for example, you have the ability see general content. Maybe another forum could be Feedback, and so on. If need be, you could have main forums with these types of titles, with sub-sub-forums. For example, under Feedback, you could have “General Feedback, Forum Feedback, Firefox Feedback, Technical Support” etc. Having main forums and then sub-sub-forums depends on how many topics you have. In your case, it may be helpful.

Concerning Palemoon’s adblock. Forks are ok. But, at least Palemoon as its own. Firefox never did. Don’t get me wrong, the third party ones are ok. But my point had nothing to do with the adblock, but the fact that another browser (Palemoon in this case), does not use a third party addon.

As for Google, yes they are a massive company. But they were just a Search engine at first. I mean, they got to that point because they had ideas. There is literally only of their ideas that massively failed: Google+. Because simply put, everyone has Facebook. In any case, Mozilla has one true product, Firefox. So, to say that is has become a third rate product is astounding - this is what Mozilla should be specialists in, but are not. I am completely baffled by this. I never would have believed that a decade ago.

True, Google is a FOR profit org. True, Mozilla is not. But, there is a reason why it’s still in existence. If truth be told, the products/services you mentioned, I have never heard of them… so I cannot say I am impressed. There is one exception, as I know your pocket. HOWEVER, I feel you missed the mark. Personally, I feel it should have been called something like the “Quantum Sync”. I never used it, for a reason. It just has no appeal to me. But a Quantum Sync would be pretty cool.

Concerning your comment about Microsoft. There are other OS out there. Not sure why mention MS in this case. Sure, most people use it, but there is Linux, Chromium and Apple (which technically are all Linux products). The matter of fact is that Firefox has never provides services I want to care about.

Yes, Edge is installed by default on PCs. Everyone knows that for a fact. BUT, there are still a lot of people buying Macbooks. They don’t have Edge lol. As for Android phones, they developed Android. So… you know, it makes sense they install their browser on there.

As for your last comment, these are my favourite addons I have used in the past and are must haves for everyone: Adblock, noscript, Rainbow, Stylish, Firebug, Greasemonkey, FEBE, Honey, and FB Purity (technically not an addon).

Speaking about some of them, if you take a look at Firebug. I honestly can say that the Inspect tool does NOT work as it was originally intended to. But on Palemoon for example, or on the Gecko version of FF, it is intuitive, and you can use it easily and select exactly what you want. On FF or even on Chrome for that matter, in either case, it’s impossible. Especially when you need to go deeper.

#4

Agreed. Oh how the mighty have fallen. Recently Firefox is doing this thing where I try to open it and nothing happens so I click it loads of times and then it opens a hundred windows, I mean what is this, internet explorer for windows xp?!? And no, it’s not my computer, since any other browser doesn’t do this. Just firefox. Rubbish.

#5

I support firefox mostly because it is the only browser (excluding Safari for not being cross platform) which prevents the Chromium monopoly. I do not want the term ‘browser’ to become ‘chrome’ as the term “image editing software” became ‘Photoshop’. Google will eventually make ‘web standards’ look like ‘chromium standards’. Just thinking of people making web apps for Chrome and not the web platform sorrows me. I would like the new Firefox with the new Servo engine stop Google from tucking inside the web platform. I would like to know Firefox devs’ opinion on this and do they worry about the same problem.

#6

I agree, I hate Chrome for the most part. All that crap with any browser (trying to imitate Chrome to a certain degree 10%+) enjoy breaking things, like forcing devs to create alternate versions of the addons just for Chrome or FF is ridiculous, or even preventing certain addons to work altogether. Which is why I stopped using Palemoon (I am now using Vivaldi, which impresses me a lot more than any other browsers I have used).

As for Edge… they are now Chrome based. So… there is pretty much no non-Chrome browsers at this point. At least, not that I would use.

Sure, I have gmail accounts like everyone, but my account pre-dates the official release of gmail all those years ago. So I will obviously still use that account, as well as Chrome when certain browsers fail to load certain websites.

As far as using anything Google based? I don’t use many of their other softwares/email, aside from Youtube (literally zero choice here :/) or Google Hangouts on the rare occasion I need to use it, but I certainly will never use their search engine ever again, nor their browser (unless I absolutely need to like if bank or government related, in which case, I often do not have the choice).

Back to FF, I loathe the fact they try so badly to imitate Chrome. The reason I preferred FF a decade ago was because it WAS awesome in every sense of the way for developers. Now, it’s utter garbage. How the hell am I supposed to verify lines of code on a website with the garbage tools that are used (not even just by FF, but even Chrome is guilty of this).

#7

I use firefox and will continue to do so. I am sure mozillla devs hate mimicking chrome and would like to have their own exclusive stuff in firefox.

In my opinion, there should be only one web browser and its code is not owned by any company like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla, etc. Something like a ‘web browser foundation’ can bring peace to the browser wars situation. I do not know how likely it is to happen.

BTW, Vivaldi is also Chromium based.

#8

I am aware that it is Chromium based. Key words: Chromium based, not Chrome. Chrome itself uses Chromium, but Chrome is not Chromium (despite being from Google). Chrome is static in essence, while Vivaldi’s browser is a massive improvement on the Chromium source code. Still, Vivaldi is not a Google product, and Google is NOT being paid for it. So I am therefore not using a Google product. On top of that, Vivaldi has its own email service that they offer. They are, in my opinion, a pretty good alternative to Google and/or Chrome.