Tab groups is pretty useful. My partner refused to try firefox in the past because it didn't have tab groups and now they're able to use it as their main browser.
We've been asking for a good JS and HTML engine, faster than what Firefox uses, and for better compatibility with websites (there are webs that don't work properly with Firefox). And to not put the Manifest V3 into Firefox (which it's done already, besides we still have uBlock Origin working as intended, for now, because nobody knows what's going to happen with that in the future).
And I think that's way more important that being able to group tabs.
For now, there isn't an alternative. Maybe a Pixel phone and GrapheneOS with the sandboxed Play Store would be the only choice, but for now, nobody knows.
That was my answer as well. Anonymity is not only "considered OK", it is a fundamental human right that must be guaranteed and protected unless there's a real need to violate the person's privacy.
The fact the question was phrased in that way is disturbing. How far the loss of personal freedom has been normalized. Like the term "side loading", it's an insult to general-purpose computing.
The day people stop inventing stuff like that and they put the same effort in do really good, quality code... That day, we might start having decent software and not Electron or React apps everywhere...
God bless old times when programmers cared about quality rather than stuff like this... "vive coding"... My God...
There are still plenty of programmers that care about quality rather than stuff like vibe coding. Most programmers I know don't take vibe coding (defined as making an app with 100% llm generated code and not looking at the code at all) too seriously. They still care about the quality of the code they write.
So... Here's an idea: stop wasting time and money on things like that, listen to the community, hire engineers, and make a browser that can be at the same level as Chrome. We already told you what we want and need, no need to keep asking.
Mozilla and the story on "How to waste money and resources" is getting tiresome at this point.
It's wild how often Mozilla asks for feedback, gets clear answers (less bloat, better performance, fix regressions), and then drops something like another random experiment no one asked for
The market often rewards bloat (more features) not technical excellence. I think a big marketing push or pre-install partnership would help them a lot. Their marketshare is now so low that web developers unironically state “Best viewed in Google Chrome” like it’s 2003 when IE6 had 95% marketshare.
Maybe because as from another comment: "Firefox is an antitrust litigation sponge". They also absorb some useful users feedback. But do they have a real intention to increase market share (which could be done easily)? They are well paid - see in other comments how much its CEO is earning. So, "antitrust litigation sponge" sounds plausible?
Mozilla develops a better browser than Chrome in a lot of ways, and they do it with a tiny fraction of their budget. I would not describe that as "money wasting".
To be fair, most of Chrome’s budget is spent on developing ever more complex web standards to stay ahead of the competition, and to make sure no one will ever catch up to them.
Just two personal experiences of why the quality of Firefox is far from Chromium's: downloads, and creating an extension.
A few years ago, they changed their interface for downloading. This introduced more than a dozen of bugs. Some were cosmetic, e.g. hover was the same color as foreground. Some were rare but caused a file loss. Some were performance related, e.g. deleting the history of downloads could take a minute with no visible change until the end. Most of these regressions are now fixed, but that made me lose confidence in the quality of Firefox.
This year, I had to develop a cross-platform extension for Chrome and Firefox. I started using Mozilla Documentation Network, but many pages seemed unmaintained. The relationship with extensionworkshop.com is unclear. The status of manifest v3 is poorly documented (most pages are for v2 only). The page about the compatibility with Chrome is incomplete. After a few struggles, I switched to Google's documentation. Then I lost time and energy on a severe bug with the Firefox tool that publishes web-extensions: https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/webexterror-unsupported-file...
So just think how much greater the browser could be if Mozilla put more of the money they get into improving Firefox instead of into pointless UI redesigns that only slow things down, or breaking existing functionality - not to mention all the other frivolous nonsense they seem preoccupied with instead of being a credible competitor to Google.
With how they've been in recent years it's almost as if they're trying to be inept competition, as if they're being paid by Google to suck - in fact, that is all but established by now.
One man's "useless UI redesigns" is another man's feature.
Every person I talk to has a completely different idea of what Mozilla should be doing. Keep pocket, or pocket is stupid, or pocket is the second coming of Christ, or the VPN is stupid, or the VPN is a revenue stream not dependent on Google, or whatever fucking bullshit.
Firefox does not "suck" - this is a legitimate psyop. It has all the features of Chrome minus the horrendous privacy violations. It has all the performance of Chrome, too.
I mean, what are we missing? Web USB? Give me a fucking break.
If you really, really need Web USB then fine - use Google Chrome. You win. 99.99% of people I've ever talked to don't even know what Web USB is, let alone do they rely on it.
.. and about a thousand less privacy violations. Plus significantly less ties to Google.
Even chromium-based web browsers are tightly coupled to Google. They rely on them for 99.99% of their source code. Mozilla just uses Google as the default search engine.
If I had to estimate, the developer time required for Mozilla to change the default search engine is ~.5 hours. In order for, say, Brave to not be dependent on Google, they'd have to spend ~100,000 dev hours. Because, you know, they'd have to completely develop a new web browser.
> > stop wasting time and money on things like that
> What do you mean? The AMA?
I’m not the parent but it’s not the AMA, it’s paying multi-million dollar salaries to CEOs that layoff engineers and divert money to political campaigning.
We could have had a Servo based Firefox by now if the team hadn't been canned in 2020 instead of Mitchell Baker giving herself a $3 million pay increase every year.
It's shameful to then come cap in hand for donations after that.
I had an email from Mozilla last week on how to prepare my phone for participation in violent political demonstrations.
I have to ask myself, what does this have to do with web browsers?
Mozilla has already millions of dollars than can be put into Firefox's development instead of the business they're getting into. It doesn't need even more money, it just needs to put part of it into engineers who would make Firefox what we need.
