You know you fucked up when even a traditionally hardcore Mozilla fan since the early 2000s like myself has had enuff and recently switched to Librewolf.
Firefox is fine. The people running it are not
Submitted 8 months ago by eli001@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/08/firefox_isnt_dead/?td=rt-3a
Comments
xeekei@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
nek0d3r@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
I’m with you. I was using Netscape way back and loved Firefox from its inception, and tried to convince everyone I knew to use it. Earlier this year I finally switched to Waterfox, and I haven’t looked back. I tried Librewolf first, and it was great, but they don’t have an app and that was a dealbreaker for me. Waterfox feels a lot like older Firefox UI-wise, and I love the tab containers.
xeekei@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
Librewolf has tab containers as well. So does Firefox. Unless Waterfox works differently somehow?
Baggie@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
Is it good so far?
xeekei@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
Yes! A bit annoying with no built in pw manager but I manage. It did show me how much of the problems which Iv hought were Gecko related were actually Firefox related, tho.
Basically it’s a faster, bluer, and less buggy Firefox. 🐺>🦊
buddascrayon@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Yeah, this is part of the new Reaganomics I like to call AIconomics. The goal isn’t to produce a good product, the goal to make something flashy that tech billionaires want to throw cash at. It’s not unlike crypto. Crypto has literally no actual value yet people are shitting money into bitcoins of every type in hopes that one will hit it big. Meanwhile tech billionaires keep minting new ones to entice new suckers every other week. The tech billionaires want you hooked on AI so you’ll give up your private info that they can sell to each other so they can cash in, the software companies are investing their time and resources into making AI LLMs in order to get tech billionaires to give them money. It’s a viscous capitalist circle. Only thing that will stop it is heavy regulation. But with Republicans in charge that will absolutely never happen. Trump practically made his entire cabinet out of billionaires and corporate shills. And too many Democrats gave them the thumb up, so don’t count of Dems doing a whole lot to stall the big tech chokehold on everything either.
BillyCrystalMeth@slrpnk.net 8 months ago
Check out enshittification and the rot economy. I feel like those two terms encompass pretty much what we are seeing these days
buddascrayon@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I’m quite aware of enshittifacation. And, though the word is new, the concept is not. It was most recently called “planned obsolescence” and I think older folks just called it “trashy new stuff” or something folksy like that. But that’s harder to apply to the amorphous entity that is the Internet and the economy that’s been built around it. Don’t fall for the doomsday cult of “it’s all just going to shit anyway so let’s only care about ourselves”. That’s how we got Baptists, Seventh Day Adventists, and Mormons (among so many others).
oo1@lemmings.world 8 months ago
There’s been investment bubbles, overshooting and disingenuous rent seeking in many economies before. It was temporarily reduced in many western economies by various FDR type policies in the '30s-'60s. The '70s and '80s were just the banks wresting back their freedom to implement market “rationality”. And we get the benefits ever since.
People do keep voting for it though so it is hard to argue they’re not satisfied. Even the ones who protest vote don’t seem to see the “investment” markets as any part of the problem; or as important at all. That’s either some pretty effective demagoguery, or some dumb fucking electorate.
e461h@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
The amount of power shareholders hold over every major (American) enterprise isn’t talked about in a way that presents a clear problem between increasingly expensive and shitty services, layoffs, anti-worker practices, political corruption and these shareholder groups. C-suite are part of this group but they’re also afraid of removal via hostile board takeovers and so easily justify acquiescing to shareholder demands. Perhaps it’s because the same investors hold the same sway over (American) media with the added benefit of using it to brand themselves as exceptional leaders. Lots to untangle there…
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Crypto has literally no actual value yet people are shitting money into bitcoins of every type in hopes that one will hit it big.
That’s not entirely correct. Black and white stones used in voting in someplace antique also have no actual value, but they substitute a vote.
BTC is used as a mechanism of exchange, like a decentralized bank.
Only thing that will stop it is heavy regulation.
Would you agree if someone told you that the only thing to resolve some political problem is heavy artillery?
Or would you doubt that the person talking has good idea of the problem and the solutions, offering the bluntest one?
“Regulation” of the “property rights protection” kind is needed. Providing a service presented as a good that doesn’t work without dancing to a certain tune is simply cheating, it’s theft. Providing a “communication platform” augmenting and weighing your words for recommendation system leading to some intended effect is cheating, theft and impersonation at the same time. These should be prosecuted. But that’s not heavy regulation, that’s an update to pretty light regulation.
Maybe also obligation for every big service on the Internet to have global identifiers and provide a global API exposing all its inner entities, be that posts or users or comments or reactions, with those global identifiers. So that you could export all of Facebook to a decentralized cache, for example. That’s heavy regulation, but also pretty reasonable, in line with old approaches to libraries, press and freedom of speech.
gian@lemmy.grys.it 8 months ago
Only thing that will stop it is heavy regulation.
Would you agree if someone told you that the only thing to resolve some political problem is heavy artillery?
Well, if everything else failed…
“Regulation” of the “property rights protection” kind is needed. Providing a service presented as a good that doesn’t work without dancing to a certain tune is simply cheating, it’s theft. Providing a “communication platform” augmenting and weighing your words for recommendation system leading to some intended effect is cheating, theft and impersonation at the same time. These should be prosecuted. But that’s not heavy regulation, that’s an update to pretty light regulation.
The problem with light regulation is that it would probably be too easy to workaround, not that a heavy regulation do not have the same problem btw, but more than the regulation itself is the punishment (and the certainty and timeliness of it) that is important.
Airowird@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 months ago
I’ld like to vote Cryptonimics as term, because it encompasses both the cryptic nature of the product, and the clear example of cryptocurrency.
Woht24@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Where do you think you are?
network_switch@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
One observer has been spectating and commentating on Mozilla since before it was a foundation – one of its original co-developers, Jamie Zawinksi
…
Zawinski has repeatedly said:
Now hear me out, but What If…? browser development was in the hands of some kind of nonprofit organization?
In my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:
- Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
- Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
- There is no 3.
This makes sense to me. I initially thought everything that Proton does, that should have been Mozilla. They should have been a collection of services to compete with like O365 and Google One. So I didn’t see a problem with Mozilla selling a VPN, even though if I remember right it being just a Mullvad rebrand.
Right now to me it looks like Proton is the closest mostly missing a web browser and a more cloud office offering.
Mozilla functioning more as the reference browser for others to finish packaging and supporting sounds good to me because Mozilla doesn’t seem to be great at attracting general users. Linux kernel devs do Linux kernel development and distros small and large do the integration with everything else needed for an operating system, branding, support, etc. Sounds like Mozilla should have been the core devs for a number of reference software projects. Firefox browser engine. Maybe an equivalent to Electron based on Servo. Shouldn’t have dropped Rust and been the steward for the reference Rust compiler. Could have been the steward for FirefoxOS/KaiOS/etc. Linux foundation stewards or contributes to all sorts of software projects not just the kernel
rekabis@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Markup pro tip: to have multiple separate lines appear as a single block quote, have the separating new lines have a quote signifier as well.
so this
is one giant
block quote
despite the newlines.
barryamelton@lemmy.world 8 months ago
That assumes though that the definition of web browser and its needed stack stays static.
What happens if we all browse the net primarily via VR then? The line is blurry, so is Mozilla org.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Mozilla functioning more as the reference browser for others to finish packaging and supporting sounds good to me because Mozilla doesn’t seem to be great at attracting general users or even picking what businesses to try and break into.
Unfortunately others are deciding on web standards mostly. Which makes it hard for it to keep up even if it were trying to be such.
Also Mozilla was kinda that, until it wasn’t - because they decided to go the other way and because apparently they lacked money (doesn’t look like that from their spending, but).
bigredcar@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Firefox still hasn’t fixed Bug 1938998 despite me reporting it multiple times. There’s a reason why Firefox is almost non existent on mobile. I’ve been using the internet for 26 years, and have used Mozilla based browsers since 2001, I want them to survive to the next era of the internet, but they are struggling to keep up. Opera and Edge already gave up their engines, Webkit and Blink are basically the same engine with different standards enabled, and Firefox is under 2% on some days on Statcounter. I feel that soon AI based browsers using their own AI-engine will probably take over the internet soon anyway.
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
that’s bullshit. spaces are not valid in URLs. they always need to be URL encoded. I see you complaining about such manual work, but that does not make sense, as it just shouldn’t happen!
where are you getting that URL? ddg has been inserting a + sign in place of any spaces for a very, very long time. this is not even a solved problem, it’s not a problem!
brot@feddit.org 8 months ago
There’s a reason why Firefox is almost non existent on mobile.
And the reason is monopoly abuse by the big tech companies. Apple is banning other browser engines from the app store and does not allow Firefox onto iPhones. Google is shipping its own Chrome with every Android device and they are breaking their own sites like YouTube or Gmail on purpose for Firefox users and push them to install Chrome. Microsoft is bundling Edge with Windows as a default browser and will aggressively enable it as a default browser during updates.
expr@programming.dev 8 months ago
I use Firefox on mobile all the time. Works fine for me. The fact that I get a block on mobile makes it a no-brainer to use over chrome.
AlfredoJohn@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
I have never encountered that bug, seems like an issue with the duck duck go not doing proper url encoding. I daily Firefox on mobile and its the best option by far with all the available extensions and of course working adblock
The_Decryptor@aussie.zone 8 months ago
It’s got nothing to do with the specific search engine, it’s Firefox thinking the URL itself is a search query and sending it as-is to the search engine.
I just tested it and it sent the URL to both DDG and to Google.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 8 months ago
I use it on mobile. It’s mostly OK tbh, and the addition of a working ad blocker means it’s far better than Chrome for me.
In fairness that is an invalid URL in my book, but it should at least be consistent across desktop and mobile, or at least tucked behind an option.
Stabbitha@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Web standards don’t care about “your book”, spaces in URLs are valid.
Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Sadly I am running into more and more things that don’t work on firefox. Stuff like medical record portals, financial websites for my companies retirement plan. Stuff I have little choice about. And most fail silently. They don’t say it is the browser. I don’t know how they are doing it, but google is winning the fight.
NoodlePoint@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Stuff like medical record portals, financial websites for my companies retirement plan. Stuff I have little choice about. And most fail silently.
I recall how South Korea literally painted itself into a corner for becoming too dependent on Internet Explorer after years of using it with a security implementation based entirely on ActiveX.
I’m currently using a user-agent switcher plugin. Allows me to spoof servers into believing I’m running a different browser.
Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I tried the spoofer on a few, and they still failed. I thought it was supposed to be all chromium under the hood, but somehow it’s different. And companies don’t test firefox, nor care.
swelter_spark@reddthat.com 8 months ago
If a site I have to use doesn’t work for no apparent reason, I e-mail the company’s Support. Let them sort it out, or provide another way I can do what I’m trying to do. Personally, I think a lot of the problems are from more and more websites integrating privacy-invading “features”, and FF interfering with their operation.
Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I talked to tech support once, they said it won’t get fixed, and there was no workaround. It was a platform type site. So I’m not their direct custom. A small business is. And the people at the small business have never heard of firefox. So they don’t even understand the problem.
underline960@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
When I asked a couple of developers who work on websites/webapps with a lot of moving parts, they said it was easiest to just test for chrome, since that’s what most people use.
It’s turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Stabbitha@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I switched from Chrome to Firefox at work recently once they added tab groups. A few parts of one of the web apps my team maintains straight up don’t work. I mentioned it in a meeting, received a full 10 seconds of silence before someone said “Well customers aren’t complaining…”
Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Yeah, I’m not a dev, but I work with dev teams. They all don’t test with firefox anymore. Not enough ROI according to the product managers.
okmko@lemmy.world 8 months ago
It’s ironic that I use Firefox personally but unfortunately we mostly did too when I did more front end work. Firefox would often render views differently compared to Chrome (Safari was also a shetshow) but we had to prioritize work ofc.
The thing is, as a pure guess, I would bet that it’s Chrome that’s not adhering to the web standards.
MinusPi@pawb.social 8 months ago
It’s so damn stupid. If your site works meaningfully differently in Firefox vs Chromium, you’re already doing something very, very wrong.
MITM0@lemmy.world 8 months ago
So what do we do ? Go to Chromium & expand it’s monopoly ?
FF forks have to become their own thing via Servo, at least until we get LadyBird
Yaztromo@lemmy.world 8 months ago
You could always use a WebKit-based browser. They’re still out there, and as they aren’t owned by a company that also sells web ads they are significantly more privacy focussed.
MITM0@lemmy.world 8 months ago
& they are ? BTW, Who disliked your non-controversial comment ?
SonOfAntenora@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I used basilisk for a short while. Very minimal browser, indeed.
But it’s chromium, so you do you. I personally favour anything that doesn’t bloat me. Early on I used opera back on a j2me device, there was also a browser with a nice data saving feature, I had access to all cricket news and cricket sport teams because it was heaviliy featured there, there was a squirrel as a logo but it’s all I remember.
aceshigh@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I just moved back to ff in November, because of ubo. I have to move again? Where to?
Ajen@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Did you read the article? It says Firefox is the best choice you have, and all of the criticism is directed at the organization’s leadership.
aceshigh@lemmy.world 8 months ago
… leadership impacts the product. Ff might be the best choice rn, but leadership will fuck it up.
MITM0@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Librewolf
pupbiru@aussie.zone 8 months ago
i’m running waterfox… it’s firefox, but with junk stripped out, and performance optimisations
there’s no real alternatives between chromium and firefox based engines, and chromium includes pretty much everything you’ve heard of except firefox
DreamlandLividity@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I run IronFox for Android and Librewolf on Desktop. Since they are both Firefox forks, migrating is not that bad.
fin@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
I don’t mean to disagree with you, but isn’t IronFox pretty slow? I was using it for like one to two weeks after I got an Android, but I switched to Bromite because of the horrible performance. Maybe it’s because of my devuce though (I’m running an 2018 second-hand Pixel 3a with EvoX)
MajesticElevator@lemmybefree.net 8 months ago
mozilla sucks
finitebanjo@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Called it
_cryptagion@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
You called what?
finitebanjo@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I haven’t trusted Mozilla for a long time. They’ve very shadily constructed a business model which is part for-profit corporation seperated from their other nonprofit component which appears to serve to purpose other than optics. Most of their funding comes from / came from Google. Their suits make a lot of terrible statements about emerging tech all the time.
bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
I can’t keep browser hopping. I want to stay with firefox. Please don’t get worse!
Ajen@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
The article says you should stick with Firefox. If you have time, I’d recommend reading the entire article!
rozodru@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Qutebrowser is my main and Lynx is my “feed” browser. Qutebrowser you don’t need anything else. it just works and you can script the thing to your hearts content.
For a long time I was using Floorp, and while I like floorp and the dev team behind it, I just stopped using it as my main. Sure it’s a fork of firefox and they’re at the whims of mozilla which lately has been clearly evident with the slow updates to floorp.
Qutebrowser just works. The dev for it is a nice dude who is easily accessible for help. the community for it is also very helpful. the integration with things like greasemonkey make scripting and customizing anything so painfully easy. I mean there’s a great script for it right now that completely 100% circumvents youtube ads and it’s been working for months straight without any need to update. It also meshes extremely well with my Bitwarden.
I’ll never use a different browser again.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 8 months ago
forks cant survive without firefox unfortunately
_cryptagion@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
Firefox is open source, it’s not going anywhere.
finitebanjo@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I’ve been very happy with Waterfox so far. Made with the Gecko Engine but not maintained by Mozilla.
Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
That’s a weird way of saying firefox is not fine.
LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 8 months ago
For clarity, Mozilla isn’t one thing. There’s Mozilla Corporation (profit) and the Mozilla Foundation (nonprofit). Firefox is a product of Mozilla Corporation. And yes, the need to make a profit is a bug not a feature.
neuracnu@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 months ago
For those holding out for a hero: ladybird.org
Ladybird is a brand-new browser & web engine. Driven by a web standards first approach, Ladybird aims to render the modern web with good performance, stability and security.
chunes@lemmy.world 8 months ago
The fact that they are now selling our data seems like both a browser problem and a leadership problem. If the browser were fine, we wouldn’t be seeing a moderate exodus to choices like Librewolf and Zen.
Pro@programming.dev 8 months ago
Both currently sucks.
cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone 8 months ago
mozilla and firefox need to learn more away from ai and more towards ethical not for profit governance. be the opposite of big tech and stand for the internet as a public utility and force or good and decency. instead of going ai bro, y'all need to stand up against racism and discrimination while pushing internet for everybody, free of profits.
underline960@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
It’s no longer the fault of long-term CEO Mitchell Baker, she of the six-million-bucks salary. She took the cash and left in February 2024. After the February 2024 layoffs that went with the “open source AI” announcement, in November, new boss Laura Chambers laid off another third of the staff, but somehow found the money to hire new executives.
Money is the problem. Not too little, but too much. Where there’s wealth, there’s a natural human desire to make more wealth. Ever since Firefox 1.0 in 2004, Firefox has never had to compete. It’s been attached like a mosquito to an artery to the Google cash firehose. The Reg noted it in 2007, and it made more the next year. We were dubious when Firefox turned five.
…
Mozilla’s leadership is directionless and flailing because it’s never had to do, or be, anything else. It’s never needed to know how to make a profit, because it never had to make a profit. It’s no wonder it has no real direction or vision or clue: it never needed them. It’s role-playing being a business.
rekabis@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
I have been using the same web browser, in terms of ideology, codebase and heritage, since the release of NCSA Mosaic.
That was 32 years ago. And holy f**ck, that dates me.
Sure, I dabbled around with others. There was the original Opera, back when Netscape cratered and the only other real option was IE. Opera’s tab behaviours made me install Tab Mix Plus for FF, and I still find that extension to be the second-most critical extension FF has, right after UBlock Origin.
And lately I took a shine to Vivaldi, but I have been weaning myself off of it once I realized that the Manifest v2 shutdown was unavoidable for it as well.
And the only reason why I even have Chromium is as a sandbox for any Google services I access and as a “naked” web browser for those websites who implement malware and spyware in the name of “website security”.
And of course, I also run forks, such as Librewolf and others, also with the appropriate anti-malware and anti-spyware add-ins. It can be useful having multiple web browsers up at once.
But my main will always be Firefox.