They allowed google to push them around on some key things:
- no addons on mobile for more than a decade! for nothing other than google-told-them-not-to.
- moving to webextensions because "google have a better standard for cross browser extensions". Broke all extensions for a long time and google did not honor their promise from day one (e.g. try to install flutter debug extension on firefox)
- reverting features on devtools for no good reason or explanation (e.g. try to change code or update a variable value after hitting a break point on the debugger.)
- No decent search on bookmarks. they keep adding and removing the keyword field. etc.
- marketing. Like it or not, it is the reason badly informed people here, right next to this comment, claim it is slower. lol. marketing lies but it matters. q.e.d.
Oh, right, there was some five addons that were "allowed". How on earth could I have forgotten that for one decade we were allowed five addons! shame on me. All hail the benevolent mozilla overlords.
> Google never dictated any product decisions.
well, it was the official mozilla excuse (we have to prevent random code. we have to submit which addons will run for review on the store. etc). So it was either google dictating product decision or mozilla having other reasons and blaming google. One or the other.
chrome is only faster if you account for all the tricks, like ultra-aggressive pre-loading of links and using their own DNS instead. With those two things off it is slower today.
Also, most google properties were caught red handed slowing down on firefox, like meet and youtube.
I use Firefox because they don't threaten to shut down power user extensions every few years. I find it faster and more reliable because it doesn't chew all of my RAM and lead to swap / early-oom-kill.
I'm quite confused by folks' opinion of Firefox in this thread because my only problem with it is that maybe once per year (or less) I find an online checkout that is subtly broken in it (sometimes it's just my adblocker). But I have occasionally found sites that are inverse, only working in Firefox.
The web moves fast, but my experience with Passkeys on Firefox mobile (Android) has been subpar so far.
Can't even use it to authenticate to GitHub, etc
However I can somehow excuse it as Android support for Passkeys isn't that great either. I had to factory reset my phone yesterday and when Google asked me to authenticate my Google account I had to plug in my Yubikey (enrolled as a Passkey) and as soon as I plugged it in (couldn't do that one over NFC for some reason) it asked for the PIN, but since the Yubikey was plugged and detected as a keyboard it would hide the on-screen keyboard, effectively making it impossible to type in the PIN. Someone at Google has to test the UX once in a while..
Oh, I don't know, what about the ability to run WebXR apps without a shim through the pre-standardization WebVR API? You know, like you would need for a metaverse app.
The bigger issue is that Firefox hasn’t moved beyond what the browser market is right now.
Another way to say that is what browser capability does Firefox have that Chrome lacks.
I remember that pre-Chrome Firefox was leaps and bounds ahead of nearly every browser in the market (especially when factoring in extensions) other than maybe Opera.
But Firefox has lagged in many ways since then. About the only really great thing that has come out of Mozilla/Firefox in the last decade or so is possibly MDN (yeah, their documentation website, which is frankly awesome to the point that MS shut down their own and paid Mozilla to improve MDN).
Even setting aside functionality and features, there’s basic housekeeping stuff that Mozilla can do so much better at. For example, have you ever tried contributing to Firefox code? It’s awful. They have their own, largely unmaintained, bug tracking system that no one uses. And as much as I love mercurial and constantly whine about how it is superior to git and should have won out, it didn’t win out. Git won. And yet Firefox is still a multi gig Mercurial repo. And it’s a mercurial repo hosted on Mozilla’s own hnmaintained forge that no one is familiar with and knows how to use. Even if you don’t want to hop onto someone else’s proprietary forge, which is completely understandable and laudable even, then why not pick up something more modern like Gitea, and run your own instance and contribute back making Gitea or any other Gothub/Gitlab alternative better and making it easier for folks to contribute to Firefox code? Why is Firefox still 1 massive repo instead of breaking it down into multiple smaller components so, for example, web developers who can very well contribute to the Firefox user facing features which are largely written in HTML/JS don’t have to go mucking around with C builds?
There’s so much Firefox needs to do that appears not to have been focused on at all.
