Mozilla is trying to innovate and bring new features to Firefox, but the browser continues to lose users. Despite these concerning market trends, the company is actively...

Can the open source browser get its mojo back before turning into history’s footnote?

  • hexagonwin@lemmy.todayEnglish
    3·
    14 days ago

    tbh it’s working really well enough now, i just wish they focus on technical stuff like optimization instead of messing with the UI and adding useless ai “features”

  • Eternal192@anarchist.nexusEnglish
    1·
    15 days ago

    Stop cramming AI into the browser and you might get some people back.

    Was on FF for years and then they announced AI so i went to WaterFox and have LibreWolf ready just in case WF starts fucking around.

    • unwarlikeExtortion@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      13 days ago

      Also, what’s with the pushing of the football world championship?

      I don’t care for it.

      I also want a browser that lets me browse the web and do what I want. Not what it decides to shill next.

      In someone’s eyes it might seem a small issue, but they add up.

      All the resources spent on designing, implementing and testing this one-off feature that’ll be scrapped in a few weeks because it’ll outlive its usefullness is an epic waste of time and resources.

      What I want is a chrome-style history page with good UX and not the history sidebar and modal from 20+ years ago.

      That is a much higher ask. But do it well and it’ll serve its purpose for another 20+ years. Not a few weeks.

      And it’ll actually be reasonably useful to users.

      • Eternal192@anarchist.nexusEnglish
        0·
        13 days ago

        Give it a bit more time and you’ll have plenty of choices.

        People are sick of the big tech crappy browsers and there are more and more open source alternatives and more and more FireFox forks that strip the crap and give you just the browser Fennec comes to mind and i bet you can ask here for options and opinions and you’ll get a ton of suggestions.

        • unwarlikeExtortion@lemmy.mlEnglish
          2·
          12 days ago

          Great suggestion!

          I’m a refugee from Reddit back from the API apocalypse days, so I might be suppsed to be an experienced Lemming, but I’m not.

          Nor here or on reddit do I know “how” to post. What community, what to say, how to say it. I only know how to hijack others’ comments and add in my own shitty take.

          I would very much like to up my browser game. I remember trying to get a userchrome that emulates the 2016-era Chrome tabs, but I had little luck. I managed to make something myself by splicing together some github repos I found, but that was a long time ago and that install is long gone.

          Oh, and to avoid any ambiguity: I switched completely from Reddit onto here in protest during the apocalypse.

    • douglasg14b@lemmy.worldEnglish
      01·
      15 days ago

      I hope you know that Waterfox and LibreWolf have their fate tied to Firefox, right?

      These aren’t hard forks. They consume the engineering efforts of Firefox itself in order to stay relevant. They aren’t developing their own solutions to web standards and CVE patches, except in extreme circumstances.

      If Mozilla loses funding for their engineering organization, which is the grand majority of their entire budget, Firefox stops keeping up to date with web standards and security patches and rapidly falls behind. Leaving just Chrome as the only option, or Safari, but I know none of us want to choose Safari.

      All the soft forks go with it.

      Now, if all the soft forks abandoned their own projects in order to pool their efforts together to maintain a single fork in this scenario, then they might make some success in staving off irrelevancy, which, instead of becoming irrelevant in the course of a couple of years, might take half a decade instead. Which does leave enough time to cobble together enough contributors and a large enough project to keep it afloat.

      But I highly doubt that all these various forks will pool their engineering efforts into a single project, at least not immediately and at least not willingly.

      • wyldrstallyns@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        01·
        15 days ago

        On the off-chance you have some experience with of, what’s your take on Vivaldi, currently?

        (edit: super curious, but how recent of an ex-reddirper would one have to be to downvote a simple request for honest input in a place where they don’t matter? Asking for a friend.)

  • Jo Miran@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    15 days ago

    The Firefox forks are just so damned good. Zen, Librewolf, and Waterfox are just great.

    • douglasg14b@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      15 days ago

      This assumes a broad misunderstanding I keep seeing here on Lemmy.

      These forks rely heavily on Firefox core engineering and development, which, if Firefox dies off, they will no longer have access to, thus relegating them to history as well.

      These are not hard forks. These are forks that maintain release parity with Firefox itself, absorbing the grand majority of all engineering efforts into Firefox into their own projects, meaning they are strongly tied to Firefox’s success or demise. And “strongly” is an understatement. We’re talking 95 to 99% of Firefox engineering efforts are consumed by these forks.

      So somewhere from 1 to 5% of the engineering effort these forks rely on to continue to stay relevant, secure, performant, and up to modern web standards is provided by their contributors.

      Keeping Firefox up-to-date with web standards and security is an engineering nightmare. I mean, just look at Safari.

      Having forks is awesome, but sitting back on our haunches, believing that they are safe, independent browser developments is absurd.

      • chloroken@lemmy.mlEnglish
        02·
        15 days ago

        Downstream. WaterFox et. al. are downstream of Firefox. “Soft” and “hard” forks are not a thing.

        • 4am@lemmy.zipEnglish
          0·
          15 days ago

          A hard fork means that a project forks and then doesn’t take upstream patches any longer. That absolutely happens all the time. Not for the Firefox downstreams, which are all soft forks, but those concepts are a thing.

  • HotsauceHurricane@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    15 days ago

    Really hoping for the best for this browser. They absolutely need to drop ai as well as reassess their budget distribution. They are vastly overpaying their ceo.

    • The D Quuuuuill@slrpnk.netEnglish
      1·
      13 days ago

      For real. Firefox should be positioning itself as the only real alternative to the vast Blink-based “It’s all just pallet swapped Chrome” ecosystem but every opportunity Google gives them to do that instead of actually positioning themselves as an alternative, they shoot themselves in the foot. It’s gotten bad enough that people who advocated for Firefox for years have thrown their hands up in the air, given up, and moved on to other browsers without any so much hope to be positioned as a real alternative like Waterfox and Servo. I don’t think it’s being talked about enough how Mozilla has squandered all of the good will they ever had when at one point it was advocates like us who pushed it to become the only real alternative to Microsoft Internet Explorer. We were able to overthrow a browser with just as much reach into market share as Google Chrome has now, but in order to do that we need an alternative browser that is actually factually an alternative. And Mozilla just isn’t giving us one at this point

  • dil@piefed.zipEnglish
    0·
    15 days ago

    I love zenbrowser, just try it and you’ll see why, I’ve left too many comments in the past detailing it, if you like swapping workspaces and having them organized without pausing all of your tabs everytime, and having essential tabs that stick around no matter what for easy access, like im jut rambling idk, it made me enjoy browsing the web again since I don’t lose tabs anymore, everything is organized in folders, pinned tabs, or essential tabs

    • KSP Atlas@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      0·
      15 days ago

      I actually ended up switching from Firefox to Chromium, Chromium overall is just faster and nicer to use (also a bit more secure I think, if it matters)

      Ublock origin and mv3 aren’t as much of an issue as I assumed at first, ubo lite works fine