Comment by ksec

Comment by ksec 3 days ago

It is strange because the hate on Firefox does not fall in sync with the quality of Firefox. As if the product itself dont matter. Had it been Pre 2020 it may have made more sense.

Apart from a few years between IE 7 and Chrome, the past few years is the only time where I would rate Firefox as the best browser, especially for Multi Tab usage. Chrome back on top since 2024 after spending years working on memory efficiency as well as multi tab ( meaning tens to hundreds ) optimisation.

So while Mozilla in terms of management and their strategy ( or lack of ) has been the same, they get much of the hate because people now dislike Google and Chrome and needs a competitor. It is as if they dislike Google so they also dislike the Google sponsored Mozilla Firefox.

For all the site I visit, I have never had problem with Chrome, mostly because I guess everyone tested their website with it, much like old IE days. Where I used to have problems with Safari pre version 18, Firefox has always worked. I remember I have only encounter rendering issues once or twice in the past 3-4 years on Firefox.

There are lots of Webkit fixes landing in Safari 26. So 2025 may finally be the year where browser rendering difference is now at an acceptable minimum. Partly thanks to Interop. At least for the past 6 months I have yet to ran into issues on any of the three major browser. And this is progress.

kelnos 3 days ago

I don't hate Firefox. It is my daily driver. I hate that Firefox went from the dominant browser by market share, to the minor, insignificant player it is today.

I hate that Firefox is so irrelevant that most web devs don't test on it. For many sites that's fine, because web standards are web standards, and Firefox supports them quite well. But whenever I run across a broken site, or even one that mostly works, but gives me papercuts, and then fire up Chrome and see that it works fine there, a little bit of me cries inside.

Mozilla should be focusing a lot more on user acquisition, and on figuring out why so many of their users have left.

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immibis 3 days ago

The hate on Mozilla. This entire thread is people saying that Firefox is great, but Mozilla is shit. Why do you think that hate on Mozilla is the same as hate on Firefox?

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PaulDavisThe1st 3 days ago

> As if the product itself dont matter.

That's sort of the point. Firefox is an excellent, even amazing browser. But because of the way Mozilla has handled it, it's become largely an also-ran, and its continued existence seems highly dependent on its primary competitor in the browser space. That's just incompetent given the quality of Firefox.

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dralley 3 days ago

Chrome's marketing budget is nearly as large as Mozilla's entire budget. They spent a couple of years actively targeting Firefox users with Chrome ads on the frontpage of google.com, and got Adobe Flash and Java and most of the free antivirus solutions to auto-install Chrome and make it the default browser.
I have yet to hear anyone on HN present an argument for how Mozilla could effectively counter that onslaught. Certainly not without using methods that they would also have complained about. (Though nobody seems to hold Chrome's bloatware tactics against them for some reason).

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eloisant 3 days ago

The thing is that in 2020 it was too late. Firefox have been lagging behind Chrome for so long, that the headstart they had when Chrome was launched didn't matter.

For example, Chrome had process in tabs when it was released in 2008. Firefox had a ticket in bugzilla open by the community that had been ignored by Mozilla for years, before Chrome was released. Even when it was released, Mozilla's first reaction was "meh, we don't need that".

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