A leading web browser can not be built and maintained by volunteers.

I don't think volunteering is going to cut it. Big orgs have big money and public commons are just targets to be controlled exploited.

mozilla employs 750 people and has a 1/2Bn dollar deal with Google and still their browser is absolute hot garbage. i think volunteering won't cut it.

Because Windows doesn't go open-source and others can't build their OS from windows like chromium. With OS, there are no open source kernels that are actively maintained and security-fix bump every month by full time staff of giant corporation. With browsers, devs already have an open source engine with most of the work and build are from full-time staff of a giant corporation, and then they just lazily build "their own" browsers upon that and brag on social media.

Build your own browser engine and see how you can pay the devs to make them work on it.

What are the other competing browsers? There's chrome(and the derivatives), safari, firefox? safari exists only because of ios lockin. Aren't most other browsers an increasingly smaller share? Genuine question.

One difference I've seen with FF vs Chrome is when finding the events to bind to each element. In FF, the event tag on the element is clickable and gives you the name and the line number in the JS file. It makes finding the code very easy. I have not seen that in Chrome. I rarely use Chrome, so this one thing leads me to saying FF's DevTools are better, at least for me and how I use them.

Funny, I have it exactly the other way around!

I definitely have not had that experience, although use FF for personal, various work, and various educational places.

None of those have required me to install a particular extension..

Of course thats not to deny your experience!

The only time profiles ever come into it, for me, is using web driver, playwright, or whatever.

I guess maybe the usage stats dont support making the profile selector better.

But also, maybe its a thing they would accept a change for?

Myself the profile support is the absolute worst thing about Chrome. I just want to log into some web site, I don't want to fight with the profiles to get things done.

For those few applications where I really would need profiles I will just open a different browser, so I still keep Edge/Chrome/Opera around for that rare situation. I don't need something that complicates my life every single click but it is the whole ideology of the Google Economy that they want you to spend 1% of attention on things that matter to you and 99% on things that don't.

This is not meant to be an alternative for Chrome's profile switching. It's a different use case entirely.

As you yourself mention, Firefox has actual profile support, which may not be as good as Chrome's, but at least compare like for like.

Firefox has a new Chrome-like profiles support as of v149.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management

LMFAO. Containers are not for profiles-purpose. Everyone who needs profiles know this.

And Firefox now needs 2 click to switch profiles.

> The inability to set a specific page for new tabs to open on. That is ridiculous.

I've been using the "New Tab Override" extension for almost a decade at this point. Sure, it would probably make sense to have as a baseline feature, but I installed it so long ago and it's continued working the whole time that it's not really something I think about anymore.

WebSerial just landed in Firefox nightly! https://bsky.app/profile/paulusschoutsen.nl/post/3mjfdx3ujta...

It is so frustrating how every thread about Mozilla has people getting upset about contradictory things.

Half the thread impunes Mozilla for taking so much money from Google and imply that they are controlled opposition, and the other half gets upset when Mozilla doesn't implement every standard that Google tries to steamroll through the standards bodies because of objections to how they can be used for fingerprinting, or complains that the attempts at anti-fingerprinting break websites, etc.

Sometimes it's not even different people, it's the same people punching them for contradictory reasons.

Mozilla is not perfect but they get all the downsides of being methodical and privacy focused alongside none of the benefits. Everybody hates the "side projects" unless it's Rust, Servo, LetsEncrypt, Thunderbird, contributions to Opus/AVI, etc. and you can be sure they'll be criticized if they "focus" by touching investment in any of those by the same people.

Okay, I'll give you that. Granted, I've used webUSB exactly twice, once with a Flipper zero and once with a mechanical keyboard. If that's the worst of it, the parent comment calling it "painful and immediately apparent" seems a bit dramatic to me.

> It just puts them behind for some stuff.

Yeah, it really undermines their ability to compromise user security and privacy.

Firefox on iOS isn't really a Firefox because Apple doesn't allow alternative browsers. It's a Safari skin.

How many milliseconds do you think this page took to render? I usually click and it's already done.

I don't care about benchmarks.

The standards used to be there. Chrome decided they made ad blocking too easy and unilaterally changed the standard. Firefox is still on the standard. Chrome is what deviated, and while performance was improved, that was definitely not the motive.

I get 80mb for reddit on firefox.

That number can be down to any number of different factors on reddit itself. Having an autoplay video running, etc.

Memory measurements reported in browsers come with substantial caveats, as measuring "how much memory is this tab using" is fairly nontrivial.

Not saying there isn't a difference, but you'd need to measure (e.g.) a fresh install viewing only one tab with no extensions, etc.

I will eat the RAM penalty to resist the Chromium hegemon. Grateful to have any alternative!

I use Firefox on both Linux and Android for 99% of my web browsing needs. At least for me it's the best browser out there, and doesn't seem neglegted at all.

Upvotes are not going to make problems actually relevant to solve.

The question keeps getting asked because people say they have problems. Answers (if any come) tells everyone what the problem is for this one user that raised it.

In aggregate we can all see that the problems are not very real for the vast majority of users.

The biggest problem users actually face with using Firefox is that web devs don’t want to support more than one browser and they have picked Chrome now. Or IT departments have blessed one and only one browser on corporate machines and it is the one most corpoware developers build extensions for.

Chasing web standards is a second order problem and will not make the user experience better in a relevant manner for end users. If web developers want an open web, they have to work to support open browsers.

Yeah the criticism is not invalid, but it is also often half-relevant soapboxing and I would wager that is why it tends to get downvoted.

h264 and h265 are patent-encumbered and therefore very expensive and/or dangerous. Patent trolls would rip Mozilla apart and eat all their money. The only reason H.264 works atm is that Cisco sponsors a plugin for that.

I don't event think h265 is widely supported. On Windows you have to pay separately for it

Firefox has had support for h265 for a few months by now, they finally relented.

I think the rest of that line is really kind of important:

> Thunderbolt is funded through a grant from Mozilla.

Is there any way that that's not taking dollars out of the same organization that's funding Firefox or thunderbird?

migrate to rust.

Maybe they shouldn't be, but they are. As a for profit corporation with employees they are very much a business not just "run like one"

How would Mozilla replace the $500M a year from Google to not be a business?