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.