Firefox Developers Hate You
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That's my main takeaway from this:
Here's Why Firefox is Seeing a Continuous Decline for Last 12 Years
There has been a lot of discussion lately about the decline of the Firefox browser and numerous articles about it losing 50 Million users in the last two years. But the real decline has been over 12 years with a total loss of half a Billion users and 75% of
Mind you, it only confirmed what I already believed, so take that for what it's worth.
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The argument that it was “too hard to maintain” a single setting enacted by 2 lines of code in a 4 Million line codebase is just insulting to the intelligence of users. Code isn’t a lawn. It doesn’t change if you leave it alone for a few weeks.
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Chrome(ium) developers also hate you, so this seems a common trend in browser development. Complain about changes in Chrome and you get the same response from them.
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Firefox lost all it’s market share because tabs on top. Sure sure. Moron.
Look, I get it, I like to complain about minor UI changes too. It’s what we do here, with several threads dedicated to it. I’ve complained that the latest layout has too much spacing or that there’s some transparency glitches when you hover over the tab. But that’s just minor gripes. It doesn’t mean I’m going to change to a different browser over that.
And anybody who thinks minor UI changes are the reason everybody switched to Chrome, or any other reason where Chrome is the same or even worse, has to be an idiot. Why would anybody switch over to something that does everything that’s being complained about and even worse so?!While I don’t know the real reasons, it’s got to have more to do with the majority of users not caring much, being generally ignorant about browsers, and being made to believe that Chrome is the one real browser. Microsoft has tried to do the same (as they successfully did in the 90s) with every Windows update telling you “no, don’t switch default browsers, try Edgium first”, just less successfully this time.
Firefox could literally be Chrome with a different name and people would still be using Chrome because Google is pushing it.
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@error said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
The argument that it was “too hard to maintain” a single setting enacted by 2 lines of code in a 4 Million line codebase is just insulting to the intelligence of users. Code isn’t a lawn. It doesn’t change if you leave it alone for a few weeks.
That statement is not wrong. If everything's "too difficult," your codebase should be served with meatballs and parmesan cheese.
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@topspin said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
Firefox could literally be Chrome with a different name and people would still be using Chrome because Google is pushing it.
That's probably part of the reason too. But I think the article has a point. They have a history of making unpopular choices and doing away with features/settings/customization. The arguments are what TFA says: the people complaining are a minority, telemetry shows that ${x} isn't being used, etc. But each time a few people get pissed and switch.
To speculate a bit, the vocal minority that gets snubbed each time would be the same vocal minority that would spread the use by word of mouth. But there's no point - Firefox isn't any better than Chrome/ium, and hell, on Windows, Edge is just kinda there.
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@Zenith said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
@error said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
The argument that it was “too hard to maintain” a single setting enacted by 2 lines of code in a 4 Million line codebase is just insulting to the intelligence of users. Code isn’t a lawn. It doesn’t change if you leave it alone for a few weeks.
That statement is not wrong. If everything's "too difficult," your codebase should be served with meatballs and parmesan cheese.
I don't expect you (personally) to understand the concept of technical debt, but the author of TFA doesn't seem to, either.A major UI fork effectively doubles your test cases. I strongly doubt that it's "2 lines of code" to switch between tab layouts, and code isn't a lawn (and therefore there's no maintenance overhead) is just a dumb statement.
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@cvi said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
The arguments are what TFA says: the people complaining are a minority, telemetry shows that ${x} isn't being used, etc. But each time a few people get pissed and switch.
It's like discussing Word or Excel. No one uses more than 70% (or whatever) of the features but the makeup of everyone's 70% is slightly different.
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@boomzilla said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
@cvi said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
The arguments are what TFA says: the people complaining are a minority, telemetry shows that ${x} isn't being used, etc. But each time a few people get pissed and switch.
It's like discussing Word or Excel. No one uses more than 70% (or whatever) of the features but the makeup of everyone's 70% is slightly different.
I use only mail merge and outlining and ActiveX embeds. The text is all in Markdown.
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@error said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
@Zenith said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
@error said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
The argument that it was “too hard to maintain” a single setting enacted by 2 lines of code in a 4 Million line codebase is just insulting to the intelligence of users. Code isn’t a lawn. It doesn’t change if you leave it alone for a few weeks.
That statement is not wrong. If everything's "too difficult," your codebase should be served with meatballs and parmesan cheese.
I don't expect you (personally) to understand the concept of technical debt, but the author of TFA doesn't seem to, either.A major UI fork effectively doubles your test cases. I strongly doubt that it's "2 lines of code" to switch between tab layouts, and code isn't a lawn (and therefore there's no maintenance overhead) is just a dumb statement.
I don't expect you (personally) to understand that it's not a major fork. It literally is two lines of code, an if/then in your window constructor. Even if it wasn't, if your engine is such a train wreck that it can't be transferred from the device context of one window shell to the device context of another window shell, that's a sign that the developers, not users, fucked up. The lawn metaphor isn't exactly wrong either - design your API right in the first place and you won't be plowing all through the lawn like a coked up Bobcat driver.
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@Zenith said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
@error said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
@Zenith said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
@error said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
The argument that it was “too hard to maintain” a single setting enacted by 2 lines of code in a 4 Million line codebase is just insulting to the intelligence of users. Code isn’t a lawn. It doesn’t change if you leave it alone for a few weeks.
That statement is not wrong. If everything's "too difficult," your codebase should be served with meatballs and parmesan cheese.
I don't expect you (personally) to understand the concept of technical debt, but the author of TFA doesn't seem to, either.A major UI fork effectively doubles your test cases. I strongly doubt that it's "2 lines of code" to switch between tab layouts, and code isn't a lawn (and therefore there's no maintenance overhead) is just a dumb statement.
I don't expect you (personally) to understand that it's not a major fork. It literally is two lines of code, an if/then in your window constructor. Even if it wasn't, if your engine is such a train wreck that it can't be transferred from the device context of one window shell to the device context of another window shell, that's a sign that the developers, not users, fucked up.Sure, the if conditional to pick a window shell is two lines. The entire separate window shell implementation is probably a bit more. No, it's not just an argument to the window constructor, not to mention that it's cross-platform so it couldn't use that even if it was. And again, the argument was never "it's too hard to do" - demonstrably, they have implemented both - it's that it's too much to maintain. It's not a lawn, after all, so you don't need to ever worry about it again once it's written.
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@Gribnit said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
@boomzilla said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
@cvi said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
The arguments are what TFA says: the people complaining are a minority, telemetry shows that ${x} isn't being used, etc. But each time a few people get pissed and switch.
It's like discussing Word or Excel. No one uses more than 70% (or whatever) of the features but the makeup of everyone's 70% is slightly different.
I use only mail merge and outlining and ActiveX embeds. The text is all in Markdown.
I only use Comic Sans.
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@cvi said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
@topspin said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
Firefox could literally be Chrome with a different name and people would still be using Chrome because Google is pushing it.
Yes, having a $120 Billion a year company pushing a product helps a lot.
The arguments are what TFA says: the people complaining are a minority, telemetry shows that ${x} isn't being used, etc. But each time a few people get pissed and switch.
The problem with the "telemetry shows that ${x} isn't being used" argument is that most knowledgeable users turn off the telemetry because they don't want their browser spying on them. So Mozilla's telemetry is not accurate and only represents the usage patterns of people too lazy or stupid to turn off the telemetry.
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@cvi said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
The arguments are what TFA says: the people complaining are a minority, telemetry shows that ${x} isn't being used, etc. But each time a few people get pissed and switch.
Switch to what, though? A browser that also doesn’t have that feature and never had it to begin with? How does that make sense?
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@boomzilla said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
@Gribnit said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
@boomzilla said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
@cvi said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
The arguments are what TFA says: the people complaining are a minority, telemetry shows that ${x} isn't being used, etc. But each time a few people get pissed and switch.
It's like discussing Word or Excel. No one uses more than 70% (or whatever) of the features but the makeup of everyone's 70% is slightly different.
I use only mail merge and outlining and ActiveX embeds. The text is all in Markdown.
I only use Comic Sans.
Indeed. It is self-evident.
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@topspin If they're both featureless blobs of spyware, may as well move to the one that's faster or more popular or generates fewer "best viewed in
IEChrome" nag prompts all over the hipsternet.
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Firefox’s attitude seems to be “Oh no, more people are using Chrome! We need to be more like Chrome.”
… which, beyond being a horrible approach in any market, entirely misses the point of why someone would choose to use Firefox.
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@topspin said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
Switch to what, though? A browser that also doesn’t have that feature and never had it to begin with? How does that make sense?
If said browser does something else better, I guess. For instance, there was a good while when Chrome(ium) was purported to be less memory hungry.
While I didn't consider switching for a good while, that decision did get revisited when the whole XUL mess happened, and one of the main reasons for me to stick with Firefox disappeared.
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@cvi said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
But there's no point - Firefox isn't any better than Chrome/ium
It supports putting tabs on the side (and organizing them in a hierarchical tree, with the appropriately named Tree Style Tab plugin). Edgium has native support for tabs on the side as well, but it's not as good as Tree Style Tab. Chrome has had an issue open about supporting this for probably a decade or more, and their response has been to keep making the browser worse while telling users to fuck off
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@El_Heffe said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
The problem with the "telemetry shows that ${x} isn't being used" argument is that most knowledgeable users turn off the telemetry because they don't want their browser spying on them. So Mozilla's telemetry is not accurate and only represents the usage patterns of people too lazy or stupid to turn off the telemetry.
Then those users who disabled telemetry are getting what they asked for.
Personally, Firefox lost me when they didn't implement process-per-tab in a timely fashion. It's less important nowadays, but that was why I jumped ship to Chrome. Firefox doesn't offer me anything unique to make me want to come back.
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@Unperverted-Vixen said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
that was why I jumped ship to Chrome. Firefox doesn't offer me anything unique to make me want to come back.
I jumped ship the opposite direction. We all know I keep way too many tabs open. Chrome is (or was, last time I used it) not good at handling that many tabs, especially launching the browser after crash/reboot/whatever. I could click on Chrome, then go cook and eat dinner, and it might be ready to use when I returned. (Slight exaggeration; about 15 minutes, or so.) It was unusably slow and unresponsive until it had finished fetching the content for all the tabs. OTOH, Firefox only fetches the content for the active tab in each window, and it only takes one or two minutes, maybe less. The other tabs only get loaded when they're activated. So for me and the way I use a browser (
), Firefox is clearly superior.
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@Atazhaia said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
Chrome(ium) developers also hate you, so this seems a common trend in
browserdevelopment.
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@HardwareGeek said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
We all know I keep way too many tabs open.
Have I ever asked you what you use to help managing them?
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@Zenith said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
@topspin If they're both featureless blobs of spyware, may as well move to the one that's faster or more popular or generates fewer "best viewed in
IEChrome" nag prompts all over the hipsternet.Yeah, but Firefox is the only one that isn’t a blob of spyware. And besides everyone claiming that’s it’s slow and leaking memory for years, it’s never been slow for me and Chrome’s memory usage has meme status.
I generally find using it a bliss (minus one problem I have with search), and it’s got built-in protection for Facebook, Google, and other nasty shit. I doubt Chrome would ever implement that.
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@HardwareGeek said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
@Zecc said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
Have I ever asked you
Νο, Ι don't think you have.
Ah, good. Otherwise I'd have to think of what exact wording I used at the time to be able to find it using
search, and that might prove to be difficult.It might have been easier to search for any addon you might have mentioned, to be honest.
I guess we'll never know.
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@HardwareGeek said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
@Zecc said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
Have I ever asked you
Νο, Ι don't think you have.
Good because nobody really cares
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@topspin I mostly don't have any problems with Firefox either, but on the rare occasions it hangs on a script, it freezes the whole thing </
>. This is infrequent enough that I don't care.The only really annoying thing is that it doesn't seem to memorize URLs in the address bar unless the page fully loads or if the HTTP status is "success". The address bar doesn't act like the glorified text input it should be and instead sometimes reverts to the URL of the last loaded page even if you hand-edited URL parameters. This is very annoying when trying to debug a web application with breakpoints and the browser times out and may decide to gaslight you (it doesn't always do it, to keep you on your toes).
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@Zecc said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
I guess we'll never know.
If you want to know, you could ask. I suspect you'd be disappointed with the answer, though.
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@HardwareGeek How come?
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@topspin said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
I generally find using it a bliss (minus one problem I have with search), and it’s got built-in protection for Facebook, Google, and other nasty shit. I doubt Chrome would ever implement that.
To be fair, I ended up sticking with Firefox as well for a good time. Nowadays, I have both Firefox and Chromium open during the day. Firefox for the main browsing, Chromium for stuff like Teams & Zoom, and to deal with the stuff that IT has b0rked and doesn't work in Firefox.
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@Zecc said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
@HardwareGeek How come?
...we don't even talk no more
And you don't even call no more
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
@Zecc said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
@HardwareGeek How come?
...we don't even talk no more
And you don't even call no moreI'm home every weekend mom, why can't we talk then?
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@topspin said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
Look, I get it, I like to complain about minor UI changes too. It’s what we do here, with several threads dedicated to it. I’ve complained that the latest layout has too much spacing or that there’s some transparency glitches when you hover over the tab. But that’s just minor gripes. It doesn’t mean I’m going to change to a different browser over that.
Actually, that's (one of) the reason(s) why I'm not using FF. Every time I do, I've got to learn its quirks anew as whatever I learnt the previous time doesn't work because they've moved stuff around. It's not a huge effort, but it's still some effort. And, as implied in TFA, every feature I like has a chance to randomly disappear in a few months so I can't even get hyped up about it.
That doesn't give me any incentive to use FF, and on the contrary gives me incentives to not use it. Minor barriers, yes, but barriers nonetheless.
While I don’t know the real reasons, it’s got to have more to do with the majority of users not caring much,
That, IMO, is the real "issue" (quotes because... well, keep reading). The browser has become a commodity and most people give as much shit about which one they use, or the difference between them, as between... I don't know, which disposable cutlery they buy when going for a picnic? Sure, some browsers may have different features and there are always geeks who care (and some of them may even be right to do so!), but on the whole, you just pick one because it's there and be done with it.
It's (part of) what kills FF because indeed the majority of users don't care, but it also shows how basic the browser has become, which is great overall (i.e. everyone can and do use one). It might be bad for innovation, but I'm struggling to see any major innovation in the browser in the past few years anyway, so maybe it's just that the concept is mature.
But that's also where FF tweaking and changing stuff is hurting them, because with a commodity you want to be the same reliable old thing that people can always come back to and know how to use without having to think. And they're failing at that.
Which is why I'm not gonna switch back to FF any time soon.
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@HardwareGeek said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
I jumped ship the opposite direction. We all know I keep way too many tabs open. Chrome is (or was, last time I used it) not good at handling that many tabs, especially launching the browser after crash/reboot/whatever.
I don’t know your definition of “too many”. I have about three dozen; it won’t fetch content for inactive tabs until I switch to them, though.
@topspin said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
I generally find using it a bliss (minus one problem I have with search), and it’s got built-in protection for Facebook, Google, and other nasty shit. I doubt Chrome would ever implement that.
Chrome proper, maybe not, but Edgium has that. The only disadvantage to Edgium - and it’s one that I think proves why switching from Chrome proper to Edgium was good - is that it keeps triggering Google’s “Chrome is better” pop ups on their sites.
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@Zecc said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
@HardwareGeek How come?
To answer that, I'd have to answer the question you haven't asked, yet.
Also, the "Questions that remind you of @Tsaukpaetra but you really don't want to know the answer" thread is
.
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@HardwareGeek said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
@Zecc said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
@HardwareGeek How come?
To answer that, I'd have to answer the question you haven't asked, yet.
Also, the "Questions that remind you of @Tsaukpaetra but you really don't want to know the answer" thread is
.Slight oxygen deprivation can occur in almost any context.
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@Unperverted-Vixen said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
I don’t know your definition of “too many”. I have about three dozen;
I don't know, either, but it's definitely somewhere between the 27 windows with 146 tabs I have open on this computer and the 94 windows with 798 tabs I have open on my old computer.
it won’t fetch content for inactive tabs until I switch to them, though.
Exactly. That's is a desirable feature, the way I use a browser.
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@Atazhaia said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
this seems a common trend in browser development
Browsers are intensely complicated. They're GUI apps, which is bad enough right there, but they're also security sensitive, have an embedded language (JS), and the specs are evolving targets that do complicated things. No wonder people don't really like working on them all that much.
That people seem to like to write them in C++ just adds to the misery.
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@error said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
It's not a lawn, after all, so you don't need to ever worry about it again once it's written.
Code's not a lawn, so you don't need to keep off it.
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Just opened chrome browser with one tab on speeddial. 120mb
Currently crashing SPA in IE I'm debugging. 25mb
Vivaldi with 12 tabs open. 1977mbSomething has gone very a miss here.
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The entire article, IMO, is generally correct but tends to veer off into crazy-land.
My favorite crazy-land header is the "Poor memory management" one, where he talks about Firefox's poor memory usage (true) then proceeds to talk about how X number of processes are writing to disk (wtf, did you confuse RAM and disk?) which is apparently evidence of Moz://a's poor coding practices?
Firefox does suffer from a "remove features not used by anyone enough times that you've removed features from everyone" mindset, and has failed to differentiate itself from Chrome in any effective way, and he's not completely wrong, but the specific points he makes are just.. weird
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@dkf said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
That people seem to like to write them in C++ just adds to the misery.
As compared to what, Java?
Someone call
to mention Minecraft, because I’m about to say I’ve not seen a Java GUI program that doesn’t suck.
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@topspin said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
Someone call to mention Minecraft, because I’m about to say I’ve not seen a Java GUI program that doesn’t suck.
It runs at about 3FPS on my (fairly modern) laptop.
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@topspin said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
@dkf said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
That people seem to like to write them in C++ just adds to the misery.
As compared to what, Java?
Someone call
to mention Minecraft, because I’m about to say I’ve not seen a Java GUI program that doesn’t suck.Why would Minecraft be considered an exception?
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@Gribnit said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
@topspin said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
@dkf said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
That people seem to like to write them in C++ just adds to the misery.
As compared to what, Java?
Someone call
to mention Minecraft, because I’m about to say I’ve not seen a Java GUI program that doesn’t suck.Why would Minecraft be considered an exception?
Never having played it, I have no idea but also can’t dispute it.
It’s also nowhere close to what I’d call a normal GUI program.
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@topspin said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
It’s also nowhere close to what I’d call a normal GUI program.
It's a game where it's not expected that you follow the standard GUI conventions for your platform.
Unlike every Java GUI ever, where you have to work hard to follow those conventions....
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@Zenith said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
I don't expect you (personally) to understand that it's not a major fork. It literally is two lines of code, an if/then in your window constructor. Even if it wasn't, if your engine is such a train wreck that it can't be transferred from the device context of one window shell to the device context of another window shell, that's a sign that the developers, not users, fucked up. The lawn metaphor isn't exactly wrong either - design your API right in the first place and you won't be plowing all through the lawn like a coked up Bobcat driver.Btw, I seriously think that in the context of Firefox removing features that the users needs, the correct path to follow if you don't want UI fork is to "revert the removal".
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@Unperverted-Vixen said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
@El_Heffe said in Firefox Developers Hate You:
The problem with the "telemetry shows that ${x} isn't being used" argument is that most knowledgeable users turn off the telemetry because they don't want their browser spying on them. So Mozilla's telemetry is not accurate and only represents the usage patterns of people too lazy or stupid to turn off the telemetry.
Then those users who disabled telemetry are getting what they asked for.
Personally, Firefox lost me when they didn't implement process-per-tab in a timely fashion. It's less important nowadays, but that was why I jumped ship to Chrome. Firefox doesn't offer me anything unique to make me want to come back.
Well, I jumped from Chrome to Firefox last year when Chrome decided to go idle itself when not visible (to save power) but I want to run active page content while it's in the background, and Chrome offered no option to opt out of this behavior.
This problem alone is enough to drive me back to Firefox.
