Hmm I don't know. I switched to FF 4 months ago and while the engine and dev tools are great, it's simply not as polished as the competition.
For example just look at the alert popups[0], or the non native contextual menus, or the video pop icon. The UI is full of little quirks like that. The tab bar is by far the ugliest one of all current browsers, at least on macOS.
It also misses important features such as multilingual spell checking. For people writing in multiple languages it's a real PITA. I know this functionality can be added with an extension but it slows down FF too much IMO.
I think that alert's design is actually a _feature_. Safari made a similar change a while back not make the alerts look like system UI, to prevent phishing and similar attacks.
The person you responded to specifically explained that. It's made to look non-native on purpose so that users don't think a pop-up, phishing, asking for their password, is a native system prompt. Safari did the same thing. It's not that it's neglected, quite the opposite, actually.
Personally, I don't think the Firefox version looks any worse than the Safari version, they're just different. It comes down to preference. Just like you saying it's the ugliest tab bar which I very much disagree with.
When I say polished I don't mean a polished visual style in an aesthetic sense. What I mean is that a designer has put some work on a UI element and after some iterations there has been a conscious decision over why an element looks the way it looks.
For example, one of the major considerations when doing UI design is creating elements that have a cohesive style (regardless of which aesthetic style that is).
None of that happened on that god forgotten alert. It's probably the first thing that someone came up with in a rush, in a style that no other UI element of FF shares, and it has stayed like this probably because nobody cares.
It is a great browser, once we agree on priorities on what they should be great at.
All modern browsers suck badly wrt UI. User interfaces dumbed down to unusability is the new fashion and both Chrome and Mozilla suffer equally from that (which is why I use Waterfox Classic). But while FF focuses on privacy, and definitely delivers in this context, Chrome and others don't, by design. I would happily trade 50% of everything else for 10% more privacy, because an ugly tab, panel, window, menu etc. does no harm compared to the potential disgrace caused by the loss of control on personal data.
Do you know how customisable firefox's UI is in ways that chrome isn't? They limited it a bit in recent years so you can no longer can easily turn the url bar and tab bar into one bar which i'm sad about but all in all most of the buttons i don't use i can remove, those i do i can add, i can change the colours, shapes and location. Chrome is ugly by default and doesn't allow me to fix it.
Very true, but it costs money and neither Google's browser with their nearly infinite resources has them.
FF might just need more time to implement them properly; I only wish they didn't fall into the dumbed down UI fashion like they did when they copied from others the "let's fill the main page with junk and remove a perfectly working configuration panel completely".
> also misses important features such as multilingual spell checking
The English spell checking is pretty bad, too, giving me at least an order of magnitude more false positives [1] than Safari or Chrome on my Mac, and Edge or Chrome on Windows. Same when compared to things other than browsers, such as Word, LibreOffice, BBEdit, Pages.
What's baffling is that Firefox, LibreOffice, and Chrome all use Hunspell [2], so presumably the reason Firefox spell check sucks compared to LibreOffice is they have a terrible dictionary.
So why doesn't Mozilla just take the LibreOffice dictionary?
[1] In case I've got the terminology wrong for spell checkers, by false positive I mean where the spell checker says that a word is spelled wrong when it is in fact spelled correctly.
@pier25 Would honestly disagree on your 'polish' concerns. I consciously 'returned' to Firefox macOS a little over a year ago from a contented experience with Chrome, for entirely non-practical reasons (it just felt like a good idea). And it's been nothing but pleasant. I'm a massive fan of the UI, it's simplicity, flexibility, but also its bold sense of self. I despise the too-polished feel of safari. It is impractical. And chrome I return to semi-regularly for debugging or QA, but it honestly feels like a downgrade. It's so plain. So lifeless. So google. Sure there may be edge-case usability issues on FF, such as your multi-lingual spell check, but this seems like an entirely workable extension challenge. Safari on the other hand is drowning in edge cases ... and chrome - privacy.
> Sure there may be edge-case usability issues on FF, such as your multi-lingual spell check, but this seems like an entirely workable extension challenge
It's an issue that affects anyone that writes in multiple languages. This accounts for the majority of internet users in the world since they write at least in their own language and English. This is not an edge case that affects 10% of users.
Like I already explained, it can't be solved properly with an extension. The ones that try to solve it slow down FF. This has to be solved at the native level, not in JS.
Firefox's spellchecking is just generally awful, even for English. It fails to recognize even basic words such as 'surveil' with the closest suggestion being 'survive'. I've found several other words I wanted to use that weren't found too. I have spellcheck off by default but when I write something long I do a quick check at the end so I don't normally notice this.
Firefox is by far my least favorite piece of software that I regularly use and I've considered throwing my computer out the window because of it.
I think you need to install a new or different dictionary. It’s dumb, but that’s how it works - spellcheck dictionaries are provided on the Mozilla extension store. You could try a new one.
There is something seriously wrong with Firefox if the default spellcheck dictionary is so bad that I might need to install a different one, especially for the English language. Hell they should just be able to merge theirs with Chromium's. Regardless, as I said I don't normally use spellcheck and I trust my own judgement over the computer's so it isn't a big deal for me.
> The tab bar is by far the ugliest one of all current browsers, at least on macOS.
I switched to FF about 2 months ago. I made a FF Color theme [0] that matches Chrome's colors to help ease my transition. Only color I wasn't able to adjust with FF color is the tab onhover color.
> The tab bar is by far the ugliest one of all current browsers, at least on macOS.
It's horrible on all platforms ;) . The way tabs are handled is by far my biggest complaint, you can't fit as many tabs in as with chrome and since they "upgraded" the extension system the vertical tab extensions don't work well (can't remove top tab panel).
I wish they'd just make a native UI for each platform, their cross platform one has always been a train wreck but it's especially bad since they dropped XUL.
But the user will switch to a browser that works for them. Which is happening.
All the people I know, who left FF, myself partly included, did so for this reason.
Quite some sites did not work anymore on firefox. And the normal user does not care that this is because of vendorprefixes which are not standard. They care about that their website does not work anymore.
> It also misses important features such as multilingual spell checking. For people writing in multiple languages it's a real PITA. I know this functionality can be added with an extension but it slows down FF too much IMO.
Really? Do you learn a new language every day? I installed languages that I am interested years ago and forgot about it until you mentioned it.
A lot of us are bi-lingual. English is not my first language, so being able to use spell checking for my native language and English without things breaking is important to me.
well, I'm bi-lingual as well, I only needed to install languages once. I don't want to have installed dictionary for every language under the sun. They do take space.
you can add as many as you want (at least I didn't hit the limit) it's just 2 clicks for each and they are retained between upgrades, the parent issue is that Firefox doesn't come with every language installed by default.
Yeah but you don't have spell checking on all these languages unless you manually switch between those.
I write in 4 languages so it's quite annoying to do that every time. In Chrome there is multilingual spell checking even when you mix languages in the same sentence.
It is definitely a great browser. I think the market share dropping has a lot to do with browser lockin on specific hardware, and site-specific apps being used more and more. We are losing more and more of the open, public infrastructure of the open web.
The decline of Firefox is largely due to Mozilla's incompetence.
If you look at their own statistics [1], you will notice that (worldwide) usage started declining after the introduction of Quantum (November 2017), and dropped substantially after the April 2019 addons outage.
This would suggest, IMHO, that Firefox loses market share when beloved features - customization, addons - stop working or got worse.
This is unsurprising to anyone who has been using Firefox for a long time: the primary differentiation factor of Firefox has always been customization. Messing with that would always be a risky proposition. Nuking the whole ecosystem entirely and starting over in the space of a few of months was simply idiotic. Disabling everyone's addon's because of an admin screw up was just the icing on the fucking cake.
Using Nightly on Linux (Bunsen Helium), 360 tabs, using 1.5 GB, but that will grow if I fire up dormant tabs. Starts going out to swap if I run it too long, then I kill it and update Nightly.
Isn't that a very low maintenance thing?
Generally just a light and very speedy stripped down version of the browser with simple security/privacy changes that aren't in the main one because they'd be inconvenient for people.
given Mozillas funding and the fact that most users don't care about browser marketing (except for sneaky performance "tricks" or Google's "want some more speed"-in your face mechanism) I really think, they should focus on the core (e.g. building a browser) and just leave politics (e.g. "safe-sync", "better media integration" - e.g. pocket) out of it completely... And yeah, I'd be more than happy to subscribe to my browser-vendor at this point if this means freedom or not.
But not if I look at what Mozilla (and wikipedia) which are raking in money from corporate shills and still want my money to develop their "business" (which is very much specified and as a not-for-profit I don't see the need to "expand")
well, it's not directly related to browser/app development (which is still the purpose of the non-profit Mozilla foundation???), but instead it's all part of the rebranding of Mozilla as a consumer SaaS-company which is currently taking place. And there is no cause for that, except politics around the internet together with an influx of people who are trying to do their marketing shitshow the righteous way this time. Integrating pocket was basically the idea of the CIO? coming from traditional dead-tree press in germany... I also shuddered when I saw right under layoff-press that the marketing VP comes straight out of facebook.
Instead of building a beacon of a non-commercial, individual and free web, it seems that people at Mozilla are more concerned with having just another carreer but with a better image up front (facebook is evil, everyone knows. but the foundation needlessly transforming into the same type of service business is ok, you know. they are doing it for good!)
>well, it's not directly related to browser/app development (which is still the purpose of the non-profit Mozilla foundation???)
"The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, with only minor exceptions"
Making a browser was part of supporting FOSS and open web standards.
>but instead it's all part of the rebranding of Mozilla as a consumer SaaS-company which is currently taking place. And there is no cause for that, except politics around the internet together with an influx of people who are trying to do their marketing shitshow the righteous way this time. Integrating pocket was basically the idea of the CIO?
Whilst I agree that the implementation was horrendous the idea behind it was good.
Do you know what I love? I can bookmark something and have that bookmark available at home.
I can log in somewhere and quickly do it elsewhere. That's firefox sync. Nobody complains about it because it isn't noticed as such a service.
The main dominator of the web currently is Google's chrome. It goes beyond even that. A lot of chrome's convenience and incentive for use for people comes from providing an ecosystem.
Keep, calendar and the like and despite how terrible the limited functionality for addons is they all nicely integrate with the browser by defaault and their mobile versions everyone gets on android.
Tried an addon for keep on firefox? It's trash. There's no convenient alternatives and without pushing them they won't appear.
Additionally they're entirely dependent on funding from their competitor who pushes the monopolising of webstandards and implementation that they try to combat.
>facebook is evil, everyone knows. but the foundation needlessly transforming into the same type of service business is ok, you know. they are doing it for good!
The fuck are you on about. moz literally implemented facebook containers to keep the tracking out and their defined data privacy principles can be trusted. Facebook isn't even a consumer or product focused service business (with some exceptions of course) they're generally in it for your data for advertising purposes given that you don't give em a dime for the privilege of using their social media.
