Firefox at 20

I've been using Firefox primarily for the Meta sites as a (probably naive) way to isolate them. I'd been using Brave as my Chrome-alike for a few years but recently switched to Edge for no particular reason.

This quote from Šime is interesting to me:

"Apple claims that they can’t, but they have disclosed user data to law enforcement in the past, so I don’t trust them. Mozilla says that they can’t, and I trust them."

Apple holds the keys with iCloud standard data protection (where Safari information is stored) so of course they can, and should given a legal reason to do so. One only need turn on Advanced Data Protection and that point is moot.

If Mozilla held the encryption key they'd also be able to provide data to law enforcement as they should. There is no reason to not trust one over the other "just because".

I guess that poster forgot the fact that Apple refused to comply with the FBI in a famous terrorism case because they couldn't decrypt the person's phone.

The first version of Mozilla's open sourced browser, released at the end of Netscape Navigator / Communicator, was a steaming pile of garbage - its XML (was it XUL?) based UI was janky, and the application ignored almost every convention of the Mac user experience.

And nothing has changed.

Firefox is still a janky browser, because it is still made by ideologues who seem to genuinely believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the browser is the central computing experience.

No one WANTS to live in a browser-centric world. The browser is the lowest common denominator, it always has been, it always will be. Its sole purpose is to provide a consistent mediocrity everywhere - app and document slop, for when a trough is the only crockery available.

No one WANTS webapps, either (the exception being, people who make web apps).

If Mozilla want Firefox to be used, how about, oh, using the system native dictionary rather than their own? How about doing standard system-native settings? How about having the Private Browsing UI actually show that you're in private browsing mode when you have the app set with privacy settings that mean you're always in private browsing?

I know it may sound heretical, but making the product good enough to buy, might make people think it's good enough to use. It's not like they can make the product *less* popular.

Waterfox is one of my favorite web browsers to use on the desktop and Mull is fabulous on mobile. Both are Firefox rebrands. I don't use Chrome at all. Don't understand the love for regular old Chrome. Vivaldi is more my thing as far as Chromium.

I miss old Presto Opera though. That was a fun browser.

@Nathan_RETRO Yes, Presto Opera was the best! And that's in spite of the fact that it often didn't render webpages quite right. All of its perks far outweighed the downsides!

I can thank it for getting me into mouse gestures, which I still use to this day.

And so far, no other web browser has ever had their fabulous "instantaneous back and forward" feature. On top of just making web browsing feel incredibly fast, it was such a life saver because it didn't just navigate back to the page you were on, it basically instantaneous transported you to the exact state the last page was in. Brilliant! That meant that anything you entered on a form or otherwise changed on the page was still there. No more accidentally navigating away from a form that took you twenty minutes to fill out only to discover that when you go back everything is blank again.

@Someone: there would be more native apps if Apple stopped breaking backwards compatibility. But spending one's life working around Apple's latest breakage is a waste of time. Mozilla doesn't have the time to do that either, hence the non-native UI. IIRC, Ladybird also made that decision.

I think this speaks to my feelings about Mozilla and Firefox, more than anything. Ultimately they failed utterly to distinguish themselves from Chrome in a meaningful way. Theirs is the story of the Great White Whale. Perhaps, if they recognised that tech debt—real as it was—isn't everything. Nah, too radical. I'm afraid it's all over for them.

@Sebby That was a good read, and I pretty much agree with all of it. Firefox's only saving grace at this point is that nearly everything crappy about it can be switched off if you're willing to take the time to customize every little bit of the browser, from hidden settings to custom CSS. Also, I have enough RAM that I can tolerate its inefficiency. And at least the daft and frustrating requirement for extensions to be signed can be avoided if you switch to Firefox ESR or LibreWolf. I use the latter, since it's basically the *actually* privacy focused "De-Mozilla'ed" version of Firefox.

Even with all these flaws, I'd still rather use a Firefox-derived browser than a Chrome-derived one. I don't even know where I'd jump to though if (and more likely when) Firefox finally kicks the bucket.

@BriI could essentially browse the web almost solely from keyboard with the Old Opera. I could check my email in the built in mail client. I could use RSS. It was so good.

@Nathan_RETRO Makes sense that Vivaldi is your preferred browser, since that’s where some of the original Presto-era Opera crew ended up. The double-layer tab bar is a neat idea.

It saddens me immensely to see Mozilla throw in the towel and leave it to a few megacorps to define what the Web is. I know it’s functionally been the case for a while now, but this feels like a definitive symbolic moment.