Seeing lots of discussion around Firefox marketshare, would be interested to hear what features / functionality people thought Firefox could implement that would make a big impact?
@dale Please please please do better with the container UX. It's the best Firefox functionality but the UX is so clunky. The fact that multi-container is a separate extension is a travesty.
@MayInToronto@dale This 100%. Containers have become a primary main stream feature, just look at Safari, Arc and Chrome. The Firefox plugin isn’t great, confusing, and easy to get into a mess.
@dale 1. It’s all about the ecosystem. Build the cloud ecosystem alternative to Apple and Google for email, calendar, contacts, photos, passwords, dropbox, VPN, ActivityPub, personal websites like Proton and https://omg.lol .
Invest more in UX. Arc and Brave went from 0 marketshare to some marketshare by focusing on UX. Even Safari experiments with potentially controversial improvements that improve UX. Firefox rarely has.
@dale I don't know if it's just me, but while Firefox on desktop had become faster over the years I feel like the mobile version is still very slow. Firefox mobile needs some improvements to become faster than chromium based browsers, especially if you install a plugin or two like I do then it becomes quite slow.
@dale I have trouble switching to Firefox because it doesn't support PWA or pages in its own taskbar items. I have right now: Gmail, Slack, Teams and Google Keep running in their own taskbar items and it only works with Chrome* based browsers.
I guess it wouldn't make "a big impact" except for me. There is so much I like about Firefox otherwise!
@dale Number one: fix the bug that means after a week or two it suddently starts using a ton of CPU and has to be shut down. It is BY FAR my biggest problem with Firefox.
Number two: stop talking about integrating "AI" features. NO-ONE WANTS THIS.
@jgoerzen@mike@dale This is the tricky thing about these AI arguments: AI is a significantly broader & older field then the recent "generative AI" hype every sizeable tech company are rushing to adopt. Too often when those of us sick of this speak up, this confusion over a technically-fuzzy distinction frequently rears its head.
Maybe put it this way: Please Mozilla no chatbots! No insisting there's demand!
But yes: Features matter, not the tech behind them. Too many techies forget this!
Would be nice to more easily be able to switch Javascript on and off on mobile. Via add-ons like ublock-origin it's quite some clicks on mobile. And many web pages are unbearable with Javascript on.
Automatically clicking "reject all" to cookie menus would improve the web too.
A second feature request: the Chrome dev tools are very good. While it may be a matter of having learned first Chrome's and then Firefox's, the former still feel easier to use and more powerful across the board.
@albertcardona I ended up using it by chance just today and was actually surprised how far it has come from the last time I tried it instead of Chromium's. What are some features you miss?
(I was able to do everything I wanted basically the same way today which was loading speed optimization for slow devices and some CSS adjustments)
In Firefox's dev tools I am missing the script editor, its integration with the file system, the breakpoints and a step debugger. In other words Chrome's tools feel complete for web development and particularly for Javascript in a way that Firefox's don't. For inspecting and profiling code it's fine indeed.
It's ridiculous that Firefox still doesn't support passkeys. If I wasn't so concerned about Chrome privacy, the lack of passkey support in Firefox would be the tipping point for me to dump it.
@dangoodin@dale
I always see this push for passkeys but I still don't get how this actually is good for an end user? Like what happens if you loose/break your device? Or is it really just "login with your Google account" in disguise and you can restore it by logging back into your Google account with a normal password?
@dangoodin Sorry for being a bit of a noob about this and it's totally fine if you don't want to engage with my questions (I can/will do research myself) but thoughts that I instantly have:
What happens if you only have one device?
How do I tell device A to sync a key with device B? (I assume via the Google account, but what if I have an iPhone too? What if I have neither?)
Can I generate my own passkeys?
How is it secure when people use biometrics which can be forced to unlock?
I'm happy to engage. The short answer is that if you use a password manager, you're just as vulnerable to those risks. Passkeys are superior to passwords because, unlike passwords (even with SMS or ToTP-based 2fa) they're absolutely resistant to credential phishing.
At the risk of tooting my own horn: Here are a few articles I've published on passkeys:
@dangoodin
I'll take a look at those later, thanks. But I don't get the argument about password managers. The police can't force me to hand over the encryption keys nor are the encrypted (and hopefully synced/backed up) passwords at risk if stolen. A passkey only protectd by biometrics or a weak pin seems to be.
(I agree with the phishing argument though seeing as most can't be bothered with proper 2fa :S)
Just like password managers, passkeys can be secured by a password or PIN that never leaves the device. Furthermore, the device where the passkey is used can also be protected by a password. That's two levels of passwords preventing prosecutors from getting your passkey.
@dangoodin@the_moep Other thing to highlight about the difference passkeys & passwords:
Passwords routinely get leaked from poorly-secured sites, whilst passkeys cannot! With passkeys only the security of your password manager matters, not every single site you log in to.
Same as Mozilla partnered with Mullvad for VPN, they could partner with the likes of Ory or Zitadel for ‘Firefox Login’, based on regular OAuth/OIDC rather than the custom stuff that’s been going on.
Let me add a more open and user-respecting alternative to the Google/Facebook/GitHub socials login of my app, and give me a reason to advocate for ‘Firefox Login’ to be added to my favorite services.
From there you can work towards a #nomadicidentity wallet baked into the browser.
@dale Keep in mind that those "market share" stats are always going to be skewed. Firefox users leave less breadcrumbs around, are less likely to show up in telemetry/tracking, and the plethora of Chromium-based browsers and electron desktop apps all help inflate Chrome's presence over everything else.
@vwbusguy
That sounds an awful lot like the argument in the days when Opera was using its own render engine: "The Opera marketshare is skewed because Opera isn't logged as Opera because of UA manipulation to make websites work at all".
Not to say it's wrong but it looks more like the last breaths of a dying product than anything else. @dale
@fluchtkapsel@dale Meh. I used to be obsessive with looking at NetApp vs w3c, vs others for market share stats. I was always amazed by how differently they categorized things or how differently Linux was represented. For instance, it's interesting the Linux on desktop and Linux on mobile was categorized separated from Android and ChromeOS, when those are also Linux. On Apple iOS, Firefox and Chrome are a skin on the Safari engine. There are real shenanigans under those stats.
@dale Or a simple feature which could make a big difference: Its not always obvious to me whether any given site provides RSS/Atom webfeeds, and its not obvious to the majority that these are or were ever a thing! So how about extracting these links & adding them to your browser UI? Maybe next to Pocket?
I'm not necessarily asking you to implement a feedreader (you can defer to other apps/sites/addons), just to make them easier to populate. And to champion this unkillable feature of the web!
@voxpelli@dale@psvensson This is a big one. I'm not sure you even need to "dial down tracking protection", but it should be possible to have a conversation w/ folks like GA to report out of band in an anonymized way.
@voxpelli ha, I wonder if you can CSP ban a non-existent url (https://nope.nope or something) with Content-Security-Policy-Report-Only and then in CSS do *:hover { background-image: url(https://nope.nope); } to get a URL ping any time anybody mouses over anything :)
@slightlyoff@dale@psvensson I tried getting eg a big multinational store to correlate their server stats with their GA stats to figure out eg how many Firefox browsers were missing
They themselves had only then discovered that iPad no longer reports as iPad…
Add comment