alt Hacker News> already painful and readily apparent, stagnation of your browser
What's wrong with Firefox? There are several things Firefox does that it's annoying to live without in other browsers (video pop-outs, competent ad blocking, etc). Is there some core feature that's missing? I'm subjected to Edge at work and I couldn't tell you a single thing it does that I'd want FF to do.
> and our standards bodies as entities distinct from corporations
Ok, I buy that.
Replies
Yes there are things that Firefox does better than others, and that is one reason I use Firefox. But there are definitely things I would like to see improved, like:
- PWA support on Linux
- better performance
- devtools should be able to handle sites with large amounts of js with sourcemaps
- fix a number of bugs that have been open for a long time
- don't lag behind standards as much (I'm not talking about things where they intentionally don't implement problematic "standards" pushed by google)
- make it feasible to embed gecko in other projects similar to how chromium is used by electron and webkit is used in "webviews"
Firefox on iOS still doesn't support extensions or adblocking - something Safari (and other browsers as well) do.
It's slow. It almost always trails Safari and Chrome on most benchmarks.
See e.g.
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1ljns9o/freshly_re...
It doesn't support WebNFC or WebUSB.
Some folks have already discussed this in sister comments to the one you're responding to, but it's a common enough hn discussion topic that searching will answer beyond that (better than I can regurgitate here.)
I'm building a fairly complicated browser extension [0].
Debugging the extension on Chrome, it works great. On Firefox, it is nearly impossible. There are a litany of compatibility issues that make it "different" than Chrome, despite the extension being very much standards based. It is really frustrating and makes me dread getting bug reports.
To be fair, Safari is even worse and I haven't even touched Edge yet.
As much as I'd love to have options in the marketplace, standards based compatibility between offerings should be a top line requirement.
> What's wrong with Firefox?
It seems like every thread talking about Firefox always has someone asking that question, so if you search back you should find plenty of reasons. Unfortunately, it’s been my observation that valid and polite criticisms always get downvoted. I don’t understand why. It’s not like downvotes are going to make the problems disappear.
Most of us would like Firefox to succeed, and it’s none of our faults that Mozilla is constantly neglecting it and going off on wild goose projects which get promptly abandoned.
It doesn’t support a lot of video formats that Chrome and Safari have supported for years (h265 is one I think. I’m no expert)
Web usb and serial are not just missing, last I checked Mozilla is opting to not implement based on their moral stance. It just puts them behind for some stuff.