Why Firefox Is Seeing a Continuous Decline for Last 12 Years

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
www.influxdata.com
featured
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
www.saashub.com
featured
  • harfbuzz

    HarfBuzz text shaping engine

  • It is owned and maintained by Google and Facebook.

    https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz/blob/main/COPYING

  • caniuse

    Raw browser/feature support data from caniuse.com

  • I don't know why this broke in the first place, all I know is that I had no sound and that the device selection menu was borked where other video calling webapps worked just fine. The enumerateDevices API has been in Firefox for years [1].

    To be fair(ish) to Microsoft, I did spoof Chrome's user agent because Microsoft forced a "this website doesn't work with your browser" screen in Firefox. Perhaps the failing API was an unstable Chrome-only API that they assumed works because of the UA. The browser compatibility screen communicates that they definitely tested it, that they definitely knew about the problem, and that they just didn't want to fix it.

    I just dropped Teams as an option and sent everyone who wanted to video chat Jitsi links. That worked fine while I needed it. If a company chooses not to support me, then I will choose not to use that company if I can.

    [1] https://caniuse.com/?search=enumerateDevices

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

    InfluxDB logo
  • syncstorage-rs

    Sync Storage server in Rust

  • geckoview

    GeckoView is a set of components for embedding Gecko in Android apps

  • I stand by what I said - their code is a convulated mess by design. It's 25 years and they still haven't modularised their code that anyone can use the Gecko engine on the desktop and creating competing browsers. All anyone can do is create a clone of Firefox, which ofcourse, cannot really compete with Firefox or other desktop browser as it will still have all the flaws of Firefox. And this is what Mozilla wants.

    They may have started with altruistic reasons, but after tasting Google's money, their greed corrupted them.

    Mobile is a good example. Mozilla realised it was in a precarious position on the mobile platform, which is dominated by Chrome, Opera and Safari. And so they have now been forced to release the Gecko rendering engine for mobile ( https://github.com/mozilla/geckoview ) and are encouraging others to create mobile browsers, in the hopes that this may provide a fillip to Mobile Firefox. Desperation drove them to this move as the money is now in mobile platform (Google paying 15 billion dollars to Apple / Safari highlights this).

    If they can do this for the mobile platform, why can't they do it for the Desktop platform too?

    This kind of deliberate convulated code mess is like a "dark pattern" where in you know the developer isn't really interested in supporting the open source movement. Yes, there are many other open source projects that have poor code or lack documentation, but unlike the Firefox project, none of them has 100's of millions of dollars at their disposal - it's a travesty how they have wasted all that money!

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

Suggest a related project

Related posts