zlacker

Mozilla has pulled a lot of dumb crap over the years, but this crossed a hard red line.

I defended them with Pocket, with promotions in the new tab screen, with dumb wastes of time like Colorways. I've continued to evangelize Firefox in spite of the fact that I knew the company had lost touch with reality because I want there to be an alternative to chromium-based browsers.

Today I'm done. I can shrug off promos in the new tab page, in the settings, whatever. But there are no second chances for full-page pop-up ads, especially when the "oops" is in the timing code. "Oops, you were supposed to see that after 20 minutes inactivity" doesn't cut it.

Mozilla has lost it, and I'm done defending them and evangelizing for them.

>>lolind+(OP)
Agreed. There have been many defenders of Firefox on HN. I’m not sure why after all the crap they have pulled over the years.

Unrelated mini rants.

1. They fill the default new tab page with garbage content. They have amazing reach with viewers. It’s a shame they can’t fill it with quality stuff. I understand you have to pay the bills, but at least find some balance.

2. Firefox 47.x was the greatest release. I’ve never been able to keep hundreds of tabs open with Firefox. Eventually Firefox eats up so much RAM and eventually crashes. Chromium based browsers can have multiple windows with hundreds of tabs each and not crash even after being open for days/weeks.

>>iJohnD+27
>I’m not sure why after all the crap they have pulled over the years.

Have you seen the competition?

It may be disturbingly similar to trying to vote for a decent politician, but there are absolutely degrees of badness.

Plus there are still forks.

>>lolind+(OP)
Yeah, at this point things like LibreWolf seem to be what it's come down to:

https://librewolf.net

Not a fantastic situation, but at least it seems to work.

>>justin+wf
Mullvad Browser is also a really good candidate. The people behind it have a track record for fighting for user privacy unlike Mozilla which has a track record of doing the opposite.

>>Groxx+A9
Brave seems to work just fine for me, and gets out of the way.

>>iJohnD+27
My desktop has over 2000 tabs open in Firefox. Memory footprint is slightly over 3 gigs. I usually manage to keep the laptop tab count under 1000. Honestly I think you're the first person I've ever heard praise Chrome(ium) for gracefully handling high tab counts.

I'm not a fan Mitchell Baker or many of the ways Mozilla works these days. But in the pulling crap department, Google and Microsoft have given Mozilla a very low bar to clear.

>>zargon+9y
One question... why?

>>lolind+(OP)
Yeah it's pretty bad, it does make me think. I've been a firefox user for probably ~ 2 decades.

Saying that, I haven't personally experienced any pop-ups or ads like this.

>>lolind+(OP)
I've been downvoted here many times for voicing this same opinion for a long time. Consider switching to Orion (a fork of Safari WebKit, Mac only, still beta though) - https://browser.kagi.com/ - or PaleMoon (a hard fork of Firefox) - http://www.palemoon.org/, as they are the only browsers that respect your zero-telemetry wish, when you toggle the right settings. Tor Browser (stripped of Tor) - https://www.torproject.org/download/ - is also a very good privacy-hardened Firefox soft fork (though it is yet to fix a bug that still phones Mozilla) but using it generates a lot of Captchas from CloudFlare, and to a lesser extent Google, both seem to hate this browser with a vengeance. Vivaldi browser (a Chromium fork with better privacy options) is another a good option but a distant second because it insists on phoning home every time you use the browser, and Vivaldi has publicly said they will not turn that off as turning off those analytics impairs their monetizing options. (A good application firewall can block those though, and Vivaldi is a decent company).

>>Zuiii+Qn
What's ironic is the Mozilla VPN being advertised is a rebadged Mullvad VPN. It's actually a good product, I don't know why Mozilla had to be dicks about pushing it in everyone's face.

>>Groxx+A9
Yes. Brave does a demonstrably better job at protecting my privacy and not making unwarranted connections to third parties I did not ask for.

>>operat+dy
It costs nothing to keep a tab (you had every intention to revisit later) open, especially when tabs can be auto unloaded to free up memory, either by an addon or the browser itself. Firefox unlike Chrome does not keep squashing more tabs in the tab strip forever, but lets them scroll horizontally out of sight to maintain a readable minimum width for each tab. Over a long enough period of time you can get 2000 open tabs. Modern browsers can handle it.

>>lionel+I33
Not what I asked.

>>Karuna+RI2
How can you guys ever trust Brave again after the whole affiliate link injection nonsense?

>>aqfamn+8w3
Link injection, ad replacement, their own cryptocurrency... It's close to getting bingo on the questionable behavior card.

Not to claim it's worse, of course. Chrome practically has the whole card filled in, and has to add extensions for the new terrible things they've invented. They're playing multi-dimensional 7x9x3i bingo.

>>aqfamn+8w3
The same way people trust Mozilla after the whole fake promotional add-on nonsense. Actually I have to give Brave the W here too: they appear capable of learning from their mistakes. Mozilla just keeps doing shady shit over and over and over again.

>>lionel+I33
This is not my personal experience. If I let a tab alone and that tab has a looping GIF then Firefox get slower and unresponsive (and eat memory).

You can try it with an imgur link: https://imgur.com/gallery/gom01RZ (sfw, vid/loop of a boa constrictor drinking water from a glass).

>>iJohnD+27
> I understand you have to pay the bills

You mean like the 5 mil per year CEO salary? Not sure if theat is really a need and not a want.

We need an open source browser that's not operated like a paypig for a for profit company. Funding should be handled via seeking grants and donations, not by selling out the users.