I always see comments like this on HN, and I struggle to understand why. Firefox is plenty fast. Its interface is extremely similar to most of its competitors. It works well. What special sauce do you expect Mozilla to implement that'll suddenly change their fortunes? It's a browser, after all. And why do you think that such features aren't being implemented due to lack of resources or muddled priorities - surely Mozilla can walk and chew gum?
"What special sauce do you expect Mozilla to implement that'll suddenly change their fortunes?"
XUL extensions maybe? The reason I gave up on Firefox after literally decades of using it was because they kept removing features I was actively using without fixing any of the problems. What's the point of using a niche browser if it is exactly like the non-niche browser, but with more compatibility issues?
For a long time it was absolutely awful on Android as well. Not sure about Android, but at least on macOS Firefox has about identical performance as of this year now. They did a lot of work, some macOS specific, in recent times.
That said your average person isn't trying out every browser multiple times per year to see how fast it is today.
Put yourself in the shoes of someone that wants a more polished experience and a longer battery life and you'd be asking "How does that help when the UI is a mix of old and new UIs and it drains battery twice as fast as Safari?"
I don't use Safari because of the extensions and overall it's too basic for me, but not everyone is like you or me.
I'm typing this on Firefox. It works, I'm not going to stop using it, but it's not as polished as other browsers.
I'll give you an example that annoys me because I look at it every day: the bookmarks bar still uses the same margins as it did in Firefox 3, even after 2 major UI redesigns. Then we have things like windows from Firefox 3 for some stuff with pages that open on tabs and have a different UI. Like, pick one and stick with it.
CTRL/CMD+Click on a bookmark has a different behaviour than CTRL/CMD+Click on a link. No other browser does this.
Profiles are there, but there's no user friendly UI... and no, containers can't do the same things as profiles.
Then you have things like battery use on platforms like macOS, which is still worse for me than Chrome or Safari.
So yeah... it works, but it's not the best browser. I tolerate it mostly because of extensions like uBlock Origin.
It is quite slow on android IMHO. At least for me, in comparison with Chrome.
I also use ublock origin in android which should make loading page faster I guess but unless the page is absolutely awful, chrome remains faster even with ads on.
Every time I launch Firefox (rare) it gives me a popup telling me it needs to install an update and to please relaunch. Come on man. It's not 2006 anymore, that kind of update prompt doesn't fly anymore.
