Voice of the Masses: What’s next for Firefox?

Stop bloating it with tons of feature’s that anyone will barely ever use just for the sake getting out another release.

Firefox doesn’t need to change, it doesn’t need compete with Google. They need to forget about competing for market share and just focus on begin stable and supporting open standards.

Any fancy new features that might be useful to some people could easily be supported as plugins.

Become more efficient, not everyone has the most speediest of computers and also become a DRM free area. If no one enables Digital Restriction Management the users of it will cease to sell their wares. (If I can loan a book to a friend, I should be able to do the same with its electronic equivalent.)

Unfortunately, at least for me, Firefox can only do one thing to leap itself ahead of the pack – and that’s to not be Chrome, whilst simultaneously, Chrome does something horrific.

A While ago, Firefox was bloated and slow, and Chrome was lithe and fast. Google sign-on and useful, integrated Apps have kept me with Chrome, even though it has admittedly slowed down (though I haven’t been bitten as hard as some have in this regard). I am, at this point, fully immersed in the Chrome/Google ecosystem, and it would take Chrome or google doing something incredibly wrong for me to make the effort of jumping ship to another browser, which would in all likelihood be Firefox.

Firefox is the only major browser that is not corporate, so it can concentrate on security and privacy for users. Do that, and keep it lean, and I will keep using it forever.

Where firefox really lags behind is in the area of video support. Every other major browser has fully working MSE support (which allows javascript to pass video content to the video element), thus allowing for DASH streaming implemented in Javascript. Firefox’s support is still experimental only, and when enabled still is not at the point where for example the DASH reference client will work. Video is more important to many browser users than it has ever been (hence EME DRM support making it into firefox), so firefox can’t afford to lag behind.

While I don’t want to kick this particular hornets net, on the DRM front it would be good if firefox is keeping the DRM sandbox, then adding support for Widevine or Playready would be helpful. Few content providers want to keep Access+ around once flash has gone, and Widevine and Playready gets providers most browsers so few providers will want to run Access+ just for firefox.

I use Firefox as my main browser because I prefer it for my general browsing life, I do however use Chromium for my dev work because I prefer the dev tools – probably because I’m used to them. Firefox doesn’t populate the 100s of tabs I leave open until I click on that tab, helping with memory usage – something chrome doesn’t do. In terms of browsing I don’t think there are many differences most people would notice.

It does make me sad that the movie industry is enforcing DRM into our browsers. Maybe one day they will realise that having content easily accessible is the key to reducing piracy. Yaaarh.

What made Firefox great in the past? It was better than IE, geeks used it, and that filtered down to Jo Public. It feels like they’re heading that way again with the privacy/security angle, this is definitely a path to forge in my book and should be continued down as far as possible.

There is no good browser right now. Firefox WAS brilliant, but they just couldn’t leave it alone. I abandoned it when it started to simply hang for no very good reason. I assume it was related to resource over-use, but monitoring and alerts and prevention measures are better than just hanging. I also didn’t like changing the look and feel just for the sake of it. The lady on the “Tech for Luddites” page has a theory that a product reaches its level of incompetence. It hits a peak of usefulness and becomes well-loved, and in a fit of hubris the developers have to keep tweaking it and bloating it until it become just horrible. The problem is particularly bad with “free” software, because they can simply ignore the outrage. Google Maps is a case in point. As bad as Microsoft is, by selling their stuff, they have to respond to user discontent. Hence Vista was replaced with Win 7 and Win 8 with 8.1 . My beloved usable Firefox which never used to hang, tabs on the bottom had to go because security fixes got tied to “up”grades. So I use Chrome now. I will move to the next efficient browser that provides sufficient functionality as soon as it becomes available.

Firefox needs to stop putting proprietary garbage in their browser. Now I use lynx, the only browser that will stay open forever!

Firefox is great, I use it all the time on PC, phone and tablet. If they make it even better, well done to them.

Integrate/improve security/sandboxing/privacy features like NoScript/CertificatePatrol/Ghostery, etc.

Having a browser that I know I can trust not to do malicious things and warn me when someone else tries them is paramount.

And removing proprietary plugins, championing open standards, and removing unnecessary cruft (like chat & whatever that paper airplane thing is).

They could also do a lot worse than putting some resources back into Thunderbird development – I think there are still lots of cool things they could do with email. But I think they spun that out of the Mozilla Foundation a while back, didn’t they?

Firefox should slim down!

Back when Chromium came out, it took a large chunk of the market share simply because it was *fast*. By focusing on performance, Firefox should be able to recover it’s old positioning. And they might even be able to encourage people with older hardware – including older mobile hardware, perhaps – to use their browser instead of a whatever outdated piece of crud they are using currently.

If they are really for privacy, I wish they could make it easier for us to reduce our uniqueness in digital fingerprints. Hide or spoof what fonts/addons/OS we are using.