Mozilla is Broken

I’m quitting Mozilla, not that I have been really been into the community(mostly because they want me to do one thing, apply this to programs, not humans) but I was using and enjoying it for a long time(like since 2008). Also in about 2014 I switched from Thunderbird to mutt because I wanted something simple which does GPG, hard time to switch but I love it. And now it seems like Mozilla is killing Firefox for years :

• Version numbering doesn’t mean anything(patches, big change, small change, security update ?)
• Have a very bad privacy and security (look at the differences between tor browser and Firefox)
  • about:config-only: DNS over HTTPS to Cloudflare
• No more choice for the user
  • Old one : JavaScript can’t be configured
  • OpenH264(non-free) is installed by default
  • adb (android, non-free) is installed by default (Dev Edition ?)
  • Pocket(non-free service) is installed, displayed, non-configurable at compile time → And now is integrated in it
  • DRM (adobe EME) is active by default (can be disabled)
  • Firefox Hello is installed, displayed, non-configurable at compile time
  • Other New web stuff(WebRTC, HTML5 audio/video, …) have to be disabled/configured into about:config which is a total mess with no help (seamonkey/opera/linux-menuconfig are very good examples)
  • add-ons have to be signed and only by Mozilla, non-configurable at compile time
  • tracks you even if you disable all tracking in about:preferences
  • Geo location can only be totally disabled with about:config
  • Can’t choose a fallback(also weirdly called “Legacy”) encoding(old profile had it, about:preferences#content → Advanced(or Fonts, whatever) is shit, about:config is a mess)
  • Broken multitasking. With chrom* when a tab crashes there is only one, in firefox it’s multiple/all tabs. (I had this issue with e10s and I still got it since the first days)
  • Do Not Track is not respected on Mozilla Websites: Ignoring Do Not Track header, knowing nothing about what "tracking means" or what a "third-party" can do, being in this stupid reasoning where there is colateral tracking by Google Analytics and/or Ads Companies, also badly using the word "anonymous"(It means no name/identification).
• No Unicode even if my Locale is en_US.UTF-8 and configured to "Default for Current Locale", I have to change every single time to Unicode instead of Western (is that even a thing?)
• more and more slowness and crashes and new profile doesn’t help

And there is potentially way more shit (just look and the old but still open tickets)

Solution kept: Used to be in a constant change of web browser/interface, see www-client are broken. Now it's been actually solved by doing my own WebKitGTK+ browser: BadWolf.

BTW if everyone have to use a LTS/ESR/real-stable version of a browser even if they are actual developers… well why is the Developer Edition based on Nightly ? For badly supported things like H.264 ? gstreamer works(can be an interface to ffmpeg). For brand new stuff ? Well most web-smiths have to support old browsers like IE6 or IE7. For marketing because we are the browser with tons of features ? Well I think so. I think Netscape did the same mistake in the browser-war, why change things?

Apparently since like… middle-late 2016 Mozilla Firefox is now better in Nightly than ESR. Whatever, it’s still broken for me.

Changes

• 2016-08-16T08:10:04Z: Mention adb and DRM (Adobe EME)
• 2017-03-05T21:05:26Z: Note that Pocket has been bough by mozilla
• 2017-07-09T03:56:12Z: Mention the broken multi-tasking that came with e10s in comparison with Chrome, Mention ESR/Nightly "difference".
• 2018-08-24T22:10:58Z: Mention DNS over HTTPS with Cloudflare
• 2020-08-13T21:35:00Z: Update solution to badwolf

published on 2015-11-11T23:12:25Z, last updated on 2020-08-13T21:35:00Z