Firefox could so easily win…
All Mozilla have to do to take a serious bite out of not just Chrome and the whole extended family tree of Chromium – INCLUDING Electron – is this:
- Fix the bugs. Seriously, just fix the damn bugs, already. There as so, so many...
- Cut the tracking, telemetry and privacy-snooping features at the source-code level.
- Cut the value-adds that nobody wants nor asked for, starting with Pocket.
- Return to the "principle of least surprise", meaning absolutely no "experiments", no modal popups interrupting the user's flow just to try to sell them on a frivolous new colour-theming gimick, no surveys, no up-selling of features: zero surprise, it's a browser, just be a browser and always be a browser.
- Make desktop integration a first-class feature: starting with effort to make the look and feel fit with the desktop environment!!{infty.}
- … and the U.I. font-size match the desktops font-size and DPI!!{infty.+2}
- … and task-bar/launcher/launchbar/launchbarx integration so that multiple, segregated, privacy-sandboxed profiles can coexist as first-class buttons, thereon. (Without the hacks needed to achieve this, today.)
- Oh, and give us PWA / `--app` support (again, with nice taskbar integration on the host desktop) so we can just use a Firefox instance to kill off Electron apps for all those cases where the available desktop app is just a site wrapped in Electron.
After all of the above, there are a tonne of easy, low-hanging fruit to grab to distinguish Firefox from the rest:
- First class advanced tab management and organisation, multiple selection, copy links to the clipboard, etc...
- Advanced user keyboard shortcuts and re-mappings: closing all tabs, closing tabs to the left or right, closing unpinned tabs, closing duplicate or old tabs...
- Built in RSS support with synchronisation of read articles via the Mozilla account...
- Use of a hardware token to encrypt synchronised passwords and other data.
Some are provided hap-haphazardly by plug-ins but I REALLY struggle to trust those because they invariably require permissions I don't want to grant and often require extra permissions because of feature creep. I do still trust Mozilla – technically – and, by building these features right into the browser, could begin to make advancements, again.
Something tells me that this new management change will not result in a single solitary one of these obvious and often trivially easy quality-of-life and privacy related changes will ever be made.