Would be really cool if Mozilla ordered up some browser features than yet another epic service doohickey to be shoehorned into it.
Fucjing dipshits. My kobo reader default launcher still has a Pocket button on it.
this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2025
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Features like what? Other than under-the-hood privacy/security improvements that normies would never notice, I can't think of any new feature I want (that needs to be baked into the browser core rather than offered as an extension).
Progressive Web Apps Modern Tab Management Cross Site Scripting (like "Web Macros") Improved History Search Improved privacy containers (fighting browser fingerprinting) Clearer and more fine granumar permission concepts (like Android, "may this website do xyz")
that's just the first that I can think about in the first 30 seconds
Interestingly other than what you say, under the hood improvements still benefit the user, but Mozilla axed the Servo Engine (fortunately that project is still alive, now outside of Mozilla). I think a number of Javascript Apis are lacking in Mozilla compared to Chrome and others.
I almost hate Mozilla as much as I do hate Google, because they are slowly letting Firefox die a death of unpopularity.
But at least they can pay their CEOs a lot of money out of that sweet Google ad revenue.
- Progressive Web Apps - check the last update, it allows for the browser to create a shortcut to a webpage with minimal ui. (At least, on Windows)
- Modern Tab Management - Depends on what you want exactly. But tab groups and vertical tabs have landed on stable already.
- Not sure what you mean by Cross Site Scripting, XSS is usually an attack vector not a feature. If by macros you mean automation features, these do exist but are mostly focussed on developers & testing - you need an external application to use these APIs.
- History Search - certainly could be improved, but I use it rarely enough as is.
- (Improved) Privacy Containers - Is already being worked on
- Granular Permissions - What exact permissions do you wish for there to be more granular? I personally don't experience this issue as I find a lot of permissions to be quite granular already.
A lot of Web APIs are proposed by Google, giving them a head start in implementation. Furthermore, some not supported by choice due to privacy implications.
The CEO pay however: I completely agree, it is insane how much the CEO is paid while responsible being for purchasing and shuttering services like Pocket.
and vertical tabs
Firefox's vertical tabs are terrible. Hopefully they'll get there, but right now they get themselves stuck in the expanded position any time you move over them to another screen, and they seem to pretty regularly get themselves stuck expanded even without that. Compared to the seamless experience that Edge offers with vertical tabs (and has done for many years), I was astonished at how much of a downgrade Firefox vertical tabs was.
Scripting - creating cross page macros, like you now can do with puppeteer etc. Have simple basic programming capabilities. Stuff like that now shows up with "AI" agentic browsers, but that's too. much. I just want to set up macros, like "go to my timesheet page, click start, enter current time". On a "Autohotkey for the web" level. (Power users instead of developers)
Tab management - I'm working a lot with jira and other "wonderful" software. What would be nice would be showing multiple tabs at once (like opening several browser windows) , also maybe automatically creating a conceptual "tree" in the tab overview. That would require some configuration (on top of what normal vertical tabs do). For example confluence has a implicit tree, why shouldn't the tab overview in the browser track that. A lot of web sites are ordered hierarchically. The only tab hierarchichy we currently have in the browser is a "i opened tab b from tab a" hierarchy
History search - not using it is proof it doesn't fulfill a desire. "Damn I recently was on a site that talked about how the confabulator works without causing wobbles in the swingmode arm" Trying to find that after you did open a few hundred other pages sucks. It would be nice to have positive and negative search terms, have a "near" operator etc. So that would be a full text search engine (which already exists) about pages I have seen in the past.
Granular permissions: I only allow a page to enumerate the fonts it needs to use, not all of them so it can calculate a hash. I want to forbid it from accessing certain domains (Adblockers can currently do that) etc. You may/may not play video. The permission system is in place, but too coarse.
And yes there are privacy containers, but not in a really helpful manner yet. They'd need to integrate with the above permissions, for example so I can put a web page into a jail of its own.
All these aren't well thought out features, rather I pulled them out of my butt. Still I feel there's close to no innovation on the usability of a browser and we could need that. We still have the same interaction model as in the 90s with Mosaic - and while (of course) not every idea would work out in a good way, some things would be worth following up on. I'd expect that out of an organization like Mozilla (less so out of commercial browser vendors).
Progressive Web Apps
Modern Tab Management
Isn't that already an extension?
Improved History Search
Could also be an extension, I bet.
Cross Site Scripting (like "Web Macros")
Improved privacy containers (fighting browser fingerprinting)
Clearer and more fine granumar permission concepts (like Android, "may this website do xyz")
That's the sort of thing I meant by "under-the-hood stuff normies won't notice."
I think a number of Javascript Apis are lacking in Mozilla compared to Chrome and others.
No, that's a good thing. Fuck JavaScript; it has way too much access to stuff it shouldn't already. If anything, APIs need to be removed.
I almost hate Mozilla as much as I do hate Google, because they are slowly letting Firefox die a death of unpopularity.
But at least they can pay their CEOs a lot of money out of that sweet Google ad revenue.
I think Google still deserves to be hated a lot more, but otherwise I agree. IMO there's no good reason for Mozilla Corporation to exist; it should only be Mozilla Foundation (the non-profit part) and all board and management should be replaced with non-overpaid people who actually believe in the mission.
Sounds nice, ideally they'd just support drop in Wireguard configurations so you can use the VPN of your choice rather than being forced to use whatever Mozilla is offering.
The only browser that has a relatively unrestricted add-on ecosystem, and the best one capable of running mobile add-ons, shouldn't need to add this as a baked-in feature.
I'm pretty sure this feature classifies as bloat.