Wednesday, September 2, 2026
Mozilla would do well to listen to the passionate comments on Hacker News
My post about Firefox generated a lively discussion on Hacker News, with many good points raised.
The top comment (as of this writing) summed things up well: “It's exactly because Firefox is so important that you'll see people here complaining when Firefox does things to push away users . . .”
Overall, the passion for Firefox was on full display. I hope Mozilla staffers take this thread as feedback and use it to improve Firefox in ways that boost market share.
I kind of regret my reference to “over thinkers on Hacker News” because it could be taken as an insult. A casual glance around this site, though, will show that I do plenty of overthinking myself.
I recall one time when someone accused me of overthinking something, I shot back that he was underthinking it. Ah, those were the days.
A comment about the moving background being “nauseating” caught my attention. It didn’t exactly move, but the stars fading in and out for a twinkling effect could give that impression.
I myself found the twinkling stars distracting, not just because of the twinkles but also because it is improbable that stars would appear this way in outer space, which is what this is supposed to depict.
So I’ve commented out a couple of lines of CSS and stopped the twinkling. I also stopped the barely perceptible wisps of cloud from blowing by.
The stars are based, by the way, on a video by Carla Notarobot. This was from six years ago, so chances are Carla really was not a robot.
Finally, it’s comments like these that make me love Hacker News:
“wait, is this a thing? firefox is the only mainstream browser with an rcfile, that alone gives you incredible powers. I hope one day it also grows something like chrome's CDP. What is everyone so upset about?”
I checked the Wikipedia article, and still only have a vague idea of what an rcfile is.
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