
Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web - inception44
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/17/firefox-mozilla-fights-back-against-google-chrome-dominance-privacy-fears
======
chappi42
The article once more reiterates the fact that Apple doesn't allow other
browser engines. You cannot even fight, there is no future ;-) on iOS.

~~~
radarsat1
How is it technically enforced though, I am curious. I mean, if I wrote an
application that downloaded text files and rendered the text to the screen, I
am sure that would be possible. If I wanted to add images to draw next to the
text I am sure it is feasible. So how can one _technically_ prohibit doing
that? Implementation-wise, how is a web browser really that different from
e.g. a video game?

Or is it only policy-enforced? Reviewers see something in an app that
resembles a "browser" too much and take you down?

~~~
sharpneli
One cannot have writeable executable memory on iOS (apple can, we cannot).

Thus one cannot make a JIT compiler for js and thus pages are slow.

Game engines such as Unity use il2cpp to go from the C# stuff into C++ that
can be statically compiled as running the C# as bytecode would be too slow
without a jitter.

~~~
radarsat1
Ah, so it is all about the javascript engine? Ok I can see how that might put
up some major technical barriers, but still it should be technically feasible
to have the firefox rendering engine make use of the iOS javascript engine,
no? Maybe it's not worth the effort of course. I am just trying to get a feel
for what the barriers are.

~~~
KonkeyDong69
In addition to what the other replies said, feel free to eyeball the code
required to embed SpiderMonkey in Firefox at
[https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-
dev/tree/master/dom/binding...](https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-
dev/tree/master/dom/bindings). It's rather large and complex.

~~~
padenot
This is not at all the code to embed SpiderMonkey in Firefox, those are the
bindings from DOM APIs to the implementation of those APIs in Firefox. Above
that, calling into this layer, is another layer that transforms JS calls into
C++ calls (roughly).

The interface between SpiderMonkey and the rest of Firefox is here:
[https://searchfox.org/mozilla-
central/source/js/src/jsapi.h](https://searchfox.org/mozilla-
central/source/js/src/jsapi.h).

------
lcall
I hope Firefox succeeds, as I like the idea of not concentrating yet more
power in few hands, but, on OpenBSD, I use Iridium (Chromium derivative), so I
see these benefits, and am wondering what Firefox would add for me, privacy-
and security-wise: 1) Iridium doesn't send info to Google like Chrome does (or
that is the idea);

2) It is easier (last I checked) than with Firefox to leave some config tabs
open so I can quickly turn on/off javascript, images, and/or cookies for those
sites where I need them (by exception list or temporary exception, and easy to
manage it without a mouse once the tab is open; separately, I do change the
search engine also, and create search keywords), and

3) OpenBSD adds pledge/unveil system calls from the browser, to prevent it
from reading/writing files where it should not (plus I browse under a
different user than I do other things with high confidence there will not be a
privilege escalation; also they say the pledge/unveil support is easier to
implement in Chrome/Iridium than in Firefox because of the cleaner separations
of concerns in the code organization (my wording; though they have probably
also put pledge/unveil in FF also for all I know),

4) Maybe the security of Chrome/Iridium benefits from Google's bug bounties,
more than what Firefox has done (ie, the security track record of each,
frequency of major holes over, say, the last 1-3 years). I don't really know
but I'm glad they try.

Given those things, what are the remaining biggest reasons I might prefer
Firefox? (I am aware of OBSD removing DNS-over-HTTP from Firefox, indicating
that is a choice that should be made by the user at the system level instead).

~~~
AsyncAwait
You're still on Blink. Contributing to that monoculture is no win.

~~~
lcall
I think this is among the best reasons I've heard in this discussion to avoid
Chrome. The other reasons to not use firefox (at least for me on OBSD for now,
given that pledge/unveil support for FF are still in progress, and no way I
know to use exception lists for images/cookies/javascript without an external
plugin), _might_ still outweigh it.

------
neiman
I see a problem, though I have no alternative to offer, with the current model
of organizations.

It seems you are either for-profit, and then you have no ethics and do
everything you can to centralize the world around you with no concern for
users or their benefits. Or you're a not-for-profit foundation or the Internet
Archive, where you do good things but are destined to be "poor".

Are there are any "shades" between those two organization models?

~~~
oefrha
> Or you're a not-for-profit foundation or the Internet Archive, where you do
> good things but are destined to be "poor".

Not necessarily. Wikipedia is actually pretty damn rich with a large war
chest.[1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statistics)

~~~
cthor
Wikipedia is the single greatest website on the Internet. That's what it takes
for donations to _keep you afloat_. $100MM revenue? Google makes that in a
_day_.

That aside, it's not entirely clear that Wikipedia can live off donations
forever.[0]

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer)

~~~
zozbot234
The article you link to points out that only a small part of what Wikipedia
spends is directly used to keep the website up. Spending in 2008 was less than
5% of today, and the website was just fine.

------
ppfrc
Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web, severely cramped by their complete
economic dependency on Google and their inability to allocate their funds
intelligently

~~~
hoptank
What do you suggest Mozilla do instead?

Mozilla don't just fund the development of their own products they also fund
research [1] and other projects [2].

[1] [https://research.mozilla.org/research-
grants/](https://research.mozilla.org/research-grants/) [2]
[https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/grants/](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/grants/)

In a perfect world Mozilla would be funded by donations. I donate to Mozilla
but it's a pittance compared to what they get from Google.

~~~
erikpukinskis
> What do you suggest Mozilla do instead?

Mozilla should sell two products:

1) Storage a la iCloud

2) Payment processing a la Paypal

And for marketing purposes they should get into discovery of free/open web
services, a la old school Yahoo.

As a web site builder, I don't want to have to manage credit cards. As a user,
I don't want to have to trust random web sites with my credit card info. I
also don't want to be redirected to Paypal, I just want a secure wallet that
can be used on web sites with a drop in <paymentframe recipient="foo@bar.com"
usd="8999" description="BonsaiThing Pro 1 year subscription" /> or similar.

As a web user, I want to be able to store my photos, downloads, music,
documents, etc conveniently in a little cloud-synced folder. I want to be able
to quickly give fine-grained access to different web apps to different parts
of that space. Photo app wants to access my photos? Great. Github wants to
access my repos? Fine. Photo app wants to access my repos? No.

And the discovery thing... There's a ton of free software out there. Mozilla
basically has shut the door behind it. "Thanks for the install. Good luck
finding other Free tools to use with it." They should be building a directory
of other free software that can be used with Firefox. I should be able to use
my Mozilla account to post reviews, to discuss new apps that are voted up,
etc. That will allow enthusiasts to start engaging socially with the brand in
a way that Mozilla (not Twitter or Apple or Facebook) can control the
identities.

From there maybe there is some social identity service, but if it's just a way
to engage the community—great. Like Hacker News is to YCombinator, Mozilla
should provide a place for us to discuss and share web services.

If they want to get into search, that's great. Write a new shitty open source
search engine that any web site can federate with. Use Google for now, but use
that money to dig us out of the hole Google put us in.

~~~
diffeomorphism
Could you explain a bit more? Why are you confident either would be
profitable?

1) would be competing with google drive, onedrive and icloud, which are all
funded by very big pockets and have other revenue sources. Furthermore, even
dropbox has trouble competing with this.

2) Again competition by paypal, apple pay, google pay, ... . Also, banking
business is quite far removed from what they are doing and hard to do while
being a non-profit.

~~~
erikpukinskis
In both cases they’d have to bet on growing the Free Software pie. It would be
the beginning of transitioning the company to trying to support the Open Web
as an institution, supporting open source webservice developers on an equal
tier with open source browser users.

No idea if that pie can realistically grown. But unlike their current
strategy, it would be in line with their mission statement.

------
dgudkov
I'd like to point out that it's still not possible to support the Firefox
browser with donations directly, in a crowdsourcing fashion. Donations to
Mozilla Foundation don't go to Firefox which is supported only by
search/sponsorship payouts from large corporations.

~~~
carapace
Part of the problem is that the web has become so complicated that making a
new web browser requires such resources.

Imagine a world where two or three people working for a couple of months could
come up with a new browser?

------
acd
Mozilla is right to fight for a brighter future of the web!

First Internet was started as academic network with little to no
advertisements. Then came the adtech model, personal data are sold for profit.
News Papers does not fully get funded and totally free when they are founded
by ads.

Thus we should fight to keep an open democratic internet where quality
journalism gets paid by end users not ads.

I thinks its important with an free open Internet for our democracy to work.

We have to somehow get away from adtech and attentiontech towards a user
funded internet. Attentiontech is were personal attention span is what
corporations fight to keep. We should have content which is good for end
users.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
I don't understand what subscriptions vs adverts has to do with being more or
less democratic.

I also don't understand how subscriptions are compatible with privacy.

There is currently no widely used facility for making anonymous electronic
payments. If there was, then governments (including democratic ones) would
crack down on it hard.

Journalism has always been funded through advertising.

------
edpichler
Mozilla really has a big challenge. It is hard to compete with such powerful
companies, creating a sustainable business with their mission without
succumbing to ads or stopping to protect user privacy. It looks like an unfair
game.

I like the Brave business model. I wish to have the same with Firefox.

~~~
jillesvangurp
Too bad they built Brave on Chromium instead of Firefox. Which of course given
that the company is run by Mozilla co-founder Brendan Eich is a bit of a
shame.

Firefox is showing that they are more than technically competent to keep up
with Chromium and deliver great performance and functionality. With the work
they are doing rewriting Firefox component by component in Rust, Google will
have their work cut out keeping up in terms of performance using their C++
implementation. Competition is good.

~~~
saagarjha
> With the work they are doing rewriting Firefox component by component in
> Rust, Google will have their work cut out keeping up in terms of performance
> using their C++ implementation.

I would expect Blink’s C++ implementation to perform comparably; wouldn’t the
main benefits would be security-related?

~~~
steveklabnik
Mozilla tried to parallelize their CSS engine multiple times in C++, and
failed. Rust’s guarantees made it possible to do so. There was a talk about it
at a Rust conference called “The Story of Stylo”; I’m on my phone or I’d link
you.

~~~
lioeters
Following my curiosity, I found:

The Story of Stylo: Replacing Firefox's CSS engine with Rust

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6SSTRr2mFU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6SSTRr2mFU)

Woo, 9M lines of C/C++ to 85K lines of Rust..

Author's slides:
[https://www.joshmatthews.net/rbr17/](https://www.joshmatthews.net/rbr17/)

~~~
fabrice_d
No, for the style system is 160K lines of C++ down to 85K lines of Rust. Still
a great win!

~~~
lioeters
Those numbers sound much more realistic, ~53% reduction in code size - and
you're right, it's a great testament to Rust's conciseness!

------
Karrot_Kream
These articles always seem to elide over the WHATWG/W3C fight. Firefox and
other browser vendors chose a living, implementable HTML spec over a
consensus-based standards body (with its own deep problems), and now we lament
the lack of alternatives. If you let browsers create the standards and change
them unchecked, the natural conclusion is to own the entire stack for
yourself.

------
hellofunk
It would seem that the Brave browser and Firefox share similar goals on
privacy. It’s hard to navigate the differences in their perspectives on this,
why would one choose one of these browsers over the other if concerned about
online tracking?

~~~
gatherhunterer
Brave stops ads from tracking you but the browser itself records your browsing
behavior and allows ads to use that anonymized data to target ads to you.
Their marketing always mentions the former and never mentions the latter. The
goal of Brave is to build a model for web advertising that pays the user but
gives Brave the lion’s share; this essentially replaces the search engines and
social networks as the nexus of web advertising with a browser.

~~~
buboard
the data stays in your computer though, doesnt travel to their servers. that's
very significant

I 'm not sure Brave's model will work, but at least they are giving websites
more options , which is more important imho than fighting for who will have
the fastest rendering engine.

------
OrgNet
It needs to fight for the present of the web, because it is getting worst.

------
miklax
Viva la Firefox :)

------
alwillis
Not only does Firefox have to worry about Chrome and Safari, now there’s Brave
on Mac/Windows/Linux/iOS/Android.

Brave is co-founded by Brendan Eich, who co-founded Mozilla. Brave is doing
all the things Firefox should have done: create a new ecosystem for a secure
and private web, while Mozilla is still taking millions from Google in
exchange for making Google the default search engine.

Although the invasive ads are blocked by default, users can opt-in to privacy
preserving ads and get paid in Basic Attention Token, which can be used to
support the over 300,000 and growing registered content creators.

On the desktop, Brave has Tor, IPFS and WebTorrent built-in—no additional
plugins needed.

Yes, it’s based on Chromium, which feeds into the monoculture narrative. But
there’s the irony of the guy who started Firefox using Chrome’s engine to
attempt to kill Google’s surveillance capitalism system.

------
auslander
> Macs remain a fairly open system, although the increasing focus on the Mac
> app store, which Firefox isn’t on, bodes ill for the browser’s future.

Why not put FF in App Store? I'd even pay for clean, no "integrations",
version.

~~~
barryvan
I suspect that it's because Firefox makes extensive use of "private" Apple
APIs to be able to efficiently render on the platform, and Apple doesn't allow
such uses for apps distributed through the app store. Similar issues apply to
electron apps:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21437255](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21437255)

------
j-pb
Never forget that mozilla puts meta bulls __* before solving problems.

Their "spec hackers" decided to kill WebSQL, because of they feared that the
available implementation was so HIGH quality that there wouldn't be any
implementation diversity.

Instead they gave us the indexedDB garbage dump.

Firefox and Mozilla can go straight to oblivion for all I care.

~~~
detaro
No, because the spec did not actually specify enough to allow implementation
diversity or even just the available implementation be updated to a new
version that breaks backwards compatibility, and apparently none of the
proposers cared enough about the spec to do the work of documenting the
intended behavior.

WebSQL implementations later proved to be insecure by not limiting the kind of
queries allowed, and strictly speaking any fix of that would have broken the
proposed specification.

~~~
j-pb
Just use the SQLite implementation and documentation everywhere. SQLite is
arguably the most well tested piece of software on the planet.

It would have been the only piece of every browser that 'just works'.

But hey having a "spec" on top to all the available documentation is super
necessary so that some bloke on twitter can put it into their bio.

Even HTML doesn't have specs anymore, because they don't matter. They are a
means to get all browsers to be compatible not the goal.

And Safari and Chrome still ship with WebSQL, so I don't think that "security
issue" is actually there.

~~~
detaro
I'm not sure where you get the idea that HTML does not have a specification?
It has a very extensive one.

~~~
j-pb
Its not a specification though, its a "living standard" a.k.a. we document the
stuff we build as we go.

~~~
detaro
A living standard is a form of specification. You can use it to implement a
tool consuming HTML the same way the browsers do from scratch, and the
browsers use the process to align their independent implementations.

~~~
j-pb
Its not a specification though, because your implementation can never conform
to it. You can't say "I have a html 5.x" compliant browser anymore because
there is no fixed specification for it. You can only have something that is
"currently compatible with the other browsers". Same thing you would have
gotten with SQLite.

------
lllr_finger
On a free and open platform like OpenBSD, Firefox isn't even really an option
due to performance issues. More than anything else, being forced to use
Chromium for a decent browsing experience turned me away from using OpenBSD on
a daily driver laptop.

~~~
danilocesar
How's that? Firefox is way better nowadays than it was a few years ago. I have
been using as my main work browser for some time and I don't face any
performance issues with it.

~~~
lllr_finger
On a BSD? It's great for me in Windows or Linux, but it's really choppy
scrolling or watching videos in OpenBSD. There was a post on the mailing list
somewhere that blamed excessive mallocs. This was with version 69, so not some
ancient version either.

~~~
mikem170
I've been running Firefox on OpenBSD on a Thinkpad X260, for about a year, and
it's been working great, including videos and scrolling.

------
mscasts
Firefox is unfortunately becoming unrelevant. They have pretty much less than
5% global usage and it's not exactly increasing.

Mozilla needs to sharpen up in my view. I use Brave because I like Brendan
Eich and I am not exactly a fan of Mozilla as an org. There is no way to fund
Firefox development as a user and it seems like they have focused more on side
products / services lately.

~~~
amiga_500
Firefox works great. I have to use chrome af work, so use both. Firefox lacks
nothing.

------
k1m
The Guardian website is horrible when it comes to tracking. They don't tend to
mention that in their privacy-focused articles.

Here's a tweet that sums it up:

'The irony is real... @Guardian headline, "The Guardian view on privacy
online: a human right", while allowing trackers to spy on their readers.'

[https://twitter.com/Ghostery/status/989543132349034499](https://twitter.com/Ghostery/status/989543132349034499)

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Isn't Ghostery the tracker-blocker that sold its users' data?

~~~
k1m
It is. I don't use them and recommend uBlock Origin to anyone who asks. But
they are correct on this.

~~~
nullc
The Meta-irony is real... @Ghostery tweet about Guardian "allowing trackers to
spy on their readers" while themselves selling their user's data.

~~~
k1m
That's why I find uBlock Origin so refreshing. The entire ad-blocking universe
is so tainted with business interests it's hard to trust any of them. The
uBlock Origin developer is genuinely principled from what I've seen.

~~~
yborg
Who should be getting a MacArthur grant or equivalent. I mean, it's literally
gorhill or nothing, it's terrifying. Someone could walk up to him with $10M
dollars and say 'Here. Stop making your thing and you can have this money." It
would be a fraction of the revenue he's blocking and who could turn it down?
Wladimir Palant suddenly became a big fan of whitelisting when he realized how
much Google would pay for it. Everyone has a price.

~~~
k1m
Agree. Although I don't really understand gorhill's refusal to take donations
for his work. I hope it's just that he doesn't need it.

------
madenine
Is there even a fight left?

Chrome was the newer, faster, better working option when the average user was
acclimating to the web as a constant part of their lives. To a degree, Chrome
became a status symbol - knowing to ditch IE and download chrome was a mark
that you were minimally web and computer savvy.

For the average person to switch away from Chrome, FF would need to have an
overwhelming advantage - and I'm not sure privacy is the place where the
average user will register that advantage. With 100 other companies stealing
and selling their data at any given time, why should they worry about their
web browser?

~~~
Zealotux
For a long time, it was installing Firefox over IE that was regarded as the
proof of being "computer savvy". I'll even admit that back in the days, I took
great pride in introducing it to my whole family when most of them didn't even
know there could be an alternative to IE. And back then, it was Firefox that
was the fastest, safest, coolest kid in town.

Up until recently, I was sharing your pessimism over the crushing success of
Chrome and how Firefox would never get back in the heart of people. This is
why it amazed me when people – non-techies – around me not only did notice but
were more than eager to know why I had stopped using Chrome. Small talk was
enough, in many cases, to convert them back into Firefox, which isn't is what
I wanted to as I never specifically advocate for personal software solutions.

It appears regular people are more aware of these issues than we, in the tech
field, might think. Maybe it's because I live in Europe and we're being
constantly bombarded with cookie compliance notices – which are obvious dark
patterns 90% of the time – that acts as a systematic reminder that almost no
website we ever visit "respect your privacy". I'll admit it's nothing more
than empirical, biased observation, but maybe something's happening here, I
believe we should at least try.

------
googthwy123
I think people are sometimes forgetting that Firefox is an ad-supported
product. Firefox monetizes by sending people to Google. In some sense, Chrome
is less directly funded by ads than Firefox, because Google (like Microsoft
and Apple) has a reason to fund the development of a web browser even if it
wasn't directly leading to ad revenue. On the other hand, Google is only
paying for Firefox to the extent that Firefox users bring ad revenue to
Google.

------
freediver
Perhaps the fight should start with:

\- Not sending data to Google

\- Finding a different business model that does not almost entirely rely on
Google

\- Not collecting user data

Source: [https://firefoxvschrome.com](https://firefoxvschrome.com)

~~~
mthoms
Wow. This is so misleading that it borders on outright lying. What's your
agenda?

~~~
freediver
Truth? I can understand 'unpopular', but 'misleading' without probably even
looking at it?

1) This can be easilly reproduced.

[https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11658588961766604...](https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/1165858896176660480)

2) Over 95% of Mozilla revenue comes from Google for using Google as default
search engine [https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-
fdn-201...](https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-fdn-2017-fs-
short-form-final-0927.pdf)

3) [https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#health-
report](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#health-report) \- see
first item

~~~
mthoms
Your link implies that Chrome is more respecting of privacy than Firefox. Can
you show me a single reputable tech journalist or online privacy expert that
agrees with this premise?

No, you can't.

Your bulleted points are widely known. Could Firefox be even more private? Of
course. Would it be better if it didn't rely on Google for the vast majority
of it's revenue? Obviously! Heck, even Mozilla itself freely admits that.

Is Firefox worse than Chrome at respecting your privacy as your link implies?
That's plainly ridiculous. Even Google itself has never made such a claim.

~~~
freediver
I understand how it may imply that, but my intention was to simply point to
facts as often times we believe what we are led to believe vs seeing the facts
with our own eyes.

To me a business model entirely dependent upon one entity whose policies they
are supposed to fight against exposes a fundamental flaw - and that is a fact.
Mozilla can make a number of choices to break the spell and they decide not
to. For something as important as this, do or do not, there is no try.

------
aledthemathguy
One new model Firefox can adopt (try) is being made possible by
cryptocurrencies. Mozilla can follow Brave's path and "pay" clients in
cryptocurrency for viewing ads (although I am not sure this is in line with
Mozilla's interests or goals or even ethics).

This might be able to create a new incentive layer for the web. Most users
really don't care about their browser (you'd be surprised how many downloaded
Chrome because it was just "simpler" than Explorer and stuck with it for no
prominent reason). Introducing an incentive to use Firefox might tilt the
choice (why not use a browser that pays me a few bucks - which I will put back
in the web).

I'll stop at this.

