Mozilla doesn't have a real sustainable business model right now.
FireFox OS could have provided such model, in fact, its successor kaios is doing very well and one can imagine that in the future, it will be the primary OS of half the mobile users on the planet. 'Feature phones' aren't dead. They provide a cheap alternative to touch phones, are usually more robust, and allowing them to run web apps instead of MIDP stuff is a giant opportunity for any web actor.
Ditching Rust as a core component of the future of Firefox is also a demonstration that Mozilla isn't a tech focused corp anymore. Rust is going to yield a lot of result when it comes to security, memory saftely and maintainability and firing Rust devs was terribly short sighted.
So yes Firefox was always enough. Leadership at Mozilla doesn't get it.
>Ditching Rust as a core component of the future of Firefox is also a demonstration that Mozilla isn't a tech focused corp anymore. Rust is going to yield a lot of result when it comes to security, memory saftely and maintainability and firing Rust devs was terribly short sighted.
Ugh, this is nonsense. Mozilla has not "ditched Rust as a core component of a tech focused corp". Mozilla has ditched the idea of developing entire components of Firefox in a silo for 5-8 years, and then spending 3 years trying to integrate that component back into the browser, the entire time trying to keep both components maintained and up-to-date with ridiculously fast changing web standards.
They want to continue using Rust, but it will be done more piecemeal and in-place, rather than trying to keep two entirely separate browser engines maintained and standards-compliant for the next 5+ years.
Largely because Rust has grown massively and Mozilla isn’t even close to its biggest sponsor at this point.
Azure, AWS, Google Cloud are all major Rust sponsors at this point. It doesn’t make sense for Mozilla to remain a major sponsor for a product that almost certainly can and will exist, and likely flourish even more, as a more independent project.
At this point Mozilla’s ownership of Rust would likely only cost resources and serve to limit the growth and development of rust.
I can't understand how Mozilla failed to execute on Firefox OS.
From where I am at it was a massive opportunity for Mozilla and Web developers all round the world. They didn't have to take on Android and iOS directly, but may have gotten there eventually thru 'worse is better'.
Imagine a web developer learning just a few APIs and being being able to customize their web app for smart TVs
> Imagine a web developer learning just a few APIs and being being able to customize their web app for smart TVs
This was WebOS in 2009.
Windows Phone, WebOS, Meego and Ubuntu Phone all "failed" around the same time period as Firefox OS. I have a hard time laying blame solely on Mozilla there.
MeeGo was a bizarre affair. There was I think Maemo, Moblin, LImo, SLP, Bada, Leste, MeeGo, Mer, Tizen, Sailfish, Nemo... all forks, merges, reforks. They seemed to spend all their time and energy continually rebranding, forming and disbanding consortiums, creating new websites and logos. They never just got on with it.
Well, wonderful... It was a huge mess. Maemo was gtk based until Nokia bought Qt. Guess there was some friction in the conversion. Maemo was deb based until Nokia management brought Intel into the boat for no technical reasons, then they switched to rpm. Well, the packaging is a relatively small detail, but many other parts of the distro saw similar switches from choice A to choice B for no real benefit. Friction after friction.
Elop was an incompetent leader, but he had not been involved in creating the mess. He went for a worse option, but that does not say that Meego would have ever succeeded.
Yes, I am stuck in the past myself, typing this on SailfishOS. But one has to see the realities.
The main problem with Meego etc was that they never released a damn phone. The N9 was both released and a very good phone. That was the "wonderful" part. I know that it was a bit of a mess technically behind the scenes. But it was also a mess that was possible to clean up.
What was the hard part that caused Android and iOS to win? Was it convincing manufacturers to ship with them? Or was it just the first mover advantage for iOS and the network effects of the Play Store with Android?
> The Nokia N9 was announced at Nokia's Connections event in Singapore, June 2011. The reception for the device has been very positive, citing the MeeGo v1.2 Harmattan UI, pseudo-buttonless design, polycarbonate unibody construction and its NFC capabilities. Still, many reviewers did not recommend to buy the N9 only because of Nokia's earlier decision to drop MeeGo for Windows Phone for future smartphones – often questioning this decision at the same time. Engadget's editor Vlad Savov said in June 2011 that "it's a terrific phone that's got me legitimately excited to use it, but its future is clouded by a parent that's investing its time and money into building up a whole other OS." In a later review, Engadget writes: "Love at first sight — this is possibly the most beautiful phone ever made," and "MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan is such a breath of fresh air it will leave you gasping — that is, until you remember that you're dealing with a dead man walking."
Yes. Mozilla couldn’t get the mobile operators to sell a phone pre-loaded with FirefoxOS. And no one is going to buy a phone and reimage it.
> I can't understand how Mozilla failed to execute on Firefox OS.
This is naive. They did execute, and failed. That’s different than not executing at all. You can’t break into this segment without cooperation from the mobile phone operators... even in India and Southeast Asia whom were the primary target markets (less disposable income than Americans)
I had a Firefox OS phone. There was nothing great about it. It was average (by intention in order to work on restricted devices). I never used it to make calls, I used it for development. And it only had a wifi connection because I did not buy service for it.
There was nothing really “disruptive” about it as I recall. $20 Android phones destroyed any hope after the mobile operators turned a blind eye.
> And no one is going to buy a phone and reimage it.
People do this all the time. I did it with my first android phone, a Nexus S, despite having bought the phone with no intention of doing so. The Chinese crapware it came loaded with didn't really leave any alternative.
So I guess the question is what made KaiOS able to succeed instead of fail if we're saying the problems FirefoxOS faced weren't execution? Was it simply different timing and now more operators are willing to partner?
This doesn't really answer the question any it just adds more speculation in between again. But to rewrite the question with the new speculation - what made KaiOS able to succeed in starting without WhatsApp support and eventually getting it (last year) instead of failing on both counts like FirefoxOS did?
I.e. if you've got something to claim as the reason it can't also apply to KaiOS unless there was something KaiOS did right that Mozilla didn't.
Commercially, it totally did. Without Whatsapp we could not sell enough devices, but without enough volume Whatsapp was not interested to build an official app. Chicken, meet egg!
If it was literally make-or-break for the entire platform, especially in the markets it was targeting, I’m surprised Mozilla never volunteered to subsidize or build a WhatsApp port.
- have been friendly to 3rd party clients developers, like Loquim (https://loqui.im/). Once WA turned on e2e encryption, the situation for 3rd party clients changed from "difficult but fun" to "mostly impossible".
I wonder what markets WhatsApp is important to. In the UK quite a few people used it while briefly lived there, but in the US, Thailand, Vietnam, et.al. I didn't see anyone using or ever talking about it.
In the Netherlands WhatsApp is so ubiquitous that it always surprises me to hear other countries are not 100% WA. (Besides China, for obvious reasons it doesn't surprise me China has their own app.)
The only people I know who don't use WhatsApp are very privacy focused and therefor use Signal.
I'm seeing a lot of push towards Discord in the USA as well; it's a bit awkward in that kind of usage, but when basically everyone is already using Discord on PC it's not hard to convince people to use the phone app.
I find it curious a lot of friends are getting back to Skype, for personal use, across continents, and not CorporateSkype/OC. Is this a huge selection bias thing? Don't know. Several have also recently deleted GMail.
Apps. Google refused to build apps for Windows Phone. Microsoft even went as far as building a YouTube app for Windows Phone themselves (a very good one at the time) but Google quickly forced them to remove it.
> Windows Phone, WebOS, Meego and Ubuntu Phone all "failed" around the same time period as Firefox OS. I have a hard time laying blame solely on Mozilla there.
I've seen a number of comments on Windows Phone since then (on HN), and one and all they emphasize how much better and nicer Windows Phone was -- from a consumer perspective -- than any other phone.
What was the failure? This isn't a retrospective that makes any sense.
I feel the same way about webOS: it was better and nicer than Android or iOS, and we had to wait half of a decade before Android and iOS adopted some of the features it shipped with in 2009.
As of 2019, however, 52.4% of the mobile OS market belongs to iOS, and 47% to Android[1]. Neither of our favorite mobile phone OSes have succeeded in comparison.
> As of 2019, however, 52.4% of the mobile OS market belongs to iOS, and 47% to Android.
This doesn't pass the sniff test, unless you're doing something weird like measuring the mobile OS market in dollars spent on phones.
> Neither of our favorite mobile phone OSes have succeeded in comparison.
To be clear, I have no experience of Windows Phone. I'm just bemused that 100% of comments about what it was like are so glowing. For some other product, you'd expect to see some comments saying "this was the greatest product ever to be commercially available" and some others saying "no, I had one of those, and it sucked". That doesn't seem to happen for Windows Phone.
Google forced Microsoft to remove Youtube and other apps. Also Microsoft kept 're-inventing' the phone OS multiple times requiring app authors to keep rewriting the app to new API's.
A lot of patent fees paid to Apple and Google for every phone sold.
Windows Phone was really good and it had millions of fans. It would probably do well in today's duopoly market if relaunched but MS has lost interest in phones presently.
WebOS wasn’t tried in any meaningful sense. It was abandoned within less than a single product lifecycle by the various companies under which it operated.
Windows Phone was an epic disaster in how badly it was rolled out. It was Ballmer at his worst. MS kept oscillating between whether they wanted Windows Phone to be an iPhone competitor or an Android competitor. They picked the worst of all worlds, by choosing to focus on distributing through 3rd party vendors, but refusing to allow them to make any changes to the interface, therefore basically eliminating any major vendors from adopting and promoting Windows Phone. It’s still amazing that MS was unable to unseat Android at a time OEMs were desperate for an Android alternative thanks to the uncertainty around the Oracle lawsuits (and were already paying more to MS than Google for Android! thanks to MS’s OS related patent portfolio).
Ubuntu Phone never made any sense, targeting the most expensive niche of the market as it did.
>What was the failure? This isn't a retrospective that makes any sense.
Windows Phone had great, snappy, intuitive UI (which was really surprising coming from Microsoft). However it had no apps. If you look at the top 10 iPhone apps in the app store, only Facebook and Netflix were officially supported on the platform. I recall there being (great) 3rd party apps for apps like Instagram, but there was a dearth of anything else.
Except that, again, that makes for a completely nonsensical theory of what happened. You can't just say "it was vastly superior to everything else, so it failed because no one would buy it". You need to explain why no one would buy it, because the only data in your model says that people should be buying it in droves.
> What was the failure? This isn't a retrospective that makes any sense.
No YouTube, no Snapchat etc.
With YouTube Google used their position to keep it that way.
It also wouldn't surprise me if someone told certain app developers that "that's a nice app you have there, it would be shame if there was a bug in the Play store that made it hard ro find".
When it comes to App Store I have heard it is pretty well established that you won't get featured, no matter how great your app is if it is available on other platforms.
Hey, thanks for this link. I was a huge fan of webOS since the days of the Palm Pre. I noticed that this runs on the Raspberry Pi 4. Do you know what the use case for this is? Store displays?
Bill Gates explained why everybody but Google and Apple failed at mobile OSes:
> “In the software world, particularly for platforms, these are winner-take-all markets. So the greatest mistake ever is whatever mismanagement I engaged in that caused Microsoft not to be what Android is. That is, Android is the standard non-Apple phone platform. That was a natural thing for Microsoft to win. It really is winner take all. If you’re there with half as many apps or 90 percent as many apps, you’re on your way to complete doom. There’s room for exactly one non-Apple operating system."
Looking at wikipedia KaiOS seems to be the second mobile OS in India now, ahead of the iPhone. I don’t think those rules apply to a system which relies of web technologies, because you have such an enormous base of developers and development infrastructure.
KaiOS is a joke though... More akin to your desk calculator than a phone that we have become accustomed to. They sell because they are cheap, not on any other merit.
> I can't understand how Mozilla failed to execute on Firefox OS.
Because this product could only be sold to a hardware maker. It doesn't matter how good it was/is, because hardware makers are smart enough now not to rely on a 3rd party supplier of an OS, in fact they've been working hard on degoogling Android as much as possible.
Another failed alternative that comes to mind is WebOS, and yes indeed, it got acquired by LG for the reasons above.
It didn't need to be KaiOS. The OS on jio phones is severely crippled and it could be any OS with a webview. I don't count it as success of FFOS, at least on technical merits.
Remember launching a phone just isn’t FirefoxOS: you need a device to load it on, a carrier willing to support it (this is the biggest hurdle by far), and to negotiate the baseband blob that you have absolutely no reason idea what it does and has DMA.
I have personally gone through carrier negotiations and they’re the reason why Android phones come with bloat ware and people go to such lengths to build and distribute minimalistic Android systems.
When the pandemic is over and the world opens again go visit Mobile World Congress. Bring a tissue because the industry might make you cry.
They just needed a bit of persistence. In a 5K run, they sprinted for 2K and then gave up and threw away the baton. Other companies picked what they ditched and profit now. Deeply irritating.
I didn't pay much attention to the project at the time, but:
Might it have something to do with the word "OS" in the title? It's never worked except for Apple, but because Apple is selling a whole product, not an OS, it doesn't seem to hit in the same way.
Marketing something as "____ OS" appears to more or less guarantee a marketing failure.
A lot of smart TV apps are already HTML and JavaScript webviews. You can create a webview app on Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, a ton of proprietary devices like cars or TVs. What benefit would Firefox OS bring here, besides creating another kludgy abstraction layer over the vendor hardware?
> Mozilla doesn't have a real sustainable business model right now.
This is the meat of my problem with Firefox as it stands. I've not stopped using Firefox since the mid 2000's but come on, you need something more than just checks from Google. Charge me for a commercial version of FireFox that includes a VPN subscription and funds its development. Just do it ten years ago.
Honestly, if they're not going to embrace Rust and Servo becomes completely usable I may just jump ship eventually. My hope for Servo is that it becomes 100% Rust as much as sustainably possible (I understand for codecs and some things recreating them in Rust might be overkill when there's standardized libraries just use them), even the JS engine.
This most common thing I write on HN is that I can’t believe I can’t pay to use Firefox.
“How will we ever earn money here at Mozilla? All we have is this world class web browser that provides massive value to millions of people, but we refuse to directly monetize. Oh whatever will we do?”
It's weird that when I tell my kids that when they want to help, but they won't help in the way that someone needs help, that they aren't actually helping, they understand it.
Mozilla has buckets of money, between the Corporation and the Foundation. They are separate, for good-ish reasons? But they are separate. If they start allowing customers or businesses to pay for Firefox, then they will have to provide an entirely different level of support. They will need a billing and support team that is beholden to those paying customers.
It will shift the focus that Firefox has on attracting and retaining users to attracting and retaining paying users.
It will mean they need to meet various warranty and regulatory requirements around the world, and potentially introduce new business risks and liabilities related to those requirements (e.g. non-compliance with specific regional legislation).
What you are asking for is to pay Mozilla for Firefox, and to get there you need a radical shift in the organization that supports and ships Firefox.
Or, you could do what the rest of folks who want to support Firefox do, and make a donation in the way that Mozilla is signalling is the best way to support Mozilla's mission and Firefox development.
If that isn't good enough for you, track down an OSS contributor to Firefox, and give them money. Direct action for the win!
> support Mozilla's mission and Firefox development.
That's the rub here. Mozilla's mission is a much larger scope than just Firefox. Some people want to support Firefox, but don't want to donate to Mozilla's mission. One such reason is because it's important to have more than one browser implementation. There's no way to support that without Mozilla allocating some portion of your donation to some unrelated part of their mission.
Ok but now you're asking for something weirder and more restrictive than "paying for firefox", right? If I buy a laptop from Lenovo I don't get to say oh I don't want to pay for tablet development, I just want all of this money to go to your laptop division.
I basically agree with you, but there is a difference too. When you buy a laptop you're not strictly dictating how the money is used, but you are signalling pretty clearly which product you actually wanted. Can you do that when you give a donation to the Mozilla Foundation?
> If I buy a laptop from Lenovo I don't get to say oh I don't want to pay for tablet development, I just want all of this money to go to your laptop division.
9HZZRfNlpR is right. Not only do you get to say this, you have no other choice but to say this. Buying a laptop sends the strongest possible message that you're giving your money to the laptop division, and not to the tablet division. If you wanted to support the tablet division, you would have bought a tablet. And Lenovo will keep very careful track of this. They may choose to cross-subsidize, but your message will be received loud and clear.
But you do, you signal it with your money that you want tablet or laptop, it's very easy. FF is open source but you have to donate to some bizarre American social issues that you have no interest in or don't want to participate.
I feel like they would lose a lot of funding if they branch out Firefox's Non-Profit into its own thing because most people care more about Firefox than the kinds of things the EFF is already doing.
You can have a separate version of Firefox that is commercial and complies, and still have open source Firefox. Chromium is open source, but Google Chrome is proprietary.
Charging money for the browser will quickly push them down to single-digit marketshare, and will make "works on Chrome, ship it" the only correct way to develop for the web.
If you want to pay for using their browser, you could always donate to them.
the donations never went to firefox. it was dispersed to many of their other misguided and failed revenue gen efforts. they redirected a ton of servo engineers to focus on VR/Magic leap, ffs.
Yes. The money should gone towards dev, but also testing.
According to the author, the problem contributing to this misprioritization was that “Firefox exists just to give Mozilla a seat at the table when the web is defined,” such that they didn’t care if it was the best. I doubt that’s true. Few want second, third, or fourth place. So let’s assume they wanted it to be the best. Where did it go wrong?
As much as Rust is great and FF was a great project to try it out on, I’m not convinced that FF needed a full rewrite, and in my experience there were significant problems with performance as Rust wasn’t fully there and the developers didn’t test adequately on all platforms, which they should’ve pushed more for if the funds were there.
I might pay for Firefox now, but I wouldn't pay for Firefox 5 years ago, when I started using it. As a consumer, it's really hard to start paying for something that used to be free.
As a world-class browser, Opera did that route. Opera died. I believe that might be in thinking but far from an insider in either, simply a happy Firefox user since 0.7 and Netscape before that.
>Honestly, if they're not going to embrace Rust and Servo becomes completely usable I may just jump ship eventually. My hope for Servo is that it becomes 100% Rust as much as sustainably possible (I understand for codecs and some things recreating them in Rust might be overkill when there's standardized libraries just use them), even the JS engine.
Have you ever compiled and run servo? I have. It's really cool but nowhere remotely close to being ready for a full production browser.
Mozilla are embracing Rust, they are just no longer interested in the idea of developing
entire components of Firefox in a silo, maintaining both at once during the entire process, and then spending multiple years trying to integrate it back into the browser.
Back when the Servo team was let go, what they basically said is that moving forwards things will be done more piecemeal and in-place, rather than hundreds of thousands of LoC at a time.
But then the VPN product is the revenue driver, not the browser. You still aren't making money off the browser. The whole point of the article is decrying the lack of focus on browser in order to focus on other revenue streams. I don't think one other other revenue stream is the solution.
The money would go towards the browser, just like the person suggested. How is that a bad thing? Maybe some nice mods like VPN, excellent RSS feeds, power user addons, etc for a couple bucks a month (or $5? )
> Mozilla doesn't have a real sustainable business model right now.
I've said this many times and I'm going to repeat it again; I wish Mozilla would offer me a way to purchase a monthly subscription for Firefox.
I want to support the open Web and I want to support FireFox development (but not any n+1 random Mozilla products / experiments) and I hate that they don't offer this.
You can donate to the foundation. I'm not sure why that would turn out any different -- even if you paid a subscription for Firefox directly, what would prevent Mozilla from using that money for their other products?
The problem with optional subscriptions is that most people will never opt-in. If subscriptions are made mandatory, the general public will be driven to one of the other major browsers.
The difference is that the Foundation legally cannot spend their tax-free money paying the salaries of employees of a for-profit entity, to develop a product that pulls in significant revenue.
It's a matter of "can't", not "won't". Subscription revenue would go to Mozilla Corp directly and therefore has no restrictions, because it's taxed as income. It at least has the possibility of being spent on Firefox development even if it actually goes to Rust maintainence or whatever else.
However, money can go the other way. Paying a subscription might end up just sending at least some of the money to the Foundation, rather than Firefox (or even Rust) development.
I don't think very many people actually like Pocket. I wish it would die. It makes Firefox look like it's no better than any commercial browser -- not even Chrome installs that kind of stuff in my toolbar by default!
Pocket is easy to dislike before you start using it -- it's just UI bloat, as you point out.
But the feedback from people who do use it is overwhelmingly positive. A lot of people love Pocket. It's enormously popular, despite the impression you would get if you exclusively went by HN comments.
Personally, I've just recently started to try using it. It hasn't really captured my enthusiasm yet, despite addressing one of my larger pain points with a browser. I still think I'd prefer management capabilities that felt more built into the standard (well, Tree-Style Tabs) tabs/history experience. But it's early days, I'll have to see how my Pocket experiment goes.
They're certainly good at surfacing appealing-looking content that isn't vapid when I try reading it. That's worth something.
kaios is "doing well" in the sense that it is on a lot of phones.
It's execution is not actually very good, if "doing well" means quality. I was actually avoiding getting a smartphone for a while, but the rise of kaios-powered phones, at least the ones in the US, drove me to smartphones. Contrary to the promise of firefoxOS/kaiOS, there was no kind of "app store" or other way to install custom apps, it just had the usual featurephone features. What there was, was a phone where every keypress had like 750ms-2000ms of latency until it had an effect on screen, making it almost unusable. It ruined feature phones, at least for now. I tried a couple. It's a pretty terrible product on every US phone using it I have seen; whatever led to it being on those phones, it was not quality.
It may be that KaiOS phones available in other countries (always the target market) are better, and an improvement from what came before. (But why are phones available in the US using it for such awfulness worse than what came before?) I would like to think if Mozilla had stayed involved, it would be better.
The business question of course is how the current (Chinese?) company behind KaiOS found enough runway to get it to market when Mozilla did not. Lowered standards/expectations might be part of it though. But it may not at all, I have no idea the story behind what happened. This thread has people giving their reasons for why FirefoxOS failed... but most of their reasons fail to explain why someone else could somehow take the open source IP behind Firefox OS and have a succesful company which succesfully got it onto phones. What was the difference?
Application programmers often dream of writing some different layer when we're frustrated because it's not working as is. Sometimes it ends well, like git. Most times it's a huge waste of time. I don't really think of Firefox OS a an operating systems, more like a layer to connect the web with the phone, so not so megalomaniac, actually it would have been a practical idea if hardware wasn't involved.
If you stipulate that 'Rust is going to yield a lot of result when it comes to security, memory safety and maintainability' (see parent comment), then a great many Internet users out there would choose Firefox if as a result of being written in Rust it's more secure, memory-safe (less crashing/bugs) and maintainable (more and better features).
Neither Firefox or Chrome right now crash for me, they're actually both very stable and have been for a while, and memory consumption and performance bottlenecks seem to have largely moved from the browser engines themselves to the rich web applications.
I'm not convinced changes to the browsers themselves at this point is anything other than a very marginal improvement.
Maybe in the Hacker News bubble but that's not "a great many Internet users". People either use what is pre-installed, what they are used to or what their techy friend recommended them.
A counter point to that is that the impact of the tech sector on recommendations like that is ever shrinking - tech is normalized; everyday stuff where people feel comfortable making their own choices (and where the number of people that haven't made those choices pretty solidly yet is ever shrinking). The market is more mature, in essence.
I think it's why Firefox's market share is declining too. I don't recommend firefox for non-technical users anymore because of its relative complexity and incompatibility with the modern web when compared to Chrome.
I've seen things that don't work quite right in Firefox. The Zoom webapp doesn't recognize some of my audio devices, but Chrome does. The Citrix gateway also fails to log in on Firefox sometimes.
I don't know whether those are bugs in Firefox or if Chrome is doing something funky that causes it to work but not Firefox.
Zoom is using experimental API in production. Just another on a list of their cowboy tricks.
I haven’t tried using Citrix for years. It used to work fine in Firefox, but given the quality of it I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve broken something.
> Zoom is using experimental API in production. Just another on a list of their cowboy tricks.
My uncle (who clicks on popup ads, and installed spyware twice a day until he got a non-admin account on a non-Windows OS last year) doesn't care about that. He doesn't know what an experimental API is. He wants to click the thing and have a video call open with his coworkers, kid's teacher, and family. There are alternatives. None of those people use them.
This is how open standards die: by convenience and cowboy tricks. Get with it.
If you do this you run the risk of having the rug pulled out from under you.
All those LOB applications that were designed for IE only have basically been left high and dry. Nobody wants to support or use IE anymore, and the applications that require it don’t look so good any more.
I switched my wife to FF from chrome and completely uninstalle chrome. She hates the inconvenience of any minor glitches or peculiarities - I hear a lot about it when she doesn't like something. I almost forgot she was switched over b.c. I didn't hear a thing about it from her.
Changing languages is not a magic bullet. Browsers written in C++ can be just as safe and maintainable -- especially with the resources of large companies behind them, with tons of engineers and testers etc.
If you read GP carefully, they're not making the argument that users will choose Firefox because it's written in Rust, but rather that the improved security and performance brought about by Rust would be what attracts and retains users.
Are users very worried about browser security nowadays? It was a major concern a few years back, but I seldom hear that kind of complaint. I do hear about surveilance and privacy, but not so much about catastrophic failures.
> Ditching Rust as a core component of the future of Firefox is also a demonstration that Mozilla isn't a tech focused corp anymore. Rust is going to yield a lot of result when it comes to security, memory saftely and maintainability and firing Rust devs was terribly short sighted.
Mozilla was tired of getting smoked by Chrome, which actually invested in browser development using what the tools they already had ("engineering"), as opposed to subsidizing PhDs on programming language theory.
Now it's too little too late. They've passed the point where they could catch up on technical grounds, so they make appeals to morality to market their software. Yes, I agree it was bad leadership.
Even if Firefox does well on feature phones like you suggest they should, how would that give Mozilla a source of revenue other than the money from Google's search deal?
I was using Firefox on both mobile and desktop for a significant period of time.
I was little infuriated when they added pocket.
Google meet does work well on chrome only. (Not firefox's fault completely)
I didn't like how they suddenly changed layout on Android and made many extensions unusable.
I didn't like Mozilla the corp / foundation's political alignments, a personal opinion and actually I don't even care about politics. But we Indians (much like South America I guess), have an aversion to SJW virtue-signalling politics because we have seen how it brings too-much right leaning parties into power. Why would a tech company get into politics at all unless it's about some virtue signalling execs pushing their agenda?
They fired some actually talented programmers but kept the C-suite, with their non-technical CEO being paid big amounts despite company being in losing game. While I personally don't like some aspects of rust community, the language itself is solid and could be a differentiating point for firefox.
As soon as I have seen their management take such decisions and their pushing of political agenda, I can't trust these people to maintain a browser well. No offense to engineers I was telling about Mozilla itself. So I somehow migrated to chrome. I miss UBO on mobile but bromite is good enough. Google is not much better
They may not lose much from a middle-class Indian dude switching to other browser. But think about it. Bringing politics and favoring useless C suite execs is a great way to lose future donors. A company should not do politics. They say they do politics for open web, that's not what I am talking about. FSF has done much better than Mozilla foundation in this regard. Mozilla just favoured execs and their agendas before technology, and lost the market.
Is there any background on that decision? I'd use Brave at the drop of a hat if it didn't involve giving yet more market-share to Google-based browsers.
They did lay off their Servo developers, and a few of their Rust developers.
They did not lay of all of their Rust developers, or even most of them. WebRender and Stylo are now integral parts of Firefox, and are actively maintained by teams of people, and a lot of new code continues being written in Rust.
The Servo DOM and HTML engine is massively complex - far moreso than Stylo or WebRender - and nowhere near ready for production use. Mozilla decided that rewriting the remaining parts (read: vast majority) of Firefox slowly, in-place, would be a better path forwards than maintaining two massively complex browser engines in parallel and trying to swap it out completely.
1. Ask that the DOJ strips Chrome from Google. You can't make the browser, search, and ad platform. Monopoly power. Google needs to exit Chrome right now.
2. Ask the DOJ to force vendors like Apple to allow other browser engines. They can't lock down all "code execution" on generic computers they sell.
3. Integrate Ad Blocking in Firefox.
4. Collect money from advertisers willing to make non-invasive ads that want to be seen.
Brave's business model, but with much more badass tech.
What isn’t bad ass about Brave’s Basic Attention Token initiative? At least it theory users and content creators get better compensated for their work/attention?
It seems to me that Mozilla isn't just technologically pessimistic, but they also just lack vision for the future of the web and what roles the browser could play in it. Right now, the only reason we're talking about them is that Firefox is sitting atop a sizable share of a practically impenetrable market. Very successful companies are being started around much less of a product, but Mozilla seems to genuinely have no idea what else can be done with a browser in the future. If they knew, they would become a proper browser as a platform company.
Maybe it's me being too naive, but if you had asked me 10 years ago to predict where they would be, I would've said that in the future Firefox would come in different versions. The main one, the flagship, would remain the general purpose browser that we know. But there would be some special editions custom tailored to specific markets. You'd have "Enterprise" editions, that facilitate internal app development for organizations. If your organization needed to quickly build internal tools, you wouldn't need to tussle with WebPack and all the other front-end nonsense. The browser would come already equipped with a development toolkit and environment, ready to connect to your db of choice, etc. I imagined that they could come up with other special versions of Firefox already customized to facilitate integration with popular platforms like Salesforce, Amazon, and others for people who work or develop for those.
A proper browser as a platform with an ecosystem. I still think it's possible.
Can be done with a browser in the future? There's no shortcoming of vision, the problem is monetizing it. A browser in the future is going to let me copy and paste seamless between mobile and desktop. What, are you going to charge 1 cent per completed copy and paste? Am I going to pay a dollar to get nightly builds of Firefox onto my device? If I have an Apple device that's not even possible!
I know this may sound like a blasphemy and anachronism rolled into one, but why can we not return to purchasing a copy of software? All of a sudden, the incentives to deliver 'monetizable' product are gone, because you already got your money. Or that does not jibe with continuous rent seeking?
> why can we not return to purchasing a copy of software?
Because your competitors are free and users expect free and we have a culture stuck in a rut of "everything is free" because ads don't have them taking money out of their wallet.
Not every software is in a niche where they can flip the switch back into a premium model and have a good outcome. If Firefox did it, most of us would stop using it.
Maybe Firefox is at a point where that's a boat worth rocking, but it certainly isn't obvious nor without fatal risk.
But, as we lament every time this topic comes up, it's not even possible to donate to Firefox. I don't know whether that would bring in significant cash, but it's frustrating that the option isn't there.
It would be possible, but it would involve some major legal wrangling, and there's a good chance that it wouldn't pay for itself and/or would tie Mozilla's hands in problematic ways.
The best route still appears to be paying for whatever paid services Mozilla comes out with (VPN, Pocket, ...?) even if you don't use them. I don't know if a "pay what you like" option would be problematic?
(Regulators watch pretty closely when you have 100s of millions of dollars of annual income.)
> The best route still appears to be paying for whatever paid services Mozilla comes out with (VPN, Pocket, ...?)
Maybe. There still doesn't seem to be any guarantee that money raised this way would go toward Firefox development. With zero pricing signals it's very hard to express the "you have one job" frustration that many of us are feeling about Mozilla these days.
Though they have been trying to do that, freemium meaning the core product is free and they try to make ancillary features compelling enough for you to pay for them.
Wait, pocket is a Mozilla thing? When that first popped up in Firefox, I just assumed they partnered with some business and sold out a little chunk of my data.
Now that I'm reading up on it, I see that it's more complicated. Apparently, Mozilla Corp _bought_ Pocket, which used to be Read It Later. Which I had been using at some point before. Wow. Some better communication around all that from Mozilla's side, and I might have given Pocket a chance when they rolled it out.
Certainly there is a lot of rent seeking going on but I don't think all subscription models fall into that category.
I think subscriptions to software can do a lot to bring in line users needs with company needs. Especially around security of purchased software - if there are no profits to be made as the software is already sold why patch security issues or bug fixes, your only goal is to sell the next
one.
The math of free vs paid has been long settled. If a product can get hundreds of millions of free users from "Western" countries, free trumps any paid model. Firefox still has 250 million users, so free still makes the most sense.
Eh, computingwise, the things that people want used to "require" a floppy or CDROM drive. The Cloud isn't a natural law, it's a stepping stone to a future which may be more service based, or more, say, appliance-based. We don't know which.
Sure, people with business interests will try to push the idea of what constitutes a valid option in various directions, but as someone more thoughtful than me once said, "prediction is hard, especially if it's about the future," and as another thoughtful person said, "even The Future has a future."
What you're thinking of is selling the browser as a product, but what about the browser as a platform? In the former the browser is considered the end product, in the latter it's only the starting point. You must create an ecosystem around it by making it easy for people and organizations to augment it beyond its simple browsing functions. When I say "augment it" a few of us may be tempted to point at HTML/CSS/JavaScript. That's pretty much Mozilla's position as well. Meanwhile others who get it come up with such things as Airtable and Retool. Is it hard to imagine versions of Firefox that cater to businesses and work like Visual Basic? Drag & drop buttons, scripting in Dart or TypeScript natively, can connect to various types of datasources. The possibilities are immense.
There clearly is value in using browser technology in business. If Mozilla was a browser company they would've pushed more aggressively to understand novel ways it can be leveraged in those environments (who are also generally willing to pay for such things). I can imagine business applications being developed in a marketplace and Mozilla at the center taking a cut somewhere.
Why do we have to deal with "tree-shaking" in 2020? That's because the browser makers have completely divorced themselves from the idea that they could be part of the app ecosystem. They just build a browser that abides by the standards and push it out the door with their foot. You guys out there figure it out.
I think that a better "Enterprise" edition would be one that allows remote administrative control and centralized management, that's what large orgs would want out of something like that. That's why AD and Azure MDM are so popular because of the level of control they provide.
This sounds awesome. I've often thought the same - an enterprise version, even today with Chrome's ubiquity, could be a huge selling point for conservative organizations that want a signed support contract.
Even an Electron like package as well - but also sold with support contracts, and offered as FOSS to the community - would have lots of potential.
If I understand this correctly. Mozilla let the author go, and the author still went out of their way to write a comprehensive and clear minded article full of feedback and honest recommendations.
If I see one big problem with Mozilla, is that they chose to let go people like the author. Engineering & product culture only follows.
It's rare to find someone who worked for them that's dissatisfied with the experience. They employ nowhere near the amount of people that FAANG employs, but people that work there are usually really passionate about their work and receive good benefits in return.
Point being that the author is more of a rule than an exception.
Disclaimer: Was a Mozilla fellow a few years back.
Mozilla was both an amazing and a highly frustrating company to work for, when I was there from 2010 to 2015.
It was also a very different place when I started (before Fx4) from when I ended (just before FxOS was killed).
When I started it was a place full of passion, with a lot of technical vision going on (Fx4 was a major reboot and there were a number of side projects going on that showed promise), albeit not necessarily a lot of obvious strategic vision. I'm sure there was more behind the scenes with John Lilly, whose leadership I hired into, but I lost confidence after he left and suddenly it seemed like the message was "desktop is dying, mobile is everything."
Wasn't our mission success based on having enough market share to win a seat at the standards tables and win a place on the "supported browsers" test plan for major websites? Getting a significant part of the shrinking desktop market we'd already executed well on in the past and that competitors were idling on might be better than getting a little of the mobile market that companies with greater resources were bouncing off of left and right, no?
Intranets and SaaS apps are still a thing, and offices still use desktop, so there'd still be a core audience right? Maybe mobile browsers can be different and less standardized than desktop browsers and that's OK? Maybe it has to be? Maybe it even should be while mobile browsing incubates? Maybe browsers won't even be the primary way websites interact on mobile and they'll use client apps instead?
That was a confusing pivot for me at the time, and Mozilla's strategy was to both put all the momentum on mobile and to kneejerk to a rapid update model for the desktop browser, inspired by Chrome. Problem was that destroyed the desktop add-ons community because it turns out you can't do that when you have a monkeypatch/binary extension model with high coupling, and Jetpack/Add-Ons SDK wasn't mature enough or powerful enough yet to replicate most existing add-ons.
It also exhausted the users because the existing flow of having to explicitly approve updates on launch still remained, only now it was frequent enough to disrupt workflows--you never knew when launching a web page meant having to navigate the updates dialog first. Google had designed their browser ecosystem and usability around that update model, it wasn't something you could just graft on. By the time we figured it out Chrome had picked up a decent chunk of the community.
The company then more or less doubled in size, in no small part bringing in a bunch of people from mobile and related sectors that didn't have the FOSS culture in their backgrounds. That culminated in the development of FxOS, which I always felt like was treated as an unwelcome fork by the platform team. Maybe it was because of the need to support two fundamentally different forms of interaction, two different models of security, two different distribution and update models, two different lots of things in wrapping Gecko with an application vs. wrapping it with an OS. That also divided the company, since there were now two broadly different technical missions going on, albeit sharing code.
When considering the success of FxOS vs. KaiOS, it's worth thinking about the drag having two competing priorities in the same company causes, and how that might clarify when the 3rd party is doing the fork instead. Conflicts like "how do you release a fix for Fx the browser when it'd zero-day FxOS the phone and you can't get an update through the carrier for two months" may not be so much of a problem to figure out without that tension. I'm extremely impressed with what Fabrice and co. have able to pull off with KaiOS, and I bet lightening that load helped a lot.
When I left, after it was plain FxOS was not going to succeed at that time, in that environment, it was still a place full of passion--but it was now also a place equally full of frustration, and not with a lot of strong leadership going on and a sharply muted FOSS culture. Seemed like there were a lot of missteps and platitudes, but not a ton of optimism. I was very happy to see Servo come to fruition and Quantum be released, because I honestly expected Mozilla to go down in flames before they could get the desktop browser to a state where people who'd defected would install it again.
I'll always treasure my experience with Mozilla--and having worked at two FAANGs now since, I agree the level of talent was equal or greater at Mozilla. But I do have to admit I wish I'd shifted that five year period about 2-3 years earlier across the board. I came in right after the really good part, I think.
And I do have to wonder if that talent would remain as good without the strong FOSS culture that incentivized me to be there. I worry when I see people like Ian getting laid off too, because there's simply no way that can be about talent. If he doesn't still fit there, that implies a level of change with which I'd have been deeply uncomfortable.
> Google had designed their browser ecosystem and usability around that update model
I don’t know why more Windows software doesn’t use Google’s approach. A low priority scheduled updater is more user friendly than update on launch, and it doesn’t kill boot times like an update on reboot.
Ian Bicking left Mozilla something like a year ago, if I'm not mistaken. Already in March he was talking about it in terms of "what I would have wanted to do but didn't get to". This post appeared last month in the context of the big layoff round.
Recently switched back to Firefox after meandering between Edge and Chrome on multiple platforms (Linux, macOS and Windows) for work and non-work purposes.
Firefox Dev Tools are fucking awesome. Firefox sync works great. All the extensions I want are here. It's fast enough in ways that microbenchmarks don't mean anything to me...and it's free as in Liberty (last but not least).
I've been looking for a VPN, and even though I find the features rather anemic - I've used mullvad before and I trust the infrastructure that Mozilla VPN is built on and it's a way to give money to them. I will probably also switch over from Raindrop to Pocket for the same purpose.
Raindrop looks nice. I've been using xBrowserSync to sync bookmarks on all devices, regardless of browser). Features: Open source. Run your own server. Encrypts on the device. No accounts. No ads.
Raindrop is the best bookmark extension/app I've ever used.
Since the desktop app has a reader view, it's great both for organizing things for classical bookmarking, and for maintaining a "live" set of things you need have at hand, such as documentation. It's very good for "read it later" use cases, too.
Pocket is a very good offline reader for having a queue of web articles (and only that; it does not do handle things like PDFs well) to read later, but not good for anything else.
It's curious that the 4 bullet points in the final section don't make any mention of open source (in fact, the article doesn't at all).
I think Opera Software circa 2012 was doing all of the things we would hope for/expect from Mozilla & Firefox, and doing them much better than Mozilla could. Bar one: it was not open source.
When I made the switch to Firefox in 2012, it was my belief that I would not have been forced to switch browser had Opera originally been open source. I strongly believed in open source at the time; I used Opera in spite of that. When they shut down the Presto project, I lamented the loss due to the inability of the community to fork.
I'm wondering if Firefox went away, would a fork be likely to survive in any impactful way; browsers are massive, complex & enormously expensive to maintain, whether you have rights to the source or not. Maybe open source isn't the panacea we thought in this particular context.
I'm still on Firefox as I'm loathe to support any browsers built on Blink & contribute further to a monoculture, but the Vivaldi project have finally started to achieve similar things to what Opera was doing 8 years ago. It's notable that it's linked in blue in the section of this article headed "A better browser".
> I'm wondering if Firefox went away, would a fork be likely to survive in any impactful way; browsers are massive, complex & enormously expensive to maintain, whether you have rights to the source or not. Maybe open source isn't the panacea we thought in this particular context.
Even now Firefox doesn't feel like an open-source project in the traditional sense; it feels like its culture is still Netscape. It's still very much owned by a corporation that does most of the development.
Konqueror shows that a proper open-source browser is or at least was possible. It always had an order of magnitude fewer developers than the competition, but was able to keep up by using better tools and frameworks and relentlessly keeping the code clean. Even today I wouldn't be surprised if it received more outside contributions than Firefox.
I did exactly the same. I switched to Firefox after Opera changed direction, with Opera 13. It's incredible how much Opera 12 was advanced and snappy. It was 2012...
I used Firefox since then. And I never had an issue with it. But, especially at the beginning, I really felt it was an inferior browser. But still better than chrome for sure. Just because I don't want google to know all my chronology.
Opera Mobile worked great on Symbian smartphones with very limited screen resolution and system resources, too. Much better than the built-in Web browser from Nokia itself.
Often, Opera Mobile was your only chance to get something done online on such a device. For example, purchase a ticket.
I felt the same way in 2002, and although I like opensource the reason I dropped opera was because it came with built in ads. I switched to phoenix, then firebird, then firefox, and have not looked back. Except for a year or so where i primarily used konqueror, but that was only because I was using kde and it was built in.
The one cool feature i considered going back to opera for was built in torrent support, I really thought that would catch on.
The problem with Opera torrent support was ironically that it came at a time when torrent was big, and people who were "into" torrenting at that time didn't want it as a side-feature, they wanted something dedicated: either highly featurful or highly targeted, which are niches a side-feature of a multi-feature app like a browser doesn't really fill.
> (Ironically [the Firefox UI bits] were called “chrome” before Chrome even existed.)
Not ironic, intentional. Chrome was made by former Firefox engineers, and the name was a joke about exactly this. I remember struggling to come up with a better name for the app other than this code name and then they eventually launched it with it anyway.
I followed that lead and read into your chrome notes, narrowing down between "first post" 2008 and "the end" 2012 - .. massive. Thanks for chrome on linux!
I'm a happy Firefox user. IMHO the thing that needs sorting out is the relation between Mozilla the company and Mozilla the Foundation.
I just browsed the website of the Mozilla Foundation and to my surprise learned that Firefox development is not one of its responsibilities. I was assuming that that was in fact its primary mission. It's not apparently. Maybe I'm wrong and it's just a vague website but it reads to me like they are spending their time doing activism and marketing and that they do not employ any developers.
The reason the foundation leading product development would make sense to me is that having no commercial conflicts of interests are kind of a per-requisite to do what most users (including me) value in Firefox, is to protect their privacy, commit to open standards (over any competitive advantages that proprietary/exclusive features could bring), be as secure as they can be, etc.
Except it seems that Firefox development is currently not structured like that and Firefox is instead an OSS product developed by a commercial for profit business competing with other companies backing a different OSS product (i.e. chromium) where users have some concerns about the conflicts of interests of the companies backing that (e.g. Google and MS) with respect to exactly the things I value in Firefox.
So, given that, what's the point of having the foundation and what's the point of Firefox as a commercial product (other than guilt tripping Google into keeping the money coming)? I don't mean pretty words and mission statements of a commercial entity. But what's the point for users picking one company over another? They are both companies that ultimately are run by their share holders; not by their users. A foundation is different: it serves its members and its mission without a goal to enrich shareholders.
The Foundation owns the Corporation. MoFo is tiny, probably tens of people. MoCo was huge with over a 1000, now I’d guess it’s about 700. MoCo exists to write Firefox and various other Mozilla products. MoFo exists to give out grants and to own MoCo.
It’s a weird setup sure, but it wasn’t originally like this. Originally there was just the nonprofit Mozilla, but IRS rules got in the way. If I remember correctly, the IRS requires a certain amount percentage of income for a nonprofit to come from donations, and Mozilla was below that threshold because they were making too much money from the Google search deal (which legally is selling a product). Mozilla split themselves this way to get around the tax laws.
If Mozilla was founded today, they’d probably incorporate as a B corp, but those didn’t exist back in the early aughts, so they have this strange setup instead. They could always reincorporate as a B Corp, but there’s no benefit to do so.
The Mozilla foundation owns the corporation, so it's not 'run by shareholders' in the normal sense. Any profit it makes stays in Mozilla. I think they set it up like this because some things are legally easier to do as a for-profit corporation than as a non-profit.
That is true, however routing funds (donations) from foundation to corp is hard, thus only very little $, ¥, €, ... of the money donated go to browser development, while the brand is tightly tied to it. Browser development is funded out of corp budget, which mostly is Google's money for being default search engine. Thus I can't even donate to browser development ...
Now we could speculate how much money they could collect with some Wikipedia-Luke banners in the browser and with the purpose of developing Firefox ... true, less than what Google pays, but how much do they need if they focus on browser (and maybe mail) instead of side projects?
Wikipedia is one of the most-used websites on the planet and they raise ~$90 million a year. That's still only like ~20% of what Mozilla brings in, and I find it unlikely that Mozilla could ever raise that much without driving away users with the annoying ads. That's not a problem for wikipedia because there's hardly a replacement for wikipedia, but there's tons of replacement browsers.
I think Safari is going to have the market cornered on technology pessimism (aka privacy features) and browser performance per watt on macOS and iOS.
Google is rapidly locking down enterprise by building in tight integrations with Google Workspace/G-Suite (see: context aware authentication).
In 10 - 15 years the web should be better than it is today. The first step in their recovery is to convey what their vision of the web looks like in 2035 and commit to Firefox being the first browser to make it a reality by 2025.
Firefox is a great deal more privacy focused than Safari when you start factoring in containers. I also wouldn’t trust Apple to stick to their privacy mission long term. It’s a marketing strategy that they seemingly care about at the moment but it’s supplementary to their core demographics so who’s to say they stick with this vision long term? I’m less concerned about the same happening with Firefox.
> In 10 - 15 years the web should be better than it is today.
That doesn’t align with the trends we’ve seen:
- tracking getting ever more sophisticated (like using WebRTC to probe open ports)
- large scale data mining sites like Facebook ignoring government regulations and getting away with it
- bloat getting worse. So many sites don’t even render without JS enabled. The fact that people have to run things like PiHole and browser plugins to filter out some of that crap is telling. And how long is that going to last? Some sites are now proxying that crap behind their own domain and DoH will prevent users from running PiHole
- The web slowly converting on a single rendering engine: Blink. It’s starting to feel a bit like the IE 5 days with everyone targeting the same browser. Just last week I couldn’t log into a pretty low tech website because their UA filtering said I was on an unsupported browser and greyed out the login button (I was on Firefox).
> The problem with Firefox containers is that it requires micromanaging your web browsing. I'm sure it's nice for people who obsess about privacy, but it's not something that the general user population is going to adopt.
Yeah I completely agree. There are extensions that make managing containers easier but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I still run into regular problems.
That said, the Facebook and Google extensions don’t require micromanaging. They only cover those two respective clouds but it’s still a really strong starting point.
> I think the right approach, ultimately, would be compartmentalize all web sites, but that's not feasible right now
It is possible with the Temporary Containers extension in Firefox. In fact this is exactly how I’ve been browsing the web for around a year now.
That issue genuinely doesn’t come up often. I’ve ran into it once in a year of using FF containers and even then, that was because of a weird DIY SSO solution I’m running on my home LAN (certainly not something most folk are going to run into).
Don’t get me wrong, the issue was highly annoying but it’s definitely not a frequent bug bare.
There are existing extensions for managing some popular cloud platforms and that goes a long way in terms of convenience.
The bigger annoyance is sites that intentionally cross talk (like “deploy stacks” buttons where 3rd party sites can run Cloudformation scripts against your AWS console). But in those cases it’s an annoyance I’m willing to manage considering they’re blocked by Temporary Containers doing exactly what it’s intended to do.
Apple can try to swing around the privacy bat right now because they have alternate revenue streams.
It will be interesting how long their shareholders will buy the premise that "we can earn more by using privacy to convince people to buy our high-margin kit and run Safari than we would by casting off the privacy mantle and getting deep into the data-grab business."
The other side of the coin is that I really believe there's a bubble waiting to burst in that exact industry. The price of building and feeding hyper-targeted, data-bloated marketing machines is far out of scale with their utility for most use cases, but people are throwing silly money at it right now. (Compare the Smart TV/IoT device model, where they believe that peddling usage data is enough to justify an increased BoM AND frequently selling the product near or under cost). If they expect the bubble to burst (either through marketers coming to their senses or heavy-duty GDPR style regulation), they might be just "passively" pushing the privacy angle-- don't bother building out an infrastructure that will be worthless as soon as the bubble bursts, and you come out of it with a huge branding/goodwill win when everyone else reinvents their business model and invents privacy.
I was surprised Chromium!Edge ended up being such a mess with privacy because, somewhat like Apple, MS has associated businesses that let them subsidize its development without having to leverage user data. They could have come out looking good-- weren't they the only ones who tried to make a go of Do Not Track headers?
>In 10 - 15 years the web should be better than it is today.
Is the web better now than it was in 2005-2010? I don't think it is and I don't see the trend arbitrarily reversing. Tons of regular people (and even tech-savvy folks who should know better) voluntarily use, love, and advocate for using a browser (and email service!) made by the modern equivalent of DoubleClick.
Were you actually alive in 2005-2010 or are you just guessing? Flash-based unskippable intros on fixed 640x480 centered viewports are the reality of the 2005 web, regardless of whatever nostalgia you suffer from.
Flash was easy to avoid unless you needed certain sites for work or for school; I kept it disabled by deleting some files starting about 2006 or 2007. HTML5 on the other hand is impossible to avoid unless you want to restrict yourself to a few familiar sites. And web fonts are getting harder to avoid because more and more sites are using them to draw icons and other small UI elements. For people whose tastes are sufficiently like my own, the web has been getting worse.
I used lynx as my daily driver for most of the 1990s and through 2005. In contrast, these days it is impractical for the average person to use a browser that is not maintained by an organization employing many hundreds of full-time developers. This dependency on money (to pay the developers) limits a person's options.
I never wanted to be able to replace my desktop apps with apps that run on the web, so I don't consider web apps to be compensation for the constant stream of annoyances (e.g., the moral equivalent of pop-up windows asking me to give the site my email address) that HTML5, web fonts, et cetera, enabled.
We've replaced "waiting for unskippable Flash intros" with:
- a web that is thoroughly unusable without an ad-blocker (ad-blocking was pretty optional in 2005)
- waiting for 20 megs of minified JS to load over 3G
- waiting for Google web fonts to load because apparently shipping more than 4 fonts in common is beyond the ability of plucky upstarts like Microsoft, Apple, and Google
- web "apps" with worse performance characteristics than programs that ran on 66 MHz machines
You have to look at the web's good and not just it's bad. It's kind of tiring to read comments that act like nobody else is capable of enumerating the downsides of something.
Why own a dog? You spend money on it, it shits, it makes noise, you have to find a caretaker when you go on vacation, it bites, it needs walks, it needs to go to the vet, your next girlfriend might be allergic to it, and after all that, it dies.
Do people who own dogs not know these things? Or is it that they own one despite those things and there's a more interesting conversation to be had?
Comments like this make me wonder if you, yourself, are capable of seeing anything that's improved about the web which is a much more illuminating exercise to do than enumerating just bad things, something anyone can do.
You're replying several comments deep in a chain where we've already discussed this. Sometimes things do in fact get worse over time and "look on the bright side" is not a universally useful strategy.
In fact, I submit blind optimism is in fact more tiring, look at any comment thread about Tesla or Bitcoin. It's as if these two things are perfect and you had better buckle up if you dare criticize either one.
Just imagine how boring the web would have been without Flash - at that time. Or did you prefer crashing Java applets? Yes, you had the annoying unskippable intros, but some jaw dropping websites were made with Flash, something you barely see these days. I still remember sites like heavy.com, music bands and movies mini-sites, ...
I think you're right to push back on the association of Flash with just negativity.
Flash is an important quirk of internet history and a stepping stone that created expectations of what the web could one day be: a rich, open, cross-device application platform accessible by URL.
And that's what the web achieved with only a few exceptions.
Are there things that have gotten worse? Yes
Are things way more complicated? Yes
But net overall? I believe it's better than 2005 and even 2010. Meaning, I would not want to revert back to 2010 and start building back up from there. There is too much good we would lose in the process.
I have no idea if my opinion is shared by the majority, but I am very optimistic about the future of the web.
I would not characterize people's choice of web browsers, or people's choice of which websites they want to interact with as "the web".
The characteristics of the web from 20+ years ago are still there. Many or most people just prefer not to use that type of web from 20+ years ago.
Everyone is still free to use whichever browser they want to access whichever website they want (in the US at least) in the same manner they did in the previous decades.
"Quantitative improvement" is table stakes that I worry have been abandoned with the jettisoning of the Servo team. "Technological pessimism" is a differentiating strategy, but ultimately dooms them to the small subset of users who understand and care about privacy at a deep level. "All encompassing" is a death march. All is infinite and Mozilla can't afford to implement everything hoping something turns out to be valuable (Google OTOH can bankrupt competition with this strategy). "A better browser" is where I think Mozilla should focus their attention. They were doing that with their lab experiments, but abandoned them before they could become valuable. Doing this approach well requires commitment to do enough of them that a vision coalesces and then more commitment to see it through. Mozilla used to be audacious enough to invent a new programming language in order to build a better browser. Now they seem to have turned their backs on that initiative and I'm left wondering if they have any guts left at all.
They didn't abandon the technological effort that went into Rust & Servo - they just decided to bring it into Firefox piece by piece under the name 'Quantum' rather than launching a brand new browser with a different name. Although there was a marketing push with Firefox 57 when the new code started to land.
Ah how this resonates with me so much, I remember the difference of tabless IE and oh so magical Netscape / Firefox when those were new. I consider myself Mozilla fanboy to this days.
But alas, every time I try clean installation with default settings I cannot believe how … bad this became and how far it diverged from original experience: by now Firefox is browser with the WORST user experience regarding tabs usage, from my perspective.
Current defaults are:
- Super slow Ctrl+Tab modal tab switcher, mimicking OS alt+tab app switching mechanic. But slow. And distracting. And not pretty. And considering tab bar, mostly redundant.
- Ctrl+Tabbing order is, naturally, in most recently used order, so visual tab proximity means nothing.
- Ctrl+Shift+Tab does mostly nothing [1]. No, it does not select the least recently used tab. No, it does not switch to tab to the left. When tabs don't fit the tabs bar width, Ctrl+Shift+Tab opens another (vertical) tabs list and lets you read titles and navigate with arrows. But usually you just instinctively press Ctrl+Tab to "undo" it, but now you stare on that Modal over the opened list and question your browser choice. From there Ctrl+Tab finally stops working predictably and whole experience breaks into horrible mess.
Don't get me wrong, Ctrl+PgUp/PgDown still operates well. You can still change some settings to get even Ctrl+Tab working the way original Firefox popularized. But still, this state of things makes me very sad. I'd really like to spread Firefox, but with such details that I cannot explain even to myself it is impossible.
I've yet to be sold on tabs. I sometimes modify the user chrome to hide the tab bar - although it is problematic.
Currently, I have the hn comments in one window, and the article in another window, and hn front page in another window on a "smaller" 2K monitor. Customized for compact density, os tab bar moved to the right, menu bar off (the default) and still the 30 links on the hn front page don't fit on the page. Why can't the tab bar be hidden when there is only one tab? I don't need to see a tab with a truncated title that already appears in the title bar. I guess I am supposed to hide the title bar, and learn to love a Lotus Notes era "Tab" interface. In my opinion, tabs are not cool.
The major issue I have with tabs is that there seems to be no way to tell Firefox to never ever, under any circumstance, create a new window for a profile. When switching tabs via mouse it is way too easy to accidently cause it to open a tab in a new window and I also occasionally accidently open a new window via the right click menu. Not once in at least 5 years (most likely longer) have I actually wanted more than one window for a profile.
I don't mind customizing things the way I want them, but it would be helpful if there was an easier way to share setting between profiles.
Christ. I forgot about the default visual tab switcher. It's truly horrendous. That, and the "insert related tab after current" behaviour, are the first things I turn off. Horrible.
This is the Linux experience I find (running Ubuntu) and is also driving me crazy.
On my Windows7 installation Ctrl+Tab switches to the next tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab switches to the previous tab. New tabs are open after the current tab.
This might be related to the window manager or the Linux build defaults?
It’s just a newer Firefox default that wasn’t applied to old installations, and you can turn it off right at the top of about:preferences (”Ctrl+Tab cycles through tabs in recently used order”). The first thing I turn off with every installation too.
I've long wondered why Mozilla hasn't worked on a embeddable Gecko engine as an alternative to Electron. The Mozilla alternative could be promoted as a modular, cross-platform component but in a stripped-down, faster and less memory hungry form than Electron (assuming these features can be achieved).
The traction that Electron has gained as a cross-platform option for building apps is huge. It's only set to get bigger (whether for better or worse).
Imagine if Gecko was in this space competing with Electron. Imagine if thousands of developers place their trust in Mozilla because they have built their cross-platform apps using Gecko. They'd want to see Mozilla grow and succeed - they have a stake in seeing Gecko development continue. Is it too late (or too unrealistic) for this to happen?
A very long time ago, Mozilla did have the option to embed Gecko into apps. It was never well-documented and what remains of the documentation is out-of-date and untouched:
> I've long wondered why Mozilla hasn't worked on a embeddable Gecko engine as an alternative to Electron.
They have. Several times, in fact. There was the old embedding, then XULRunner, then Firefox apps (I'm not sure if that's the same as webapprt). But these efforts generally only lasts a couple of years before Mozilla decides it's the wrong approach and kills off the embedding.
Although unfortunately at the same time increasing your app size by dozens of MBs just so you can use Gecko doesn't seem like an easy sell for mobile apps, especially when you have to compete with the Webview provided by the OS for free.
What I would like is to be able to use Firefox as a UI for my local projects. Now if I want to do it, I have to run a server and duplicate code.
The ability to create extensions for my personal use that can interact in local with my computer would be great.
I understand that a browser have to be sandboxed but there are ways that could work without being unsafe. Maybe even two separate downloads, one for people that want to use the browser UI capabilities but work in local.
This would not solve Mozilla problems, so it's a little tangent to the current discussion.
I think it might lead to growth or "mind share" among app developers (and indirectly to end-users who use the apps built by devs).
The Chrome engine now powers the Edge and Brave browsers. Electron is used to built desktop apps by companies everyone recognises e.g. Microsoft, Slack, Figma. The appetite among companies and devs to build Electron apps shows no slowdown.
Mozilla is nowhere to been seen in ths important space. In my opinion, this is a missed opportunity.
Safari is definitely in the technological pessimism camp as that's Apple's party line on the open web.
Safari has continuously caused "headache" to businesses that rely on tracking user behavior for years now, as Apple is very bent on protecting your privacy from every other company outside or inside their walled garden.
They claim to be in the technological pessimism camp. I don't believe their poor support for progressive web apps is truly about privacy and security, but rather to force apps to go through their App Store so they get a cut of the revenue.
These aren't mutually exclusive but rather well aligned goals.
I find it odd to ask whether any non-monetary goals are "truly" their goals. They are a listed company. Of course they want to make profit. But they do so in part by means of providing privacy and security.
What would happen if Firefox took away a significant number of users away from Chrome? Wouldn't Google just stop paying for search placement, removing Mozilla's main source of income?
I get that Chrome isn't Google's direct source of income, ads are. But, it seems like controlling the web in order to facilitate serving advertisements (e.g. AMP, Extension Manifest v3) is part of its strategy. If Mozilla made a more successful browser, and Mozilla hewed to its stated values, it would just become a threat to Chrome, rather than a harmless surface area for serving ads, and a small opportunity to earn a little good will.
From that perspective, it made perfect sense to me that Mozilla has tried to diversify its revenue. The fact that it hasn't been successful at doing that doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad idea.
> Wouldn't Google just stop paying for search placement, removing Mozilla's main source of income?
They would haggle a bit more but they would still pay. That's because Firefox's very existence is their insurance against accusations of monopolistic practices in a field where antitrust caselaw actually exists.
Also, it's not like chrome is googles main source of income or anything. I don't think google really would be impacted all that much anymore in todays market if chrome shrank, especially if they lost market share to firefox (as opposed to say, apple, and maaayybe microsoft). Why would they care?
I dont think I understood the point about mozilla wanting to influence the web being bad for firefox.
Particlulalry if having lots of users is how you influence things, since then you need to provide a good product (or lock users in via some external ecosystem).
Maybe some recent EU legislation moves can help them in the same way the browser choice thing helped.
Well thats the thing... Firefox is not particularly good in anything and this is the point of the article. When Firefox becomes more unpopular than Mozilla fails its mission aside from Firefox, which is to set open web standards.
The situation for Firefox is that bad, that even enterprise users - ESR - are moving to MS Edge since its offering support together with MS Office.
I think Firefox needs something drastic to become relevant again, which is very unlikely taking into account the last years history.
Myself as a FF user i'm more and more tempted to switch to some other multiplatform-chrome-compatible browser.
The goals have a lot of compatibility, but occasionally come in conflict. And example may illustrate.
If you care about making Firefox good for users, you will work to improve current performance, and prioritize compatibility with badly coded websites. Even if it makes it harder to adopt future standards coming down the pipeline.
If you care about pushing standards, you'll put more energy into those future standards, even at the cost of performance and compatibility with badly coded websites.
Firefox has consistently chosen to prioritize standards that are someone's idea about how to do things better over the real world that exists right now.
I think Firefox is like some banks in that it is too big to fail [0]. Not that Firefox is a financial institution, but something that has embedded and woven itself so deeply into the web in general that I can't imagine the web without it. If it dies in some fantastical way, something else (hopefully better and evolved) will fill its place. We can't have the Chromes of the world slurping up all our data in the near future. Firefox is a privacy tool as well as a browser.
But it's not that big, comparatively. 2/3 people are using Chrome, 1/6 are using Safari, and ~1/28 are using Firefox. If you look at a trend line over the last 10 years Firefox has fallen from its peak around ~30% in a steady decline toward 3% (and eventually 0%). It's not big, it's barely hanging onto numbers on the chart, alongside Internet Explorer and Edge. Some data: https://caniuse.com/usage-table
Firefox can trace its history back to Netscape Navigator, released in 1994. It has failed and come back before. Even if the Mozilla Foundation fails, Firefox would likely survive in some form.
Nowadays most browsing is mobile, and all mobile devices come with a high quality browser component which is effectively part of the operating system already, used pervasively by applications on the device as a component rather than a standalone browser.
Installing a browser, any browser, is already a niche thing to do for the majority of internet users today.
>all mobile devices come with a high quality browser component which is effectively part of the operating system already, used pervasively by applications on the device as a component rather than a standalone browser.
that sounds a lot like M$'s IE before the antitrust case, no ?
It may be true that a particular company has a stranglehold on browser choice on your particular phone, but that is completely different from having an anticompetitive strangehold on the market as a whole, which is what matters from an antitrust standpoint. I'm not the biggest fan of capitalism but the market seems to be functioning rather well. Not perfectly but well.
Just a refresher: IE had 96% market share at its peak, and Microsoft were guilty of quite a few other anticompetitive practices as well w.r.t. Windows itself, more or less literally penalizing OEMs from shipping any other desktop OS.
Competition is thriving in the mobile space. Safari, Chrome, and derivatives of Chrome are competing with each other and they are well-performing, aggressively maintained and updated pieces of software.
Sure, there are plenty of technical reasons to be annoyed with either one of them. Mobile Safari sure is slow to adopt certain standards, etc. And don't get me wrong -- it is extremely regrettable whenever browser choice is restricted. It sucks, I hate it.
Another thing working against Firefox on mobile is that it seems like every software update for Samsung phones resets the default browser/URL handler to Samsung Internet. Anyone not paying close attention will just click through the EULA and suddenly no longer be using Firefox.
I have a Samsung phone, and it's updated quite recently, but I've never noticed this.
I virtually never open Samsung Internet only because I virtually never open any web browser. Browsers launch as a side effect of something else. For example clicking on a link inside LinkedIn, Telegram, bank app help, etc.
When that happens, if a separate app gets opened it's usually Firefox Focus that opens for me, so I guess that means the default URL handler is Firefox Focus (must have set it years ago) and it's not being changed by software updates.
I have a history of being unlucky with technology, which is why I worked in QA before becoming a software engineer. I've noticed lots of jank w.r.t. Firefox and phone updates. YMMV. Firefox desktop updates have reset privacy preferences at least once in the last month or two, and Samsung Internet has made itself my default on top of Firefox at least two or three times in the last few months.
>Installing a browser, any browser, is already a niche thing to do for the majority of internet users today.
And yet there are a range of choices for terminal only browsers. You've overall right, but I doubt that minority of users would let Firefox totally die any time soon.
Ostensibly, they pay Firefox for eyeballs, but....
Google certainly values the eyeballs they get via Firefox, but Firefox could disappear tomorrow and that barely affect Google one bit from a pure "eyeballs" perspective. How much traffic would Google lose? People would just use those same Google services through Chrome, Safari, native apps, whatever.
So, I believe Google funds Firefox mainly as a hedge against monopoly charges.
If Chrome ever dominated the browser market entirely with 95%+ marketshare like Internet Explorer back in the bad old days of IE5/6, they'd be painting a large target on their backs for various governments to step in and make life difficult.
If we think about it, Chrome/Chromium's current ~70% market share is pretty ideal for Google. They get to kinda sorta mostly control the web, without a bunch of pesky governments on their backs.
When I was there, we speculated Google was using Mozilla as antitrust lawyer repellant, but it's a weak argument. Google pushed Chrome onto Firefox users repeatedly, by accident or on purpose doesn't matter.
Now that Google is in antitrust court, I think the Mozilla deal is mainly for PR, both positive while it lasts, and negative sense (to avoid being the Firefox killer by not renewing the deal this year -- Google preannounced renewal after Mozilla's August layoffs, and let others repeat the too-high-by-now $400M/year number).
My impression is that Google is simply having to play the same game their own advertising business makes others play; in order to keep getting customers (eyeballs for adsense+doubleclick) they have to pay for it because the competition also advertises (via paid default search).
Firefox switching to Yahoo for default search was probably an eye opener for them; 30% of global search traffic (at whatever fraction of users didn't change their search engine) is a boatload of money and from public estimates at least an order of magnitude more than they pay Mozilla for the traffic.
From a business perspective Google might benefit if Firefox disappeared but there's no guarantee. Opera, Brave, Safari, Edge, etc. could take up Firefox's install-base without significantly increasing Chrome's. At least Firefox is a known entity for them and they would probably rather have a guaranteed platform with Google as the default search engine than having to negotiate with whatever sprang up to replace Firefox.
The Yahoo deal failed badly in first year, as Firefox users who were shocked by the change of default search from G to Y overrode default back to G. This caused Marissa Mayer's Yahoo to bleed money, as rumors supported by Mozilla statements say the deal was fixed-payment-per-year, not traffic-based. IIRC searchengineland cracked Yahoo's 10Q to show the blood loss. We also know the deal bled money because of Verizon getting out of it in 2017, when Mozilla went back to Google.
Firefox market share is now in the danger zone where Google can replace it with more Chrome promotion and still save on TAC vs. Chrome-eng+mktg. Also the danger zone where webdevs do not test in Gecko and break Firefox, even on such properties as AirBNB.
I guess the choice for google isn't either keep firefox alive or let it die. It's probably more be th standard search engine in firefox or not. Mozilla would probably still be able to sell that spot to s/o else, albeit for a lower price, but not so low to get Firefox fully out of the picture. I guess the revenue stream from firefox users is still big enough that it is worth it for google.
Firefox must obviously be the core product, the one that people know, love and trust and can easily use - although this doesn't mean that Mozilla can't try other projects as well, maybe with with more constrained resources so projects that don't get enough momentum don't linger for too long.
And the writer has a point when he says that the weight of Firefox has allowed Mozilla to be a heavyweight at the table of the standards of the web.
But there's a point he misses (and he was nearly there when he mentioned Gecko).
What do Chrome, Safari, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, Edge and basically every browser on Android and iOS have in common? That's the web engine - and that's WebKit/Blink, with Chromium usually being the foundation.
That wasn't a big problem when the guys at Google were still pushing for better web standards, but that's no longer the case. Gecko may have a big window to become a really modular engine that any browser can use on any platform, and it could advertise itself like the modular, corporate-free, privacy-aware, fully standard-compliant solution that can power the next generation of browsers out there - or at least be an alternative to the WebKit/Blink/Chromium monopoly. I know that a while ago Mozilla had considered exposing Gecko as a browser-agnostic engine, but at some point for some reason they dropped the plan - and that's quite a shame.
I still use FF on a desktop, but on Android is not Firefox for me. It's just as dumb (if not dumber) than chrome, and serves no purpose whatsoever without addons.
I also don't get the point of limiting addons to a vetted whitelist. I feared this would be the case since they introduced signing requirements, and that's precisely what happened. I waited a bit, but I completely lost interest since the new mobile redesign which also destroyed the UI usability for me.
Mozilla will need to do a complete turn-around to get me back on mobile.
I wouldn't complain if work from the community (which is just as important as the browser itself) wasn't artificially restricted. As a previous extension developer, an avid extension user, and also OSS contributor, it strikes against all my values.
I'm fully supportive of Mozilla for their work, a doubly so for being the main alternative to Chrome, however Android always felt as a double-standard to me. FF on Android is not (and was really never) on the same page as the desktop version, and I don't understand why it can't.
I'm complaing because the reason why I love FF on desktop is the reason why I find it unusable on Android.
My guess it's MS will let Chromium do the heavy lifting, and they will integrate it nicely with AD etc and all IT departments will make it the new corporate default.
I was at Microsoft (and on the IE/Edge team) when that movement started. The writing was on the wall; too many developers were targeting (and testing in) Chromium (and/or Webkit) alone. The iPhone in 2007 pretty much claimed the mobile-web as its own.
Massive efforts were made to bring IE up-to-speed. Support for -webkit- prefixes and more were added, but that proved to be too little, too late. IE 11 eventually even had pretty stellar ES6 support.
Forking Trident into EdgeHTML (for project Spartan) was a good move, but still not the right move. Hundreds of thousands of lines of code later, it was clear that Edge would need to adapt or die. I left before the decision was made to drop EdgeHTML (I went to Brave), but I think that was the right decision for Microsoft.
I've seen saying for years that I think Firefox will eventually do the same, or suffer the same drift into irrelevancy that Microsoft had been experiencing for so long.
> I've seen saying for years that I think Firefox will eventually do the same, or suffer the same drift into irrelevancy that Microsoft had been experiencing for so long.
Man, that would be something? Firefox forking Chromium to replace gecko would be a very sad day for the internet, but as of now it does kind of seem inevitable.
I might be wrong but i guess thats what Mozilla is about right now, is to have enough resources to continue to support Gecko. If things continue on the same way or turn worse its inevitable or they will just stop producing a browser.
I dont think there is a point to continue Firefox without Gecko. Of course im with you, if Gecko dies it will be a very sad day for the internet.
I have a love hate relationship with Firefox, its only major trick left is that it’s not Chromium. Making it a monopoly of the non-monopoly browsers. I tried for a while to use Waterfox and Pale Moon but they just aren’t accepted by too many websites and now even mainstream websites are locking out Firefox too.
Some things lock out Firefox as an accident of implementation.
I don't recall which site it was for me recently, perhaps Sainsbury's, but I reached a card payment screen and it just would not accept payment - it kept getting stuck with a spinner making no progress at the payment stage. Opened exactly the same page in Safari and it worked fine quickly. Next time it happened again, and I remembered that I needed to switch browser.
There's also no way to be sure it was FF in general and not the particular version(s) of FF Beta I was running at the time.
There is no way to know which of numerous factors might contribute without running from a blank profile, which isn't something anyone would do unless really keen on investigating a problem, as it's easier to just run a different browser instead.
If a payment process gets stuck due to an FF-specific adblocker, I'd still count that as an accident of implementation affecting FF users, because final stage payment processes don't have any reason to call up ad-blocked services, and most FF users use an adblocker, don't they?
I periodically see sites broken in Firefox until I turn off uBlock and/or Privacy Badger - including issues with paying like you describe. But I've always assumed that the same would happen in Chrome if I had the same extensions installed there. This seems more like 'locking out people with adblockers' than 'locking out Firefox', even if there's substantial overlap.
It's distressingly common for JS developers to just throw something like "t.track('payment')" in the onclick handler for the last button (or every button) in a payment flow, where "t" is some analytics package you've blocked. No exception handling, of course, so when the analytics package isn't loaded, nothing happens when you click the button. If you're lucky, there will be a console message logged saying something like "unable to call method track on undefined".
I just don't know if 8% of desktop browser share is enough. It's creeping down into Opera range, and at that point, you're not a real option, you're a niche enthusiast brand.
I agree, they’re currently locked in a negative spiral, the share needs to be higher to be stable, otherwise maintaining compatibility will not be a high enough priority for web developers. 8% on desktop means 3-4% on all platforms and less in selected markets.
To regain market share they need to be the unambiguously better browser. I thought there was a really solid path to do that with their parallelising efforts, in particular a fully parallel layout engine in combination with their other work would have meant drastically improved UI speeds, notably on Android, but elsewhere as well, it would have eliminated a lot of development difficulty and allowed a much more native-equivalent level of performance. That would have made a good basis for an embedded engine to compete with electron.
That path seems to have been closed off with the Servo team being fired. I’m not sure where Mozilla is going now, it’s not enough to tread water.
Unfortunately and unavoidably, all browsers won’t be 100% compatible so web devs need to do browser specific fixes. If the browser is sufficiently unpopular, it won’t get specific fixes. If it doesn’t get specific fixes, then it breaks websites and users are forced to try another browser. Eventually customers may just give up on the incompatible browser. Increasing the drop In market share, increasing the likelihood that a website doesn’t get specific fixes... [spiral]
I always thought with Firefox + Thunderbird, the next natural evolution would be mail service integration and SaaS mail offerings. So many companies now outsource their mail and the Thunderbird devs had so much insight into the space it could have been a natural extension with revenue diversity.
They could have been on the path of Google Apps and Office 365 before they even existed. Now, who knows.
Probably should not bother writing this because it's not going to be appreciated but I will try anyway.
The browser evolved from an information dispersal tool to become a networked operating system with a few implementations loosely compatible.
My suggestion is that now with web assembly we have a chance to almost start over with that. The problem is that people are not really approaching wasm as an operating system or shared platform. Rather they are making piecemeal efforts and adding little bits of functionality in here and there in different runtimes etc.
So so far it seems a missed opportunity to create a framework where people can collaborate on what the platform is. Something like a common ABI. Or a distributed package registry. Or a voting mechanism for new features.
We should have a new shared platform built on web assembly. And for the information distribution part, drop CSS and HTML and start over with content-centric networking and markdown. Focus on instant retrieval and pre-dissemination.
It occurs to me that web standards are a lot like a government. A lot of users, a few rich stewards with vested interests, and no real democracy.
If I, a random user, come up with a really great standard that solves a bunch of real problems that users have, it has no chance of being accepted unless it solves the problems of the few rich stewards.
So, today, The Web(TM) and its Internets(TM), which now pretty much defines our global economy, is currently being developed by advertising and consumer product companies, and a handful of companies who profit off of the standards that they make. Our future rests not a little in their hands.
Feels kinda like watching a big capitalist train moving towards global society in really slow motion.
Can anyone from/formerly of Mozilla explain why XUL had to die? When I was a kid it seemed utterly fascinating, I wonder now if we'd ever needed Electron if there was a modern XULRunner
Firefox lacks in the default UX area, just from the top of my head:
Print to PDF is better in Chrome, comes with a preview.
Search marks matches in the scroll bar.
Opening a recently closed tab opens a new tab in Chrome instead of replacing the existing one.
There were probably 5-10 more annoyances in Firefox for me that I don't recall right now. Maybe it was my familiarity with Chrome but overall I still think Chrome has better UX defaults.
I like the bookmark tags feature of Firefox though, which Chrome lacks.
That's an interesting feature, I'd like it if that was implemented. I see some add-ons do something to simulate this.
> Opening a recently closed tab opens a new tab in Chrome instead of replacing the existing one.
This opens a new tab for me, no settings I've changed that I could find.
> There were probably 5-10 more annoyances in Firefox for me that I don't recall right now. Maybe it was my familiarity with Chrome but overall I still think Chrome has better UX defaults.
There will probably always be differences, that's why different browsers exist after all, and it'll be different annoyances for different people. Personally I think generally the UX of Chrome (that Firefox has tried to copy) is the worst thing about all current browsers. The new add-on API made me start using custom UX CSS to make it tolerable instead of a "fix add-on", but the only serious alternative (Chrome) always felt worse to me. Has many nifty features though.
> Print to PDF is better in Chrome, comes with a preview
Wait, isn't this something the OS print dialog is supposed to provide?
> Search marks matches in the scroll bar.
I'd like to see this implemented as well (just as another commenter mentioned).
> There were probably 5-10 more annoyances in Firefox for me that I don't recall right now. Maybe it was my familiarity with Chrome but overall I still think Chrome has better UX defaults.
Which is mostly because you're more familiar with Chrome overall (and it's also a matter of taste). As an example, I strongly dislike the downloads "bar" in chrome and the fact that bookmark/history/downloads pages are pages and not dialogs. Many people dislike dialogs tho, because they seem bloated and difficult to use to them.
One small UI gimmick I'd like to see implemented in major browsers (at least on macOS) is an option to use the fluent/vibrant blur tab bar background instead of the default white/gray/black. Firefox already kinda does that (at least when using the dark theme), but I still have to write my own userchrome.css to get the full effect.
I just switched a bit on mobile from Firefox to Chrome. I was annoyed by the fact that the address bar is at top in there and I think it's unfair to say at all points that the UX is better on Chrome.
I have it there by default on FF, I was talking about chrome having a worse UX on Android. Reading the original post, I admit I phrased it in a confusing way.
Can't say that I agree. I've been using Firefox on Android for years now and it just keeps getting better IMO. I'm satisfied with the performance and the UI, but what I really love the extensions.
I know they rejiggered the UI a bit recently, but it seems like a moderate improvement to me.
Also, I use Firefox to sync across all of my devices. I know you can do that with Chrome, but I trust Mozilla more than Google with my data.
About:config is essential to fix rendering of text. As an example, Reddit renders smaller than full screen view.
Not to mention the loss of critical add-ons.
I loved Firefox on desktop, and for mobile the tradeoffs of slower load were acceptable for a secure browser. That got taken away, forcibly, and left a bad taste in the mouth of virtually every review you read on Play app store.
It was way more than a UI reskin, it was a complete overhaul. It makes me lose trust in having them maintain things like passwords knowing they can produce instability like they did here.
I mean, I do. The 2-3 that I mainly use work fine. The only one that ever gave me trouble was some "youtube download" kind of thing, but there are a hundred of those.
I know there were some breaking changes, but I assume they were for a good reason, and Mozilla obviously left a path forward.
That's where you're wrong. The reason they gave is "we don't want to confuse casual users with comiplcated functionality" or something along those lines, which is absurd because there has always been power user functionality available to those that need it without hurting the casual user experience, and installation of extensions is up to the user, casual users don't need to do it.
So since their explanation doesn't add up, tell me, why do you think Mozilla, who gets most of it's funding from Google, decided to make add-ons such as Privacy Badger and umatrix and cookie autodelete unavailable to us to use?
Never just assume someone does something for a good reason. Never assume malicious intent either, but don't just take it laying down when a tool you use no longer works for you. If a tool keeps getting worse and worse from a user perspective, it is because the changes being made aren't made with the user in mind.
For what it's worth, Privacy Badger is currently one of the top recommended add-ons for me in Firefox for Android. I just installed it and it seems to work fine.
So someone has updated me in this thread somewhere that Mozilla has backtracked on their solid "recommended extensions program" and begun to work towards implementing more. I'm glad to see that, for the sake of those who will continue to use Firefox. I won't, because the trust is gone for me at this point.
It's a matter of perspective. I found the previous generation intolerably slow compared to Chrome, but the new version is now my daily driver. I wasn't using any addons which makes the difference, but still, boy am I happy to use Firefox instead.
Who in their right mind pushed the Fenix upgrade for release while absolutely breaking compatibility with the whole universe of Firefox add-ons?
The whole point of using firefox is the control that add-ons and the about:config actually give you. Failing to realize that is failing to understand who you're user are.
I hope that Mozilla the company fail as fast as possible, so that Mozilla the foundation is allowed to carry on Firefox's purpose and fund actual work from people like the author, instead of ivory tower board and C-levels.
If you're lucky, you traveled back in time and disabled Firefox updates before Fenix rolled out. If you're unlucky, you later visit a site with an exploit for that old version.
I've loved Firefox for years. There's also been a bug that I've never been able to track down: clicking on dropdowns doesn't "stick" and it take multiple tries to select something. Today I finally cracked. I just can't have that irritation in my life any more. So Brave it is. #myfirefoxstory
How I long for a funding model where eyeballs=$, but NOT because of advertising or tracking. I pay money every month to be connected. I wish some of this money ended up in the hands of the software companies that created the software I used, and some of it in the hands of the content providers. I can only dream....
Well written article, was a good read. I think that Firefox company should rehire you :-) You hear this FIREFOX? But if they don't, maybe Google will be smarter and hire you for Chrome instead ^_^ After all you started in "Chrome" group even before Chrome browser existed. Hehe
I never left. There still isn't a good alternative for me.
But can someone please fix the extension API? A good start could be to add a supported way to move the tab bar around or at least remove it so it doesn't annoy me when I use vertical tabs.
If Mozilla wants revenue diversity, it can be found through empowering independent creators on the open web. The open, standards-oriented, values-based browser is the key, not a sideshow.
Man. You have to be careful.
Pocket has been pushing too much of political content. Specially from the left's point of view.
I believe anything with a bias is bad. Right or Left. Specially such sites where people see or read. Otherwise pocket is great.
It's pretty easy to turn off any ML-generated Pocket recommendations. I wasn't even aware they were doing this given how long I've had it turned off. I'm only interested in articles I've curated myself.
what would happen if firefox decides to fire all "executives", "ceo" and the whole "bureaucracy" leadership, not technical one that is.
what money can be saved from doing that which brings me to the second question, does firefox really need a CEO?
ooh! Really cool to see Amna get a mention in this post. Amna lets you use your browser as part of to-do list. Though, it in in itself is not a browser.
I will make the same comment I made on another post regarding Firefox and Mozilla:
a few tips from from no one:
1. Rewrite the Mozilla mission statement. I read that and have no idea what your organization does. Mission statements seem like corporate naval gazing, but if it is honest and well written it keeps everyone focused on what you are working towards.
2. Refocus on Firefox R&D and core technologies - Firefox needs to be the best browser. It is the thing that makes the company money and makes it recognizable to the lay person. You will never be able to outspend Google, Microsoft, and Apple, but they are always going to have more competing priorities pulling their best engineers away and causing political infighting about what should be crammed into the browser. Mozilla does not have to have any of that.
3. Invest more in Thunderbird the application and develop Thunderbird the privacy focus email service for independent professionals and small businesses.
That is it. I like some of Mozilla's side projects and I agree with the business philosophy that they should be looking to diversify their revenue stream, but I think they should all be part of two core products: Firefox and Thunderbird. Why Thunderbird? Because I think there is an undeserved niche in the business email service provider space and I think Mozilla can have a universal client on desktop, phone, tablet, and browser that is the trojan horse to up sell that product.
Please don't copy-paste comments on HN. These threads are repetitive enough without literal repetition.
If you want to refer to what you wrote before, a link is the way to do it. And of course you're welcome to add information that's specific to what's new in this article. There should be something different somewhere...
> 3. Invest more in Thunderbird the application and develop Thunderbird the privacy focus email service for independent professionals and small businesses.
I know Mozilla's non-Firefox projects aren't popular here, but if Thunderbird really wanted a niche in the business world Mozilla would need to start an email service to go with it. The age of non-integrated email clients for the average user ended a while ago.
In my experience, the vast majority of corporate is hooked on Outlook, which is actually quite unreliable in its 365 version and constantly has annoying bugs and performance issues.
It still might be a good idea to host an e-Mail service or create an Exchange pendant.
I often wonder why there never has been a popular open pendant to domain controllers in Windows. I think there were multiple attempts, but I don't think anything really caught on.
What many don't realize is the reason open/free software doesn't easily make it in the corporate zone is that there's no company behind them to put their name behind an SLA. This and integration with the ecosystem (MS has an easier time selling Windows+365+Exchange+cloudstuff).
The jump from "providing an email client" to "providing a privacy focus email service for independent professionals and small businesses" is already quite large. Being able to sell that by giving some guarantees (in signed SLA form) is yet another jump on an entirely different scale.
> there's no company behind them to put their name behind an SLA.
I agree that this is a sticking issue; most procurement offices have vendor/supplier questionnaires that ask about their cash flows etc., because companies want to deal with going concerns. FOSS without an org doesn't check that box.
BUT isn't this exactly the point of having a Mozilla Corporation, as separate from the nonprofit???
> isn't this exactly the point of having a Mozilla Corporation
This is the critical part. If I am using Thunderbird (or the hypothetical mail service discussed above) in my company today and have an issue or request (bug, configuration error, need assistance with a deployment, want additional features in the product, want additional integration with other products) can I contact someone directly and know that this will be treated according to my specific expectations?
In other words can I call someone at Mozilla Corporation now and ask for dedicated tech support, for a bug fix in a specified time frame, for a consultant to listen to my needs and come up with a solution? Because if my business relies on that product or service and I get no guarantees then I won't be happy to pay you just so I can queue up on Github and raise issues, and I'll go with %prominent software vendor% who gives me that.
RedHat doesn't sell you "Linux", they sell everything that comes with it, and create an entire ecosystem to go with that (partners that offer certification, training, consultancy and support, dev support, etc.).
Not to mention that companies like Google and Microsoft also offer different levels of technical support alongside their products.
For smaller companies, or companies that want to invest less in their technology stack IT department, it sounds like a better deal to have all services provided and backed by a larger computation corporation (even if that's not always actually cheaper in the long run).
For small/new companies, approx $15/head/mo for 365 (however it's branded now) is pretty hard to argue with. That gives you sharepoint/onedrive exchange & teams, and all the usual word/excel/outlook etc.
You can go quite a ways with that before you would get close to breaking even on even a single dedicated IT person. Assuming their cloud services etc. fit your business needs of course - but that's an awful lot of companies.
Then look no further than public institutions, where (leaving everything else aside) almost every tender is public [0]. You'll never see Thunderbird in any of the submitted bids because there's no company behind it to write the bid and put its weight behind it.
It's a good canary to see if a service or product has anyone capable of supporting it, or if it can be monetized in any way. This doesn't have to be the developer, just any company that can realistically push it into the corporate world.
There is a ton of public procurement out there. It all has some level (sometimes an insane level) of hoop jumping and domain knowledge to be successful with. In my limited experience, the people who understand this don't have a lot of overlap with people who advocate and use open source solutions - although I have seen a few (e.g. CentOS rollouts).
Yeah, and Outlook is available on Android/iOS so it's something many business users are already accustomed to. Then there's the entire domain integration thing (ex. Intune) which is a bit more cumbersome to set up/manage for sysadmins for OSS.
Agree. Mozilla should focus more on online services, nicely integrated in the browser. Online email, password management, vpn services, file storage and sharing, ... All privacy focused and with paid offerings, to make them more independent from Google.
I think you're spot on here. The only people using desktop mail clients are techies with multiple accounts (such as us HN users), and business users (who all use Outlook).
As a counterpoint, the non-techies in my family have become so used to the iPhone and iPad mail client that they look for (and find, and use) the desktop mail client on their Macs. Even my mom knows she has to "find the mail and give it my GMail" when she gets a new device.
> The age of non-integrated email clients for the average user ended a while ago.
As someone currently beta testing Mimestream (3rd party Gmail desktop client for Mac), I couldn't disagree more. A good UI and a responsive interface makes an absolute world of difference. Gmail's web interface isn't bad, but a desktop client is just so much better to use.
Yes, it is integrated with Google, in that it uses the Google API.
However, relevant to this thread, it's not developed by Google, as Thunderbird would not be. And so Thunderbird could still provide value as such a client.
I think this was the key. No average user I know uses an email client on their PC, outside of the corporate one. It's one more thing to take care of and average users rarely want that.
It's easier on mobile where people are used with the "app" concept, not really on the PC. This is one reason why Thunderbird doesn't enjoy the kind of popularity browser based email does.
Of course it's not impossible. But also they must be tech savvy enough to go look for an email client where they already had the usual web interface, get to testing a few and settle on Thunderbird, then configure and stick with it.
But that obviously it doesn't happen that often or else Thunderbird would boast a lot more users than it actually does. Relatively few users use it at all, and it's a reasonable assumption that the usage is higher among the more tech savvy than the average user.
I'm a fairly average user, in reality. One personal email address. Few rules. No integrations.
I still find it to be a significant improvement, even if most of my interactions involve arrow keys and the backspace key (ironically the keys I can't use in their web interface).
I disagree - the feature they need is better calendar integration with Exchange based services and the Exchange address book (GAL). As a corporate user this is the Achilles heel and always has been for 20 years, like it or not Exchange is king of the hill in large sprawling companies and Thunderbird has always left it to 3rd party add-ons (some of which they just killed due to the extension redesign) to try and handle.
I recently had to buy an such an add-on (Owl), because my umiversity's IT department killed IMAP support and only offers Exchange (which is stupid, but what can you do?).
Solutions like Owl are actually kind of nice, I have been using a similar one on my phone (AquaMail) for many years and it's worked out great. Thanks for the tip, might give it a shot - I see it's by the same author as ExQuilla which has been around for awhile as well.
Besides this rather serious bug, which does not allow you to accept Exchange meeting invites from within Thunderbird [1], everything else works perfectly with this extension.
Very much this. Gmail (well, all of Google properties anymore) is pretty terrible from a UI perspective. Not to mention the abject privacy considerations with anything Google related.
I would love for Mozilla to start a competing email service that focused on performance, UI, privacy and integrated well with not only Thunderbird but other desktop mail clients.
If standalone email clients really are dead for the average user, that to me would suggest Thunderbird should focus on power-users and/or corporate deployments, not that it should shift its focus to being part of yet another "service". It's perfectly fine to make a product with an audience that isn't everyone on Earth.
It might be because it's searching using the IMAP server, for some reason those can't often deal with non-ASCII characters. Searching with diacritics seems to work for me in locally-downloaded folders.
Well, wasn’t email designed in a time when the only supported standards were everyone’s form of Extended ASCII? So it would make sense that IMAP only supports ASCII. Heck, attachments are encoded in some base## form before being sent because the entire standard is based on text.
Here I like to quote my favorite penguin:"don't give me excuses, give me results". MS products somehow can do it, and it is a big showstopper dor adaptation in (a lot of) countries with special characters if you cannot search for the product name/customer name/project. (But maybe I remember wronfly and MS also cannot do with IMAP, so exchange it is)
I hate to bring it to you, but every single one of your priorities have been long rejected: Thunderbird was officially discontinued like ten years ago, Mozilla had just let go a large number of devs in early 2020 and then again a couple weeks ago, among them all Servo developers.
Even if you wanted to financially support Firefox or Thunderbird development through donations, there would be no way to. Your money will go to the Moz foundation, and end up in all sorts of endeavors except the ones you care about: Moz spends money on discontinued mobile operating systems and new languages and language runtimes (Rust, WASM) nobody needs (sorry Rustees). Above all, your money likely goes to salaries and pension plans for CEOs and upper management.
When it has been suggested many times that Moz just needed to put the money they got from Google into a fund to finance FF development.
As to TFA's point about "sitting on the table to decide about web standards", that also hasn't worked out. It hasn't helped to keep "web standards" in check, nor did Mozilla's own contributions become part of them. All in all, Moz just acts as a fig leaf for the web end-game, pretending there's a community or some such.
With respect to "web standards", our best bet could be to demand that W3C, WHATWG clear up their shit and publish formal standards (possibly in an executable language to base a new formal browser/viewer app on). The way it is now helps no-one except Google.
> Your money will go to the Moz foundation, and end up in all sorts of endeavors except the ones you care about: Moz spends money on discontinued mobile operating systems and new languages and language runtimes (Rust, WASM) nobody needs (sorry Rustees). Above all, your money likely goes to salaries and pension plans for CEOs and upper management.
This is simply incorrect. The Mozilla Foundation is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, which have strict laws delineating how they are allowed to spend money. "Education" is one endeavor where charities can spend money, which IIRC is where most of the foundation money goes: to educating people about the web and web development. Notably, "software development" is not an endeavor for which such a charity can spend its funds. Donations don't go to Rust, or even Firefox, because they legally can't.
> As to TFA's point about "sitting on the table to decide about web standards", that also hasn't worked out. It hasn't helped to keep "web standards" in check, nor did Mozilla's own contributions become part of them.
This is also simply incorrect. Enormous swaths of the web spec have been authored by Mozilla representatives, and we can point to plenty of instances where Mozilla has torpedoed proposals from other organizations (e.g. WebSQL, PNaCL).
But I want to donate to Firefox development and Mozilla is straight up telling me to eff off. That sucks and should be changed. Let me GitHub Sponsor or whatever FF development not throw money at a foundation that doesn't put the money where I want it to go.
Why in God's name did Mozilla even do this to themselves? Sitting up Mozilla into a Corp and a Foundation. The Corp which is supposed to be a money-printing machine has been shanghaied by a person who has gone on the record saying it would be unfair to reduce their salary because of dependants yet has consistently run this machine into red.
Why isn't Mozilla taking any action? Why is Baker continuing to be allowed to destroy the dream of a multiplicity of browser engines? It kills me.
> Notably, "software development" is not an endeavor for which such a charity can spend its funds. Donations don't go to Rust, or even Firefox, because they legally can't.
Not OP, but I think the comment was saying that donating to Mozilla will result in them using the funds on all sorts of stupid shit not FireFox related. Not to literally donate to FireFox as a stand-alone software dev endeavor. Mozilla could easily accept funds in a legally compliant way if they had some sort of “please direct my funds primarily on FireFox” if they wanted to do so. This is similar to how many charities take donations from donors (eg “Here’s some money, only use it to build a building with my name on it.”)
Mozilla absolutely has been helping to keep web standards in check. Maybe not to the degree that you would like, but if it were up to Google, we'd all have some ancient under-specified version of SQLite and LLVM encoded in web standards, as they tried to just drop those in for database storage and NaCL.
Mozilla pushed back on those, demanding documented standards that could have independent implementations.
WASM is the cross-browser, much better specified alternative to NaCL.
Formal standards in an executable language are by far the exception rather than the norm. For something with as big a surface area as web browsers, I'm sure they would cost an ungodly amount of time and money to complete. And while you may prefer to reduce the surface area to deal with this, no one wants to break compatibility with existing sites.
I'm a bit puzzled by what you actually want. Mozilla did scale back its investment in Rust, WASM, and the experimental browser engine Servo, to focus more on its core browser, in the recent round of layoffs. But the existing investment has paid off; a number of projects that started off in Servo, and were written in Rust, like the CSS parser and Webrender, are now part of Firefox, providing safe, parallel styling and GPU rendering. WASM is widely supported across browsers, providing an efficient compilation target which is much better specified and easier to work with than JavaScript as a compilation target, or something like NaCL.
And some of the other efforts, like Rust and WASM, have now achieved sufficient industry adoption that other companies are picking up the slack; Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Fastly, and others are all hiring and paying people to work on Rust and WASM full time.
It seems that other than funding Thunderbird development, Mozilla is doing what you want, but you somehow still seem unhappy with it. Why is that?
1. Were a very tiny part of the overall Mozilla budget
2. Were also employees of Moco, not Mofo, and so donations could not go towards them either.
> nobody needs (sorry Rustees)
Industry adoption says otherwise, see for example, the CTO of Amazon's comments during re:Invent yesterday.
(That being said, you could absolutely suggest that it's not Mozilla's job to help the industry in this way. That's a much better argument than "nobody needs Rust.")
Also, the main executive pay people complain about is paid by the Corporation, not the Foundation, so, suggesting your donations would go towards that is also incorrect.
> That being said, you could absolutely suggest that it's not Mozilla's job to help the industry in this way. That's a much better argument than "nobody needs Rust."
Exactly what I mean, of course.
> Also, the main executive pay people complain about is paid by the Corporation, not the Foundation, so, suggesting your donations would go towards that is also incorrect.
> demand that W3C, WHATWG clear up their shit and publish formal standards
WHATWG was founded explicitly to avoid that, i.e. "let's get shit done without ceremony, and whatever comes out is the actual standard". Going back to W3C-like processes would remove the very reason for its existence. Google has been very good at leveraging this, but that's mostly because other players seem unwilling to dedicate as many resources to browser-dev as they do (even when, like in Apple's and Microsoft's case, they have more than enough money to spend).
Agree with all points except Rust and “standards”. The performance and stability of Firefox Quantum was largely driven by Rust. W3C standards are just out-of-date documentation. Do what’s good for the Web and the W3C will eventually document it.
W3C published editorialized snapshots of WHATWG HTML5 specs only until 2017; they're now just redirecting to WHATWG github's HEAD. SVG2 (part of HTML5) has reached CR status in 2018, and ended up to include only minor amendments vs 1.1/1.2 anyway.
W3C is mostly involved in CSS specs today, with significant influence on this past decade's advances, and also source of a lot of the complexity of browsers. CSS is a primary candidate for a formal spec among web standards IMO, since HTML5 the markup language is sufficiently covered by either the procedural spec or SGML.
Firefox is already the best browser and has been for a long time. The problem is that most laypeople don't even know it exists. Combined with dark patterns used by microsoft and google to steer users toward their own browsers, it's an uphill battle. I'll stick firefox and appropriate extensions on a friends computer so they can watch youtube etc completely ad free, which is a major tangible QOL improvement, but then find them watching ads in ms edge a few days later without having realized.
I don't know about Windows or Linux, but on Mac it's far from the best browser. It uses more resources (power/battery, memory, etc) than Safari (and sometimes Chrome[ium]), the UI is a mix of old and new code, and system integration is worse than Safari and Chrome.
I use it, but both Chromium and Safari are better on this platform.
It's not that Firefox isn't an excellent browser on its own, but on macOS Safari rises the bar very high if you care about details (most people don't).
I disagree with this. Safari and Chrome are both noticeably better than Firefox on OSX.
I'm a Firefox fanboy, still use it on OSX because it's important to me, but the amount of random pauses, crashes, etc is just painful on OSX. It's like none of the Firefox developers use it on OSX or something.
And before someone says "oh it's your extensions", that IMO leads to two talking points
1. It's 2020 and major extensions still cause memory leaks in Firefox. Debugging them isn't easy at all. Almost all of the resources say something like "Run in safe mode and see if it fixes things" and then lots of posts of "post your about:memory here and I'll analyze it." I'm a software engineer by trade and it's been difficult for me to diagnose...
2. Nah because I don't run any extensions on my OSX firefox install
Well, at least for me, Safari is often still the fastest browser and has long been the best at power management (important when you're running on battery power). And I like its UI a little more; its tabs, for instance, are native macOS tabs. Firefox and Chrome both make up their own stuff.
As far as "least standards-compliant," I understand that when it comes to supporting progressive web apps, Safari has largely dropped the ball, but in day-to-day practice there just aren't many sites that I have trouble with on Safari. (The biggest one seems to be new Reddit, and I am not entirely convinced that issue is on Safari's end.)
Yes, Safari is the most buggy browser in common use other than IE11. It's also the one that uses the least battery life, it's standards-compliant enough to render most web pages, and it's the only option on iOS.
It's somewhat a myth that Safari is less standard-compliant. True, Safari's release cycle is slower and Apple has the motivation to prevent PWAs to become too good, but in many things Safari has always been very innovative browser.
Built on top of KHTML foundation, it then became webkit and later the most successfull engine. It was the first to implement full ES6 support, and basically invented CSS transformations/transitions (really amazing stuff back then but not really used until all major browsers caught up years later), was the first to ditch Flash support, has argueably the best privacy policy, has superb font rendering, etc.
Internet explorer is also a very innovative browser. It introduced XHR and a bunch of other stuff. But that is a different measure from standards-compliant.
Yes, IE was very innovative in its heyday (up to version 4). But back then there was no strong standard body (sort of status quo) like we have today, and due to Windows monopoly they could come up with stuff which was never even intented to be implemented by other vendors (well, Mozilla). You cannot really compare that era to today's situation.
This. I was a FireFox long time supporter, but switched off when I started using Mac as my daily driver. It crashed more, used more resources, etc than Safari, Chrome, and Brave.
I also stopped recommending it to randos when they started coming back and complaining about weird behavior. Now if I don’t know someone and want them to just have the simplest working experience I recommend Safari on Mac and Brave on windows.
There's some kind of longstanding bug with non-default scaling on Mac apparently. It's great on Linux, but it's hard to get Mac friends to switch over.
For me Firefox has been chasing the Chrome market share by trying to replicate the Chrome user experience for so long it's no longer distinct from Chrome in a meaningful way. Give me the Firefox experience from ten years ago and I'll drop Chrome on the spot.
>Firefox is already the best browser and has been for a long time.
I used FF for years before switching to chrome when it came out. Every attempt I've made since to switch back (windows and macOS) as been a disaster. Hogging resources, pages that skip around while scrolling, and rendering issues (perhaps GPU related) are a few of the numerous issues I've run into.
I try to switch back to FF about twice a year. I'm going on about a eight years with no success.
On my aarch64 devices, Chromium in a Docker image loads faster, never dominates the CPU, renders video and websites faster, and has working DRM. Firefox is slower in every respect and can't render Netflix.
I don't think you can make a blanket statement like this. My experience has been almost the opposite, Chrome always uses significantly more CPU for me.
I think it really depends on hardware, drivers etc.
Using Firefox every day, somewhat on principle. The experience is nowhere as good as Chrome.
It takes FOREVER after starting Firefox to load saved tabs -- like 30 seconds to 1 minute of delay before the first tab starts to load.
Recently, it also has been updating quietly in the background and FORCING me to restart Firefox to view any content. I'm sure there's a setting I can change somewhere that makes it require manual updates. That should be the default.
It's so weird to me this type of comment pops up on every firefox discussion, but I use firefox on mac everyday and it's rock solid, never run into any problems.
Agreed with you, the best Firefox experience is on Windows. Hardware acceleration is on point, always very snappy rendering with no lag. Can't say the same about FF on macOS or Linux, where the experience is worse.
Support for CoreAnimation compositing was added last year. Support for hardware acceleration on Linux was added this week.
Speaking from personal experience doing user support in firefox IRC channel on freenode and formerly moznet, the vast majority of "resource hog" complaints are due to the user running AdBlock with a million block rules (or some similar addon). Occasionally it is a particular long running website with JS memory leaks though. Like a gmail pinned tab.
In terms of performance, until recently a common issue was lack of default graphics acceleration on linux, requiring manually enabling layers.acceleration.force-enabled
Firefox has a suite of `about:` URLs[1], one of them is about:performance which will show you the Task Manager (their name) which has a sort of CPU and RAM column. It even shows you when it's javascript on a tab chewing up resources and not the extension.
I don't know if the situation has improved, but at least in past it seems about:performance has a problem picking out problems created by an addon doing a ton of DOM manipulation that chews up resources in the tab. Bisecting addons or my preference, a clean profile or safe mode, was usually what I suggested, but YMMV.
I don't think any of this fundamentally beats the main problem.
That being platform control and advertising.
Google advertises chrome with it's services and is the incumbent. It's also preloaded and unremovable on Android.
Microsoft advertises edgium on Windows and makes it unremovable.
Apple only allows webkit and safari clones on their platform.
Firefox even if it's the best browser in the world would have the same problem that Linux has. Namely that Linux may be better and fit the needs, but people aren't going to bother installing it. Just look at Windows 10 and how many people are pissed at various aspects from telemetry, updates, ads and still these same people can't be bothered to flash Linux. Linux has something like 1-2% of the desktop market.
The other issue with (2) is that R&D into Firefox will not return money. Not unless they choose to basically switch to blink and offload the R&D costs onto Google. Heck Microsoft themselves did the same because they realized the R&D costs weren't worth it.
If Mozilla wants to stay alive, it needs to diversify and find a niche not dominated/controlled by Google, Microsoft and Apple.
Chrome didn't dethrone IE and displace FF because google advertised it, it was legitimately the best browser at the time. FF was awful, and so was IE.
I keep trying FF, but I honestly haven't found it sufficiently compelling to go back. I don't mix work hardware and personal business, so I don't need multiple profiles. I prefer chrome's debug tools.
Maybe we will see how manifest v3 plays out with uBlock, that might actually be enough.
Yes enthusiasts care about adblock, manifest v3 and performance. That is a very tiny minority of users.
>Chrome didn't dethrone IE and displace FF because google advertised it.
This I almost heavily disagree with. Surprisingly, marketing and advertising is far, far more effective than product performance. Performance helps retain users, but advertising is what moves users. That is nearly always the case.
Chrome was also bundled with Adobe's Flash installer, which is ironic because Chrome bundles its own Flash plugin. So a Firefox user wanting Flash would download Adobe's Flash installer and (if they didn't watch the installer's default settings carefully) would be switched to Chrome. If a Firefox user wanted to switch to Chrome, they would have downloaded Google's Chrome installer, not Adobe's Flash installer.
Adobe had no incentive to change this relationship because they got paid by Google twice: for bundling Chrome in Flash and bundling Flash in Chrome.
There were definitely enough dark patterns and advertisements around Chrome to increase its market share. Chrome may have been faster, but it was also had more rendering issues early on.
> Chrome didn't dethrone IE and displace FF because google advertised it, it was legitimately the best browser at the time. FF was awful, and so was IE.
It started that way, then it dominated because every google search not using chrome popped up “Better with Chrome” or “Try Chrome.” Same with all of Google’s properties. There’s no way to disable this. That’s billions of free adverts every day. It adds up.
I think similarly back in the 90s that IE4 took off because Netscape4 was horrible and then stagnated, but dominated because Windows bundled and required it. They had bundled and required IE2/3 but those were inferior to NN3.
So being good gets them to critical mass and then anticompetitive forces got them to owning.
Firefox got to 30% by being a good browser. An alternative take on why it is now lower: not because of dark patterns but because Google genuinely built a better product. I'm a Firefox user, but because of stubbornness. In all honesty, I find Chrome easier to use and less cluttered.
yes, back when browsers sucked. Performance is hardly the reason of choosing a browser these days, personal preferences, what you are used to, what is given to you, etc...its a good argument for why Google needs to be broken up.
Yea from the old MacOS sure. However, now that iOS apps are looking to be pushed to desktop, do you really think that is gonna continue in the future?
As soon as universal binaries/iOS apps becomes fully fledged on ARM Mac I can imagine Apple just removing support completely. It's almost inevitable the way Apple is progressing to basically move to the iOS style platform control to OS X.
Even from Mozilla's economics perspective, it doesn't make sense for Mozilla to be spending engineering effort maintaining both the iOS and OS X variants for something like 4% of desktop. If it was up to me, I would have just migrated/maintained the Firefox Wrapper iOS and called it a day.
Yes. I do really think that is gonna continue in the future.
I've said this before and I'll probably say it in increasingly irascible tones, but "next year macOS is gonna become just like iOS" is becoming the new "next year is the year of Linux on the desktop."
Yes, Apple will almost certainly keep making security decisions people (including me) don't like, but there's no compelling business decision for trying to lock the Mac down to only App Store installs. Yes, I know Apple gets 30% of software sales that way. No, that is not enough of a reason for them to take the hit to their hardware profits that would undoubtedly entail. Even if it were just a loss of a few percent of Mac sales -- which I think is extremely optimistic -- it'd be coming out of the sales of the most expensive Macs, and making up one lost Mac sale literally requires hundreds of sales on the App Store to make up for it. Any executive at Apple who suggested that would be beat senseless by their accounting department.
Of course it would be stupid to cut it out suddenly.
The real successful strategy is to do it very slowly and gradually. With each release make it a tiny bit more annoying to install and run non-store apps. Make them slower - "this app is not trusted so it needs to be monitored for your safety which might negatively affect its performance". Users will prefer store apps and will put pressure on app developers to publish on app store.
If they do it well then hardly anybody will even notice they finally killed the non-store apps.
For all the reasons I've elucidated in other replies, I simply don't buy this. Also: this year has seen the move, after nearly two decades, from OS X/macOS 10.x to macOS 11.0, a new UI redesign clearly modeled on iOS, and a change to Apple's own processors derived from the ones they use for iPhones and iPads. There would have been no better year to make such a move than this year. It would have been the absolute perfect cover.
If and when both iOS and macOS are replaced by one unified operating system, this would be back on the table. But personally, I wouldn't bet a whole lot of money on it happening even then.
That's also a great point! Apple has not been doing too well at reading the room on this one for a while now, granted, but in a year they've literally been called before Congress over concerns about their control over the iOS application market, "and now we're going to do the same thing for macOS!" would not go over very well.
There are plenty of compelling business decisions including from the developer houses themselves.
Development houses now have an opportunity to bring their software to a larger market share (iPad, iOS and MacOS) whilst maintaining just one code base.
Development houses would also have much stronger piracy prevention (same kind of benefit that enables console games to function).
Development houses would have much stronger control over the running environment (preventing adblock, preventing VPN region bypass etc...).
Development houses would have much more control over updates.
Surprisingly just like the now defunct Mac Servers, Apple doesn't really care about the high end hardware Mac platforms. They only care for those graphic designers/video editor/MS office crowd and their software is coming in iOS forms.
The developers that I hear from have different opinions than what you're expressing here. Many want direct relationships with their customers, for a start, and if you want that, the App Store is right out. And I can't think of a single developer who would say they "would have much more control over updates" if they delivered them through the App Store. (They'd say "oh, honey, no," after they finally caught their breath after the laughing fit.)
As for "Apple doesn't really care about the high end hardware Mac platforms," well. It's possible that they rolled out the Mac Pro just last year as an elaborate ruse to distract us from how much they don't care about the Mac Pro, but it strikes me as relatively unlikely. (And if you think the "graphic designer/video editor" crowd, either users or developers, is on board with moving everything to the App Store, oh, honey, no.)
It's not that we can't be bothered to flash Linux, but that we can't be bothered to deal with the incompatibility issues we will have after we have flashed it.
Again if you are talking about words like 'incompatability' then you are probably closer to the enthusiast techie type 5% than the 95% majority.
That majority doesn't even know about Linux or what flashing even is. They just bought a box from bestbuy/amazon so they can access the internet and email. They stick to the manufacturer defaults and would be stuck with Chrome, Edgium or Safari.
I was indeed talking about normie stuff like games or simple applications. Those are the reasons why I will happily be staying on Windows for the next few years.
Chrome/Chromium/Edge has more features, does more things. Why would I use Firefox except for being stubborn?
I personally moved to Edge from Chrome after they forked Chromium because of better integration with Windows. I wouldn't have before, because it was lacking. Now with feature parity, the integration with Windows has a value.
Chromium can be configured for all of the privacy things Firefox has. There is no inherent other difference. Normal people will always value utility over privacy.
Mozilla can chose to fork Chromium, and come ahead. Chromium/Blink was a fork of WebKit. They made it better. Mozilla can chose a better starting point with Chromium.
I still remember moving from Internet Explorer to Firefox to Chrome now to Edge.
I was blown away by Chrome when it came out. It was just better. Way better.
> 3. Invest more in Thunderbird the application and develop Thunderbird the privacy focus email service for independent professionals and small businesses.
While I agree that Thunderbird as a standalone Windows/MacOS/Linux desktop email client is a very important project, and needs to be continued, maintained and refined, the paradigm of email has moved on somewhat since 2003.
People need to be able to do more than just access email on a desktop or laptop.
I'd like to see two new things under the Thunderbird/Mozilla name:
a) a fully open source GPL licensed, self-hostable, webmail server application that fulfills the same functions as rainloop or roundcube, implemented in the Thunderbird name. Maybe it could have its own new GUI to run inside the browser, or it could offer an optional "traditional" GUI that is similar to the Thunderbird desktop client. This has a possibility for a natural symbiotic relationship with Firefox, as the best and most optimal web browser client to view the webmail.
b) a Thunderbird Android email client. There should be no reason why people should be locked into the default Android google/gmail email client. I can't even view message headers on it. I want a full featured "power user" IMAP-over-TLS + SMTP email client for Android that is also open source.
> b) a Thunderbird Android email client. There should be no reason why people should be locked into the default Android google/gmail email client. I can't even view message headers on it. I want a full featured "power user" IMAP-over-TLS + SMTP email client for Android that is also open source.
K-9 mail should satisfy these requirements. It's been slow moving development wise the last two years, but it is not dead:
> a fully open source GPL licensed, self-hostable, webmail server application that fulfills the same functions as rainloop or roundcube, implemented in the Thunderbird name. Maybe it could have its own new GUI to run inside the browser, or it could offer an optional "traditional" GUI that is similar to the Thunderbird desktop client. This has a possibility for a natural symbiotic relationship with Firefox, as the best and most optimal web browser client to view the webmail.
If this shares neither the thunderbird feature set or UX, why does it have to be called thunderbird? I still use thunderbird because it's UX efficiency for dealing with large volumes of mail blow away the Gmail and Fastmail web interfaces.
I really like a). More broadly, I’ve thought for a long time that we should to make it turnkey-easy for people to deploy their own services, to start re-decentralizing a lot of the services that have trended toward centralization - email, blog/personal news hosting, photo sharing. Like built-into-their-router easy, to avoid the need to set up port forwarding. Mozilla seems like a great place for a lot of this to start, given their focus on the open web, privacy, etc. Many of the details involved in hosting this stuff can be a bit messy for laymen, but I think defaults could be chosen and a minimum subset of the features could be polished to the point of user friendliness.
> a Thunderbird Android email client. [...] I want a full featured "power user" IMAP-over-TLS + SMTP email client for Android that is also open source.
I've been using Thunderbird for close to 15 years and 2021 is probably the year I'll stop because of how poorly it works with Office 365. It's kind of a bummer but hard to get that upset about it because I really don't like email to start with.
On 2, I actually think that the right sideproject does have the ability to market Firefox and grows its userbase better than making incremental gains in the browser. For example, Firefox Send was a clever way of putting the brand in front of many people who might never have seen it.
On 3, I too would love to see that happen, but, from the outside at least, the project has seen so much upheaval [1]. I don't really understand the significance of the latest change, at the start of the year [2], but hopefully it's a good sign.
But I couldn't disagree more with number 3. Thunderbird is always going to be a niche product with a much smaller potential user base than Firefox.
More or less every corporation and every individual user out there is a potential consumer of Firefox--every single one who uses the web.
Thunderbird? Not so much. Many consumers prefer web-based e-mail clients or e-mail clients tied directly to the e-mail platform they are using (Gmail, Outlook.com, etc.). And Thunderbird is never going to replace Outlook for corporate mail. Thunderbird is only useful when you want a generic feature set, and it mostly competes with other niche mail clients.
Basically, every dollar invested in Thunderbird is a dollar that could be better spent on Firefox (or MDN). If anything, they should spin off development of Thunderbird into a separate company with its own independent funding structure.
> If anything, they should spin off development of Thunderbird into a separate company with its own independent funding structure.
They already did that.
- In 2012 Mozilla (the corporation) started this move by announcing that "Thunderbird was not a priority for Mozilla" [1]. At this point Mozilla (corp) stopped actively investing in Thunderbird.
- In 2015, Mitchel Baker made it clear that the Mozilla (corp) wanted to get rid of Thunderbird [2]. At this point the Mozilla corp started shutting down support services for the Thunderbird project.
- In 2017 Thunderbird was legally moved to the Mozilla Foundation (instead of the corporation) and started surviving mostly on its own, with some minor help from the Mozilla Foundation [3]. Here Mozilla (corp), the company responsible for Firefox, already got rid of Thunderbird entirely.
- In 2020, it became clear that Thunderbird can survive entirely on its own donations and could even try to provide commercial services. Thus, the Mozilla Foundation created a new "MZLA Technologies Corporation" that is now the legal entity responsible of Thunderbird [4]. MZLA Tech is not responsible for any other product that I know of.
I really like the idea of businesses focused on their core value proposition. However, in tech, these businesses get crushed by larger platform plays see for example Firefox vs. chrome, slack vs teams, Aws vs digital ocean.
There are a few factors at play here, but I’ll call out a few I’ve observed.
1) If you hire good engineers and give them autonomy, branching into new markets is cheaper than you think. “Focusing” engineers tends to just cut back on autonomy, both lowering productivity as well as limiting the quality of engineering talent one can attract.
2) Unified, integrated solutions, with great default options are preferred by nearly everyone on the market. Sure lastpass let people store passwords easily, but how many consumers bother changing the default password manager in their browser?
3) Investors recognize this pattern and funnel money to the biggest “platform” they can in any given market.
I never understood how bad point solutions were from a business standpoint until I worked in the application performance monitoring space. For any given monitoring feature there are dozens to hundreds of small, high quality point solutions targeting one market niche or another - but most customers will simply purchase their preferred all in one solution and forget about the other options.
I agree with points 1 and 2. I also think it's a reasonable idea for Mozilla to focus on Thunderbird the email client since there aren't a lot of great alternatives.
However, when it comes to a hosted email service, there are plenty of good options already out there (e.g. Fastmail and Protonmail). The same goes for VPNs.
I would much prefer Mozilla spend that money making Firefox better, or putting that money in some sort of mutual fund, the proceeds of which would fund browser development if Google ever stopped paying Mozilla.
The reason is, VPN services are not hard to build. Email services are not hard to build. Browsers are hard to build, and if Firefox development ever stalled it would probably go away forever.
Maybe not hard to build, but they are decidedly non-trivial to maintain. Their whole purpose is to get around the business/political decisions of one organization or another, and those organizations are making it increasingly difficult to be got around. A "real" VPN company has to deal with service providers on both ends of the tunnel trying to detect and block them, compliance with complicated legal situations in every country (and state) they have a presence in, law enforcement demanding access to logs and traffic, fraudsters trying to create accounts with stolen payment methods, attackers trying to make their way into the system for a variety of nefarious reasons, and semi-regular zero-day vulnerabilities being discovered and patched throughout the whole service stack. To name just a few of the most obvious hurdles.
No, I would not want to be responsible for running a VPN service in this day and age.
Email hosting is not much better, for most of the same reasons as above, except that spam filtering is also a whole full-time profession unto itself as well.
But yes, I agree with your point on Mozilla's lack of focus. And management competency, I would argue.
You won't be able to beat Chrome by technology alone. I actually don't know how Mozilla can beat Chrome.
Google has an extremely strong incentive to capture the web client market. Whatever Mozilla can do to make Firefox more popular, Google can outspend them by a factor 10 and do more, or better, or both.
I want Firefox to win but unfortunately I just don't see a path for it. My mindset at the moment is "I'm going to use Firefox for as long as it's possible, and then I'll find the least crappy Chromium fork available".
I don't know if it'll take 6 months or 6 years to get to that point but I really don't have faith in Mozilla righting the ship.
> Whatever Mozilla can do to make Firefox more popular, Google can outspend them by a factor 10 and do more, or better, or both.
Firefox isn't struggling on technical grounds though. It's not a charity case, it's a perfectly competent browser. Whether Firefox outperforms Chromium depends on which benchmark you use. As far as the user is concerned, they're both technically solid browsers.
I wasn't talking solely about technical merits. I was also talking about marketing and everything else. Google can (and does) push Chrome aggressively through a multitude of channels. How can Mozilla beat that?
I wonder why Firefox even has to beat Chrome. Wouldn't it be enough to have 30% marketshare again? Or even 10% would be enough to consider Firefox a serious competitor.
Somewhere along the line we got this idea that if you're not #1 you've failed. You don't need to crush every single competitor into oblivion to be successful, you just need to succeed at what you set out to do, and in Firefox's case, isn't that just to build a good browser?
The only way to beat Chrome, is the same way Firefox beat IE: Someone else will have to do it.
On some level, Firefox has to 'beat' Chrome in order to get/keep a significant level of marketshare. It needs people to see it as better in some way if they're to choose to use it, especially on mobile where Chrome is the default.
For some of us, it still 'beats' Chrome on some kind of principle - I'm not giving Google yet more control. But are there enough people like me to actually keep a modern browser going?
In that sense, Firefox's competition is not Chrome: it's the other "non-mainstream" browsers like Chromium Edge, Brave, or Opera. What can Mozilla do to attract those users to Firefox? Google doesn't want to crush Firefox to 0% because Google profits from Firefox searches and presumably wants a non-Chromium browser to exist to avoid antitrust scrutiny regulating Chrome.
I'm probably a niche user, but better crypto and web3 support (still cannot make firefox recognize my hardware wallet on Linux). That's the singular most important reason I switched, after many years.
... It'll raise trust if they follow through their promises. Open source Pocket, yet?
One big area where Firefox could win is privacy. The problem is that currently most of their money comes from Google, which means privacy will always be pretty limited. Perhaps £5/yr fees would fund an alternative?
Nothing wrong with "We're Building a Better Internet", but they should up their game a bit by actively participating in privacy and projects to decentralize the web (again). For example, I have once envisioned a so-called 'privacy box': A physical box one put's in their own house and provides user friendly decentralized functions by installing extra software (ie using containers) for the local residents. Think filestore (like NC), mail, pihole, contacts, calender, pw vault (like bitwarden_rs), etc, etc. Mozilla could activily participate in the software and get a cut from the selling of those boxes or the sw subscriptions on top, which is probably even better.
I agree. I also think they should own the Privacy/Security/Confidentiality niche as well. Inventing and rebasing on Rust put them in a good position to provide reliable and provably-correct privacy-focused communications platforms as well. Double down on that, and pitch enterprises, govts, and other potential customers on that angle. Secure comms is an increasingly top-of-mind concern these days.
I've been using Thunderbird for years probably since it was created. I was going to write a message about wishing they would invest more in Thunderbird and fix a particular bug.
As I was typing this it made me starting looking a bug I've found using it. So then I started Googling around to see if someone else found it. Looking at it, it appears it's been open for 3 years. But in the bug ticket they had steps to fix it. I now know few more menus in Thunderbird that I never considered clicking on. The bug now seem to be resolved and happier.
But then I also wish they would trim it down or at least give me the option to turn stuff off. I don't want an events and task organiser and all this stuff. I just want a mail client. I also wish their spam filter would be more consistent and stuff keeps getting through that I've flagged and is clearly spam as it's the same message I've been receiving for the last couple of months.
Sort of. Google basically is what makes the company money, which is more or less indentured servitude. If it were to break away and find another way to monetize I think it becomes a very different browser.
#3. I agree. Amd yet Ian has this to say under "Firefox was never enough" -
All encompassing: The web hosts most of our desktop applications. It should host even more of them, it should host mobile applications, it should be the universal platform. More APIs. More ways to package and present sites. (See Project Fugu)
I fundamentally disagree with this one. There's just too much of a bad security track record on all 6 of the first 6 levels of the OSI model for me to use web apps for office apps.
The parallel there would be giving away @mozilla.org addresses. @firefox.com to me feels somewhere closer to @gmail.com, both being products, not companies.
I think that Mozilla partnership with Google has made these goals difficult to achieve. Mozilla gets its money from Google, so it is implicitly part of the monopolist game played by them. What this means is that they're happy to be second in the browser development game, and are richly rewarded for doing so.
I mean, I don't think (2) is controversial -- the issue is that there are many dimensions you can measure to determine "best". There's not a settled single definition.
> With this in mind the argument is: Firefox has to be popular enough that Mozilla has at least a veto over problematic points of standards, and the ability to vigorously advance positive standards.
Has veto ever worked for web browsers?? I think the problem is user perception: users don't blame the page, they blame the browser. Especially when they learn browser X renders the page while browser Y doesn't. As an example, browsers were racing to fix malformed HTML so that the user has a good experience.
I had been using Firefox as the primary browser since before it was v1.0 until some time in 2016, which is when I switched to Chrome. The reason was mostly usability related. Chrome felt faster and easier to use.
With the reach of Google, Firefox had to be that much better to keep up, like it was compared to any version of IE. Unfortunately, Firefox kind of remained the same while Chrome became better and better.
In hindsight, they could have done what Opera did. But then they didn't. I don't think they did anything particularly wrong. Firefox just aged beyond its usefulness and will die, just because it's not needed anymore.
I see Brave as the spiritual successor of Firefox. Just like Firefox challenged the then status quo and made way for better browsers to come, Brave is challenging the current status quo Chrome and Google's business model at the same time.
Unless Brave is forking Chromium, Google owns them. Google controls what gets merged into Chromium. Brave can talk the talk all they want, but they merely exist as a Chrome skin with crypto added in and a few privacy features included.
I know they are committed to supporting Manifest v2 (I think), but more and more decisions are going to have to be made where they differ from upstream Chromium. I have doubts this will be sustainable forever.
Google doesn't own us (Hello, I'm Sampson from Brave). We don't have to get anything merged back into Chromium (though we do contribute up-stream, and have landed commits). We do a soft-patch on top of Chromium, removing that which is against our commitment to privacy-by-default, and user control. If we never land another commit in Chromium, that would be okay. We continue maintain our patches (as does Microsoft and others who build upon Chromium).
Firefox made a mistake of getting paid by Google and getting too comfortable with it. I think they won't have much happening for them.
I mean something could still happen, who knows? Maybe Huawei or Xiaomi or Canonical or IBM will see some value in it and make something out of it, but I fear it might be too late for them.
And Brave is not Chrome. It's based on Chromium. Many other companies depend upon Chromium codebase for their browsers, companies like Microsoft, Samsung, Amazon, Tesla. If Google does stop the development, there is a good chance that someone else will pick it up and keep it shared and open to distribute the work required to develop and maintain it.
Out of these, only Microsoft could reasonably develop a browser enginge - and they stopped doing so, decreasing the available web implementations by one.
I’m not worried about google stopping chrome, it is way too big for that - just firefox is unique in what they are doing, and is irreplaceble from a freedom of web perspective.
And that Eich went on to create the privacy focused Brave browser based on Chromium.
Yet, these mistakes didn’t really change the downward trajectory. Apple and Google are the dominant mobile platforms and I can’t see how an independent desktop browser can grow against competent conglomerates.
Since I have your ear, in hindsight do you think the promotion of IndexedDB over SQLite/WebSQL was a good move?
I think persistent SQLite is on the verge of returning to the browser via WebAssembly but it needs a proper POSIX-like WASI [1] (WebAssembly System Interface) implementation in the browser. If you are looking for (very) small footholds in the market for Brave, a WASI implementation supporting a SQLite VFS [2] extension has my vote.
The article discusses four strategies and I think your (assuming you are the Brendan Eich) strategy for Brave falls under 3. Technological pessimism, though it needs a better name.
You are correct, growth for a desktop browser is possible, I misspoke, but I think the general browser market is a tough nut to crack. Good luck. Your (Brendan Eich's) past and present work is greatly appreciated.
I reject Ian's categories. Brave is not only about "pessimism" and never was. Of course this makes us hard to categorize.
Main point is we grew and grow. Firefox shrinks, it's dying. I'm not saying that a bigger browser in decline would be easy to turn around, but Mozilla has not done right by Firefox.
I do agree with Ian that loss of Firefox founders hurt. We made brevet promotions and hires who did not hit the heights of hyatt, blake, joehewitt, and bengoodger. This is an oft-told tale, often requiring restart via a different codebase while maintaining the extant one.
I think the poster is making a distinction between Firefox and Mozilla founders, but it could be more clear. Mitchell, a Mozilla founder, is still around. The Firefox founders, who are Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross, and possibly Joe Hewitt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_version_history only states the first two, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox#History all three), have not been at Mozilla since the early 2000s.
You're misinterpreting the statement in your search for a soapbox. Brendan was one of "Mozilla's founders," not "Firefox's founders," so he was the wrong person for the job anyway.
I actually missed that too, I guess because it wasn't where it seemed he was going after the previous paragraph.
So looking at that section again, his argument seems weak on that point. He is promoting founders as leaders because they have innate clout and don't have to engage in consensus building, but that should apply to Mozilla's founders too.
You're right, founder effect wears off in terms of consensus-free authority, and it should. Founder effects in code style and culture last practically forever, in my experience. But with Mitchell pulling $3M/year, the top job needs leadership and consensus around what to do to save Mozilla, not resting on laurels from a couple of decades ago. (BTW Mitchell was not on founding staff @ mozilla dot org; she was on Netscape's legal team and wrote the NPL and MPL.)
> I remember when Brendan Eich was briefly the Mozilla CEO. It was noted that a founder has a special place and ability as a leader. We never got to find out, but there was some sense to it: a founder has particular authority, without getting that authority through consensus-building. If you bring in a decisive outsider they will probably fail, lacking the authority (and probably the wisdom) to guide the company. If you bring in or promote someone appropriate for a more mature company, then the company may be operated well but the choices made will be more conservative.
When FireFox Quantum first came out, I was amazed. All the speed and performance problems started to fade and I was so happy to use Firefox again, switching back from Vivaldi. I also noticed a lot of bad information going on about Eich at the time. People were claiming he wasn't very competent, that he didn't put priority on multi-thread/cpu/quantum support (he did) .. lot's of stuff to discredit him.
I do think it was sad that Mozilla forced him out. Diversity of ideas? Not at Mozilla. Diversity based on identity and not thought has become the focus at many companies and it feels insane.
I will not use Brave. Their crypto stuff and ad injection and privacy concerns bother me. However, Firefox has continually gotten more and more unstable. I may switch back to Vivaldi, which I do not really want to do. Diversity in the browser eco system is pretty critical to an open web.
You're mistaken, or simply misleading. Brave has never inserted affiliate links into any content. What you may be referring to was the offering of affiliate links within the suggestions-dropdown in the browser itself. We wrote about this back in June of this year: https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/.
When a user searched (e.g. 'binance'), the browser would check to see if an affiliate link existed. If it did, it would be displayed as a suggested URL. If the user were to press Enter at that point, they would be sent to the domain, with Brave's affiliate code in tow. We did make a mistake, however. We unintentionally matched against a fully-qualified URL as well (e.g. binance.us). We were able to fix that within a couple of days, however.
This is not in any way "sketchy". Open Firefox, Opera, Vivaldi, or Edge and perform a search for "Hacker News". You'll note that in Firefox, and Opera (IIRC) you're sent to Google with an affiliate-identifier in the URL. In Edge and Vivaldi, I believe you're sent to Bing, but with the same type of identifier.
It's weird how consistent this claim is when the ad stuff (which I personally never used when I tried Brave) was always opt-in and always an advertised feature part of Brave's (possibly misguided) mission to change the landscape of internet advertising.
It's not weird. A lot of people (especially on HN) repeat false claims they hear that "sound right" to them, especially where they have some animus against someone involved (me, in Brave's case). Brave was inspired by All Advantage, but we knew going in that Gator and worse examples of personal ad systems would be used to dismiss or disparage. Marketing challenge, not a reason to give up.
“A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots.” —Mark Twain
Their entire business model is sketchy. They'll collect payments on your behalf whether you're signed up to them or not while removing your ad revenue.
This is incorrect, and based on misinformation from 2018. In 2018, Brave users could tip unverified content creators with BAT. Those tokens would go into a settlement wallet until claimed by the intended recipient. This was a bad design.
Within 48 hours we had a new build of Brave out which held the tips locally, in the browser. The tip would be attempted for up to 90 days; if the unverified publisher were to verify within that time, the tip would be sent to their wallet. If the 90 days passed, the user's BAT would be released within the browser to be distributed elsewhere.
> This is incorrect, and based on misinformation from 2018.
Great, I love being incorrect and learning something new.
> In 2018, Brave users could tip unverified content creators with BAT. Those tokens would go into a settlement wallet until claimed by the intended recipient. This was a bad design.
So it wasn't incorrect or misinformation then?
Glad you've fixed that shitty practice but that doesn't expunge it from history or make the fact anyone in a decision making position thought that was in any way ethical/acceptable.
You're missing quite a bit of context here. Brave distributed tokens to users (from our User-Growth Pool of 300M BAT) as a means of ramping-up this new support model. Users then, in turn, could send received tokens to verified creators. If they wished to send the tokens to an unverified creator, the tokens would go [back to Brave] (in a settlement wallet), where they would reside until claimed by the publisher. Meanwhile, at Brave, we would reach out to unverified creators who had a growing balance waiting.
The change we made kept the tokens on the user's device. We also introduced better UI/UX as well, with many thanks to our community for helping us spot some areas for improvement. Although I'm part of the team, I still stand in awe of those few days in December, 2018. A great, yet flawed, system was radically improved in a matter of hours with a few small (yet profound) changes. And it wouldn't have been possible without Brave's incredibly engaged community.
Most blockers these days use the same lists; this includes Brave. Brave also does additional work, liking inspecting the CNAME to see if the domain is an alias for a third-party, known tracker. One area where Brave is a little behind is in the aesthetic blocking, things like clearing elements off a page. We have that ability as well, but it's not quite as mature and well-rounded as you would see in something like uBO. Our work is not complete :)
>forcibly kicked out founder Brendan Eich because you disliked his unrelated politics
>belittles everyone who doesn't share your narrow ideology
Wake up to the present. People who actively try to ban same-sex marriage are just as bad as segregation was back in the day.
Calling this "narrow ideology" is preposterous.
There is nothing wrong with homosexuality and they should be given the same rights as everyone else. It's NOT a debate. So if someone is actively trying to campaign against equality then they are flat out wrong and deserve the backlash.
(I work for Mozilla and was there when this all happened)
That is false. Only one of them quit "because of" him. You don't need to take my word for it: Stephen Shankland's piece [1] is the least-inaccurate account of what happened there.
And in fact, your statement is not even logical. Think about it: Who hires a CEO? A company's board. Now you're saying that a huge chunk of the board quit because of a hire that they themselves were responsible for making? That makes no sense.
You forgot to mention the most important and commonly misstated fact that Brendan Eich was NOT fired, and was NOT asked to resign, and was NOT "kicked out".
The false narratives that the board fired him, and also that half the board quit because of him, both directly contradict the official statement published on the Mozilla Blog, and Brendan's own words he published on Twitter:
>On April 3, 2014 Brendan Eich voluntarily stepped down as CEO of Mozilla. [...]
>Q: Was Brendan Eich fired?
>A: No, Brendan Eich resigned. Brendan himself said:
>“I have decided to resign as CEO effective April 3rd, and leave Mozilla. Our mission is bigger than any one of us, and under the present circumstances, I cannot be an effective leader. I will be taking time before I decide what to do next.”
>Brendan Eich also blogged on this topic.
>Q: Was Brendan Eich asked to resign by the Board?
>A: No. It was Brendan’s idea to resign, and in fact, once he submitted his resignation, Board members tried to get Brendan to stay at Mozilla in another C-level role.
Despite that irrefutable proof of Mozilla's and Brendan's own words that he resigned of his own free will, and the Board actually wanted him to stay, GamerGate followers love to spread conspiracy theories based on those false narratives, framing Brendan as a victim and martyr, instead of respecting the human rights of the people whose marriages Brendan donated his money to destroy.
Indeed. This is very true, but I've become exhausted from repeating it ad infinitum. Six+ years is a long time in tech, and yet we're still talking about this nonsense.
In the 2nd link you posted Brendan Eich himself replies to you tell you to search for "constructive separation". So while he "quit" it didn't sound like he had much of an option.
I disagree with his views and believe Mozilla did the right thing in severing ties but I don't think it's as cut and dry as you're making it sound. It definitely comes across as a "We expect your resignation by the end of the day or shit will get messy for everyone" situation.
It is my position that he should have resigned for the good of the Mozilla community (which he did, because what he did was hurtful and mean, and the consequences of his actions make him a poor leader), or justified his homophobic beliefs and kept his job (which I believe are unjustifiable, unless he has some new information that is news to me, which is why I think he should have spoken up instead of resigning if he had some special insight into why same sex marriage should be illegal, or simply admitted he was wrong and sincerely apologized, instead of clinging to an indefensible position).
Even anti-gay born-again Christian Gervase Markham certainly didn't hold back trying to defend his indefensible position against same sex marriage, and Mozilla never fired him or asked him to leave as he continued to speak out, until the day he died. And he too testified that Brendan wasn't asked to leave, either. Do you accuse him of being in on the conspiracy, too? How do you theorize they bought him off, a presumably morally upright born-again Christian?
>Hi. My name is Gervase Markham. I’m a supporter of traditional marriage, and I work for Mozilla. In fact, as far as being on the record goes, I believe I’m now the only one.
>Many people who agree with me on this issue are very upset about what happened to Brendan Eich, our co-founder and, for two weeks, CEO of the Mozilla Corporation. Brendan was appointed and then, after 10 days under the Internet’s lens of anger based on his donation in opposition to the redefinition of marriage, stepped down and stepped away from Mozilla – to our great loss.
>I am assured by sources I trust that Brendan decided to leave of his own accord – he was not forced out. My understanding is that the senior management of Mozilla (many of whom disagree with him on this issue) worked very hard to support him, even if I would not agree with all the actions they took in doing so. However, he eventually felt that it was impossible for him to focus on leading if he was spending all of his time dealing with the continued, relentless news and social media storm surrounding the donation he made. In other words, he wasn’t forced out from the inside – he was dragged out from the outside.
Mozilla should launch a stripped-down version of Firefox, with all the past 20 years' legacy support removed. No quirk mode etc. Just bare minimum implementation of modern core web tech. How fast would it be?
It's probably true that it's difficult to decide what should be removed without breaking the browsing experience too much. Still, I bet that the engine still contains lot of code for legacy stuff from the era when we wrote HTML such as <table cellpadding="0"> etc.
The real problem of course is that the web specs itself have become too complex and expensive to implement. But a stripped-down version of browser could point out why we need to reboot the whole technology. It would be a long shot, I admit.
> Now it’s focused on technological pessimism in the form of a security and privacy emphasis.
First time I've seen this phrased that way. If all you can think of with regards to tech is security and privacy, you are the EU: "technological pessimism".
Yes that might be a better general term. However the perspective is the same: no optimism, no enablement, no vision. Instead control and contain the negative aspects. I'm not saying that in itself is bad, its just not sufficient to build a prosperous civilisation.
In the pursuit of better technology, don't forget that we have already built and are living in a prosperous civilization. The browser doesn't exist to "create" a civilization. It exists to enable the one that already exists, and is evolving every day.
> don't forget that we have already built and are living in a prosperous civilization
I don't think thats true for the west. The only impressive progress we have made for the last 50 years was in computer hardware and software. Sure, we are somewhat comfortable, we got a bit better at producing things, but if compare that with 1850-1950? Its not even a competition.
I don't know how you can look at plummeting rates of illiteracy, child mortality, polio(!) and countless other scourges on humanity and conclude that no impressive progress has been made since 1950 outside of computers.
The first (internal) organ transplant was only in 1954. The amount of progress made in medicine and pharmaceuticals alone is staggering.
I have recently gone from a Mozilla fanboy to a Mozilla hater in the span of under a year. I'm sure this won't be popular, but I refuse to use Firefox particularly, and would rather use chromium at this point, which, if you'd heard the way I trash google, you'd ask me what on earth was going through my head. It has gotten that bad.
They keep progressively crippling the browser. There isn't a single Firefox major update, either software wise or news wise, that amounts to good news. They try to dress it up but the substance is always bad for the user. Recently, they artificially limited the extensions available in Firefox mobile. I uninstalled Firefox immediately on all my machines.
Now they're firing the Rust team? Are these people stupid? Rust is pretty much the only thing Mozilla has going for it. I guess it's time for Thunderbird to go as well.
The idea that Mozilla is somehow the only thing standing between Google and control of web standards is laughable. I used to buy it. But Firefox is funded by Google, and they'll get what they want. And you can see plain as day that they're getting what they want. At this point you're more disconnected from Google's influence using ungoogled-chromium than using Firefox. So that's what I do. I feel more free online using a fork of a Google product than I do using Firefox. Imagine that.
>Recently, they artificially limited the extensions available in Firefox mobile. I uninstalled Firefox immediately on all my machines.
They did not "artificially limit" the extensions available, you are misinformed.
They rewrote the engine of their mobile browser, and swapped the old engine for the new one before the new one had 100% support for all of the extension APIs. They have been working on this, and over the past few months I've seen several of my extensions which were previously disabled start re-enabling themselves as support for those APIs has been added. The eventual goal is to support all of the extensions that were supported before.
It sucks that, for the span of a couple months, I lost a couple of my addons, but as someone whose team has struggled for years supporting two very different versions of a piece of software simultaneously, I understand why they did it. And the new browser is so much faster and more responsive that my annoyance about the addons was tempered somewhat.
>Now they're firing the Rust team? Are these people stupid? Rust is pretty much the only thing Mozilla has going for it. I guess it's time for Thunderbird to go as well.
They did not fire the Rust team. They laid off a few of the people who had been working primarily on Rust, and retained several others. But significant components of Firefox are written in Rust, and the people who are working on those components are still employed. And significant amounts of new code is being written in Rust - but essentially they can't swapping out hundreds of thousands of lines of code at a time anymore.
"Extensions can add powerful customization features to Firefox. However, we have noticed that the number of add-ons available for Firefox today can be overwhelming for some users. And even though our policy provides clear guidelines for the behavior of add-ons, they sometimes find it difficult to decide which tools and developers they consider most trustworthy. That's why we established the ‘recommended extensions’ program: a collection of curated extensions that meet our highest standards for security, functionality and usability, which we are now bringing to another platform with the new Firefox for Android."
If what you're saying is true, it is backtracking. They made a deliberate decision, as I have demonstrated with the link above, to restricted access to extensions on their mobile browser. And in the quote, they provide what I consider to be a phony bologna excuse plainly evident on its face. I don't trust Mozilla anymore and I do not want to use their products because of if this, and any time the topic comes up I will continue to talk about it.
> They did not "artificially limit" the extensions available, you are misinformed.
They certainly did – https://github.com/mozilla/video-bg-play for example is a very simply content script which doesn't use any special extension APIs at all and so would have worked right from the start, yet it still took several months until it was eventually added to the list of officially "blessed" add-ons.
I feel like we're in a very interesting place for main stream computing. The technology has matured enough that it's nearly impossible to add novel, valuable features. It feels like everything is just starting to break for no good reason.
At the same time, companies have hard data about what works and what doesn't work so they're starting to trim excess.
> At the same time, companies have hard data about what works and what doesn't work so they're starting to trim excess.
What works for whom? Every place I go on the internet where technical people discuss things, there's a common thread: competing interests have incentivized companies to put user needs second and it has resulted in a broken web that does not work and does not serve the users. The most cynical of us say that the web is irreparable.
It seems to me, from a user perspective, that they haven't found what works at all. It also seems to me that they don't care about finding what works anymore, they're happy to rest on their megalithic laurels the way Blockbuster and Radio Shack thought they could ad infinitum.
I think you're right about novel features and things breaking for no good reason, and I think the next phase in innovation of communication and networking technologies are already beginning to adopt some new axioms: less is more, and the idea that there will be one place to do everything online is flawed and cannot be achieved.
FireFox OS could have provided such model, in fact, its successor kaios is doing very well and one can imagine that in the future, it will be the primary OS of half the mobile users on the planet. 'Feature phones' aren't dead. They provide a cheap alternative to touch phones, are usually more robust, and allowing them to run web apps instead of MIDP stuff is a giant opportunity for any web actor.
Ditching Rust as a core component of the future of Firefox is also a demonstration that Mozilla isn't a tech focused corp anymore. Rust is going to yield a lot of result when it comes to security, memory saftely and maintainability and firing Rust devs was terribly short sighted.
So yes Firefox was always enough. Leadership at Mozilla doesn't get it.