- Cut out all (or at the very least, most) initiatives that don't serve the goal of promoting Firefox's market share or sustainability going forward
- Donate the major money drains that aren't Firefox to the Apache Foundation or another worthy custodian
- Fire all inessential staff that don't want to work on Firefox.
- Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money, and cut their salaries (bonuses tied directly to increase in Firefox market share).
- Make sure that all donations from now on are redirected to things that support Firefox development and nothing else, period.
- Make whatever partnerships are needed to have a steady stream of income, be that donation or selling out to Google or Bing.
Firefox is in trouble. Firefox is also Mozilla's raison d'être, and they should embrace that. We as a community, cannot afford to let Firefox languish until the only browsers in the world are Chromium derivatives. The diversity of truly independent browser engines is far too important to give up without a fight.
Current CEO is a cancer to Mozilla, her main goal seems like to make more money personally before Mozilla goes bankrupt. As long is as she is there - there is no hope
> In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to." [0]
I'm a firefox user for over 10 years.
I think I'm now convinced there is no future, I'll have to start to adapt to another browser now. I'll give Vivaldi a try.
That was the layoff where they got rid of all the rust people?
Its going to sound harsh, but they are loosing market share to browsers that didn't have to invent a new language to write a browser in.
So, getting rid of those people was probably a positive impact for firefox since they were mostly just yak shaving instead of actually improving the end product. The users don't care if you wrote it in C++ or fortran as long as it performs well, doesn't eat all their ram, or create giant backdoors.
Letting "the lets rewrite our core product in $COOL_TECH_OF_MONTH" people run a product is a sure sign of something that will fail if its not already. Lets invent our own computer language to do it is even worse.
This feels like a gross mischaracterization of the intent and work that went into Servo. You say this as if nothing else was being done on Firefox concurrently even though this is demonstrably false - and in fact, portions of Servo were integrated into Firefox (see: Quantum).
Firefox keeps losing on technical merit because it is fundamentally impossible to keep up with Webkit and Blink, which are all backed by massive corporations and are throwing money at the engineering and project resources to actually move things forward.
Your take was wrong. The move to rust was great and used to improve security and maintainability of the browser. They cut the wrong people. What they should have done was whack everything other than firefox and coders contributing to that code base and employees supporting that effort directly. They have awful leadership currently that are just milking their exec offices for the cash.
> The users don't care if you wrote it in C++ or fortran as long as it performs well, doesn't eat all their ram, or create giant backdoors.
In the short term, yes. In the long term however, this strategy could have been crucial. And the long term is precisely where open source software usually has the upper hand.
> The users don't care if you wrote it in C++ or fortran
Web site users don't care if a site's written with NodeJS or assembly; but that would make a huge difference to bugginess, development speed, feature set, etc.
Firefox is getting bogged-down in some areas due to its C++ codebase; especially trying to introduce concurrency (in a way which doesn't break everything, or cause unforeseen security implications, which is often the case in C/C++)
Yes, but consider the engineering effort to create a general purpose memory safe language vs just a domain specific one in comparison to the work required to write a browser, which also includes another domain specific language (javascript).
Seat of the pants, I would say getting something like rust on par with g++/clang code generation, and 3rd party tools is probably in the same ballpark engineering wise as actually maintaining the browser.
And if you spend a little time looking at firefox, there is/was a lot of low hanging fruit. I've mentioned elsewhere the difficultly building it, but even more than that, is that pretty much every single version of gcc that came out for a while would break firefox in some fundamental ways. And overwhelmingly these breaks were caused by crappy C++ programming where people were doing things that were known not to be syntactically correct but no one bothered to fix them. Then frequently instead of actually fixing them they did things like switch from building with an old GCC to a newer clang because it threw fewer errors. Then they claimed that the result was "faster" than gcc, despite the fact they were comparing an old version of GCC with a newer version clang. When the work was done to actually get it to build with gcc, it turned out to be even faster. (not that gcc is better than clang, only that ideally a project like firefox would compile cleanly with a wide range of compilers). Said compiler warnings are frequently valid, and analyzing them at least to know if its true is a worthwhile code quality exercise.
Yes, you have to ask yourself why everyone is using V8 as their JavaScript runtime and not Mozilla’s equivalent or why every alternative browser is using Chrome as a foundation.
Or XUL wasn’t packaged as cross platform GUI framework.
And then of course the Firefox mobile fiasco.
My guess is that the engineering and management don’t interact. Two different companies within the same company, no coherent vision.
What FF mobile fiasco are you speaking of? I am using FF mobile happily and have been for years. I haven't noticed any issues with it. Was there a business level fiasco or something?
One objective fiasco is the inability of FF on Android to keep multiple tabs in memory. Older versions were capable of it without issue, ever since the tab unloading feature, Firefox has been reloading tabs at the slightest pretense.
Switch apps? Tabs get reloaded when you're back.
Lock & unlock phone with Firefox in focus? Tabs get reloaded
Switch tabs in Firefox? Tabs get reloaded...
I wish I was just ranting, but all of the above happens with a single active tab loaded...
That is interesting to me because that isn't my experience. I just tried the lock screen for example and I couldn't get any of tabs to reload, foreground or not. I'm on Android 10 running on a Moto G7. Maybe it's affected by vendor settings?
Quite a few devices experience this though. For the record, I use an S9, and used to have 50+ tabs with no issues on older versions of Firefox - now I cannot have one tab remain open without a reload if I lock my phone with Firefox focused and turn unlock it a minute later. And that's with Firefox explicitly exempt from each and every kind of battery/memory etc. "optimization" by Android...
Doesn't happen for me. OnePlus 8 with Oxygen OS 11.
The one thing I really miss in FF mobile is the opposite.. Pull to refresh or another gesture that accomplishes that. The current two tap option is too slow.
The main problem is that they're not making money with their core product so they need to experiment and innovate to find ways to make money.
I agree they probably didn't need to invent rust: that was an happy accident, the kind of things that happen when you have really smart people around. If they had a money making accident we would be talking about something else, but I guess they would need a different type of culture for that to happen.
This is not how you run a company and it shows.
It's impressive Mozilla is still around if you ask me - but I suspect it has to do with Google, M$ needing someone easily controllable to keep the anti monopoly government people away from browsers.
> The main problem is that they're not making money with their core product so they need to experiment and innovate to find ways to make money.
Firefox is owned by the Mozilla foundation, the corp is only there to help develop it since having developers work directly for the foundation is apparently complicated. Non-profit foundations don't need to find ways to make money with their core product and they should not try to - instead they can seek funding elsewhere, for example from donations and government grants.
No the corporation was founded because having a major corporation like Google pay so much to a foundation was difficult for tax reasons.
But it did push them over the edge IMO. They're behaving like a corporation now, with a CEO pulling as much money as they can, too much PR etc. Through the Google deal they have become what they were fighting. But they're not very good at it, hence the low marketshare.
Rust and servo were how they were innovating, and where a lot of the competitive features came from. By firing them, Mozilla made clear that they do not care about these things. The CEO is quite clearly a parasite hell-bent on extracting as much value as she can before bailing for the next victim.
The problem--and I feel the pain here deeply as a security person myself--is that that innovation was primarily along an axis (security) that no users care about (with a small bit of performance from concurrency, but there were clearly other ways to be faster), and was draining resources away from innovation that users cared about... which I'd claim was even going in the opposite direction: for many years now they have been continually tearing out the non-philosophical reasons I used Firefox in the quest to build a clone of Chrome, something the world doesn't have much use for as it already has Chrome.
Remember that the users still using Firefox are mostly technical and privacy fans that do care about security a lot.
Focusing on the mainstream user at this point will not help as they're already so far gone they don't even remember the name Firefox anymore.
They should focus first on making it and excellent browser for the users that still care. Then word of mouth will bring it back to the mainstream as it did the first time.
It's not even that they're building a clone of Chrome - Chromium is actually adding features like tab groups.
It's more that they're removing not-Chromey bits, not adding the Chromey bits, and removing Firefoxy bits like search keywords via bookmarks and the like.
As a Firefox user I disagree. Their work on Servo and Rust resulted in many performance and reliability improvements. WebRender for example came directly from Servo.
It's unfortunate that after those changes, the Mozilla team did not take criticism in public forums very seriously and brushed it off as noise. I personally stopped using Firefox after some of those "architectural" changes started producing "dead" tabs - the tab could not be interacted after load.
In place of "We're listening", users that complained got a "Works fine on my machine" bundled with a few rude words in places like Reddit. Not the core teams fault, of course.
Someone with more time can probably set up a scientific test of the performance claim even today - set up a bunch of Selenium tests to open JS-heavy sites in multiple tabs on older versions of FF upto current version using BrowserStack or SauceLabs.
The question is, would the work have been done sooner, or more effectively if they had just fixed the C++ code rather than spending a lot of time creating rust, only to rewrite said code?
I mean to this day (and i just tossed off a firefox build yesterday to see if most of what I was saying is still true), the firefox maintainers can't even be bothered to fix the tens of thousands of warnings that appear when built certain ways. That is a really low bar to cross with a C++ project, and they haven't even bothered. I've worked on projects where we had a recommended compiler, but we always spent some time assuring that the project appeared to work with the latest gcc/icc/whatever, because at some point those newer compilers would become the defaults, and also because they frequently pointed out issues in the code. Its just a cheap way to fix undefined behavior bugs.
So, I think the only answer to that is yes, that long stretch before they dropped the rust code was wasted time/effort.
Mozilla didn't really invent Rust, and its looking quite likely that Rust is going to be just as significant of a contribution to the world as Firefox was (long term).
I wish Vivaldi wasn't horrible. I gave it a real try on all my devices for about 6 months a couple of years ago, but it is just too unreliable and prone to crashes and random issues. I've been way, way happier on Firefox ever since.
If Firefox goes the rest of the way down the tubes, I'll try Edge before I go Vivaldi again.
Her logic assumes that another company would actually pay her that much. Given how disastrous her tenure has been to Firefox's user base, I'm skeptical that another company would even want her as CEO, let alone pay her this much.
Any replacement CEO is going to be thinking, I'm trying to beat Google, Apple and Microsoft on a tiny budget and if I dont succeed people will blame me personally for it all, complain about me online and claim that no one else should employ me. That's a gamble for anyone coming in who has better options and so attacks on the CEO for being a failure only help to create a moat and increase her bargaining power.
The replacement "CEO" should be someone like Linus Torvalds, someone who is not in it for the money but for the satisfaction of crushing his opponents where it matters: mind share among developers followed by market share. Someone who does not try to go with the flow of fake virtue and bloated CxO remuneration. Someone real. Someone who has the testicular fortitude to say ¨NO" to the social justice crowd.
Maybe Brendan Eich can come back? Do a Steve Jobs, take back the project and make it into what it was meant to be, primus inter pares among browsers.
I'm extremely curious what you think her job is and what her job actually is. I don't know either one. But I must be waaaaaay of base if 2m+ is a reasonable salary for the workload and responsibility.
And if we want to get conspiratorial, If she thinks her main job is getting the most money out of the Google deal, then Google would be more than happy to pretend shes doing great in the negotiations and pay 5m extra.
The sooner Mozilla loses its dev culture and talent the more power Google has.
> By 2020, her salary had risen to over $3 million. In the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic.
Yikes, makes me also consider just switching off it again
For me, the crypto wallet built into Brave puts me off. I want my browser to be a browser, nothing more than that. Other than Brave, the option is Vivaldi, but that's not completely open source, and the devs refuse to completely open source it, making me doubt the trustworthiness of it.
That's because you're looking at this with your "professional" hat on. If your look at this with your "philanthropist" hat on, the optics are suddenly very different.
There's a weird type of logic going on where almost everyone who would be willing to do it for almost free is probably not qualified for the job. Would you really stake the future of your foundation on someone who still needs to build their resume?
$2.5 million per year is in the top 0.1% of income in the United States. No matter how you shake it, whether you want people with management experience, tech experience, browser experience, or some combination thereof, you will find a significantly large number who would be able to do the job, do it well, and make more than their current salary.
I bet any mid level tech manager from a large company (who loves open source) would do a much better job and work for 1/4 her salary until he proved he was worth her old salary and raised the tides of success for the company.
You could make this same argument about professional athletes, but all across the world no one seems to follow through on this obvious money-saving hack. So I presume it's more complicated than you're suggesting.
Japanese CEO salaries are famously very low. The Toyota CEO makes about USD 3.5m. There are other C levels that make 3 times what the Toyota CEO earns in direct compensation.
Japanese CEO salaries in general seem to be below USD1m on average.
Toyota is a huge company though. It's nothing like Mozilla. I would imagine there's a lot of responsibility riding on it. And I'd imagine that in Japanese culture badly performing CEOs actually face consequences.
I disagree, if you're a company raking in $270B a year in revenue, you want the absolute best running it. The Toyota CEO is like 0.001% of the revenue, an extremely small price to pay for the right management.
I don't believe that for a second. Unless you just mean it in the sense of "90% of people that apply to a job aren't good at it". You can get many many qualified people for $250k.
Paying more doesn't get rid of the risk, so yes do the version that has risk but without the bonfire of cash.
If I cared badly enough about the mission and it wasn't a for-profit enterprise, I'd take the pay cut. The non-monetary part of my compensation (the feel-good factor and the actual good done in the world that I can't get in a for-profit enterprise) would more than make up for it, at least for a couple of years.
Market rates don't matter all that much if the person setting them has a significant influence on what they are. It's like a child determining their allowance based on which one of their friends was able to grab the most money from their mom's purse.
I don't think this has anything to do with arrogance, this is simply the market value speaking. Ginni Rometty did something similar with IBM; while being a terrible CEO ("IBM was the worst-performing large-cap tech stock during Rometty's tenure, dropping 24%" [1]), she got a whopping $20M per year [2] during her first 7 years of being a CEO, and she got $20M golden parachute [3] upon leaving the shell of an IBM.
This is not arrogance. This is simply the pay of a CEO, regardless of their performance.
Mozilla is not IBM. They may compete against the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Apple, yet they are not those companies either. The scope of their business interests are minuscule in comparison. Heck, their share of the markets that they do compete with those companies in pales in comparison. So yes, there is an element of arrogance in her claim.
> This is not arrogance. This is simply the pay of a CEO
You have a social responsibility to take care of the people working below you, which as a CEO is everyone. If you fire them and give yourself a raise, perhaps it is not arrogance but it definitely is gross negligence. No amount of "this is simply the market value" corporate doublespeak is going to change the fact that doing so takes you further and further from being an actual human being. Perhaps this is okay with you, but I think it should be questioned and mocked.
IBM is more than two orders of magnitude bigger than Mozilla in terms of both spending and headcount. On a log scale, Mozilla's scale is about halfway between IBM and your local McDonald's franchise.
CEOs of smaller companies typically don't command that level of compensation, and when they do, it's generally because the company performed well and their pay was heavily perforamnce-based.
> I don't think this has anything to do with arrogance, this is simply the market value speaking.
What market value? Firefox's market share is down 85%. It's hard to believe there's not someone cheaper and more capable available. This sort of extravagant CEO pay might be excusable if the company is actually booming, but in this case, it really looks like it's just plain greed: loot the company while running it into the ground.
Saying "yes" to a powerpoint presentation about why a poor CEO should be given a $20M bonus due to staggering bonuses of other CEOs (such as in Facebook or Google) while underperforming as fuck.
What "CEO"? Does every mom-and-pop shop get a "CEO" with $3M compensation? Does every startup? I don't think Mozilla leadership deserves to be placed among big tech executives with standardized pay.
It might be that they need to pay that amount to attract top CEO talent. But then again, I'm not sure if Mozilla should be large enough to need a top CEO. I mean effectively reducing it to just the Firefox team would be fine with me. And then it's maybe 80 people to manage in total. So that's one regular office building and you're done. It doesn't sound like the CEO will be critical for anything in this company.
> When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."
Then go work somewhere else!
If you can make 5 times as much somewhere else, and that's all you care about, quit Mozilla and go work somewhere else. Her attitude and greed are unbelievably infuriating.
I would have zero problems with her salary if firefox wasn't a sinking ship and was actually increasing market share (or at least holding on to it). I continue to use it, as it's a great product, but I wonder how long before google cuts off the spigot of money.
But the CPI is fairly accurate, and those who calculate it are doing their best with a problem that doesn't have one easy to compute answer. Regardless, I know just from personal experience that your numbers are way off. My grocery bills haven't gone up 50 to 100% since 2012; what I spend on clothes and software and veterinary visits hasn't gone up 50 to 100% either. The only thing that I might buy that contradicts this is a GPU, but that's an exception (and other computer hardware hasn't risen in price that much).
Also: as part of my job I can check prices in a major sector of the retail industry as far back as 2015, and I absolutely do not see such major inflation as you're arguing. Inflation is bad right now, but hasn't been that way for several decades.
>But the CPI is fairly accurate, and those who calculate it are doing their best
Completely disagree.
>Also: as part of my job I can check prices in a major sector of the retail industry
That is probably the problem.
>clothes and software
Clothes = imported from countries we export inflation to. Software = ~0 cost to duplicate.
Inflation doesnt hit the whole population equally or at the same time, and it doesnt hit all products uniformly.
The items/services we all want/need, that are scarce, and can't be imported from our foreign "slaves", are where you will find it concentrated. Healthcare, housing, university, etc...
My earlier observation 50%/10y, 50%/5y is closer to reality for the vast majority of the population.
How much did housing go up in price in the last 10-12 years (300%? 400%?)?
Remember when house prices went up 20-30% in a 6 month period of 2021? Not inflation?
How is that a problem? Let's say I work in the grocery industry. Everyone has to buy groceries at some point, whether wealthy or impoverished, and for those on lower incomes groceries are a fairly major share of total consumption. I can check those prices and they haven't gone up nearly as much as you're saying. Ipso facto you're just wrong.
> Remember when house prices went up 20-30% in a 6 month period of 2021? Not inflation?
Inflation is more than just home prices, and just because something is more expensive than it used to be doesn't mean that inflation is the culprit. Supply and demand are still factors. Regardless, rent is accounted for in the CPI (though not assets like home purchases).
Got anything besides home prices? Car prices haven't gone up that much, at least. I can hardly think of anything besides houses and GPUs that (a) impact me and (b) have gone up fairly drastically in price. (Though around here, the suburbs of greater Cincinnati, home prices haven't generally doubled in ten years; my home's valuation is maybe 15% higher than it was when I bought it five years ago.)
>The items/services we all want/need, that are scarce, and can't be imported from our foreign "slaves", are where you will find it concentrated. Healthcare, housing, university, etc...
It seems you didnt read anything I wrote since you avoided my earlier point and are still ignorantly talking about retail goods that are, for the most part, subsidized, imported from countries we export inflation to, or experience heavy shrinkflation.
I also mentioned inflation is not evenly distributed. Different areas/segments of the population experience different rates. The Ohio housing market may not have been hit as hard, probably parts of Michigan fall in that same boat (these are not desirable markets), but most houses did 3-4x in the past 12 years.
I will move on... Everyone will understand the hurdle rate is higher than 7.5% after enough time has elapsed (just like they did with the BS 2.5% CPI number we used to use) and the standard of living decline is significant enough that it cant be ignored anymore. The investor class generally understands the new yearly hurdle rate is 20%-30% (must earn atleast ~120% of last year's return just to break even). Saylor and a few others makes this point often...
I'll leave those that disagree or aren't interested in learning to figure this out the harder way.
As someone who knew someone who worked there she is absolutely nuts and her thinking is beyond radical. She will destroy Mozilla if she doesn't step down. Assuming it's not too late already.
Pretty sure Apple/Safari and Microsoft/Edge have the monopoly shield taken care of at this point. Firefox on its current trajectory will bleed to death slow enough for nobody to notice. Mozilla stopped innovating in the one product of theirs anybody cares about. I sort of wish Mozilla would die faster so the current executives bleeding it dry would move on, and hopefully someone who actually cares about more than the money could revive it.
> to keep Firefox as a shield against monopoly claims
Not with that marketshare! Assuming you're right, it seems she's failing at that too; there is no appearance of worthwhile competition from Firefox, which fighting for a distant #3 spot
Well they fired the previous competent CEO for political reasons. If politics and what you do in your private time is more important than competence, then this is what you get. Well deserved. FireFox getting it what it deserves. If you hire CEOs based on being women or having nice private beliefs, instead of competence you can eat failure all day long as far as I'm concerned.
A big part of the problem IMO is that Mitchell Baker is a lawyer, not a technologist or engineer. She does not understand how software companies are supposed to function.
I used to strongly support the mission of Mozilla. When I first read about the practices of upper management I felt like a fool for ever having donated in the past.
That is not going to happen again and I don't even like Firefox so much anymore because of it.
> High salary and a golden parachute would be required to attract anyone good enough to succeed.
I'm not sure if the best way to get someone to save a dying product is a golden parachute which rewards them for running it straight into the ground. You have to make sure they're not risking everything to keep Firefox going, but ideally they'd have some skin in the game so they don't have an incentive to just loot whatever they can until it dies before sailing away from the burning wreak with even more money.
It's not a reward for failure, it's an insurance policy.
Here's a CEO job offer: take on a nearly impossible task, for a salary that is far below the market rate. If you fail (and you probably will!) it might damage your career and make it harder for you to find another job. If you succeed, you will get prestige, but you still won't get a lot of money.
What kind of executive would accept an offer like that?
A golden parachute is the insurance policy: it says to the candidate, we know this is a nearly impossible task, and it might damage your career if you fail, so we will guarantee you some money if you fail in order to compensate you for taking on that risk.
I would really love to hear even one example of a CEO's career being damaged by failure in any material way.
Meanwhile, people for whom income is literally making the difference between getting food on the table and not get 2 weeks at best, often nothing at all.
I mean, I'm actually sympathetic to the idea that no one should take a job unless it has absolutely zero risk of ruining them financially if they fail at it, but it's pretty clear that this is a benefit only extended to very few people who don't really need it.
> Here's a CEO job offer: take on a nearly impossible task, for a salary that is far below the market rate. If you fail (and you probably will!) it might damage your career and make it harder for you to find another job. If you succeed, you will get prestige, but you still won't get a lot of money.
Keeping in mind that "below market rate" is still "retirement within a few years at the Mozilla CEO's rate.
So even if your career were damaged, and it's easy to not have it damaged, you can retire after like 3 years. That's a fine insurance policy.
> If you succeed, you will get prestige, but you still won't get a lot of money.
Of course you'll get a lot of money.
1. You can give yourself a raise. If the Moz CEO had come in and we saw market share increasing do you think anyone would give a shit about increasing their pay? The issue is it's tanking and they laid off a ton of people at the same time they took a huge pay raise.
2. Executives are compensated with stock. Company does well, your stock goes up.
You don't want that kind of executive anyway. You want someone that identifies with the market and is seen as a safe hand to run FF into the long term future. That alone will do a good part of stopping the drain.
At the position FF/Mozilla is in, even finding such a person is a challenge:
Ideally, FF would need a developer or another seasoned IT person at the helm, but let's be real most of our profession find management borderline disgusting at best.
The MBA/beancounter/finance-type execs have no fucking idea about the business or the spirit behind a project like FF, all they care about is financial numbers - and the ones you might want from that group can earn ten times the compensation outside of the NGO sector.
And the NGO execs... most of them have absolutely no experience leading a project as large and international as FF and the ones that do (e.g. Greenpeace) don't have any idea about technology either.
As stated, the offer is for a job that's almost sure to fail and will damage the taker's career if it does. Combine that with undermarket pay and it's definitely a tough ask, even if you restrict yourself to those who feel strongly about Firefox's mission. If you buy into the notion that an effective CEO has a particular, rare set of skills in business strategy and people management, then your job gets even tougher.
Most people cheered when Pat Gelsinger came back to Intel and I bet he even believes in Intel's mission, but he likely wouldn't have accepted an 80% pay cut relative to other industry CEOs. And Intel's prospects are infinitely better than Mozilla's.
I think Mozilla and Firefox are cherished by a lot of people who would like to see them thrive.
But I think if given a choice, most of those people would prioritize the survival of a viable competitive web browser. The name of the product and the sponsor of the product are less important.
So a related question might be, "What would it take for a Firefox fork to succeed?"
If you think the CEO of Mozilla is a cancer, a fork solves that issue. Obviously, there are a lot more concerns than just the CEO. So, what else would a viable fork need?
In the end, Mozilla could implement any measures that would work for the fork, and probably do so easier. So answer the question for the fork, and you've answered the question for Mozilla.
Well a large part of the problem with a fork is that you don't see a lot of random drive by contributions. As a possible contributor myself a couple times, firefox is a development nightmare because it doesn't have a good autoconfig system that lets one download the code and start being productive quickly.
Then like chrome, i'm betting most people can't actually built it in reasonable time on their laptops since it burns a good 64 core machine with 128G of ram for a hour or two. Screw up said configuration, and your in for another rebuild loop. It can take days just to get a working development environment.
No, that is one the problems you have to solve before you can have a successful fork unless you happen to have a few million a year coming in to compete with the main branch.
I've been known to waste a weekend or two a year working on open source projects. These though generally are small things that scratch and itch for fix a bug. I don't work on projects where it takes a month+ of weekends just to get a working dev environment. I don't think that's unusual, you have to pay people to put up with that kind of pain.
A fork in no way solves this because you can't for the devs who mozilla is paying. Firefox is a huge project requiring devs with lots of experience in the technology who also like to be compensated. You can't fork firefox, you have to change the leadership or nothing else will change.
It's related to funding, but recognition is really important. Actually forking (as opposed to the GitHub fork button) is generally seen to be hostile and and will split the community (see e.g. ffmpeg vs. libav). This means that getting a fork to succeed is much harder than it would have been for the original project. For example if the Mozilla foundation went after government grants and donations for funding Firefox instead of trying to monetize the browser they'd probably have much more success than any unproven fork could ever dream for.
$1m is senior engineering manager compensation in the valley at several companies just a short drive away from Mozilla’s offices. It’s far below CEO compensation.
Anyone who is capable of succeeding as the CEO of Mozilla would be giving up millions of dollars they could easily make elsewhere in the valley if they took only $1m as their comp.
So? Not the entire world is US-based. Tech salaries in USD are way out of whack compared to elsewhere.
I also bet that for the type of challenges facing Firefox and with my proposed reforms, a motivated senior engineer who knows what they are doing would be just as good or better compared to a standard CEO.
There is a wide spectrum of CEOs skills and compensation. A SVP, VP, or even director level person at Apple (and the like) could be CEO of Mozilla (and would be happy to take a CEO title and steer their own ship).
I'd bet there are couple internal people at Mozilla that could be promoted to CEO and be happy with CEO pay and be successful too.
"Capable of succeeding" meaning what? If you switch to a normal manager and suddenly save the company 2 million a year, and they stop making the current trend of decisions, that sounds like a win-win. CEOs aren't magical rarities.
Sounds perfect. Any up and coming CEO wannabe could take the Mozilla job to prove they've got the chops. Then, after turning things around, they could ride off into the sunset at any of those other corps. Everybody wins.
How much money do you think a Sundar or Satya-type person would be willing to accept? Certainly not as little as the current Mozilla CEO is being paid!
"- Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money"
That has to be the first on the list, because that is the prerequisite for everything else.
Unfortunately there is no mechanism to achieve this within Mozilla. The people that need to go won't; they've got their trophy titles and they've feathered their nest as they want it. Thus Mozilla and Firefox with it are doomed.
Solving that would take a fork, just like it did with Netscape. It would also require an endowment of capital to fund a core of developers for years just to catch up with blink/webkit/etc. At this point the best plan might be to adopt the latter.
Thing is the market is producing this without Mozilla. Brave and others are delivering real alternatives to Chrome, Safari and Edge.
So at this point what is the value proposition of saving Firefox? That's a rhetorical question; I get it. I just don't know if it's enough to attract the developers and funding to do it. It's conceivable; one could imagine a leader with the passion to inspire people and attract the funding and developers.
Maybe that person exists. If so they won't be doing it under Mozilla.
> Thing is the market is producing this without Mozilla. Brave and others are delivering real alternatives to Chrome, Safari and Edge.
And in the end, it's all WebKit derivatives under the hood. That is the danger. There used to be three major distinct engines (Firefox, IE/Trident, WebKit) plus a boatload of specialized ones (Opera)... and that competition bred improvements and features. These days it's all about walled gardens, which is what the "market" (aka a bunch of ultra rich companies) wants, and Firefox is the last truly independent fighter standing.
Sadly, Firefox has been mismanaged for almost a decade now.
We are snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Just as "the open web" is becoming fully viable as an application platform, it is morphing into "Google's VM".
Was an endowment needed for LibreOffice and Maria DB? I don't actually know how it happened with those two, but they both seemed to be more or less grassroots forks when people realised that Oracle won't ever be a good custodian. Perhaps a Firefox fork here could emerge in a similar way.
I don't know about LibreOffice, but my recollection was that MariaDB was initially less a reaction to Oracle actually having been bad for MySQL and more a fear that Oracle would potentially {be bad, close the product, ...}
> Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money, and cut their salaries (bonuses tied directly to increase in Firefox market share).
If Mozilla is just Firefox then why to they need a CEO at all? Why does a web browser need an executive team? It doesn't make any sense to me. Linux doesn't have a CEO. Python doesn't have a CEO. Postgres doesn't have a CEO.
But all those projects have commercial support in some way because other companies rely on them and provide resources. It's unclear to me how Firefox achieves the same. Maybe that's a question a CEO can answer.
If you think you need a CEO then it makes perfect sense to me to pay them a competitive salary. For the same reason you should pay your devs a competitive salary. You can't just say "they should work for less". That's unfair and unrealistic. Either you need one and should pay for a good one, or you don't need one at all.
> Donate the major money drains that aren't Firefox to the Apache Foundation or another worthy custodian.
> If Mozilla is just Firefox then why to they need a CEO at all? Why does a web browser need an executive team? It doesn't make any sense to me. Linux doesn't have a CEO. Python doesn't have a CEO. Postgres doesn't have a CEO.
It doesn't matter what the top position is called: CEO, the Grand Warlock of Yendor, or Benevolent Dictator For Life. CEO ≈ whoever is in charge and entrusted with enough authority that they can elevate or kill whatever they are managing, and that was probably the intended meaning.
> Or how about they donate Firefox to Apache?
Apache has a reputation as the graveyard of open source software. If Firefox gets donated to them, it's curtains. Maybe if they went elsewhere it could work.
Or, they could create a Totally-Not-Mozilla Foundation and bring trustworthy old-timers with the right vision on board. Then they could either do a hostile takeover aka LibreOffice, or coax the original Mozilla Foundation into handing over the brand peacefully.
>Or, they could create a Totally-Not-Mozilla Foundation and bring trustworthy old-timers with the right vision on board. Then they could either do a hostile takeover aka LibreOffice, or coax the original Mozilla Foundation into handing over the brand peacefully.
> Apache has a reputation as the graveyard of open source software.
Interesting. I did not seem to know that. I always thought that Apache was a leader in open source since a lot of the notable tools (i.e. Spark, Airflow, Kafta) are maintained by Apache.
Are there any articles that I can learn more about this?
It's an interesting point. A significant number of Apache (big data) projects do indeed seem to be "in the attic"[1]. But they have high profile projects that are well maintained. AirBnB created Airflow then donated it to Apache. Do they still use it internally and contribute to Apache Airflow? Do other companies contribute?
Spark is central to Databricks, the company started by the original creator of Spark.
So at least for a couple high-profile Apache projects there are for-profit organizations with an interest in furthering development.
I assume Databricks pays devs to contribute to Spark, I actually don't know.
So maybe Apache Firefox with a Mozilla corporate sponsor isn't such a terrible idea. Although again, I have no idea what the commercial motivation would be behind supporting Firefox development.
You are answering the question "how can Mozilla make more money", but that wasn't what was asked. Mozilla as a whole is profitable already, and revenues have been growing close to 100% year over year. As a company they are in great health.
Except that's not what users care about when picking a browser. Google has too much money, tech, marketing and too big an existing user and device base to make any kind of direct competition feasible. Giving Mozilla a few hundred million dollars extra isn't going to make a difference.
The subtitle of the question was "What would you do if you were in charge of Mozilla? How would you save Firefox?"
My answer is an attempt at addressing these two questions. My goal wasn't to make Mozilla more profitable, but to ensure that it's focused on what should be its core mission, rather than the mire of sideshows that they engage in at the moment.
Also, I don't care how Mozilla the amorphous blob of a corporation is doing. I care about how Mozilla the vehicle for the survival, promotion and development of Firefox is doing, and that one seems to be on the brink of death if nothing is done to change the current course.
As a regular end user why do I care about what Mozilla's mission is? Apple makes shiny devices, Google gives me great free services, and in return I use their (perfectly great) browsers. What is one single reason to use Firefox?
As long as these large companies continue to put effort into their browsers (which Microsoft didn't do with IE), users are simply never going to switch, the same way no one is using desktop Linux or LibreOffice or DuckDuckGo.
I wish Firefox would focus on being a useful tool (like the rest of the software I use). Compare Firefox's first-run experience with that of GNOME Web: Firefox is obnoxious; GNOME Web just gets out of the way.
I believe in Mozilla's mission circa 2004, but I'm not convinced that Firefox does any more.
The other day I opened up Firefox to discover that the theme had automatically changed to some garish pink monstrosity, overlaid by a popup that asked if I wanted to keep the new "colorway".
Did you actually took the time to setup firefox to your liking once? From the above post it looks like you didn't.
Pocket is pretty much invisible, especially if you remove the button from the toolbar. The only time I see mentions of the mozilla VPN is when I go to the configuration of an existing container and I see the option to integrate it to mozilla VPN.
> Did you actually took the time to setup firefox to your liking once?
Yes. I use Firefox pretty much exclusively.
I'm saying that the first-run experience, and the amount of setting up it takes to make Firefox less intrusive, illustrate that Firefox is not as focused on being a useful tool as I would like.
Compare that to browsers having more market share and firefox isn't any more intrusive or less focused at being useful. Chrome is totally shitty in stock form as well unless you love ads and don't care about privacy.
I have set up Firefox to my liking but UI reworks and new anti-features mean that I have to invest significant time for each update to just get things back to how I like them.
I agree. More than this, it's not just “I don't like change and I have to tweak Firefox to my liking”; it's “I don't trust that Mozilla is acting in my interests; I expect that any changes are to my detriment”.
It is not like every update break everything. They did one major update that broke a number of extensions and they didn't even do it without prior announcement and time for extensions developpers to adapt them. Appart from them those are tiny changes.
I actually don't use the direct Firefox branch anymore, although my wife and daughter have it on their computers so it is often available to me. I tend to use Firefox Developer branch so a lot of these complaints people are seeing I haven't experienced. (haven't experienced in the normal Firefox on other computers either so sort of weird, maybe I set up a don't bother me with changes profile a long time ago and I just forgot)
I'm not sure how critical this is in practice; but the way this evolved may be a symptom of the fact that Blink's authors' motivations align less well with those of an ad-block user than Firefox's authors' motivations do.
The worry of course is that once there truly are no competing rendering engines, that google will no longer feel the pressure to put user's interests before those of sites of even itself. And because blink and webkit don't really compete (still nice to have two, but on virtually no devices are both engines serious alternatives), that day is pretty close; it's likely already having an impact.
There’s no guarantee that lightning will strike twice in this case.
When Firefox overtook IE6, Microsoft had been colossally mismanaging IE for years, which meant that IE had become a rusted husk of what it was in its glory days. This made for incredibly strong incentive for web developers to support an alternative, because having to develop for an utterly broken browser for an indefinite period of time was intensely unappealing. On the end user side of the equation, Firefox’s incredible speed, UX improvements, and robust support for extensions did a lot to win people over.
Fast forward to today. Google is infinitely more savvy with web developer relations than late-IE-era MS could’ve ever been — they keep devs “fed” well enough with a steady stream of new shiny features that it’s unlikely that they’d ever revolt. For users, the difference in speed and UX between Firefox is negligible or even works in Chrome’s favor (which is tilting further in Chrome’s direction with every site that’s developed and tested only against Chrome).
Additionally, the barrier to entry for new web engines is so high now that anybody trying to build a browser that is to Chrome what Firefox was to IE is almost certainly doomed to fail unless backed by a company with deep pockets and no expectation of return on investment for many years.
This is an interesting argument. But this is effectively stating that Google has to be a good steward. If that is the case, then there really isn't much of a problem afaict (i.e. majority is happy).
If Google is treating devs and users well, there is no reason to switch. It's when they falter on one, migrations can and will occur (given past history as experience).
They don't have to be a good steward. They can simply be a good-enough steward until they kill off all remaining competition (of which - hey, only Firefox is left!), then they can coast on minimum effort for as long as it takes for the web to die off and for the app-ification process of everything to complete. Then they can move on to greater, bolder things.
Exactly. Once there’s nothing but Chrome, there can never be another significant challenger because the barrier to entry is too high.
Additionally, even in the situation that Google is a “good steward”, their total dominance means that there is no room for meaningfully different visions of the web to compete, which is very bad.
And if Wal-Mart drives the local Mom-and-Pops out of business by undercutting them, that's fine too because people wouldn't switch if it weren't better.
</analogy>
Bootstrapping competitors is hard. Driving your competitors under and then cranking up the heat when the field is clear is a classic strategy.
The DRM industry's answer to the previous waves of DRM and DRM-breaking was Denuvo.
The copyright cartel's answer to copying via digital bypassing and the analogue hole was to make it all but mandatory to cryptographically secure every single element in the chain between their own servers and the pixels on our displays, and refuse to serve HD content if your hardware and software won't implement that. Not to mention, DMCA.
Just because Firefox was the liberation from IE6, doesn't mean it will be proportionally as easy to liberate ourselves from Chromium if it does become the only browser engine.
I mean, we don't need competition, sure. But we also have a social structure that utterly depends on competition for economic efficiency. I'm not seeing the popular up-swell for communism quite yet, so until that happens, having privately owned monopolists act not just as single providers of critical goods and services, but also control access to information about those goods and services, and the publications reporting about those goods and services, and getting to pick which shops get to even open their doors, and the roads to those goods and services, and the banking system you need to pay for em... you know, that might just weaken your negotiating position. You just might get shafted.
These aren't the weak little monopolies of times past, stuff like standard oil - these new setups are much more clever, and much more pervasive, and much more powerful.
Oh hey, as it turns out tech companies are making obscene profits (so much for economic efficiency!), and we've given them little legal monopolies by implementing copyrights, patents and contract law in just the right way to make competition almost impossible. Startups competing with them need great luck, huge pockets, a brilliantly found niche - and even then they'll probably just get bought or simply fail.
I mean I get that browsers are just one small element of the whole puzzle. But on the other hand, it's also one of the few where avoiding lock-in might still be fairly easy. I don't blame anybody for using chrome - use it myself on occasion - but I'll avoid it as long as it's at least easy to do so.
Browsers are complex. Just because Netscape managed to commit corporate harakiri in just the right way to leave a spoiler for Microsoft behind doesn't mean that'll happen again. The web is quite different now from then, and much more centralized. If google were to dominate; or to simply share the pie in a non-competitive truce with apple, well, users would have very little leverage over google/apple whenever new developments were to slowly evolve the web into a whatever benefits the corporate bottom line over users interests; for instance by tracking users or playing gatekeeper. Note that that can happen even now, but more insidiously: by _preventing_ evolution that might protect users from exploitation.
Browser complexity is an issue in a more direct, plainly technical way too. Even from a purely technical perspective it's just nice to see alternatives, and the world is a big place; the extra investment spread over the now huge online economy is surely worth simply the extra reliability that such reproducibility brings to design of the web fundamentals and discovering new, useful platform features.
If you only have one implementation, it's very easy to accidentally have oversights in the spec that in effect render the true spec "whatever the browser does"; and while I applaud the pragmatism in that approach, I don't applaud the design-by-coincidence that then results in some pretty bad api's being permanent gotcha's in new webdev. Some of the API's that resulted from MS + apples more... "innovative" moments are pretty terrible, and here to stay.
Basically: having a bit of competition is just a good idea for all kinds of reasons, especially when the downsides are... well what exactly? Why would you want a blink monoculture?
It can, hypothetically. Whether that realistically would happen is another question (and I wish this distinction was more clearly grasped in conversations about these things!).
As a strategy, it would be reckless in the extreme.
On mobile, definitely. I realize that many people like to complain about the mobile version of Firefox, but it offers extensions when their competition does not.
about the same but soon chrome is going to be handicapping adblocking and ublock origin dev said he'd probably have to back away from it since they are crippling the interface he used primarily (basically taking it away in the name of "security").
Security, privacy, and customization are why I use it. It takes a lot of work to do it, but you can lock down firefox very effectively and you have more freedom to decide what your browser is and isn't allowed to do with firefox than anyone else.
In the end, what we're missing in browsers is a browser that works for you instead of exploiting you to make money. Out of the box, firefox doesn't hit that mark today, but at least it can be beaten into submission. No other browser gives users that kind of control.
I actually do use duck duck go. There doesn't seem to be any advantage to using G search anymore, the web has reached a critical mass of trash that just overwhelms unspecific searches.
Yeah, DDG can even give better results at time than google does. Google search has gone from being exceptional to becoming ad filled trash. Every other major search engine (directly or indirectly) gets their results in part from Google, but since most spammers are focused on Google the father from google you get the better results can be.
I recently switched to try out ddg (again). Local search is terrible. Other searches have at least been ok. Nothing so far seems worlds better, but there does seem to be a bit less spam in the results.
However the one reason that instantly pops into my mind is containers. I can easily have multiple "accounts" without mucking around with multiple browser profiles. This alone is worth it switching from Chrome to Firefox for me.
I use Firefox because I believe its important for there to be more than one browser implementation (rendering engine) in the world. If you believe the same, go and download and use Firefox, even if it inconveniences you to do so. Now, about Skia...
It's not user-facing features that move users from one browser to another, it's the number of websites they use that don't break with one or the other.
Because I consider websites with obnoxious ads and a bunch of tracking "broken" Firefox gives people a lot of reason to switch, but unless they try it for themselves they have no idea what they're missing or how the pages they visit would look and be improved without all that junk.
I agree, and imho firefox should even bet more on user privacy (for example adopting strong measures against fingerprinting, and migrating away from google as a default search engine).
They recently signed a new deal with Google, and those deals more or less completely fund the development of Firefox, so I don't see a change there happening any time soon.
I think the major problem with a privacy focus from a business perspective is that not enough people care. So you have to spend both a lot of time and effort _being_ better at privacy and then also a bunch of time and effort trying to convince people that it matters.
For a minute there Firefox was running significant advertising against Chrome along these lines, and touting its improved speed, but I don't think it really moved the needle for them.
> . So you have to spend both a lot of time and effort _being_ better at privacy and then also a bunch of time and effort trying to convince people that it matters.
The good news for Mozilla is that the task of trying to inform the public on privacy issues doesn't fall to browser makers alone. Many businesses spanning multiple industries are offering services for people looking for better privacy and they're working to convince more people of the need. There are also several non-profits and online communities which are spreading the message about the importance of privacy and security. The news media also often reports on abuses of our data as they are discovered. As more and more people become aware of how they're being screwed over as a result of handing out the intimate details of their lives like candy the market will grow.
The bad news is that the largest and most powerful companies are making money hand over fist exploiting our private and personal data and they're working hard to normalize it and shield themselves from legal responsibility. The influence and money they possess, along with support from the state which also benefits by taking copies of that data for themselves is no small hurdle to overcome, but the entire system isn't sustainable if we really want freedom and equality so at a certain point the tide has to turn or we fall into total oppression.
I have not seen an important website genuinely break in a long time. Certainly not enough to build any sort of decision heuristic. Who are these people who have websites break all the time on Firefox but not in Chrome so much it drives them from one to another?
The problem with building a web browser is that if you introduce too many new features then you are breaking with web standards. The most you can do is add some user conveniences like sync, themes and extensions, but those don't go far enough to make enough users consider switching. A browser can, by definition, never have a "killer app".
There is so much more a browser can add beyond just rendering websites "correctly" - and even that does not mean always rendering them the way the designer wants. Just a few things that could win over power users:
- Better tab organization. Vertical, tree-style tabs are an improvement possible with extensions, but surely we can do even better, especially if with direct support from the browser.
- Better bookmarking. All bookmarks should take a snapshot of the website in case it disappears or changes and should have fast full-text search. And those are only the obvious parts that are missing.
- Integrated ad-blocking and user scripts/styles to enhance and fix user-hostile websites. Make it easy to share these with non-technical users. Really anything that puts the user in control. This includes the Browser UI too - firefox has been going backwards con customizability.
- Ability to keep up with websites directly through the browser. Aka bring back RSS support and actually make it useful.
- Anything that works against the centralization of the web. Allow users to comment and share websites with their friends or community right from the browser in a way that is resistant to censorship.
And this is just what I could think of right away.
LibreOffice is the dominant OpenOffice fork and the main alternative to Microsoft Office, unless you count Google Docs. LO seems much healthier when compared to Firefox, if anything.
This is exactly right, and as you’ll see from the long tail of answers, there isn’t one that actually applies to normal people.
It used to be that IE etc was actually quite bad, and Firefox was substantially faster while adding important features like tabs. That’s when the nerds installed Firefox on their parents computers. Then FF languished, Chrome came out and was much faster and used less resources. So the nerds replaced everyone’s browsers with Chrome.
Now everyone is using their default browser from their phones, or apps, or inline system browsers in apps. All the browsers are roughly equivalent now, so the nerds don’t have a lot of reason to go around and change their parents browsers. Plus you don’t have any real advantage to changing the mobile browser from Chrome (Android) or Safari (iOS). Thus the market has shifted away from desktops, FF lost there, hasn’t regained, and has made almost no inroads on mobile.
They need a reason for the nerds en masse to go and change everything, while inertia and incompatible built-in password managers will make this painful.
Once Google have a total monopoly there is nothing stopping them from making adblocking impossible and add even more user tracking/data gathering.
It's a stance.
And tbh I don't see much difference with Firefox when using Chrome
(besides all the data that I can see leaving my computer to go to google servers even when I'm not on any website)
The real (and often downvoted) answer is that Mozilla compromised on their core values. A "death by a thousand cuts", as it were.
For me, it started back when "sponsored tiles" were first announced in 2014. On the surface it was obviously advertisements, but many defenders tried to argue that it was a "good thing"
Then there was the proprietary Pocket extension baked into the browser with no easy removal. Again, many defenders tried to argue it was a "good thing"
Then the "studies" channel was used to push a Mr Robot ad. It's unclear how it was aligned with the values, but defenders tried to argue it was a "good thing".
They partnered with Cliqz to collect data and make recommendations. Again, defenders tried to argue it was a "good thing"
They partnered with Booking.com to push advertisements, going so far as to argue that they didn't receive any monetary compensation and that it was just a "social experiment". Again, defenders tried to argue it was a "good thing"
This is just a sampling of the events in the last 8 years (sponsored tiles was 2014). Every single time, they may have received some sort of benefit, but a number of users who bought into firefox for the security and privacy aspects ... felt betrayed and left. Because if it isn't about the privacy, what is the USP of firefox? "Not google" is only a small part of the user base.
> The real (and often downvoted) answer is that Mozilla compromised on their core values. A "death by a thousand cuts", as it were.
I expect it's downvoted because it's laughable. 99% of browser users don't give a shit about those things. If a poll were to be taken of the HN users who switched to Chrome, I doubt even a quarter would cite that as the reason.
It was indeed a death by a thousand cuts, but the thousand cuts were
* popup advertisements for Chrome on the frontpage of the most visited website on the planet
* Google paying off Adobe, AVG, Avast and others to make their installers include Chrome using disgusting dark patterns
* Android, the collapse of desktop browsing in comparsion to mobile browsing, and people that will just default to using the same browser on their laptop/desktop as on their phone
* Netflix DRM that didn't work on Firefox for a few months
* Youtube, Google Meet and Google Docs refusing to work properly on Firefox
* The word "Google" becoming as synonymous with simply using the internet as the internet explorer icon was in the 2000s
* Chrome was and to some extent still is legitimately snappier than Firefox
Agreed, these are the macro-level events that really drove user adoption. The narrative (especially the Mr. Robot thing!) are totally out of proportion to their actual impact on user adoption and aren't the all-or-nothing tests of credibility or integrity that people are suggesting they are.
— but they are symptomatic. The Mozilla of 2004 wouldn't even think of doing user-hostile stuff like that, because they were trying to make a useful tool rather than a lifestyle brand.
Those things will have disillusioned people who used Firefox because their goals were aligned. I agree that Google being Google will have lost people who used Firefox simply because it was a good tool.
I use Google Meet with Firefox on my M1 Mac every day. The only thing that doesn't work for me is camera backgrounds. Would be nice to be able to share audio when presenting, but I almost never present.
99% of browser users is not relevant, the question is how big a percentage of FireFox' users (the ones that remain, that is). Because if you lose those that is a much harder thing to recover from than to not win back the other 99% that you don't have anyway. And I suspect that the FF users of old care very much, though, of course I'm only speaking for myself here.
>And I suspect that the FF users of old care very much
But do they? Firefox's rise was largely due to IE6 being pure trash, and the average user of a web browser in 2008 being a lot more knowledgeable than the average user today.
Marketshare, by definition, is the share of the market. The market has expanded dramatically, but desktop browsing itself has plummeted, and a lot of users are just going to default to whatever they're using on their primary device (their phone), which is Google. "Google" is synonomous with using the internet in the same way that the internet explorer logo used to be in the mid 2000s.
Even if it is one percent (which I highly doubt) and that one percent is committed enough then that's enough of a core to guarantee the success of the project. It doesn't need a team of 1000 to build a browser, much less to keep an existing one patched and rolling along.
Quite on the contrary, even a team of 1000 won't be sufficient to maintain compatibility if your marketshare is so low that website and webapp builders ignore your concerns.
A non-Chromium browser needs to maintain a critical mass of users to be sufficiently large to ensure that the world wants to stay compatible with it, and having 1% of marketshare is not sufficient for that, no matter how committed these users are - if firefox drops to 1%, then it becomes irrelevant and the project has failed at its goals as the "web standards" become equivalent to whatever chromium does.
Browsers get influence to keep the web as we want it to be mostly based on the quantity of browser users which websites want to attract and keep; without that all the best code in the world is useless and doesn't even give you a seat at the table, much less a strong say for how the de-facto standard web practices will change.
> Quite on the contrary, even a team of 1000 won't be sufficient to maintain compatibility if your marketshare is so low that website and webapp builders ignore your concerns.
As a browser maker your "concerns" should really be web/internet standards. If websites and webapp builders aren't complying with standards and are building their stuff to only work in non-standard compliant browsers that's a separate problem that no web browser can solve.
Perhaps that's not how they ought to work, but that's definitely how they work - web standards are effectively determined (e.g. in WHATWG) by a consensus (or in some cases unilateral action) of makers of browsers with nontrivial market share; and that's how this has been happening for quite some time now. If you've got 20% market share, then your opinion (and your implementation choices) matters much more than that of the multiple <1% browsers.
I fully agree. If the consistent messaging is meant to be "use this browser, it's private and respects you", but it's then compromised by advertising and data abuse, it seems hypocritical and damages adoption of the browser.
I don't recall very many people defending Mozilla on the Mr Robot or the Booking.com missteps. Even current and ex-Mozillans lambasted them for those.
I recall a few people defending the sponsored titles (or half-hearted defenses about how it's bad but not that bad since you can turn them off) but those defenses seemed to be largely drowned out by the overwhelmingly negative response.
The only of those that I recall having anything close to "many defenders" was the Pocket integration.
I know you're saying this not the question being asked, but what's your source for their revenue growing anywhere near that rate, or indeed at all?
As far as I can see their revenue peaked around FY 2017 at $562 million. In 2018 that number was about $450 million and short of expenses, they were short of expenses again for 2019 but for a $338 million settlement from Yahoo/Verizon.
The most recent reported year, 2020, saw a slight drop in their search income but a sharper cut to expenses (mostly by cutting about $60 million in "software development" expenses), putting them back on track, in a way.
They've had a steady increase in subscription income, but it's still dwarfed by the current search deal (in 2020, just shy of $25 million in subscriptions vs. over $440 million from search).
I think that the point of the GP is not necessarily about money, but to have the structure focus on Firefox. ie that it should be the source and the objective of the funding to have all the attention that it needs.
The last thing Mozilla needs is to spend more time pretending they're a big tech company and can compete with those guys. They should focus on Firefox (as GP said), not build a communication platform that will then fail versus Signal/WhatsApp/Hangouts/Teams/etc.
Yup. Someone else will likely do a better job building those. Mozilla's (and only Mozilla's) core competency is browser building, and they should stick to it. Anyone can build a communicator, but building a full browser engine is becoming a forgotten skill.
The decline of Firefox started with Chrome's JavaScript engine, who was years ahead of Firefox's performance. The focus on JavaScript-heavy websites was already growing, and Firefox was slow to catch up.
Now they're about the same performance-wise, but the mind share lost was brutal. there was a period that the only advantages Firefox had over Chrome were memory use and extensions, and they had to get rid of the NPAPI extensions for security reasons.
The basic problem for Mozilla is they poured a ton of effort into improving performance and marketed that heavily... and they basically didn't gain back share at all.
Pivoting would kill Firefox, and this is exactly what we should be trying to save if we care about some version of the open web. Indeed, I'm advocating for pivoting away from all of these other things, and towards Firefox as the one and only concern for the organisation.
> DuckDuckGo already proved there is an appetite for something like this.
An appetite, yes. But not a major one. A privacy-focused, ad-free approach would be hugely appealing to the HN crowd. But I’m less convinced about the public at large.
They get most of their money from advertising deals with those major companies (such as by putting google in as the default search engine). Competing against them would likely result in those companies removing the advertising dollars and tanking the business.
> Competing against them would likely result in those companies removing the advertising dollars and tanking the business.
Google paying Apple massive amounts of money to keep Google Search the default search engine on their devices doesn't seem to be affected by the fact that Pixel phones (or Android as a whole) and iPhones are competing. Though I gotta admit that it could be because Google doesn't have the overwhelming winner position in that market, as opposed to the web browser market.
However, I still find Google pulling the funding unlikely, given (afaik) the reason for Google "financially supporting" Mozilla is exactly because Google is afraid of being legally called out as a monopoly in the web browser market. The only point at which I can see Google pulling that funding is if Mozilla ends up on the same level as Chrome in terms of posing a danger to Google's dominance. At which point, Mozilla has already won and doesn't need Google that much to sustain itself, so I wouldn't pose it as a strong concern.
Mozilla getting rid of the Google default search engine deal would be the best thing that ould happen to Firefox. That money is not free, it is (amongs other things) a shackle that keeps Firefox from going too far against Google's interests.
I know many people who used to use Firefox and moved on to Brave. Brave has a mission that is easier to get behind and till it’s unclear what Firefox is trying to be.
I don't think that's true: Brave is actively building independent revenue-generating services so they have a footprint on the web instead of just being a company that makes a window to the web.
And they are growing. The big thing there is just positioning, and being aggressive in the right places.
That's the fundamental problem with Mozilla: MS, Google and Apple can leverage web footprint and physical platforms to market their products and generate revenue for browser development. Plus Apple's happy to take money from Google. Brave's building some kind of revenue-generating platform that stands on its own.
I don't know if Mozilla has a vision in that kind of way.
>> We as a community, cannot afford to let Firefox languish until the only browsers in the world are Chromium derivatives. The diversity of truly independent browser engines is far too important to give up without a fight.
There are a lot of people oh HN who agree with that but then use a different browser for whatever reason. I feel like these people are being very hypocritical and should use what they want to succeed. Firefox is very usable and increasing its market share starts with you. Or to use another cliche - be the change you wish to see.
That's not to say Mozilla doesn't need to get their shit together, but if market share drops too low they will not be able to get money to do the things they need to do.
> Firefox is very usable and increasing its market share starts with you. Or to use another cliche - be the change you wish to see.
I use Firefox despite long standing bugs. Somehow a browser that aggressively throttles background tabs is still able to leak memory to background tabs. For the longest time Firefox messed with my wireless headset, they finally added proper support for web audio APIs and things are better now.
CPU usage is still all over the place. Some inactive tab will cause FF to spin CPU usage up to 100%.
Firefox still leaks resources, I can shut down all tabs and still have the media playback process using up tons of CPU and RAM.
WebGL performance is worse than Chrome.
TBF it has been getting steadily better over the last year, I have noticed a marked improvement. I'd say a year or so ago it was noticeably bad on a regular basis, now it is an occasional annoyance. But it should never have gotten that bad.
More to the point of the question, Google spent a LONG time pushing Chrome, hard. They paid lots of # to bundle it with app updates years ago. Visiting Google properties causes banner ads "Download Chrome!" to appear. A few years back YouTube videos would occasionally just stop working in Firefox.
And now days with Node development, well, Node developer tools are built into Chrome. React developer tools run in Chrome.
A while back I spent a few weeks figuring out how to configure Firefox to work exactly how I want a browser to work, then months happily using it. Then a big update was released and everything broke. I never bothered to get it working again. And despite claims of performance improvements that came with the release, it still chugged slower than Chrome. I would love to use a browser that I can actually configure how I want without things breaking every week, even if it's slower in general. But if I can't configure reliably and it's slower -- what's the point?
Actually there is a fairly secret long term version of windows 10 that also does without all the bullshit. No store, no constant massive feature updates, etc. Windows 10 LTSB / LTSC. They try to make it seem like its only for embedded machines but its basically just stripped down windows 10 with a lot more similarities (feature wise) to what windows 7 was.
RedHat has no magic Mozilla sauce, they simply ship Firefox ESR and upgrade it every year. You'll have the same breakage in the end, just yearly instead of monthly.
They offer nothing I cannot get elsewhere and thus I have no reason to switch.
When it first came out, Firefox was faster, lighter and offered way better function than the alternatives at the time. Since then, competition has been fierce in the browser market and they’ve done little to distinguish themselves in any major way from their competitive set.
Until they do something so vastly incomparable in the market, they gonna continue to falter.
For an average person, I think this argument is fine. But we're on HN where we can discuss something with a bit more nuance. There's two major things that I see that FF offers that Chrome doesn't, including chromium alternatives. 1) More privacy. Chrome tracks you substantially more than alternative browsers. In addition to that, is simply the chrome ecosystem, see next point. 2) Chrome's dominance defines the web. A decentralized service doesn't become centralized once one player takes 100% of the users. It happens long before because a big player can throw their weight around and force others to do what they want. Chrome already acts this way. We talk about this extensively several times a year here, so I'll let others state this argument better. But the short is that Google can define protocols, more tracking analytics, etc.
It really comes down to two things.
- Do you want to encourage more privacy across the web?
- Do you want the web to be more decentralized?
If you want more privacy and less centralization, you should use FF. I don't think it is just about the services that they offer. I think we can go deeper and talk about the future of the web in general and how our choices affect that.
Firefox promises all these things, but I think that by and large the problem is that it just doesn't deliver on them for the average person. And average person is how we get the market share and safety in numbers.
FF definitely offers more privacy for the average person when compared to Chrome. I'm not sure what you're talking about. That normal people don't care? Well that's why I said the conversation about "products" was fine for the average person but not here on HN where we're experts and there's more nuance.
Right, I've never walked by my computer at midnight to discover its awake and hammering the disk scanning everything that's installed on my machines like chrome does.
You're right, but neither can we wait for legislation to be passed. So attack this problem from multiple fronts. And even after legislation is passed that doesn't solve the second problem of centralization.
Multi Account Containers is the key reason I use Firefox. I have to juggle multiple accounts for the same services for work. Containers makes this trivial. The closest chrome has is profiles which require a separate window and are just generally far more painful to use.
Temporary Containers as well. An entire throwaway container by default. I can just accept all the cookies and closing the tab deletes them all. No management.
Nothing else comes close.
I'm glad this exists (although it appears there are extensions in other browsers that do the same thing) but I never have more than 10 tabs open, so it's not something that would make me switch.
I'm glad it exists too. If you ever have a need to juggle tabs this extension is a godsend. Believe me, I've tried finding similar functionality for Chrome/Edge and aside from Edge vertical tabs, the rest are a kludge at best.
Sidebery is great, but I had to switch back to Tree Style Tab because I hate animations, and while Sidebery is impressively configurable, not all animations can be disabled (https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery/issues/517).
> They offer nothing I cannot get elsewhere and thus I have no reason to switch.
I'm not going to tell anybody else what their reasons are or should be, but for me voting against the browser monoculture was a reason to switch.
Most people won't care enough, of course, but to me it's not that different than voting for a candidate in an election who might not be the absolute best fit for my personal interests but who seems better for an overall political culture, or some other similar compromise.
On Desktop, I can agree. But uBlock Origin on Android is only possible on Firefox afaik (and one of the major ways Google uses Android for Ad revenue leverage)
Recently switched to Linux and only installed Firefox. When you force yourself to use it, it's doable. I think only once in the last 6 months did a website not work (my dumb HOA website). Other than that, it's more than sufficient.
It crashes sometimes but if that's the price for not having coercive software controlling my life, so be it.
Not claiming, that your experience isn't true, but: Firefox hasn't crashed for me in years! And I am a real tab hoarder. 400 tabs and more are not so uncommon for me. Then again I don't allow arbitrary websites to run all sorts of shit scripts. It might or might not be your hardware, or it might be the websites you visit.
Not the OP, but I consider it a soft crash every time I update Firefox in my OS, and it won't allow me to spawn new tabs until I restart Firefox. Annoying behavior they've included a couple years back.
If I understand what you're reporting correctly, then that's something your OS "included a couple of years back".
If you install Firefox from Mozilla's site, it won't have these update problems. What's happening is that your package manager is swapping Firefox's bits out from under it while it's running. Firefox's built-in update system doesn't do that.
Which is not to say that I think you shouldn't be using a packaged version of Firefox. Personally I'm running Nightly so I don't have the option anyway. Generally speaking, I vastly prefer sticking to my package manager's stuff.
I just wish the package managers would fix their Firefox updates. (I don't know what the right fix would be, and I imagine it could be hard.)
Then someone at Redhat was probably bribed by some Googler, cause it only happens with Firefox updates /s
Joke aside, Firefox is aware that it's been updated and the new tab states that I have to restart my browser. I'm not familiar with the inner workings of Firefox, I just expect it to have everything it needs to function, in working memory. I've been using Fedora for close to 14 years now, Firefox always installed from system packages, and the updates always replaced the existing files on disk without it affecting my application experience. No other desktop app I use has this behavior after updates while they where running.
A big fuss? No, got used to it already. But I still consider it a soft crash state that I encounter with Firefox.
Er... just yesterday I had the crappy update experience that everyone is talking about. And that's using Firefox Nightly, with a downloaded build. So I'd need to look more into this to understand what the actual situation is.
Hm... though now I wonder... I also had a cron job that ran me out of disk space. I wonder if that contributed to make it more like the external file replacement situation?
Strictly, Fedora doesn't support doing updates while the system is running (or at least they don't recommend it).
An alternative that might be smoother in this regard: use a flatpak version of Firefox instead. (Firefox is in Fedora's flatpak repo, and on Flathub.) GNOME Software updates flatpak apps in the background, and you just get the new version the next time you open the app.
Not sure from which perspective your comment comes from. dnf update or dnfdragora updates (if you prefer a GUI) are all done while the system is running.
Sure, distribution upgrades nowadays are just like Windows update requiring a system reboot and a black screen with a useless progress bar to stare at (that's also a pretty annoying relatively recent addition).
GNOME is not my cup of tea. And until flatpak delivers tangible finegrained software sandboxing (at least Android level sandboxing), I'm not really interested in using it for software that's already packaged in the dnf repositories.
I use Fedora because it has newer software, pretty stable in my experience, and my knowledge is transferable to RedHat/Enterprise Linux. But I stopped buying into most of Redhat's desktop innovations a while ago.
> Not sure from which perspective your comment comes from. dnf update or dnfdragora updates (if you prefer a GUI) are all done while the system is running.
> Sure, distribution upgrades nowadays are just like Windows update requiring a system reboot and a black screen with a useless progress bar to stare at (that's also a pretty annoying relatively recent addition).
Silverblue doesn't have a black screen with a progress bar — it just boots straight into the updated version. I assume Kinoite (like Silverblue but with Plasma instead of GNOME) is the same.
> And until flatpak delivers tangible finegrained software sandboxing (at least Android level sandboxing)
It's cool, I get it. You find these adequate solutions to existing problems. But they are replacements of some issues for new issues. That's why I'm not onboard with Redhat vision for a Linux desktop, that's why I stay away from GNOME, Flatpak, rpm-ostree distro flavours. They are almost an 80% of something, then a coin toss away of being deprecated/ignored.
Those tools are not teaching me how to fish, but how to carve out and build a fish rod, fish anatomy, and anything in between. When all I want is the proverbial fish.
Things got dicier in the server space since the IBM acquisition, e.g. RedHat 8 experience was anything but good, and their entry into the container space with UBIs. A pile of things breaking, when switching the Dockerfile from CentOS to RedHat. Even more ridiculous things, like RedHat 8 offering a license that allows X install for free, but then the ISO wasn't even distributed by torrent file and the download speed for me in EU was under 100KBps.
But anyway, here I am ranting about RedHat, when I didn't want to. My main complaint is still with Firefox, it wants me to restart the browser but I can use the existing tabs just fine for any web browsing. Nothing is bricked by the update, just Firefox deciding when I should restart my browser, just like the very vague Windows experience I left so long ago.
You just probably use the web browser much more often to catch it after an update.
And afaik, the reason for this is that they can only maintain a known good state this way, as well as making freshly patched security patches available as soon as possible.
I don't think the package managers are at fault here and this would be much more easily fixed in Firefox itself by not touching the filesystem after Firefox starts - resources are already bundled so you only need to keep a handle open (package managers don't change file contents but replace what the filename points to) and only fork instead of executing new processes (keep a pristine process running to fork from if you want).
Yeah, I think there are measures I could take to help the situation but it's a little low on my priority queue at the moment. The crashes are rare and not really a big issue for me.
Hmm, interesting, because I don't force myself to use Firefox. I use it because it's just plain better than Chrome, in that I can configure it just the way I want.
I use it almost exclusively on Linux. It was much worse just 9 months ago. I do close and reopen it every week or so, it reopens all my tabs per my config, and it never gets sluggish on me if I do that. I agree with commenter above. I prefer it, with its flaws, because of configurability. It's been 6 months since I ahve been forced to open a site in Chromium. It tends to be some bloated highly commercial (F500) site that requires that.
Damning by faint praise shows how bad it is right now for FF. Back in the golden age of Firefox (arguably, before the versions started incrementing like Chrome), it was a pure pleasure to use, even if certain things like ActiveX refused to work. Now, if we "force ourselves" to use it, it's "maybe OK".
I can't remember Firefox crashing in recent years and that includes times I approached 2000 open tabs. Though after using the same profile for over 5 years now it has trouble remembering the color scheme for whatever reason.
I'd say that's usually a problem with websites and not the browser.
Many websites are just designed with the 80% of most frequent configurations. And when autoplay is disabled, the browser window is too narrow, a special font isn't loaded or a cookie is blocked all bets are off.
I never had Firefox crashes until Ubuntu 21.10 which I think made Firefox a snap, now I get crashes when it tries to load fonts. And I get that colour scheme thing now too.
I use Firefox. Not exclusively, but most of the time, on principle.
I would call it usable, but not "very usable". For normal people, Chrome(ium) UX is better. For power users, Vivaldi is a far better choice despite the Chromium browser engine. And for both of these groups, Firefox UX worsens and improves seemingly at random.
Quite frankly, I'm conflicted whether I should recommend Firefox at all. If I say "look, here's Firefox! It's more private than Chrome, and almost as fast and error-free!", and then Mozilla goes on to ruin that perception 6 months later (as they are wont to do), then it's my reputation and credibility at stake. Not only is that an unnecessary ego hit, but also makes me look like a liar (or at best, like an ivory tower dweller divorced from reality).
The hamburger menu, for one. It's extremely unintuitive. Not the fact that it uses a hamburger icon, but that even simple things like accessing the full list of my bookmarks involve multiple clicks. If you know the keyboard shortcuts then it's not a problem, but I want common UI items to be accessible from the UI.
Besides that, the UI is just sluggish a lot of the time. It feels that Chrome(ium) has a far better latency response.
In both cases you get a list of bookmarks on step 2 and you get a full, searchable, editable view in step 3. The global shortcut for the third step is the same in both (ctrl + shift + o).
I want Firefox to succeed. But that doesn't mean I will use an inferior browser, especially when I feel the decision makers at Mozilla are out of sync.
I don't understand what you need. Go and try Firefox. As a person that uses Firefox as a daily driver, both at work and at home usage, I can't recall when I had to switch to Chrome. In 2010, maybe. I don't know what other "awe-inspiring endorsement" you need.
Firefox did not save my marriage nor did it make me a million dollars, no.
Do you use Firefox because it’s a better browser or because of philosophical reasons? If it’s the former, then I want to know that somebody thinks it’s the best way to browse the web. If it’s the latter, then tell me it’s worse but the politics of supporting Google are distasteful to you.
Don’t tell me it’s “very usable” because I’m going to interpret it as the latter which may or may not be correct.
I actually don't use ad blocking. If there are ads and I don't want to see them, then I don't visit that site again. The site has chosen their business model and I can choose which sites I want to visit.
I also like buying things that I might like, so seeing ads (and ads that are targeted to me) isn't necessarily a bad thing to me.
I agree with your topline goal, but I am surprised by the way you think about it. Most of what you recommend has no obvious connection to firefox-the-program.
Like...
> - Donate the major money drains that aren't Firefox to the Apache Foundation or another worthy custodian
> - Fire all inessential staff that don't want to work on Firefox.
> - Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money, and cut their salaries (bonuses tied directly to increase in Firefox market share).
> - Make sure that all donations from now on are redirected to things that support Firefox development and nothing else, period.
All of these are good suggestions if the problem is that Firefox is running out of money or has too few resources. But that's not my impression at all!
Google's strategy with Chrome demonstrates how valuable it is to develop other compelling services that use cutting-edge standards supported by your browser. Google does it in a way where they freeze out other compatible browsers, but Mozilla does not have to. I would say that the number one thing that Mozilla can do to support the web is to make web standards meaningful again - and the best way to do that is to develop things aside from web browsers to demonstrate the value of those standards.
> We as a community, cannot afford to let Firefox languish until the only browsers in the world are Chromium derivatives.
I don't think Mozilla having non-Firefox projects harms Firefox. I think there is every reason to believe that a healthy Mozilla has Firefox at the center, with many other ongoing projects.
My impression is that Mozilla is too focused on basically everything that isn't Firefox - to me, it's axiomatic that Firefox wouldn't be in such a horrifying shape if they were focused on it. They are lacking for attention, and not money, which is why they should jettison everything that isn't Firefox or doesn't serve Firefox. Anyone else can do funny extensions or VPN or what have you got, but browser-making is Mozilla's core competency that no one in the FOSS ecosystem has mastered to the extent they did.
It seems evident to me that if they made Firefox into a power user browser again, somehow, then power users would flock to it again and bring in some of their peers and family, putting it back in a safe 10-15% range of market share where it can't be picked off or ignored by Google. And I know that power users are leaving en masse - I stuck with them through thick and thin for nearly 15 years, and I'm finally getting ready to leave if the situation doesn't improve.
> I think there is every reason to believe that a healthy Mozilla has Firefox at the center
Neither Mozilla not Firefox are healthy, in my assessment. And this is exactly because they are getting sidetracked instead of centering on Firefox.
> it's axiomatic that Firefox wouldn't be in such a horrifying shape if they were focused on it
In my experience many things come to be in horrifying shape because of focus as well, so I don't agree with your logic.
> which is why they should jettison everything that isn't Firefox or doesn't serve Firefox.
I mean, 4 / 6 of the products on their product pages have Firefox in the name[1]? Really begs the question on what you mean by "doesn't serve firefox." I guess you mean you don't like the VPN or Pocket?
> if they made Firefox into a power user browser again, somehow, then power users would flock to it again and bring in some of their peers and family
I think maybe the reason we have different views on this is that we might view the user base differently. I'm not sure how you mean "power users" - it's a fuzzy term - but I suggest we start at the number of people in the worldwide IT industry[2]. Probably not all super users, but likely more technically savvy. It seems there are about 55,000,000 of us, but that's in an internet user population of 4.66 billion[3]. That puts the power user population at about 1.4% of the people represented in the market share statistics. So if global relevance is your goal, I'm not sure that the power users are gonna do it. Even if Firefox dominated the market they would need to bring a lot of friends and family along to get the people needed to push Firefox up ~6%.
The web is just way, way bigger than it used to be and is serving way more people. I totally agree that Firefox is failing to find a convincing foothold in the modern web, but I'm unconvinced that appealing to power users would benefit the browser or the web more than any other group. I also think that, if Firefox caters to a particular demographic with unusually deep expertise, that they risk moving the browser in a direction that's less appealing to users who lack that deep expertise.
> My impression is that Mozilla is too focused on basically everything that isn't Firefox - to me, it's axiomatic that Firefox wouldn't be in such a horrifying shape if they were focused on it.
I really don’t think that most of us would have any meaningful knowledge on this without having first hand experience, so I don’t think these opinions are of any use.
If all that is left is chromium, then you can kiss what is left of web standards good bye. Google will set the standard, taking input from any other tech player big enough to have a seat at the table.
Its bad enough ISO certification boards and official positions of the W3C can be bought or corrupted. Let there be only one engine, controlled by Google? And even the pretense of a open and fair playing field goes away.
Open source and open protocols were not resistant enough to for profit corporations.
Now our standards are dwindling, open source projects and standards boards re completely co-opted, and the conversation on mailing lists and forums sounds like the never ending squabbling and finger wagging from your Fortune 500 HR department.
Foss and open standards have been captured by capital. And it shows in the culture.
Hell, it shows in the conversations around places like this.
Exactly. This is why Mozilla, as the only credible custodian of the only credible Chromium/Blink/WebKit competitor, needs to wake up and die trying to stop that future, if needed. If they lose that war, there is no reason for them to exist over Brave or Vivaldi, for example.
> If all that is left is chromium, then you can kiss what is left of web standards good bye.
Well, we've already done that. Google a) dominates the standards bodies and b) releases "standard" features that are only standard because Chrome says so
However, I think they need to answer the question, why should Firefox exist? If there is no compelling reason, well, there you go. If there is, double down on that make that reason shine. They have wasted so much money on the wrong things, IMO.
If Firefox dies, the open web dies. It's that simple. For the open web to remain open, there needs to be at least one more truly independent source of authority regarding how a rendering engine should work. Everyone else has thrown in the towel and abdicated that authority to Google by embedding Blink.
Google is either actively malicious to the open web, or doesn't care about it other than as something they can strip-mine as a revenue source. They sufficiently diversified into mobile and Android that the death of the open web would be but a blip to them.
IMO, Firefox should consciously be that alternate source of authority. How they accomplish that organisationally is irrelevant, what is relevant that their browser as a whole is competitive and focused enough that it stops haemorrhaging market share, and can start to slowly rebuild it as people look for a way out of Google's ecosystem.
That is a reason why the world should want it to exist, but it isn't a reason why anyone individual would consider it better than Chrome.
Firefox used to at least directly target segments of the population with its more comprehensive developer platform, but they have slowly been tearing that out for many years and now Chrome is converging to the same place.
At best I would say "the reason for Firefox to exist is because we need it to exist" argues we would have to prop it up using some kind of government intervention--to deal with the "it is at least slightly worse for every given user"--but the problem is we need people to actually use it, not for it to merely continue to be developed, and "require some random percentage of people to draw lots and be forced to use Firefox" is probably a dystopia for other reasons.
Why does everyone always forget about Safari in these discussions?
Safari has a respectable marketshare on mobile / tablets. Not as good on desktop but it’s not a lost cause.
It's not a relevant browser. The last time I have seen Safari installed on a Windows machine was likely 2013-14, if not earlier. It doesn't have an Android version (which makes it less relevant on smartphones). It doesn't support Linux, which lots of the power user/tech trailblazer crowd is using. It's not open source, unlike Firefox or Chromium. It lags in features (which to be fair, isn't bad when they impact privacy).
I don't think there's a good case to be made for Safari outside of Apple devices.
Those things don't matter. Just by existing Safari is making sure web developers can't solely focus on Chromium. If we disregard mobile, Safari still has more marketshare on desktop than Firefox.
> Apple's offering, Safari, currently holds 18.34% of the internet browser market, with an
estimated 844 million people using it in 2021. Safari also makes up 23.78% of all
mobile device browsers worldwide, which is high considering Apple holds 26.35% of the
mobile vendor market. https://backlinko.com/browser-market-share
I think the other thing that makes it less relevant is that Safari is using WebKit and at this point its just a WebKit derivative. Part of the value that Firefox provides for better or worse is alternate components that force things to actually try and meet standards.
I've never seen Safari on an Android or Windows device. I would imagine this is on the list of things that is technically possible, but not a real world use case.
>they need to answer the question, why should Firefox exist? If there is no compelling reason, well, there you go. If there is, double down on that make that reason shine.
Unfortunately, that reason (browser engine diversity)is compelling to people who understand the situation, but not general consumers - and it's impossible to make general consumers care, unless maybe Firefox went for an edgy "rebel against the man" vibe.
I feel like I understand the situation but I'm doubtful that browser engine diversity is compelling. It seems like duplicate effort. As long as Chromium accepts pull requests, what's the problem with browser monoculture?
(In case it's not clear, I'm asking in earnest. I'm not trolling.)
- - - -
edit: Okay, pull requests alone are not enough, but the objections y'all are raising seem like they could all be answered by forking, no? If Google upsets their users then a different browser has a chance to gain users:
- Ad-blocking
- Better extension API
- Maintaining backwards compatibility
- No Manifest V3
- Better vision of the web than Google
In other words, effort expended on duplicate functionality for it's own sake is wasted. Why not let Google do the heavy lifting and then improve on their work, rather than trying to compete head-to-head on the whole enchilada (of a complete browser engine)?
A browser monoculture allows one entity to dictate how the web works. Even if you can open a pull request against Chromium, that doesn't mean it will get accepted without the approval of Google.
Right now, backwards compatibility is protected by competing browsers. If one breaks backwards compatibility too often, it risks becoming known for having sites not work on it.
In a monoculture, Google could take aggressive moves to prevent ad-blocking. In a monoculture, Google could push more ad focused features like FloC. Google could integrate more ways to allow browser fingerprint (not saying they would, but there would be no recourse).
With competition Google knows that people could balk at any point so they must balance their interests with their users' interests. In a monoculture, they wouldn't have to.
Anyone can "fork" it by making their own build. Which will quickly become worse than useless as it falls behind security patches. A secure fork is something that is easy to start, very very hard to maintain.
The possibility of forks does little to prevent a Chromium monoculture from embracing, extending, and extinguishing the web. (Something like Brave, with an independent revenue model, does help some with the bad maintainer problem. But it doesn't help with the constant stream of everyday bugs in the underlying engine, ones that would get set in stone with a monoculture.)
We're already there. 4% Firefox market share may as well be zero. What is the current recourse for Chrome pushing a monoculture? I don't think it matters today what Firefox does or objects to.
Because Google is still in control. Saying that Chromium "accepts pull requests" is misleading. That's true, but the overall direction and large architectural decisions are made by Google.
For example, see Manifest V3 (and the deprecation/removal of old versions). Almost everybody that hears about it disagrees - users, extension developers, etc. However, despite it's popularity being as low as could be, Google is still putting it in.
Today, if I see an article about FLOC (or whatever they're calling it now) and don't like it I can go and download Firefox. In a Chromium-only world I'm SOL.
The problem with browser monoculture is that it will erode the authority of the spec over time. Having multiple independent implementations of the same spec means that developers won't be able to merely code to one browser and treat it's quirks as gospel.
A good example of what happens if you only have one implementation is Flash Player. People programmed to the implementation and not the (non-existant) spec. So any reimplementation of Flash Player is largely an exercise in chasing after implementation bugs in the Player that badly-developed movies rely upon. Even Adobe's official internal documentation on SWF and AVM2 is woefully incomplete, because the actual "spec" is the proprietary source code of the player and whatever tribal knowledge had been accrued from decades of maintaining it.
The sole implementation in this case (Chromium) being Free Software does alleviate this a little, but the spec is still more of a suggestion than a reality.
I know it's in bad taste to complain about downvotes on HN, but why is this downvoted?
It's a legitimate question, in a realm that many people including in HN's general demographic don't consider.
If someone wants to learn something, why not help them instead of downvoting into oblivion because they don't know or disagree with something you know/believe?
Edit to respond to edit:
The biggest reason I think is that there's no way a fork would survive - the only way that it could would be if Microsoft/Apple/Facebook/$SOMEBODY_WITH_MONEY threw their weight behind it, which is unlikely, because any change which harms users will either help or be neutral to any of these companies.
I think it's the opposite. A lot of the HN demographic has in fact mulled this over time and time again, and has no patience for those who don't account for the possibility that one day, the monopolist will stop being a nice guy when there is every incentive to do that.
I would rather educate than downvote, but downvoting has gotten to be more emotional than based on the site guidelines, so not everyone sticks to that.
(FWIW, I don't give a crap about up/downvotes, I want to engage in a deep discussion.)
Back in the day when it was FF vs. Microsoft Internet Explorer the need for a competing FOSS browser seemed very compelling, but I don't think FF won marketshare on that, rather it won on merits: FF was better than IE.
Today the situation seems different. To me it seems to make sense to let the engine become a standardized component (developed FOSS-style) incorporating work by Google for speed, security, and reliability, and let the diversity and competition happen on a higher, more user-facing level, in terms of policy and politics and UI/UX and so on.
If people wanted features, why was Opera always so niche? It used to be so far ahead in features. I guess Brave today has quite a few features. Maybe Vivaldi.. I haven't looked really.
I think the real issue is that the vast majority of users don't really care about browser features beyond a certain point, a point which all modern browsers have easily covered. You could sit a person in front of Chrome, Firefox, Edge, or Safari and they'd barely notice. If there's attachment to a certain brand, it's mostly emotional. Arguing that people should use X over Y is like arguing that they should drink Pepsi over Coca Cola..
It's hard to differentiate a browser in such a market. It's just a window to the web, with tabs and bookmarks and a handful of features. And an adblocker extension, for some 30% of users. Beyond that, it just needs to work and be fast.
> The biggest reason I think is that there's no way a fork would survive
If the fork offers something compelling to entice users then it would presumably survive, otherwise not, but would they save FF then?
The whole problem under discussion here is that FF is losing marketshare. The things that differentiate FF in the minds of the mass consumers aren't directly related to the browser engine. Chrome/Chromium is arguably better on the fundamentals (speed, security, reliability) so why not take their core and implement user-attracting features on top of it?
I think the idea of having competing FOSS browser engines is largely a holdover from the bad old days of Internet Explorer. The main reason that browser engine diversity might be useful is that it makes for a certain robustness in the face of errors and crashes. If everyone is using the same browser then everyone is vulnerable to the same zero-days, for example.
> Okay, pull requests alone are not enough, but the objections y'all are raising seem like they could all be answered by forking, no? If Google upsets their users then a different browser has a chance to gain users:
Forking is an uphill battle starting at 0% market share, which is less than Firefox has now.
If your fork is stuggling to gain users then it's not really worth forking, I agree. You wouldn't fork for forking's sake. Whatever compelling features are going to win users away from Google Chrome could appear in Firefox or in a hypothetical Mozzila Chromium, but with the latter you're getting effectively free work from Google. And a Mozzila Chromium fork would start off a little better than 0% market share just on hype, I think, eh?
I think that's a bit too far - for example, Thunderbird is a great web client. I do think they should have found a way to hold onto the Servo team and make that engine more useable and better than the base chromium engine. If they had been able to keep the Rust foundation on board, it would have also made sense.
However, I do agree that their leadership has made terrible decisions and they've absolutely focused on the wrong products.
Thunderbird was on my mind when I was writing this. I think it ultimately comes down to whether they can afford any missteps or side concerns at all - and if the answer is "no", then Thunderbird must be cut loose no matter its value. It can always be mothballed until the times get better, or it can even be given "on loan" for some fixed duration to another trusted FOSS foundation and re-adopted when the time is up.
As good as Thunderbird is, I wouldn't want it to be anywhere near the top of Mozilla's priorities list right now.
I think Thunderbird gets to piggyback on some Mozilla infrastructure - hosting, CI/CD, receiving donations into a dedicated Thunderbird pool - but has been mostly cut out as you describe for some time. https://blog.thunderbird.net/2012/07/the-community-is-standi...
Thunderbird has always been their opportunity to demonstrate their stack is a general ecosystem, but it's headaches show that their stack isn't a good ecosystem for anything that isn't Firefox.
They shouldn't be trying to build thunderbird for its own sake, they should be demonstrating their equivalent for electron and feel pressured to make it no worse for users than the current Thunderbird, but attractive/stable enough for outside developers to choose over electron/etc.
For the record, I disagree with the assessment that they should be building an Electron email client. Most users are already using a paid/monetised Electron email client, a soon to become Electron client (like is supposedly planned for Microsoft Outlook), or a webmail interface.
Electron clients cannot compete on deep technically obscure feature sets, simply because they didn't have 20 years to accumulate them. They cannot compete on latency. Thunderbird should remain native.
Er, you do realise that Thunderbird isn't exactly native, either, what with it being based on XUL (or whatever's still left of that these days) and Gecko?
I think you are using dichotomies inappropriately to invoke the standard biases that have trapped the Mozilla community.
Something that competes with electron is not electron. Non-native includes RLBox which is now going to secure Firefox according to Mozilla. Mozilla is on record regretting thunderbird's poor Integration with the Firefox stack as a trial for thunderbird devs and a tax slowing Firefox engineering.
This holding pattern has gone on and on because no one wants to establish the correct API layer to maintain as an inherent tax for Firefox engineering that enables all F/OSS to reuse the NS* stack correctly with good documentation.
In the long term this means chromium has an ecosystem and Mozilla's stable ecosystem consists of just one browser. However flawed chromium is, it has no competition for most developers and competition with WebKit for a handful.
The obvious thing to do was continue to invest in Servo. If they could have produced a parallel layout engine, which could provide app like animations without fiddling on desktop and Android, and then make that easy to embed, they could have made real inroads into blink/webkit.
You're absolutely right. The fact that so many other browsers are based on chromium, is a blatant condemnation of how the Servo engine has not met an important demand. If Servo was properly useable outside of Firefox, we would have seen more open-source browsers use it.
Yeah but Mozilla has been subverted, since the current CEO got on they are a lightning rod for Google against browser monopoly legal attention, while trying everything possible to neuter them from being a real threat.
Thus she cut the thing most likely to provide a real threat to chrome.
Another interesting idea: what if they courted alternate browser projects and/or environments like electron to use the Firefox engine the way those currently tend to use Chromium?
I don’t know if Firefox is currently harder to integrate than Chromium, or if they would just need to gain some sort of edge (no pun intended). But they could for example:
- Provide first-class documentation for integrating
- Provide some kind of stripped-down version that’s optimized for Electron-type scenarios; perhaps they could make it more resource-light for this usecase than Chromium is
Gaining marketshare this way could garner better support from websites and/or libraries, and might also prompt corporate support from invested companies
> Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money, and cut their salaries (bonuses tied directly to increase in Firefox market share).
They fired the CEO that knew what he was doing. Personally, I think Mozilla is getting what they asked for.
What makes you think Brendan Eich would have been a good CEO? He was CTO of Mozilla during the period that Chrome was eating Firefox's lunch. He was probably more responsible for Firefox product decisions at that time than CEO Mitchell Baker.
"throwaway" is fitting, given the quality of this comment. I was CTO from 2005 (when we incorporated Mozilla Corporation for taxpaying reasons; before that I had a Chief Architect title; I was also on the Mozilla Foundation board) through 2014. Firefox market share grew until 2011. Whatever the causes of Firefox peaking then, if you blame me for the fall during my last three years there, you can credit me for the rise from 2004-2011. Use a consistent yardstick.
Point of clarification: Mitchell Baker was not CEO at that time (and never had been). She was chair of the board. The previous full CEO was Gary Kovacs, succeeded by acting CEO Jay Sullivan, then Eich for 9 days.
I feel they should start trying to out “out innovate” the other browser developers. Stop playing politics, which Google will always win, and just start making new “cool shit” that developers want to use! Hire the best innovative thinkers in the industry and set them free to invent browser apis for developers to use.
Also, they should be attacking things like electron, and “hybrid” mobile app development. Build a toolkit based on Gecko for cross platform development that addresses the problems with electron.
> Hire the best innovative thinkers in the industry and set them free to invent browser apis for developers to use.
I think they should be doing the opposite: Adding features the users want to use and keeping the web as simple as they can get away with. Google is already busy giving web developers whatever APIs they want, that is not a fight Firefox can win.
I would instead argue that Firefox's Gecko engine is beyond saving and that any money invested in it now would be better donated to other community projects because there isn't enough resource to catch up. Sticking with Gecko will eventually lead to the dismise of Firefox the organization.
Microsoft, with their resource and their ability to bundle Microsoft Edge in with Windows, couldn't get any appreciable amount of marketshare. Firefox, with less resource than Microsoft, won't fare any better.
Rebuilding Firefox with Chronium would salvage whatever the mindshare/marketshare left. Then Firefox could still wield some influence with their marketshare and the threat of forking Chronium.
I'm 100% onboard with Chromium being the universal de facto standard for the web as long as it's open.
Really, all I want from a browser is Chromium, full features without disabled APIs, with a few extras like Sync, P2P stuff, and codecs, fully open.
Right now, I think anyone with name recognition and marketing ability could probably develop a winning browser for 50k or so. Just... take chromium, add sync, and an ad blocker for high bandwidth video ads. Done. You have made the world's best browser, the rest is business stuff.
Mozilla itself didn't think the Gecko engine itself has a long term future either. After all, Mozilla funded the development of the new Servo engine for eight whole years, and it slowly replaced pieces of Gecko with Servo.
After Mozilla laid off all Servo developers in 2020, the future doesn't look bright for Gecko or Firefox.
This set of policies would spell the end of Mozilla, and the end of Firefox unless the community (or another org) picked it up. Mozilla is mostly funded by search engine companies, the largest being Google, and any direct attempt to compete with Chrome would probably end a significant chunk of that funding.
Like it or not, unless Mozilla does what Google sees as acceptable, Firefox can't continue. The only way to turn Firefox around and continue development would be to find an alternative benefactor.
Mozilla is mostly funded by search engine companies, the largest being Google
Not only that, but this creates perverse incentives for Mozilla. Google funds Mozilla to avoid charges of monopoly, and that disincentives Mozilla to compete with Google and make Firefox a competitive browser to Chromium.
Mozilla is currently funded by Google but why are you assuming that a non-profit oriented Mozilla could not find other funding sources? All their past attemts seem to be about monetizing the browser but just like Google has been throwing cash at them there will be others whose motives are more alligned with Mozilla doing the same. As far as I am aware there is no way to donate to the development of Firefox and even if there was I and many others would not do so while Mozilla while the Google funding steers Mozilla's interests.
Would Mozilla be able to get as much without Google as they get from Google? Probably not, but if they do follow the suggestions of the OP then hopefully they would not need as much.
Use all/most of the money from the Google deal to build a fund. Even doing this for a couple years will build a huge backup plan for Firefox and they can look at not relying on the deal for survival. Instead work off the interest earned on the fund.
True, but at this point it doesn't feel to me that the community has that much to lose. If we're truly sub-5% like Statcounter says, then as long as we minimally muzzle this particular paperclip maximiser (say, the browser engine must remain Gecko or an in-house project and cannot be Blink, user privacy must be no worse than currently, selling data or "partnering with" third parties is disallowed) and let it run for a couple of years, at least we'll get a viable browser out of it.
Despite my constant advocacy for Firefox for over a decade, a family member whom I respect greatly told me directly and in no uncertain terms that they do not wish to use Firefox and wish to switch to Chrome instead because of numerous issues they have observed. And the worst part is that as much as I wanted it to, Firefox wasn't up to it. I cannot help but think that this is a microcosm of what's happening more broadly.
Cutting organizational expenses might be good for unrelated reasons, but I don't see how that increases the market share of Firefox, and I can think of a few ways it could decrease their market share.
My goal, if I were CEO, would be to reduce organizational expenses (and increase other forms of revenue) to the point where the 100s of millions of dollars from Google ($562 million in 2017) was not required for covering the cost of firefox development and spend all those millions on advertising firefox until Google stopped giving it. I can't see where having such a large part of your finances coming from your biggest direct competitor could ever be a good thing, but at least spending it on increasing firefox's market share directly through advertising would have a certain irony associated with it. At least of the Alanis Morisette variety.
What he said was: get rid of the people who are not interested in making the Firefox browser better. Get rid of the distractions. Focus on the browser.
If the goal is to plow all available resources into Firefox, then cutting down on expenses that don't directly or indirectly support the existence of Firefox seems key.
The CEO and upper management do loads to steer the ship. If all they care about is enriching themselves, they will likely struggle to find developers who are in it for the passion.
Look at Google. It is a late-stage, post-IPO business that’s now, frankly, ran by the CFO with a CEO who cares only about the board and an ever-increasing stock number.
The people who have passion left for the most part. Replaced by those who only seek to enrich themselves and climb the perf ladder.
Would those who have passion stuck around if Google was ran by people who still had passion? I’d imagine a much greater number of them would still be there.
I guess my post was meant to capture the idea: "Do you find it suspicious that you are recommending CEO/Management be in it for the passion (and low pay!) but seemingly not expecting software engineers to make the same sacrifices?"
> Would those who have passion stuck around if Google was ran by people who still had passion? I’d imagine a much greater number of them would still be there.
Why not just lower compensation for software engineers? Then all the dispassionate perf-chasing engineers will leave for greener pastures and you'll only be left with people who are passionate about the products Google builds, no?
> not expecting software engineers to make the same sacrifices?
Are you talking about the same sacrifices? I haven't seen anyone here asking the CEO to not be paid at all, only those questioning the absurd amount. I don't think going from 1 000 000 to 100 000 (which would be a lot lower than what it was before, just to show the extreme) is even remotely the same "sacrifice" as going from 100 000 to 10 000 per year.
But to answer you original question, yes, Mozilla should also be looking for developers that believe in the mission instead of just trying to maximize their wealth. That should probably include moving the company somewhere cheaper.
on a more serious note, what if mozilla fires ALL execs? will it just crumble under its own weight or will that "industry linked remuneration" be replaced with more money for actual developers who get things done and are not in for the quick buck like address bar ads?
I'm hoping for the latter. Or if not, the that if the Firefox collapsed, it would re-emerge in some fashion as a grassroots community project with non-Mozilla governance.
Look at what happened to youtube-dl - even before the DMCA takedown, nobody was doing anything about the leadership being AWOL despite the huge PR backlog. Then, when it was taken down, various forks popped up, including yt-dlp which became a natural potential successor. They injected lots of potential, because the main authority was absent and they seized initiative.
Even after youtube-dl came back, they eventually went under a new management. The entire space of YouTube/video downloaders is better off for the DMCA incident, even if taken by itself it was a harmful event.
Mozilla falling might just reenergise Firefox, though I'd obviously much rather they undergo a priority shift instead, so we can keep continuity.
That’s rather inaccurate; yt-dlp grew out of youtube-dlc, which was started by the author of this ticket: <https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/26462>, filed in August 2020, some time before the DMCA in November 2020.
> Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money, and cut their salaries (bonuses tied directly to increase in Firefox market share)
And people wonder why non-profits and NGOs don’t attract the best talent. This entitled mindset is the why.
That people who want to do good work should earn less. Perfect! Let them pay for their vacation with goodwill and air.
This is especially rich coming from the HN crowd. Everybody wants a revolutionary but in the neighbour’s house.
There is a vast ocean between strugling to pay for your vacation and making millions every year.
And there is no "the HN crowd" - don't fall into the trap of assinging to collective consciousness for groups and then complaining that it does not behave rationally.
Assuming the board are unable or unwilling to salvage FF for the sake of Mozilla, would it be worth considering starting a new non-profit browser based on FF? A new organization without all that baggage? WaterWolf or something?
Donating money isn't going to help them. It might help them look good to some techies that follow that information, but otherwise most wont care.
Mozilla needs to focus on other products to use in tandem w FF. Email service that is private, VPN (i think they have a partnership), Thunderbird, zoom like platform. They need office/business solutions most likely. Devtools, dev services, etc.
I'm not saying forget FF, but they can't just focus on 1 product or they are doomed.
I know their phone project fizzled, but I wonder if there's a market for a Chromebook competitor. Position it as a privacy-respecting product for schools. Introduce kids to the idea that Chrome != The Internet.
https://www.kaiostech.com/ is the lineal descendant of FirefoxOS. It got to scale on the same plan: attack the low end of the Android market where the fatter, more recent versions do not fit.
They should also consider more "Oxidation" of Firefox components, if only because it lowers the bar for mere mortals to make open source contributions.
In corporate leadership, homophobia is not a "personal view," it is a matter of governance and directly impacts talent acquisition. Further, Brave browser is a Chromium browser that does little to stop the browser engine monopoly at risk here—it does nothing meaningful for browser diversity. Not one comprehensible point is made here besides, I suppose, treating Eich's firing as a political issue.
My thoughts on this are that every time I see a news piece about Firefox it's about "social justice", some code of conduct controversy, or something else utterly unimportant to web browser selection.
Being "Open Source" does nothing for me when Firefox engages in the same crap as other closed source browsers, like Pocket. Mozilla also allowed social issues to take precedence over retaining good engineers. Whether you like it or not, even assholes have a basic right to exist and the more recent culture of shun and cancel has had negative consequences for society as a whole. Maybe they were assholes, but I don't give a shit how nice the developers who made my web browser are.
I suppose the problem with Mozilla is the CEO/people who make decisions about Firefox, replace them and maybe Firefox could be revived. But I have extraordinary doubts that Firefox is salvageable at this point. Mozilla's priorities have strayed so far from mine that I cannot see them becoming something I care about any time soon. I suspect it is similar for others.
There is not one issue with Firefox, the people in charge are not competent. It's mistake after mistake after mistake. These mistakes are a direct result of prioritizing diversity over talent.
I think this post assumes that Firefox is an inferior browser, and that the cause is mismanagement.
But is Firefox an inferior browser? I think it used to be, but over the last couple years, it has made massive improvements in features and performance. I use it in both desktop and mobile, and I prefer it over Chrome.
As a software engineer, I rely heavily on my browser for work. For me, the multi-account containers in Firefox are the must-have feature. No other browser can offer the ease of separating multiple test accounts, and multiple gmail/gsuite accounts for multiple enterprises separate.
Also, I like how Lockwise on mobile is divorced from the browser, making it easy to use it to manage passwords across websites and apps.
Maybe the problem with Mozilla, then, is marketing. Maybe not enough people know that Firefox is much, much better than it used to be. Or maybe the general sentiment is echoed in your post. People don't feel that Mozilla is focused on writing good software, so they don't expect Firefox to be good.
Personally, I think the biggest cause for the loss of market share is simple:
Safari is the default on iOS and Chrome is the default on Android, and population of mobile devices is exploding, and there are no mainstream mobile devices that are carrying Firefox with it.
I agree - Firefox today is super solid. It blows away Chrome in terms of memory management and I have less compatibility issues with it than any other browser.
I agree with you on marketing and mobile - if the defaults are good enough on mobile then people are going to mostly use that. And while Firefox used to be hugely popular Chrome has really taken over its market share. Butnow Chrome has gone from a lean and simple browser to a bloated mess that chokes when you have too many tabs and starts using gigabytes of ram.
It has problems with memory, performance, rendering and battery drainage.
Every year I switch to Firefox and use it as a main browser. It usually goes for a month and then I need to switch again because Firefox has too many glitches.
Firefox has had a bad policy of not fixing the basics first before new features.
I do use Firefox as my main development browser still but that is because I’m more used to the developer tools than the alternatives.
That's funny, because I've had the same experience as you—but in the opposite direction.
In my experience, Chrome has problems with memory, performance, rendering and battery drainage. Every now and then I try to use Chrome (or a derivative) as secondary browser and I give up because it has noticeably higher latency for simple web page loads, and more likely to suffer irritating repaint flashes.
It's a common story -- people use browser A, start noticing a variety of problems, switch to browser B and everything is so much better. After a while, they start noticing a variety of problems, switch to browser A, and once again everything is so much better.
Those people are not being stupid, that is their real experience.
Sometimes the problem is in a web site (an update starts leaking memory, for example) and whatever browser is running gets blamed.
Sometimes it's just natural human bias—we want to see patterns, and we want there to be a solution ("just switch browsers!"), so we get selective in what we notice and don't notice.
Sometimes it's because profile cruft piles up, and resetting would fix it.
Sometimes the problems really are in one browser and not the other. There are plenty of legitimate problems to be found, and things change pretty rapidly.
How would resetting the profile help? It means losing addons and their configuration, the bookmarks, the open sessions and the tabs, the history, the about:config settings.
It means losing a lot of stuff, yes. It sometimes helps because some things slow down as state is accumulated. So resetting can speed things up, at the cost of losing all of your state.
But the comparison point is switching browsers, which also loses lots of state.
(In both cases, you can import a subset of your state into your new profile, and you'd probably get most of the performance advantages.)
I believe all browsers have been improving in their resistance to the accumulated state problem, but I also believe that all browsers are still susceptible to it.
For what it's worth I haven't had an issue with Firefox for at least five years. And in the entire history of using Firefox I've never had a problem that was solved by a profile reset—though that might be because I'm a technically savvy user who can troubleshoot with relative ease.
Any time I've tried switching away it's more to see if I'm missing out on something... and it turns out I'm not.
I’ve encountered annoying bugs like Firefox being unable to render elements when SVG filters are applied to them so they just disappear, or smaller things like extreme banding on gradients that no other browser has.
My biggest issue was (maybe still is, I quit using Firefox last year) is that on wide color gamut displays, like every MacBook Pro, it renders colors completely wrong. So it would render literally every website, save black and white website, completely incorrectly.
My main browser these days is Safari (so I’m still enjoying a lot of browser bugs). When I really need something to work or need specific de tools I switch to Chrome. For me Firefox is in a middle ground between those two browsers, resulting in me never actually using it anymore.
In case you wouldn't know: Firefox for iOS can now act as a password manager. So, even though Lockwise has disappeared, the function is still there through Firefox alone.
Several APIs that make powerful web applications possible are missing (e.g. WebUSB, various filesystem access APIs) and Firefox generally tends to lag behind Chrome when it comes to new APIs/web features.
The lower market share means that many web sites don't support it properly. For example, I need to keep a Chrome profile around for Zoom since the button doesn't even show up on Firefox, and when I tried to join a Teams meeting with Firefox, it failed in some non-obvious way, causing me to be late to a job interview (may have been due to some extension misbehaving or some config issue). I don't know if that's just because the sites don't test and do user agent sniffing, or whether Firefox is actually missing some APIs that would be required, but from a user perspective, it doesn't really matter, I can't use the browser for things I can do with Chrome.
> Several APIs that make powerful web applications possible are missing (e.g. WebUSB, various filesystem access APIs) and Firefox generally tends to lag behind Chrome when it comes to new APIs/web features.
WebUSB may not be the best example, as it was disabled by Chrome because there is no way to secure it. Though I agree in general that some APIs (WebGL) were experimental and behind a flag for too long in FF.
As a counterpoint, Firefox is/was ahead on some important APIs (WASM, U2f)
I have not shared your experience with Teams or Zoom. I use them both daily from FF on OSX.
And this is one of those places where FF could break with the pack. Sure implement webGL/usb/whatever but provide a simple browser and page enable/disable function for those people who aren't interested in having random websites sending rogue mining code to their GPUs, or various other API's that have questionable merit if you goal is a simple browser API/surface/function.
You're not very good at mind reading. I'm not advocating pro-bigotry. I just want a browser to focus on being the best browser, and not "fact check" for me.
A good time to remind everyone that when you donate to "Mozilla", you're donating to the Mozilla Foundation, which is the social justice part, not the Mozilla Corporation, which is the browser part.
The vast majority people who use web browsers have literally zero knowledge, awareness, or interest in these things. What actually seems to have happened, is that a long time ago now, their techy friends recommended they use Firefox instead of IE. Then those techy friends recommended Chrome because it was even better. Now it's arguably the case that Chrome and Firefox are equivalent from a non-techy standpoint, but non-techies don't want to move browsers over and over. That large audience is largely lost to Firefox until there there are big enough practical downsides to Chrome or upsides to Firefox.
As it stands now, even if techy people, who might be put off by the things you mention, were to be made perfectly happy again, if they recommend Firefox without a significant practical justification, non-techy people simply will not change from Chrome back to Firefox again.
Importantly, more and more people have just grown up with Chrome, never having used Firefox or IE even once. Even if Firefox stays as good as Chrome, more and more people will start their web browsing experience never having considered Firefox and just always having organically used Chrome. This alone will lead to Firefox losing market share over time, even if all existing Firefox users keep using it and loving it.
In my mind, it's clear that the reasons Firefox lost market-share are technical/practical, and the way it might regain market-share is also technical/practical improvements. That will be hard though, especially given Firefox would probably need technical/practical dominance on Android as well as on traditional computers.
If Google shut all the doors making ad blockers on Chrome virtually impossible that'd be interesting. Ad blocker use is pretty high and might be as high as 40% and if those people all defected that'd do it. Probably why Google can't do that though even though they clearly want to.
> I don't give a shit how nice the developers who made my web browser are
It sounds like you do give a shit that they care about "social justice" and you don't want to use their browser because of that?
Or are there specific features / functionality / performance / security issues that prevent you from using Firefox and are somehow caused by the worldview of the developers?
I am someone who does give a shit about not wanting to reward assholes.
There is one thing I think is worth noting. There's always all of this talk about, "It's the talent that matters, not the social justice stance of a developer. Keep the talented assholes; don't hire for social justice posturing!"
Well, I'm waiting to see all of those displaced "talented assholes" band together to create a product so compelling it will *prove* they were replaced by inferior developers for "social justice" reasons. By now there should be so many uber-talented people who aren't given their fair shake because of their abhorent political/social beliefs.
Or maybe... just maybe... those assholes talk a big game (as assholes often do), but aren't as indispensible as they believe themselves to be?
Being an "asshole" is not a white or black thing. Do you use linux? Because for many people, Linus is considered an asshole.
So, I've worked for a lot of effective asshole in my life, I may not have always liked them but I almost always respected what they were achieving.
So, sure someone is against gay marriage, i'm sure if you look carefully you can find uncomfortable things about anyone. I mean for some people just flying a US flag is a uncomfortable because it represents a country that still hasn't come to terms with genocide against the native people and imported slavery, as well as an economic system that rewards people for behaviors far more offensive than whether someone believes in gay marriage.
I've been sitting through my own companies D&I training for the past year or so, and the most important takeway I've gotten is something one of the trainers said, taken out of context... "We all need to get more comfortable with being uncomfortable"
So, if you damage your org over something did on their own time serving their own opinion your no better than them. Yes people trying to tell others what to do with their own personal lives (in their own personal bedrooms) is pretty sick, but so is getting into peoples private beliefs that they aren't wearing on their shoulder.
Just interpreting what the OP said and not really sure where I stand on the topic, but I think he means that "social justice" controversies have purged asshole devs that were competent developers producing good features and that firefox as a product is not as good due to that. Taking senior engineers off the roster will usually impact the product whether or not they were assholes.
As far as I can tell, OP's talking about the replacement of Mozilla Corporation CEO Brendan Eich, who had an engineering background[0] and was CTO but made a small but controversial donation to an anti gay marriage campaign, with Mitchell Barker, who came from a legal background and was formerly the president of the Mozilla Foundation.
At the time this was pretty divisive, because it was a candidate with objectionable social opinions but great technical chops getting ousted by a candidate who was uncontroversial but seen as more business-minded and more inclined to broad-spectrum activism outside the confines of Firefox's typical free software and online freedom work.
[0] he was the creator of javascript, among other things
Your timeline is off, FWIW. Brendan Eich resigned in 2104 and was replaced by Chris Beard as CEO from 2014 through 2019. Mitchell Baker became CEO in 2020.
In my experience Firefox has become a much better browser in the last 18 months, so if there was an asshole purge then maybe that helped?
If Firefox is missing specific capabilities that make it noncompetitive, and those deficits are traced to the asshole purge, then @rpnx might strengthen their argument by citing those examples.
Yea, could be that a purge helped. I tend to think assholes produce a toxic working environment and are almost like malignant cancerous tumors in the way they impact a company in the long run.
I give a shit that the people building my tools are injecting their politics into my tools in places where they don't belong. Browser makers being happy to decide what I should see on the web will make me bail.
Now, there are of course parts of politics that are pertinent to the tool in question - privacy issues for browser developers, for example, or tracking.
Both the Brave and Vivaldi teams have people I know I disagree with politically. But I like their products, and I like the companies? Why? Because whatever the companies' employees views, the two companies' politics are about user control and privacy, and they walk the talk. Both in their own ways that reflect the people making the tool, but insofar as the companies are political, they are political in a very, very narrow way.
Basically, they understand their job is to make hammers and not to sermon about flower arrangement. Mozilla (and much of the tech sphere, sadly) is increasingly the reverse.
I use Firefox daily and I have no idea what the hell you are talking about. What does Mozilla have to do with "cancel" culture? Is there some huge news article I am missing out on or something?
Likely rooted in the experience with Brendan Eich who had a long history with Mozilla, was appointed as CEO and then (due to his personal political contributions, mainly Proposition 8 related) essentially forced to resign as CEO due to the accompanying backlash - https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/brendan-eich-steps-down-...
According to wikipedia he now an "ardent" anti-masker for Covid and now people are trying to get him to step down from Brave browser. Does this guy just not learn?
Which shows what a joke Wikipedia is - a series of fiefdoms controlled by heavily biased editors ... the Talk page for that article is hilarious. It (correctly) points out that "ardent" is used nowhere in either source linked - one of which is a tweet, the second a NYT article that itself references a tweet. The dialogue is purposely crafted to encourage the reader to form a prejudiced opinion. Why would this even be relevant to his bio?
The guy literally invented Javascript and cofounded Mozilla. So he made a few political contributions that the Twitter mob didn't like. Maybe if Mozilla focused its efforts more on fixing actual bugs instead of countless UI/UX changes and seemingly purging their ranks of wrong-think, maybe more people would use their browser and we wouldn't be asking these questions.
I personally despise that we have a browser monoculture, but there are few legitimate reasons to use Firefox on platforms that support Chromium.
I don't think supporting a mandate to wear a basic cloth mask is a hill anyone should be willing to die on.
I'm fiercely, fiercely pro-mainstream-science, and there's no doubt that proper N95 masks (or better) are very effective against respiratory disease transmission. But mask mandates almost always permit basic cloth masks which lack strong evidence of efficacy. If we're not going to mandate an effective mask, I honestly don't see what the point of the mandate is.
N95 masks work. Well designed, well fitted, correctly worn, hygienically cleaned cloth masks probably work okay, though good evidence of this is still limited and based largely upon assumptions. From my own observations, the overwhelming majority of people are wearing a mask of poor quality and/or in a manner which the scientific consensus couldn't possibly agree was effective. And I doubt most people are washing them with soap and water every single day.
If we're not going to mandate an effective mask, I honestly don't see what the point of the mandate is. It makes as much sense to me as seatbelt mandates accepting a knitted scarf as an acceptable seatbelt.
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"Cloth face masks show minimum efficacy in source control than the medical grade mask. The efficacy of cloth face masks filtration varies and depends on the type of material used, number of layers, and degree of moisture in mask and fitting of mask on face."
"The use of cloth masks during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic is under debate."
"Until a cloth mask design is proven to be equally effective as a medical or N95 mask, wearing cloth masks should not be mandated for healthcare workers."
"In 2015, we conducted a randomized controlled trial to compare the efficacy of cloth masks with that of medical masks and controls (standard practice) among healthcare workers in Vietnam. Rates of infection were consistently higher among those in the cloth mask group than in the medical mask and control groups."
"Your cloth face mask isn't protecting you against the coronavirus variant omicron, health officials say. As common as cloth face masks have become, health experts say, they do little to prevent tiny virus particles from getting into your nose or mouth and aren't effective against the new variant."
"They found that the effectiveness of the masks varied widely: a three-layer knitted cotton mask blocked an average of 26.5 percent of particles in the chamber, while a washed, two-layer woven nylon mask with a filter insert and metal nose bridge blocked 79 percent of particles on average. Other masks scored somewhere in between."
Yea, not having to work with assholes is pretty great. Maybe there is some tradeoff to be made and a balance where keeping a productive asshole around could be better for the product than purging said assholes, but I think a team with that toxicity can't be sustainable in the long run unless its a team full of assholes that are content.
> every time I see a news piece about Firefox it's about "social justice", some code of conduct controversy, or something else utterly unimportant to web browser selection.
This can't be true, unless you have extremely unusual new reading habits.
The problem is when some assholes are actively engaged in denying basic rights from others. If you say "well those assholes have a right to exist", you're effectively saying "the assholes have more of a right to exist than the people they're trying to erase."
Could you clarify what basic rights you are referring to, whose existence ”the assholes” are trying to erase, and what methods they are using to do so?
I think they're talking about the creator of JS giving money to a political cause trying to block gay marriage.
There was a big huff about it in the tech space for a while when it happened and he ended up secluding himself after that for a while.
It was really not a good look. In the years since, we've seen a much larger push to shine the spotlight on behaviour that would have previously been swept under the rug or hidden behind technological "tenure".
If the "asshole" is being an asshole on the job yes. If the problem is that the coworkers don't like the "asshole"'s beliefs or what he is doing in his free time then they should be told to deal with it.
I agree that it is your prerogative as a consumer to decide how much you care about the integrity of the companies who make the products you use. Maybe it's just my inner Hank Hill talking, but I don't think a responsible consumer would ever say, "I don't give a shit how nice the developers who made my web browser are." The way I see it, if you're willing to be an asshole for profit to someone else, then you're willing to be an asshole for profit to me too. So I appreciate and support companies who make deliberate choices to treat humans better, especially ones made at the cost of profits.
- Prioritise getting the new extension framework fully functional. And continue innovating on the capabilities that are exposed. Especially on mobile where the new fenix engine is still limited to a small whitelist of extensions
- Sort out the multi-profile story. Container tabs are great, but the chrome model is also a great fit for many workflow (e.g. different people in a house or home vs. work profiles).
- Try and work on making Gecko easily embeddable again. Webkit/Blink gets all the attention because it's easy to embed into things. I suspect Gecko needs to compete in this market if it hopes to survive. It needs to have more than one company invested in it.
This ship has probably sailed now as they've fired most of their Rust and Servo teams. But IMO they ought to have created a rust-based cross-platform UI framework. They tried to do it web-based with Firefox OS but that was too slow. But with a Rust solution I think they could have owned both the mobile and desktop application spaces, which could potentially have made them a bootload of money and been a huge win for linux.
Chrome’s Profiles are the #1 reason I use it over Firefox. If Firefox had as complete of an implementation as Chrome then I would consider switching, but until then Firefox is a non-starter for me.
I use all 3 of these profiles all day every day for work:
* one personal profile logged into personal Google
* one work profile managed by the company, logged into company Google
* one development profile with all the debugging extensions installed, like React and Redux tools (they require access to all pages all the time)
I would imagine huge number of non-technical users share a computer and want their own chrome profiles so that they can access their own emails without signing out of their family members. I know my middle-aged parents use Chrome in this way for example, and it would be a blocker for switching them to Firefox.
Is this basically a use case where they don't want to create separate Windows users for some reason, but still would want their own private space in the browser?
With containers you can. It's literally opening a new tab.
If you have two profiles open at the same time like described you can easily switch desktops. The clear seperation of work and private browsing sessions helps me as well.
What is easy here? In Chrome, on macOS, it's command-` to switch windows and command-shift-m to open a new window in with a specific profile.
Also, links always open in the profile that is currently in the foreground. Is that possible in Firefox? Last I heard it isn't, but I haven't checked in a while.
Yes, there is but I don't know if it works for macOS since it works for me in Windows.
Set the profile you prefer to open for links as a default profile and make sure to tick the option to automatically use the default profile without opening the profile manager. Then for the second profile, you need to use the shortcuts for that with the argument like this
firefox.exe -P "<profile_name>"
And make sure you leave it as capitalized P, I believe that is the argument. Then apply the setting and click the shortcut. It should be opening links to the default profile that you set in the profile manager.
I use Firefox's container tabs all the time, which segment exactly the same way as profiles (albiet with the same extension pool). Personally I prefer having blended tabs in a single window, or having additional segregation; I keep Amazon punted out to it's own container, as well as social media. I know it won't stop all the cross-identificaiton, but it should at least help.
In Chrome there's an icon you click to switch. Honestly, if someone would create a FF extension that was just that, it would probably cover 90% of what's considered superior in Chrome.
have you used container tabs? those are effectively "different profiles" for what most people consider them. It's still shared extensions and history and bookmarks but you can login with different accounts in different tabs and it keeps that separate.
I use container tabs, temporary tabs and the containerise extension to help manage things. I use it so there's stronger isolation between the websites I visit, and cookies are cleaned up when I close the browser.
That's on my main/personal profile.
I have separate profiles for work stuff, one for each client or organisation I work with. On those, I only access sites that are relevant to the organisation, and I have a lot fewer protections. I keep long sessions, I leave cookies in place, etc. It's a lot more convenient that way.
An important UX difference is that Firefox's default "New Tab" keyboard shortcut doesn't respect the container of the current tab. I've found that it's really easy to accidentally switch back to the main container.
about:profiles looks like a debugging page, not something you use for launching a profile. And I'm not referring to its aspect, but usability. It's not made to be used daily.
I'll have to see if it can be "designed" with userChrome.css or something and I'll give it a try.
The only thing I can think of is that the UI is not as nice as chromes for switching? in chrome you can switch the profile from a menu option and there can be more than one profile active at a time with separate everything including extensions and bookmarks.
in firefox you don't get that easy switch and I am not sure the gui for the profiles is enabled by default. you have to manually start up firefox with a -P flag from the command line to get the profile manager. And you only get one profile active at a time.
This isn't true. As I'm writing this, I have three Firefox windows open, each in a different profile. What makes you think you can only have one profile active at a time?
were there any hoops you had to run to get that to work? afaict that's not possible ootb without adding a flag to the command line. I'll admit that I haven't really tried it since many years ago.
for 90% of the users out there that we need to convince to use firefox: having a command line switch is about the same as not having the feature at all... chrome has a menu item that brings up a brand new window in that profile.
I want firefox to succeed and it's my daily driver.
You do have to use the command-line and there is a single hoop: the `--new-instance` flag. I agree the situation could be made "normal" user friendly and it isn't right now.
When I open Chrome, I can open any profile straight away from the menu. On Mac, there’s just one Chrome icon.
When I open Firefox, I have to go to a page that looks like a developer debug mode, and then open a new profile in a new Firefox instance. I now have two Firefox icons in my dock. I normally work with three profiles, so now I have three Firefox icons in my dock all called Firefox. 66.6% of the time I press the wrong one.
The problem is that Firefox has to be at least as good as Chrome to succeed. Being _almost_ as good as Chrome means people will just use Chrome.
It doesn’t sync your entire experience. I have a completely different setup for each profile, and then I use Containers _within_ each profile. They’re not the same thing.
This is my personal opinion only, so take it with a grain of salt.
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Mozilla can't save Firefox. It's not that Firefox can't be saved, but rather that Mozilla as an organization is not capable of doing so.
My take is this - Despite a history of being relatively privacy friendly, the vast majority of funding for the organization comes directly from Google (To the tune of ~90% of their total funding, straight from Google so that Google can maintain its position as the default search in Firefox).
That leads to insurmountable conflicts of interest - They claim they are for people and for privacy, but they are funded almost entirely by Google, and have to secure search deals for their continued existence (the latest just this year: https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-go...).
In this light - I believe it actually BENEFITS mozilla to keep Firefox relevant, but not good enough to replace Chrome. If the browser genuinely becomes good enough that customers start switching from Chrome to Firefox en mass, Mozilla needs a replacement funding plan because Google can essentially turn the lights off at any point by simply refusing to pay them for search at next contract renewal.
While they've dipped their toes into paid products... most of them are not particularly relevant or compelling on their own merits (that's not to say they're bad, just not all that innovative or likely to drive enough revenue to replace the 500million a year google is paying them)
So not only do I not believe that Mozilla is capable of "saving" Firefox in this way, I don't believe they have the right incentives to even seriously try.
The unsaid part is that Google keeps Firefox alive so that they are not hit by anti-trust over in-browser search. That's why FF will always trail Chrome, its the designated loser. If it weren't for anti-trust, Google would have bought out Mozilla years ago.
You can't buy out an open source project. If Google bought it out and started messing with it, there would be an immediate outcry and Firefox would end up with the community fork winning out, just like it happened with MySQL and OpenOffice.
A browser would not do well as a volunteer driven open-source project. It is simply too big and too complex to be able to get by without full-time paid developers.
I don't follow this line of reasoning. Google pays Mozilla for the search traffic. If Firefox overtook Chrome in market share, Mozilla's position would become even _more_ favourable and they could command a larger sum from Google. If Google threatened to end the agreement, Mozilla could simply walk to Bing/DuckDuckGo or whoever else.
Right now, Google pays more than Bing or DuckDuckGo.
Perhaps Google just has mountains of spare cash, which DDG doesn't. Perhaps Google gets extra value as FF both provides search traffic, and keeps competition regulators off their back. Perhaps Bing thinks if FF changed the default search engine away from Google, 95% users would change it right back.
But if Bing is only willing to pay 70% of what Google pays - could Mozilla survive losing that much income? Or would it trigger a death spiral, with less money meaning less development meaning lower market share?
As far as paid products go, it seems like a no brainer to offer paid plans for privacy focused email or other g-suite-like collaboration services. It seems like Mozilla needs additional revenue streams.
>Mozilla needs a replacement funding plan because Google can essentially turn the lights off at any point by simply refusing to pay them for search at next contract renewal.
And then Bing/Yandex/Baidu buys the rights, and all that changes is the amount they get. It'd drop if Google publicly vowed they won't bid on it anymore, but there's also the possibility that someone like Yahoo pays more than Google like what happened in 2015.
It's not like Google is arbitrarily deciding how much money to give Mozilla, they are buying something at the lowest price they can.
I think Google is fairly arbitrarily deciding how much money to give to Mozilla (and it's roughly their current OpEx) - They aren't just buying search, they're also buying "competition" in the browser space.
Further, the kind of transition where Firefox might gain users from Chrome isn't instantaneous, and it turns out users have a preference here (most users don't want to have google removed from Firefox - they still prefer it. Mozilla is quietly testing a program to use Bing as the default, just to see how loud the feedback is: https://www.pcgamer.com/firefox-is-conducting-a-study-to-see...)
So there's a tension here that's beyond just enterprise deals.
Last - that deal didn't actually work out very well for Yahoo, and that was when Firefox had nearly 15% of the browser market (vs ~8% today).
>Mozilla is quietly testing a program to use Bing as the default, just to see how loud the feedback is:
Or Mozilla is running market research to show that X% of users don't care about the default search to drive up the price. As the deal isn't arbitrarily Google deciding an amount to give them, it's a bid between the major search engines. Just like it is for Safari.
#1 reason: Google has been spending millions of dollars on ads. 2010 many subway, buses, and TVs had ads about how fast Chrome was. Advertising works! Early adopters switched, followed by mainstream users.
Additional Key Strategies:
Google focused on developer experience with its tools.
Google shipped a good enough extension system.
Google invested in matching or beating a few key features but kept Chrome a leaner project overall. Worse is better and 80/20 rule.
Ecosystem evolution:
Google successfully got every major browser vendor to move to their rendering engine, except for Firefox. Gecko has always been harder to embed.
Slowly over time, some web devs stopped testing their work on Firefox since they were using Chrome and most browsers "just worked" like Chrome. Every week I hit a site that I have to use in Chrome because of a bug I'm seeing in Firefox.
Mozilla went all-in on trying to disrupt itself with a mobile phone operating system, which didn't work out.
Mozilla dabbles in many strategies (Privacy, Games, Advertising, WebXR), but none have been successful in growing active daily users.
Some people say Mozilla should focus on executing Firefox, but I think Mozilla is smart for trying to re-invent itself because the browser is a commodity, and if Google wants to own that on-ramp to the internet, it will.
Netscape and Firefox 1.0 were massive products. Mozilla needs a 3rd act to return to a significant marketshare.
> #1 reason: Google has been spending millions of dollars on ads. 2010 many subway, buses, and TVs had ads about how fast Chrome was. Advertising works! Early adopters switched, followed by mainstream users.
Not to mention paying the likes of Adobe, Avast, AVG, and Oracle to have their installers auto-install Chrome using dark patterns.
The amount of people in HN who think they can do a better job at being the CEO of every company; or being the president of any country; or being better than whoever is trying to something, astounds me.
Dudes, if saving Firefox was so easy that could be described in a single comment like that, it would have been saved already.
There are more people at Mozilla than the CEO, she is not responsible for all decisions. She is a quite nice person to be honest, has always been very kind to me while I was volunteering and later while I was working there. She is more into the Mozilla mission than many here.
Also, people need to understand that Firefox is not the reason for Mozilla existence, Firefox is one of the tools that Mozilla has (and depends on) to fullfil its mission. People need to wake up and realise that Firefox is the last remaining independent browser, and that fighting against Microsoft, Google, and Apple is damn hard.
There is a huge intersection between people who are often saying they know how to fix Mozilla and those using non-Firefox browsers. If people here who cares about Mozilla would volunteer, and also use the browser, Mozilla would be in a much better shape.
People who keep saying things like "cut their salaries", "cancel all projects", have absolutely no idea how all this works, or even how Mozilla works. I understand you're all frustrated, but you're going at it from the wrong direction. You need to remember that it was side projects that made Firefox. At that time the workhorse of Mozilla was the Mozilla Suite. It was also non-Firefox projects that brought up Rust and many other cool technologies.
Not specifically about Firefox but: if nonprofits can’t pay for talent then you get what you pay for, crappy talent for important positions. That said many people have your mindset so that puts all nonprofits at a disadvantage against any for-profit initiative as far as getting talent goes. You shouldn’t need to martyr yourself to do something good.
> Also, people need to understand that Firefox is not the reason for Mozilla existence, Firefox is one of the tools that Mozilla has (and depends on) to fullfil its mission.
No. This is arguing that the tail is wagging the dog. The only reason why people care about Mozilla at all is not their social projects, not the fact that they released a VPN, or the fact that they maintain Thunderbird (OK, fine, for some it is). The reason they care is because Mozilla is developing Firefox.
Subtract Firefox from Mozilla, and you get zero or less. And yes, we realise that Firefox is the last remaining independent browser - which is why it's alarming that they are focusing on anything else when the market share is so low. Their ship is sinking and they are debating whether the orchestra should play Bach or Mozart on the way down.
> Also, people need to understand that Firefox is not the reason for Mozilla existence, Firefox is one of the tools that Mozilla has (and depends on) to fullfil its mission.
This is why I downvoted you. (edit: will undo, this misunderstanding needs to be discussed.)
This is the big misunderstanding.
If Mozilla can do something in addition to Firefox, fine.
But Firefox is simultaneously Mozillas biggest contribution to the open web and their main income source.
Sacrificing Firefox for a higher goal is almost literally to butcher the goose who laid the golden eggs.
> Want to fix Mozilla? Take an active part in it.
Try that and get flagged for advocacy(!). Seriously: see the tab strip api to see it in action.
>There is a huge intersection between people who are often saying they know how to fix Mozilla and those using non-Firefox browsers. If people here who cares about Mozilla would volunteer, and also use the browser, Mozilla would be in a much better shape
I have to agree with this. You see everyone on HN talking about the importance of Firefox in the fight against Google's monopoly but yet when you read comments about anything web related many (maybe most) commenters say they use Chrome (Someone should do a HN Poll).
There is no excuse to use anything other than Firefox if you claim to care about things the open web, software freedom etc.
very simple answer, because Mozilla doesn't control the infrastructure that runs on 80% of smartphones in the world and ships Firefox as the default browser.
It really has nothing to do with the bespoke features that people on HN pay attention to. Firefox doesn't control any platform and defaults matter. There's a reason Google pays them a gazillion dollars to be the standard search engine, which you can change with one click. It's also why Safari is still going relatively strong.
Microsoft was forced to allow browser choice in the EU. I don't see why Apple and Google shouldn't be subject to the same, with the added condition that browser rendering engine diversity gets preferential treatment.
Give users a 60% chance to see Firefox as the first option, then show them the multitude of Chrome/Safari-based browsers.
The problem is that even when that choice is given, every Google search pushes Chrome, Microsoft constantly pushes you to switch to Edge. I'm not sure how much Apple pushes Safari, but last I heard it actually gives superior battery life on Mac OS so there's a real technical reason to not use Firefox.
Because no one cares anymore about browser diversity now that the main browser is open source, runs on every platform and complies mostly with browser standards. Not to say it isn't important. But it was way worse when IE was creating a dependency on IE and Windows due to poor standards.
One thing missed when talking about Firefox's market share is desktop versus mobile market share.
If you look at Wikimedia's metrics, Firefox still has ~10% market share of the desktop browser market[0], not too bad considering Firefox is not the default browser on any platform outside of linux systems for the most part, and that Mozilla is much smaller entity than competing browser vendors. Still down from the ~30%[0] desktop share they had, but now they have 2 large competing entities offering default browsers so the decline is somewhat expected.
Also, contrast this with Firefox's ~0.7% share on mobile[0] where Mozilla has never been able to get a good foothold.
As long as Firefox isn't available as a default on mobile and as the share of mobile device web browsing increases, Firefox will keep losing total market share as a percentage.
Strategy wise, refocusing efforts on retaining that 10% desktop share might be a good idea. From there, work on building up more of the desktop share and then try marketing the mobile browser to the desktop browser community to build up mobile browser share.
I feel like Firefox on Android should be more popular than it is. Chrome is default, but it doesn't offer an Ad Blocker. Firefox with uBlock origin is a far superior experience. Although there are other 3rd party chromium-based browsers that are just as good.
I suspect that it's poor market share is due the very poor performance of the older fennec implementation.
I tried to use FF on Android, and while it's capable and works rather well, perf-wise Chromium is just years ahead (I use Brave).
You can see it well on JS-heavy sites like Twitter, the difference is very easy to perceive with loading time, scrolling perf, and also with memory management (Firefox evicts pages from memory cache aggressively compared to Chromium; you sometimes switch a tab or switch an app, go back, and bang, it's gone and needs a reload); and I have a decent good phone (not top shelf, but a "high-mid" Pixel 3a, probably 60-70th percentile within Androids?).
I use Firefox mobile for the past 3 or so phones. To be blunt, it sucks. The only reason I haven't switched to a Chromium derivative is because I don't want to migrate my bookmarks, because they don't have as good ad blocking support, and out of sheer stubbornness.
I came to say something similar. I'm a diehard Firefox user, and can articulate all sorts of things about it I love, but mobile has been hugely disappointing. I still use it but there's a massive discrepancy between Firefox mobile and desktop.
Desktop is great; not that there's nothing that could be improved, but I love it and do not want to switch for any reason.
Mobile has weird lags and hangs that I don't understand, and has this weird crippled extension system. Going into Nightly and adding some of them helps a little but not really. Its UI has been strange at times, and these little changes keep cropping up that I don't quite understand.
I still use it but I have thought about moving to something else, and the main reason I don't is because it's so convenient to sync between devices.
There was a big part of me that was suspicious that when mobile started becoming dominant, someone in Mozilla made a decision to migrate the mobile browser to something more advertiser-friendly to recoup funding, with the idea that the desktop would be the libre target and the mobile version would be the moneymaker. It just all feels so inward-focused and not user-focused, with crippled extensions and weird UI tweaks all the time.
It has gotten far better in the past years, although it still has some pretty crippling bugs and tiny yet incredibly annoying UX issues (e.g. can't easily wipe the cookies for the site you're currently on, try opening a URL from your clipboard in incognito).
But Firefox has gotten sufficiently close that the overall experience of Firefox with an ad blocker beats Chrome with ads.
Out of interest, what hardware do you have? I had a Samsung S7, and the difference between Chrome and FF was minimal (Chrome was slightly faster, but only just). That's quite an old device, but I wonder if somehow it being a high-end device when it was new still counts for something...?
Cat S52. Although a 6502 managed to respond immediately to input 47 years ago, so I don't understand how a modern processor could struggle with this today.
I’d argue that FF could possibly convince some manufacturers to preload Firefox with uBlock installed as a faster browser (if UCBrowser could, surely FF can).
This. When I joined my prev company in mid 2018, I checked some graphs, and mobile users market share was around 45%. When I checked the same graph in mid 2021, mobile market share was >60%.
Many people don't have a desktop anymore those days, or barely use it.
Every time I restart Firefox, I get about 8 different prompts for "See what's new!" "Reset your Firefox profile now!" "See our new diversity initiative now!" etc.
It feels like opening a Windows Me installation from 2000. I just want to get browsing done.
That's...not the case (and never has been) for me. You only restart it when you get an update (in which case that wouldn't be very often)? Or you did something whacky in about:config? Or maybe a bad extension. Dunno, not normal
Huh that's fun...I've had pocket disabled for so long that I forgot it was a thing. I've always been pretty vigilant about turning off nonsense like pocket, so I suppose I'm not as typical of a ff user as I thought...but still think what the parent comment described sounds abnormal.
I only start FF when I get a customer report about an issue on FF. I guess I start it seldom enough to always trigger some sort of watchdog?
Anyway, here's my 2 cents. I only open FireFox when a customer reports an issue, and I'm always barraged by a deluge of unwanted info, which doesn't encourage me to open FF more often.
If you're on the stable channel you'll see a single tab of "unwanted info" once every six weeks. Half the time it's just a generic "Firefox updated!" page.
May be OS-specific, or it may not happen when you've set Firefox to restore previous tabs when restarting, or there may be a way to turn it off.
I don't remember seeing many of these on my actual machine (I did get the color scheme nonsense if I remember correctly), but I'm constantly seeing these in dev/testing VMs where I just installed it for testing and occasionally keep it updated.
Search for mstone (browser.startup.homepage_override.mstone) and set it to "ignore" (without the quotes) am not sure why this has to be done this way and I don't have it disabled since I want to know what's new, but hope it helps.
Oh and browser.disableResetPrompt and set it to true. Create it if it doesn't exist
He's exaggerating a bit bit his point still stands. After an update there's at least one extra tab about the update, and sometimes more like the recent-ish stupid color scheme feature.
Exaggerating isn't particularly helpful, makes me thing the problems the OP has with the browser are more based on perception of "culture" or something rather than the actual product
It's not about perception. The browser's job is to display webpages and otherwise get out of the user's way - Firefox constantly fails at that, much more than a lot of paid, proprietary software even.
Really? I've never had that happen and I've been using Firefox for 2 decades. Occasionally I've had a grumble about it not being the latest version, but that didn't stop me.
Short of the removal of flash I can't think of anything you could be referring to, so perhaps rather than exaggerating some actual concrete examples would be good.
Also been using FF for 2 decades, but can corroborate the experience you cannot.
I have seen all those things he complained about. Diversity initiatives, new features, etc. For me it appears as a new tab on restart that I have to close, and it does feel like it's every single time I update, and sometimes between updates.
It is especially annoying on a seldom-used machine where the browser will typically be outdated every single time you start it up. To make things worse, the machine is rarely used and only gets powered on when you actually need to do a task right away, so the bullshit update notifications are infuriating. I can put up with the updates themselves for security reasons, but intentionally getting in my way for no functional reason is too much.
I believe the reset thing is due to it being a good way to solve user problems that have accumulated over time.
It seemed a bigger thing a few years ago, but if you keep seeing it, then they've probably identified you as someone likely to benfit from it. I don't think I've seen it for years.
This is just speculation though.
I just get an update "what's new" tab after every update, which seems reasonable if you are adding or removing things.
Chrome went heavy on marketing. And their marketing was compelling. At a time when the web was really slow, Chrome advertised speed - remember those Chrome ads where they'd load web pages while something flew by the screen?
At a time when the web was dangerous, Chrome advertised security. Remember when Flash wasn't sandboxed? When Java executed automatically? When nothing had auto-updates?
Firefox caught up, but at best it's "as good". What's it really doing for me?
The answer is presumably privacy. And that's cool. But most people have a hard time understanding what "privacy" means. Further, you can say Chrome is weak on privacy, but it's hardly as bad as people make it out to be.
So basically Mozilla is, at best, equivalent to Chrome, but Chrome was way better for a long time. So it's got to convince people to come back, but its only selling point is really vague.
And then you have some other stuff like companies can manage Chrome via GSuite. So now your work computer is X% more likely to run Chrome. So now you have to choose to have a different experience at home and at work.
What would I do?
1. I'd refocus on the mission. Privacy is critical, security is critical. That would mean a number of things - how is it that Brave is the first browser to integrate TOR? Isn't that insane? TOR has been using Firefox by default forever, and no one thought "maybe we should just support this thing, and start heavily contributing to it" ?
2. I'd invest heavily in next-gen performance and security. Chrome has In-The-Wild zero days being exploited - that's an opportunity. The web is heavier than eve
- Cut out all (or at the very least, most) initiatives that don't serve the goal of promoting Firefox's market share or sustainability going forward
- Donate the major money drains that aren't Firefox to the Apache Foundation or another worthy custodian
- Fire all inessential staff that don't want to work on Firefox.
- Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money, and cut their salaries (bonuses tied directly to increase in Firefox market share).
- Make sure that all donations from now on are redirected to things that support Firefox development and nothing else, period.
- Make whatever partnerships are needed to have a steady stream of income, be that donation or selling out to Google or Bing.
Firefox is in trouble. Firefox is also Mozilla's raison d'être, and they should embrace that. We as a community, cannot afford to let Firefox languish until the only browsers in the world are Chromium derivatives. The diversity of truly independent browser engines is far too important to give up without a fight.