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Ask HN: How can we help Firefox not to dissapear?
102 points by urlwolf 11 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 123 comments
I'm very impressed with Firefox (in terms of features) and value the fact that it's preventing a tech monoculture on chrome (dominated by one corporation).

I see FF users dwindling down, and I'm worried. What could we do to prevent FF from going out of business?




Mozilla needs new leadership, one that is focused on building the userbase, rather than lining their own personal pockets and riding it into the ground. The chair of the board receives 3x the salaries of the rest of the executive leadership combined[1].

There are so many ways that Mozilla the organization could do more to promote not just a browser, but the open web writ large.

1: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-990...


Maybe a true fork, with key players in the tech community could set things on the right path. Firefox exists in spite of, not because of, Mozilla's leadership.


I'd say this is true of CEOs across almost all multi-million (or billion) dollar companies. I won't say CEOs aren't important, but they're not 100x the value of the median worker in a company.


For a good CEO 100x seems fair, if we consider there's a 10x range within workers already.


CEO Mitchell Baker is even less involved with Firefox's direction than you imagine, which is probably a good thing. She's too busy playing TED Talk diplomat.


No, it is not when she gets paid millions of USD, money that could be spent making Firefox better, which it needs a lot.


Mozilla's assets increased $200 million in 2021. Mitchell Baker's salary is not limiting Firefox development.


And their market share decreased 30%. Not limiting? She destroyed it.


Complain about Baker's performance all you want. You complained about her salary. Her salary is not limiting Firefox development.

Statcounter said Firefox's market share increased in 2021 surprisingly.


I genuinely wonder what the Mozilla leadership think when they see threads like this.

Do they just not see them and float above the real world in some bubble where a web browser is some abstract thing that has no intersection with reality? Do they know they exist but pretend they don't? Do they scoff and say "they just don't understand, bless them"? Do they scoff and say "those idiots still think we care"?

How is possible to command generational wealth for the platform: millions upon millions in funding, and the goodwill of nearly all open source enthusiasts, over decades, have the entire community basically unanimous in saying "this is going downhill", see all the metrics agree and still plough onwards and downwards?

For a friend, how can I get a job like that?


>I genuinely wonder what the Mozilla leadership think when they see threads like this. Do they just not see them and float above the real world in some bubble

I would have spotted a literal bubble when I was an intern in the SF office, but they definitely didn't mix with us.

I interned in ~2013. I had a boss who took everyone but me out to lunch, forever aggreived I'd gotten an offer prior to Eich being forced out. Despite designing my own research project on short notice that got a lot of good feedback, I was neither hired on nor pointed somewhere in the valley to work...

Meanwhile, I got the impression that my advice to the engineers to abandon "VR" (which danah boyd had pointed out can't even be used by everyone) and the weird firefox os crap to focus on getting ram usage down and browsershare up to build up a war chest, to partner with other search engines than google and to ban said googlers from our events since they kept poaching people...

But I was not heeded, and Firefox instead introduced pocket and did a bunch of other stupid stuff...

Nevertheless, I keep using it, because I love the extension system and the community around it but that summer broke the heart of the abused pre-teen who discovered the web and themselves via it.

The old Firefox, a lean extensible open source browser... is alive if you throw some switches and are selective in your extensions... but they messed up very badly that summer after Snowden and never recovered.


> the weird firefox os crap

I really liked Firefox OS, was an early adopter using one of the ZTE Phones, tried my best to acquire an Fx0 while I was in Japan but they wouldn't sell me one without a phone contract, I also crowdfunded the matchstick that never came to be.

I'm not sure what KaiOS is doing with it now, they're not very transparent.


i'd have rather ppl creates some fork of android sans google trackers.

one issue with open source phones is the divergence of talent means more unpatched vulns, imho.

i don't have the money to experiment like i used to, so i don't like to comment on these matters -- i suspect kai, like many other projects, may struggle financially and go dark in ways that make ppl more paranoid than they should be rather than anything truly nefarious.

if they'd done proper user research they'd have found lots of people wanna just do navigation and calls on the phone then hotspot to a laptop... but instead the os got bloated (imho)


It's a natural trend cycle: things grow beautifully, they stagnate, their corruption load exceeds their productivity and they start declining, then they collapse in lieu of something new.

There's hope for revitalization, but only if it's caught early-on. I feel Mozilla doesn't have much time.

A cliche that may apply here is "follow the money". If your primary financiers are entities that prefer you to avoid competing with what that financier is producing, you're not looking at the interests of the userbase anymore.


Right, but is Mozilla leadership vampiracally extracting the last cash before the lights go out, are they desperately holding out for 00 to come up on the wheel, or are they just sat there with eyes screwed shut going "it's still 2008, it's still 2008"?


Product managers have no idea these threads exist and leadership doesn't care.


It's genuinely baffling that that can happen. If a leading industry forum had an equivalent "Product X is dying, is there any hope left" post on the front page, there'd be quite a to-do in the office on the day after! Hell, we get that after a rude overheard comment at a trade show!


Do you think they have time to look at this stuff?

Maybe on the way back from their latest cocktail party, their secretary can give them a little summary of what's going on on the message boards.


> For a friend, how can I get a job like that?

Ask around inside Alphabet, Inc.


See my long thread here about a month ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37801542

Bottom line from that thread: The organization supporting Firefox does not have the trust or gravitas left to gain enough competent followers to create the conditions needed to sustain Firefox as a leader


I'm confused about which part of the link supports your hypothesis.

You might as well say that a forum on XDA Developers is proof that Apple products suck and nobody buys them. Mozilla is trying to convince people who have never been to this forum to use their browser, not a vocal minority of idealists who hate the idea of Mozilla daring to try and expand their revenue streams ("pointless endeavors" as user "sirwhinesalot" calls it).


In what ways has mozilla meaningfully dared to try and expand their revenue streams?

Seems to me, they've been very daring and motivated at expanding the executive compensation of a single board member, chair Mitchell Baker, who earns 3x the rest of the executive leadership combined.


> In what ways has mozilla meaningfully dared to try and expand their revenue streams?

I think that Mozilla VPN is pretty nice. It's based on Mullvad VPN, so they seem to know their audience (given that Mullvad has a pretty okay reputation among many tech savvy or privacy conscious folks, a lot of which probably use something like Firefox as well): https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/products/vpn/

I guess there's also Firefox Relay, for those who might benefit from something like that: https://relay.firefox.com/

Not many other products to give them money for come to mind, though.


> In what ways has mozilla meaningfully dared to try and expand their revenue streams?

Pocket. Mozilla VPN. Is MDN Plus meaningful? Probably the Mr. Robot ad would have led to paid ads without the backlash.


Watch for the repeated mentions of "I don't use Firefox because (specific issue)" for which the answer often turns out to be either "that was fixed years ago" or "have you reported a bug so that there's any hope whatsoever of someone fixing it?".

Don't let Firefox threads turn into a litany of unreported hearsay bugs. Get them reported and fixed.


> "have you reported a bug so that there's any hope whatsoever of someone fixing it?"

The average user probably wouldn't wanna bother with the process of reporting (and I sure don't either):

1. find the place to report it (so googling "report bug Firefox", going to a Mozilla help page that goes to Bugzilla)

2. make an account

2.1 enter an email

2.2 verify the email

2.3 come up with a password that fits the requirements

3. read the bug writing guidelines

4. actually reporting the bug

4.1 selecting Firefox

4.2 describing the bug

4.3 find out if its already reported or not

4.4 selecting version, writing a summary, steps to reproduce, actual results, expected results.

4.5 potentially needing to provide additional information that might not be easy for a user to get (e.g. stack trace, output of about:memory, profiling)

versus just... not using Firefox, it's just not easy enough in my opinion, I know on crashes, you get a popup where you can just write a short summary and it'll automatically send some of the information to Mozilla though.


And then there is the issue of project maintainers actually accepting a proper and well-built bug report.

I can’t remember which one it was, but years back I found a bug in some open-source project. Made a bug report with all the information, steps to reproduce (full workflow, with expected and actual results), screenshots, the works. Essentially the GOLDEN STANDARD for a bug report. Everything they could possibly be needed to investigate it.

My report was closed with the comment, “did not provide the location in the code where the bug occurred”.

Like, WTF?? That’s not a part of a bug report, THAT’S YOUR JOB!!

I ended up just uninstalling the software, as that bug interfered with what I was doing and there were other options out there.


Consider contributing or donating to what was intended to be the replacement of Gecko (Firefox's web rendering engine), Servo.

https://crowdfunding.lfx.linuxfoundation.org/projects/servo


I thought servo had died, it's great to hear that work is still ongoing.


Mozilla said Servo was for prototyping. Not Gecko's replacement.


Fix Mozilla. Or fork Firefox and create a team with equal resources. Firefox by itself has lost all selling points which could sway the normal people. And Mozilla is unwilling or unable to add new strength. So at this point there probably is not enough benefits one can use to advertise Firefox and let it win against other browsers.

But maybe this is also just my impression. Why not start with a website listing reasons and strengths of the different browsers, and research the selling points of browsers and Firefox specifically. Maybe this could be used to figure out which features could be used for advertising, and which features Firefox is missing to compete with others.


I think it’s this.

Mozilla seems broken. I love Firefox and its mission, but I have no idea what Mozilla’s mission is. And they seem too beholden to Google to really make a browser good enough to threaten them.

I think we need another “true” open source group of devs who just love browsers and love writing browsers who would like to fork and work on.

I would support such a group, but I don’t think it exists and don’t know how to effectively encourage it.

But I feel like donating money to Mozilla is actually counterproducti


A large majority of Mozilla's activity is developing Firefox.

What would a browser good enough to threaten Google look like? Has anyone else produced one?


This impression is dramatized. I'm a technical user, I can't detect a difference between browsing websites on Firefox and Chrome 99% of the time. I imagine the non-technical user notices even less of a difference.

I think the decline of Firefox market share has a lot more to do with forces outside of its control than the quality of the product.


I agree, although I suspect most people nowadays interact with Firefox for the first time via the mobile app rather than the desktop. The difference between FF mobile and Chrome is pretty noticeable. Overall usability is worse, if not also performance.

If you're using Chrome on mobile, and the differences between the desktop versions are negligible, why would you not just stick to Chrome on desktop as well?


Chrome v Firefox on mobile (android at least) is pretty noticeable, but in a good way IMHO. Firefox on mobile supporting extensions makes it 10x better out of the gate, but there are also little thought-through things like not having the horrendous "pull down from top to refresh" which 9 out of 10 times I trigger is an accident and not at all what I wanted.

I think this is actually a good example of where Firefox could really make a difference on desktop. Introduce a very powerful extension framework, allowing things like what Chrome is removing in manifest v3. Killer extensions will be built and people will switch for that. For the users who would inevitably install malware extensions, there will always be Chrome. Firefox doesn't need 100% market share, just one big enough that it can't be ignored.


I couldn't survive without uBlock on Firefox mobile. The web is just that hostile and awful.


I see and hear about many differences between Firefox and other browsers, mostly on user-facing features, but also some on technical level. They can be small, or big, depends on the user. Maybe your view is too technical to really see the user-impressions?


> I see and hear about many differences between Firefox and other browsers, (...)

Can you point out what you feel is the single most noticeable difference? I use Firefox as my daily driver but I also use Chrome, and I never noticed any difference.


It's not a single difference, and not something simple to point out. Because yes, at surface they are mostly the same. They mostly look similar, behave similar, Firefox is on surface just another browser like chrome. Which is the problem, because Firefox does not offer any features outside the core-ability of Web-Browsing.

Chrome on the other side has good integration into Googles ecosystem, has better support from Webapps (yes, this sometimes is a relevant topic), is depending on the platform significant faster, and seems to have some better side-features here and there. So its whole identity is to be THE Google-Browser, well polished for the modern World Wide Web.

Similar stuff is with Opera, Vivaldi, they all have their own special identity which they support with accompanying features. Like Vivaldi being an app-suite which offers more than just web browsing, or Opera with their Gaming-Browser catering to give gamers a good selling point. Not sure that Brave is doing today, but they were once strongly focused on AdBlock and earning Money?

Firefox on the other side has nothing of this. It once was the everything-browser, which could be anything through extensions. A mail-client, ftp-client, web-archiver, note-app, office suite, and much much more, all depending on the Users preferences. But that is lost, and now it can't even restore lost basic features. At this point it's just a window to render Web-stuff, with a better Adblocker and customization than Chrome. And even this is not advertised well. I mean the last ads I saw from Mozilla were not even about anything specific, just random pictures...


I don't use Firefox as my primary browser, but I do use the desktop version of it on various computers numerous times per week as part of some work I do.

I find Firefox to be noticeably slower than the various Blink-based browsers and Safari (when available) when running on the same systems. I'm referring to the overall responsiveness of the UI and the application itself, as well as the rendering of sites, and the subsequent interaction with them. I find this to be the case for a fresh installation with no extensions, all the way through to an installation with common ad blocker extensions installed. Firefox is just plain slower, from what I can tell.

Firefox's extension signing nonsense is another pain point. As part of my work, there's a fully-trusted custom extension developed in-house that I need to install. It's trivial to install in the various Blink-based browsers. On the stable releases of Firefox, though, I have to jump through numerous hoop to get it installed and usable, and this has to be done each time the browser restarts, which is often in my case.


> I'm a technical user, I can't detect a difference between browsing websites on Firefox and Chrome 99% of the time.

That is exactly what they are saying.


The only time I can detect a difference is on complex web apps like Photopea which by their own admission is optimized for Chrome.


> Fix Mozilla. Or fork Firefox and create a team with equal resources.

What is there to fix? I use Firefox as my daily driver, and I think it's already flawless.

To me all major browsers look and feel the same. There are subtle visual queues to remind us of which app we're using, but browsers are pretty much interchangeable nowadays.

What exactly do you believe Firefox does wrong that Chrome of even Edge or Safari do right?


> I think it's already flawless.

It's behind even Edge on features, let alone Vivaldi or something.

• No integrated option for vertical tabs

• No integrated ad-block (I know there are reasons but still)

• They broke the old extensions system, and its replacement is inferior

• Bundled development tools 99.9% of users don't want or need

• Built in Win98 era profile handling when this is the OS' job

• Can't sync toolbar settings or search engines

(as per discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38048385 )

• Needs custom stylesheets to even hide the immovable built in tab bar

• Needs `about:config` tweaks to enable custom stylesheets

In re the last 2: FFS this is meant to be the customisable FOSS tool here!


I'm sorry to say but your list sounds like the poster child of desperate nitpicking.

Complaining that Firefox provides development tools when all major browsers also ship with those it's simply absurd.

So is complaining about lack of an integrated adblock when Firefox was the one who created that feature and allowed any third party to roll their own.

Whining about vague complains about profile handling when Firefox made it trivial to run multiple profiles perfectly independently as separate processes, and even to pick and choose which profile to run at app start.

And the peak of absurdity is complaining that Firefox is customizable and allows you to do stuff no one in the world cares about.

There are plenty of reasons why feature requests are triaged, and your post is a poster child of absurd feature requests.


> Complaining that Firefox provides development tools when all major browsers also ship with those it's simply absurd.

No it is not, and here is why.

1. How many developers work on Firefox? Chrome & Chrome or Webkit-based browsers are already some 95% of the market.

Citation: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

It is borderline irresponsible to work on Firefox now. Test on it, yes. Develop on it, no.

2. There is already a developer edition: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/

I am just arguing that more functionality needs to be moved to that from the ordinary mass-market edition.

> So is complaining about lack of an integrated adblock when Firefox was the one who created that feature and allowed any third party to roll their own.

No it isn't. It's a feature of competing products. I am arguing Firefox should be the power users' tool. So replicate the key functions the competition have.

> Whining about vague complains about profile handling

Dude, if you don't understand it that doesn't mean it's vague.

When the Mozilla suite was developed, the main Windows OS was Windows 95, which did not come with a browser. IE was not only an add-on it was a paid-for extra.

Now the OS provides profiles and functional separation. Lean on it, make the default edition as small and as fast as possible. Less is more.

> And the peak of absurdity is complaining that Firefox is customizable

Again, ISTM you don't understand me. I am saying it's still more customisable than Chrome and they should lean in to this. Don't make it necessary to frig `about:config` and add a config file to move a freakin' toolbar. This is not a hard point.

> and allows you to do stuff no one in the world cares about.

So you don't know how to customise your browser. I do. I care. I did my research.

E.g. citing the Classic Addons Archive:

« 19,450 Firefox add-ons created by 14,274 developers »

https://github.com/JustOff/ca-archive

A lot of people care a lot. 15,000 developers falsifies your ludicrous "no one in the world cares about.

Like many others, you are mixing up "I don't care" with "nobody cares", and you are wrong.


Like 99% of people don't care about any of these

Why does HN always assume everyone is a power user


Mozilla the Corporation is having some trouble; seems to have lost focus. The browser is good but the Zeitgeist of HN (and elsewhere on the web) is that their loss of focus is causing their marketshare to decline. Some mis-steps, staff cuts, folk still mad about Pocket. The product is good (my daily driver too) but the thoughts are it could be better if more focus was on the Browser and less on fluffy blog posts and VPN, etc.

Chrome, Edge and Safari are doing: a) being the default and b) being the default.


> What is there to fix?

My impression of Mozilla as a company over the last decade is that they are in the business of burning money under the pretext of doing good. And while doing that, they ignore the product which enables them to earn the money.

> I use Firefox as my daily driver, and I think it's already flawless.

It's not bad, but far less than what it once was and could be.

> To me all major browsers look and feel the same.

The differences are deeper than just visual gimmicks. But true, on the core-abilities there is not much more than this. And this is a big problem too, it seems people today don't even know what's possible in this space. It's all the same, because to few people know it better.

> What exactly do you believe Firefox does wrong that Chrome of even Edge or Safari do right?

It's wrong to be the same as the leader. Be different.

Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, they are all different, and they sell well enough with being different. Firefox has nothing like that, it's just building on a history they mostly buried.


> I think it's already flawless.

There are more than 18K open bugs in Bugzilla for Firefox. That's far from flawless for everyone.


This comment reads like an entitled gamer complaining about the next Call of Battlefield IV is "literally 0/10" for not including their favorite RGB-colored skin for a submachine gun.


Actually, no, the chair of the board is unapologetically fleecing the organization.

You aren't donating to firefox the browser, you are donating to Mitchell Baker.


I don’t think it does at all, your comparison is pretty clumsy and inapplicable. To stretch the connection you made, it might be if Activision sought out R&D ventures and educational initiative instead of tending to its golden goose, which in reality it obviously does, as is its responsibility.

Firefox is Mozilla’s flagship product, the organization wouldn’t exist in its current form without it. It’s understandable if people are frustrated it doesn’t appear to be getting the org wide funding it proportionally deserves.


Where did I say Firefox is bad? Lacking a selling point which distinguish it from competition does not mean it's generally bad, it's just not good enough to bring in enough new users to balance out the loss of users.


I've been seeing this sort of laziness all over lately. Some people seem unable to separate analysis/criticism with opinion on overall worth/merit. i.e. if you think there's anything wrong with Organization X, then you must hate them or secretly be a supporter of Organization Y, their arch nemesis. It's annoying at best, dangerous at worst (because that type of thinking can lead to behavior/decisions that are never questioned or challenged).


Nothing. The Mozilla Corporation pays for the development of Firefox with:

1. Google's fee for default search (the vast majority of their revenue)

2. Paid Firefox services (Mozilla VPN, MDN Plus, etc)

Remember that there are things we don't have any control over in life. You have no control over the success or failure of Firefox because its financial means of survival are controlled by people who are not you (unless you feel like signing up for a VPN).

My understanding is that the Mozilla Corporation is doing just fine for itself. They even have some financial information published [PDF]: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202...


AdBlock on mobile is a Firefox great advantage that everyone can appreciate. You can install it with AdBlock on mobiles your friends and family uses.


You can install it with AdBlock on mobiles your friends and family uses.

You just pointed out why everyone don't appreciate it.

If "everyone can appreciate it", why isn't it a native/default part of the browser? This way, you wouldn't have to install and maintain it for your friends and family.


This is a great feature. However, the UX is super bad. I use Firefox for desktop for many years know and I'm happy with it. But for mobile, I keep it installed (and use it from time to time) just to support it.


100% agree. This and the nifty little feature that lets you stop webpages from being notified that the window is no longer on top or the screen is no longer on.


Google is keeping them on life support for anti-trust reasons. What impact do you hope to have?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-go...


1. Software companies need to support it. My employers both don’t anymore, including one that says it is “socially deprecated.” A bug in Firefox gets closed as “did you try Chrome?”

2. People need a reason to use it that isn’t privacy. I don’t care about privacy personally and certainly am not changing browsers over it. Could be a killer extension or some new browsing system.


On 1. yeah this is a serious problem. If webapps start failing to work well under FF all bets are off. I didn't think of it. Testing on another browser increases costs of development. But the alternative (being in the hands of a single company owning the internet) is pretty terrible. It's one company that has a single choke point on how you deliver your product. If for whatever reason your company and the monopolist have incentives that are conflicting... you know what's going to be the result.


If a webapp only works in chrome then it’s a good reason to not use the said app at all or if indispensible fire up Chrome, use the app and then close Chrome. But unfortunately Im in minority here, the masses move in predictable and manipulable ways.


I'm a long-time, hard-core FF user on all platforms and I admit to having used weird extensions. As time goes by, however, I wonder whether it's worth it. Too many websites break because they aren't tested with FF. I wonder whether it'd be a viable way forward if FF forked Chromium and added the excellent rights & extension management on top. That way no more effort would have to be spent on the rendering or browsing engines, end-user experience would improve (as a result of better web page compatibility) but the things we love about FF (extensions) would still be there?


I think the alternative engine is a thing folk think will block G from more hijinks, like maybe WEI.


I use Firefox on all my devices, and you'll have to take them feel my dead cold hands before I switch back to chrome. Not only Firefox is the only obstacle that protects us from browser engine monoculture, it is actually superior to chrome (in my experience) on both mobile and desktop.


Safari does not protect from browser engine monoculture?


Can I install it on my Android?


What fraction of web sites do you believe were tested on Firefox on Android?


100% of those that were created by developers who are worth their salt.


Firefox does not have the platforms. If you're for ex: google you have android, google.com... to promote your browser. It's the same for all the big browsers except Firefox. For the average user, I don't know how can Firefox compete with that.

Too bad Firefox OS did not became a real thing.


> value the fact that it's preventing a tech monoculture on chrome (dominated by one corporation).

Actually the company that is preventing a tech monoculture on Chrome is Apple with the mandatory Safari on iOS.

A company can afford to ignore Firefox, but they can’t afford to ignore iOS.


The sweet moment in time when Firefox was the dominant browser was a great time. Google really does deserve to lose the antitrust case for chrome. I hate it so dang much.


You can evangelize Firefox among your circles and on technical forums (such as HN).

Beyond that there’s nothing you can do. Firefox is paid for by Mozilla Corporation, whose major revenue source is Google’s search partnership. Initiatives like Mozilla VPN and MDN Premium are minuscule in comparison. These are also not available everywhere and Mozilla Corporation doesn’t seem aggressive enough to create more paid or subscription products that people are willing to pay for.

Don’t donate on mozilla.org assuming it will help Firefox directly. That goes to Mozilla Foundation to promote the open web. Not a penny from that can go to Firefox development or marketing.


What would happen if Google loses it's currently ongoing antitrust lawsuits? That would mean it cannot keep paying Apple the default search engine fee. But would that mean it cannot keep paying Mozilla the same fee? Effectively halting Mozilla finances?


Continue to use it.


I'm fairly content with how they are doing. I can't think of anything that would let them buy users to compete with the big names, and if they could afford to they'd probably be doing something to tarnish their core values.

Certainly, almost every suggestion I've read in threads like this over the years is indistinguishable from concern trolling, so it would seem the hive mind doesn't have any good ideas either.


How to save Firefox? Change Mozilla. Mozilla does anything, but a development or advertisement of either Gecko and Firefox. Mozilla wastes too much time on online petitions and asking Big Tech not to be bad and the main source of income they have is Google - Google pays them millions, so it does not surprise me, why doesn't Mozilla wants to get in a way of Google. We need a community like a one of Debian.


How much difficulty is there in creating a wrapper that could then host multiple rendering engines in it? Like a browser-wrapper that could switch between the chrome, webkit and firefox engines -- embedded in there some how? Perhaps even some of those more exotic rendering engines as well. Then one could browse with a safer wrapper which manages bookmarks/history/etc and perhaps each could be an isolated container so no profile leakage. You could have one "browser" and then one tab using Chrome/Blink w/o add-ons for YouTube but other tabs using FF engine, or servo or webkit or whatever?

Is this a thing Rust could do? Or would one need to code this wrapper in C because we'd have to link/embed so many other C projects.

I'm sure it's very difficult -- but is it impossible?


1. Use it. I have used Firefox on and off since the early "it's better than IE" days. More users gives them the opportunity for more resources. More users increases the odds of websites testing on it. It's currently my favorite mobile browser, because adblock makes mobile web far more usable.

2. Test your website(s) on it. Maybe you don't officially support Firefox, and maybe you're not a QA, but if you are a web developer you should use your site in Firefox and fix any bugs you find. Don't give your users a reason to abandon Firefox.

3. Join the discussion when you disagree with Mozilla's leadership. It may or may not change anything, but large vocal online communities have impacted the direction of large open-source projects before.


This is my take, but it's just IMHO:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/29/mozilla_asleep_at_whe...


You cannot. Most of their funding comes from one source: Google, and that is pay per impression largely. Unless they get another large source of funding to offset what they're going to continue to lose, then they will shrink until they disappear.


Do they need another large source of funding? Everything I’ve read about Mozilla seems to say that they only spend a small fraction of their income on Firefox. Maybe FF could spin off the way Thunderbird did.


> Everything I’ve read about Mozilla seems to say that they only spend a small fraction of their income on Firefox.

They spent 88% of income in 2020. 56% in 2021 through a combination of more income and less expenses. Mozilla Foundation expenses were 7% of of all expenses in 2021. What did you read? Where did you read it?


Mostly comments here on HN, I'm looking for some proper citations. In the meantime, are we talking about Mozilla Corp (for-profit software dev company) or Mozilla Foundation (nonprofit umbrella corp)?


So, trying to unpack the OP's multiple questions a little:

1. Preventing Firefox going out of business -> as noted by others, Mozilla is actually doing decently well financially, and continues to dedicate a large part of its resources to Firefox -> however given some of its revenue sources, maintaining a certain share of users is important to maintain that state of affairs

2. Driving more adoption of Firefox -> Most users have pretty simple browsing needs, and a non-negligible share still don't know what a browser is (we all know a few I wager) while still using one daily, -> Competing browsers have semi-exclusive or exclusive distribution channels for their products which help drive their adoption (Google.com, some Android flavours, ChromeOS / Mac and iOS / Windows, Bing, Outlook & Office) -> Thus as with any product, driving adoption could be done by: --A. offering a killer feature many (actual) people care enough about to download the browser for - for most people, this would need to be significant speed or friction reduction (Adblock, etc) which Firefox already does well but perhaps not significantly well enough --B. get users early, i.e. partner with websites, apps and influencers that reach younger users to promote/recommend Firefox and its features, notably on the privacy and personalisation side (themes, meta filter, Adblock, password and history sync, etc) - think some viral Tiktoks on the benefits or simple product placement --C. get a series of not-just-tech ambassadors to promote the browser along with the work of the Foundation, which may be done cheaply as they do have commendable initiatives --D. Partner with like-minded organisations to recommend each other's solutions where possible, e.g. Automattic or such -- etc etc

Firefox has been my daily driver on all devices for 20+ years. I personally feel it's never been as good as it is now: it's fast, the memory woes are gone, the sync works like a charm, password suggestion and management is seamless, the Android version is great (love the bottom navbar option).

Probably not perfect - what is - but I just wanted to share a more upbeat comment here, and perhaps one more geared towards the majority of users, who will be less technical and choose their browser's (or better said default to their browser's) for vary different reasons.


Complain to website owners about sites that don't work on Firefox. Try to provide detailed steps to reproduce the error, detailed error messages from the console (control meta J), and screenshots.

I think Firefox enforces some security constraints more strictly than Chrome. One error I've seen often has been blocked resources due to Cross-Origin Resource Sharing without the proper permissions, such as via Access-Control-Allow-Origin headers.

For security related errors, I emphasize that this is a potential security issue and I use FireFox for its security.


What could we do to prevent FF from going out of business?

*We* don't have any control over the situation.

What Mozilla *could* do but won't is take a strong stand on privacy by default --- something more than lip service. But their sugar daddy wouldn't approve so they can't.

In any case, it's probably too late now --- credibility and integrity have been lost.

Brave is what Firefox could and should have become. Brendan Eich (boo, hiss) grabbed the opportunity that Mozilla intentionally chose to ignore.


> In any case, it's probably too late now --- credibility and integrity have been lost.

That, and user base. Their position now is way worse than it used to be, and the viable options open to them are closing off.

Firefox should have pushed more privacy and user-convenience features by default. Those were a big part of what got them adoption to begin with.

Pushing open-protocol social networking built into the browser would have been a good idea, most likely. Amazing differentiator, in line with the browser's perceived values.

Half a dozen other good ideas that might give their browser an edge and deliver things people actually want.

But they needed to start this stuff more than a decade ago.


Why Brave? Why not something like Vivaldi or anything else? At least there is no crypto/ad model there. Firefox lives of Google money while Brave is based on Google technology. Seems to me like FF is still better option here.


Why Brave?

Privacy, speed, stability, compatibility, availability.

At least there is no crypto/ad model there.

I'm not a crypto fan so I don't use it. It is easily ignored and has no effect unless you choose to enable it.

Seems to me like FF is still better option here.

Seems to me FF is beholden to and needs to appease Google. This is why they talk privacy but don't offer it by default.

Brave doesn't suffer from these "political" contradictions and complications that run counter to user interests.


Why “boo, hiss” next to Eich’s name? He’s had massive influence on the web as the creator of JS (which I’m not actually fond of for its dynamic typing), and as the once-head of Mozilla.


Because a fair number of people here don't seem to like his politics and they tend to judge Brave based on this.

See below.


That's fair. I believe in selective usage for some things too, but the thought came to me that what happened with Eich getting ousted is probably a very early instance of what people call "cancel culture" these days.


People tend to judge Brave on the ad replacement idea. And collecting donations for publishers without knowledge or consent. And inserting affiliate codes. And all the cryptocurrency things. And promoting FTX. See below.


> Brave is what Firefox could and should have become.

A little known Chromium fork?

Brave has some privacy advantages by default. Firefox has some privacy advantages with configuration. Both are useful.

Vivaldi seems to have been more successful as a power user's browser than Brave has had with 1 eye on cryptocurrency and 1 eye on privacy.


"Stop using Brave."

https://www.spacebar.news/p/stop-using-brave-browser

He's right.


No thanks.

As I see it, the choice is between my privacy and your politics.

No offense but my privacy is the bigger concern to me. Brave is one of the most privacy focused browsers available on every every major platform. Privacy by default --- no fiddling with add-ons or updates or configurations, just install and go.


FF already went out of business once. It wasn’t the end.


Most people don't care about what browser they have anymore. The world has moved onto apps, for better or worse. This will only accelerate if we move into AR/VR more seriously.

I love Firefox, but as long as Safari continues to be the default on iOS and Chrome continues to be the de facto default everywhere else, I don't see much hope for Firefox long term.


By "strangling" its leadership and "strangling" Chromium. That can only be done by doing substantial development without Mozilla's consent and filling niches where Google have no profit. Both are impossible feats though.

I don't think Mozilla is dead like it seemed a year ago though, obviously nowadays it's as influential (close to zero) as some companies like Atlassian.


Gecko should be decoupled from Firefox (embeddable)

It should support hardware APIs like Web Serial API (their stance that a browser is not an app platform is ridiculous)

Chromium's huge and underappreciated weakness is that their font rendering on Windows is horrible (at standard 96 DPI anyway), FF could've capitalized on things like that.


After pause, there is still ongoing development on embeddable engine: https://servo.org/


Fork it into a browser people pay for. Become more successful than Mozilla. Hire Mozilla developers.


Firefox is up against companies like Microsoft, Apple and Google, who are happy to use their dominance in their fields to increase their own browser market share. Microsoft's own attempts are almost pathetically desperate, in fact. So, regulation, I suppose.


Ask Google to provide even more funding to Mozilla?

Beyond that, FF should be alive as long as there are paid developers to keep it up to date in terms of W3C web standards and security. Mozilla is a non-profit whose revenue is mostly unrelated to the number of FF users.


Mozilla exists to siphon effort away from competing browsers while furiously twiddling its thumbs to avoid innovating in anyway that might offend its gracious Google funding.

Their existence is actively harmful to the web. Firefox deserves better.


reach out to the devs for any number of webkitgtk browsers, agree on a 10-year plan to factor it into a bunch of smaller, more maintainable libraries/interfaces and eventually split from Apple, and go to work.

unless you can bring better leadership to the project, Firefox is a dead end. you’re talking about monocultures: how many different webkitgtk or qtwebengine (chromium)-based browsers are there? how many gecko browsers are there? which one’s the real monoculture?


I think Mozilla disappearing might be good for the web. They're a sick company IMO, and Firefox kind of sucks.

"We care about your privacy" but they also send your memory dumps to Mozilla when Firefox crashes. "Might contain private data" ... yeah ok. Just one of infinite examples, really.

I bet in a couple of years after we would see the development and rise of an actual non-corporate browser that serves the user. No telemetry, build-in ad blocking, no extension signing, no pushing services, no build-in ads or search engines, more powerful extensions, etc.


I don't think Firefox will disappear anytime soon because Google needs it alive so Chrome can stay out of the "monopoly" territory.


People won't be happy with Firefox until they've destroyed it and we have to choose between Chromium-clones and Safari. Victory.


Everyone except the folks leading firefox want it to succeed


Give Mozilla money. Stop beating around the bush.


At least the Android version would for sure have to be taken up by a different organization, they've done everything they could to make it unusable


Riot against currently leadership. It won't happen so I'm hoping for it to burn so something can come out of its ashes


Firefox is a product that hasn't found any way of monitization. Without money they cannot implement the features that chrome offers and web developers use on their web products. As such users will have zillion of little bugs, be annoyed which make them move to chrome and the circle will continue.

Let it die. Let Google be sued and forced to break Chrome away. Let every engine be based on the same engine. Less bugs. Easier for developers. Less user problems.


Kill it.

Replacing it will be a gargantuan effort, but until it's truly dead every attempt to do so won't even be given a chance due to appeals to "just use firefox" or to stop diluting the efforts of the firefox team.

Firefox as it stands is a zombie sucking the efforts of good talented developers away from hypothetical new hopeful things.

As others have said, it's also a backstop for Google against antitrust suits. Firefox surviving without any hope of ever thriving is the ideal scenario for Google.


Let it die. Its essentially ran by children at this point. Between the recent obsession with identity politics and crap like this, I'd rather use IE: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...


Because they oppose spreading the views of a politician who staged a coup and attempted to end free elections? A person who is currently on trial in federal and state court for doing that?

Keep in mind that this was posted two days after the coup attempt, and emotions were running high throughout the country.


No, because the executive of a browser company (an apparent agnostic software tool, not a social media network) is advocating for "deplatforming" ... you don't think thats strange?

Mozilla, from my understanding, has always been big on privacy first and data protection. This most definitely goes against their ethos, which is understandable, given how they've been hijacked over the years. I'm glad these advocates of "free and open software" show their true colors, it makes it really easy to not use their software. I'm not alone on this either.


Deplatforming has no relevance to privacy and data protection, regardless of your feelings on the issue.

Mozilla runs a content suggestion platform (Pocket), not just an agnostic software tool. It is sensible for them to have a stance on this particular issue.

It’s also not “against their ethos” just because you don’t agree with it.




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