What’s up with Firefox?
recode.net
recode.net
By focusing on low-end phones and not Nexus- or Galaxy-class handsets, they lost sight of the fact that smartphones are aspirational devices. People want the best phones they can get, with high performance and high-resolution screens. They don't care about libre software or the Open Web if the devices on which it runs are perceived as inferior. (Everyone I know uses either an iPhone or a reasonably performant Android phone, and I don't run in wealthy or tech circles much these days.)
Look at the runaway success of the iPhone. It wasn't cheap, but because it was clearly a quality device, both regular people and developers clamored for them. (Remember the hue and cry when Apple initially said they wouldn't provide a market for third-party apps?)
If Mozilla really wanted to spur interest in FirefoxOS among developers, they should have set up kiosks at every Fry's Electronics in the greater S.F. Bay area (on the doorsteps of Apple, Google, Facebook) to sell decent, unlocked phones directly. People would have lined up to buy them just to hack on them. I would have seriously considered buying one as an alternative to a Nexus phone, if one had been available.
1: Ars Technical eviscerates a $35 FirefoxOS phone: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/10/testing-a-3
EDIT: I just read that review you linked and it suffers the same problem - a total lack of perspective. The only critical error I can see is the lack of internal battery to keep time synced, which will be a major setback for browsing because of authentication and whatnot. Other than that, the sorts of people spending 35$ on a phone do not care about the three different materials, the thickness, the shitty camera, etc. I've seen the most horrifying, hackneyed together internet connectivity solutions in China that to mock a 35$ phone for being "too thick" is to be just... out of touch.
The lesson here, and where we failed, is that if you don't have control over the full stack you're shipping (hardware and software) and can't manage the QA and sign off process before shipping, you expose yourself to bad surprises.
Anyway, crappy hardware cares more about software efficiency. Firefox OS struggled massively with performance, to the point of absurdity; targeting low-end hardware with that is an idea that only ever made sense on paper. Supposedly it was just a temporary problem, optimizations were coming… eventually...
It does when those Bay Area hackers are the ones who decide whether or not they will port their app to your phone.
The mistake is rather that for closed protocols you are dependent on the Bay Area hacker to port the apps instead of "everyone can implement the open protocol".
GP's point is that targeting these markets was a mistake. Their strategy was fundamentally flawed from the start.
> Other than that, the sorts of people spending 35$ on a phone do not care about the three different materials, the thickness, the shitty camera, etc. I've seen the most horrifying, hackneyed together internet connectivity solutions in China that to mock a 35$ phone for being "too thick" is to be just... out of touch.
Again, GP's point was that the idea of selling a $35 phone to China was what killed Firefox OS in the first place.
If Mozilla was targeting the market for cheap, crappy phones, they were also targeting the search market on cheap, crappy phones. Unfortunately Yahoo, Bing and Google, the companies who comprise nearly all of Mozilla's revenues, need access to extraordinarily rich markets to justify their bids. It's not clear to me that they'd be substantially better off if the Mozilla phone was considered a success.
There's also government social welfare contracts to consider, or good faith agreements with a government that allows you to corner a more profitable market (you provided five hundred thousand affordable phones to our people, so we'll let you lay fiber through our country / get through our Great Firewall / whatever).
Not so. Android decided to do cheap and lean, too. I did some price comparisons in emerging markets back in 2015, and everywhere that Firefox OS tried to play, there was an Android alternative available at a comparable price. More details are here:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/537661/firefox-maker-batt...
Firefox OS was doomed the day they partnered with Telefónica. It's a massive juggernaut which phagocytes every startup they touch, assimilate their talent, then destroy the rest.
For those who don't know Telefónica, it's something akin to T-Mobile or AT&T (maybe even bigger, not sure). They had to change the name and branding of their phone division, a massive feat in both cash and brand recognition a few years ago to clean up their shitty reputation because people hated them so much.
In the tech side that HN may be interested in, they earn money by winning government contracts and developing crappy tech like a regular consultancy. They have a very high tech R+D division which I'm sure does wonderful work but their projects don't seem to surface.
In summary, if you see something "developed by Telefonica" it should turn your alarms on.
It does make it hard to learn from the experience though. Maybe the lesson is about learning how to quit at the right time.
I'm a Mozilla employee and I was very deeply involved in Firefox OS work.
On the engineering level, Telefonica was very helpful and working with them was actually a good experience. (can't say the same about all partners :().
Hindsight 20/20 is a powerful bias and it's easy now to talk about why FxOS wasn't meant to be.
All I can say, is that we tried our best and designed a pretty usable device in the end - just week ago I launched my Z3 with latest nightly of Firefox OS 3.0 (from April 2016) and damn, it's actually pretty nice and super smooth, and I'm speaking as a user of the Pixel.
I deeply believe that there's room for an open source operating system and that web stack is a good platform to base it on. The legacy of Firefox OS in form of tons of spec work and engine improvements (Firefox memory usage!) makes it much easier to do this now and I hope someone will.
But anyone building a new mobile OS will be facing the elephant in the room: will you get the top 5 apps to run or be ported on your OS? Without that, no way you can succeed. For FxOS, the unwillingness of Whatsapp to build an official app was more damaging that all the other reasons I read about.
OSes are commodity vehicules for apps, which are rightly what users care about. This gives a lot of power to prominent apps, which are often silos themselves - so maybe the fight to give is to displace these!
I've also known Telefonica engineers and they are some of the best. Maybe my bitterness against the behemoth clouded my words and I apologize for that.
The problem, as Lance said, is their inability to execute anything that doesn't provide them a direct, noticeable impact on sales (said to me by a Telefonica exec)
What I'm truly sorry for is the fact that the Firefox OS flopped. As an engineer, I know that you can build an awesome product but the execs may trash it if it doesn't go in the expected direction. And, with Telefonica, that happens too often.
It does have it's glitches (TV guide screen UI is very unresponsive) but I have few complaints. The Youtube app probably gets some usage as well as screen mirroring from Android/Windows PC.
Comcast. The word you're looking for is Comcast.
A more recent example would be the merger of the despised Time Warner Cable with Charter, now renamed to Spectrum.
Yeah, I remember when Firefox OS first came out, and when I heard of Mozilla's strategy of starting in the third world and then moving up, I knew Firefox OS was doomed.
Why? Because it reminded me of something I heard about car platforms, years ago. Back in 2002, GM introduced a pair of cars in the European market both based on the same platform: the Vauxhall Vectra and the Saab 9-3 (not the first generation of either nameplate, but the first to share a platform). GM made sure to introduce the Saab first. Why? Because Saab was a premium brand and Vauxhall wasn't. GM knew that "Saab built on Vauxhall technology" wouldn't fly -- people would see it as Saab degrading themselves by raiding a mid-level car for parts. On the other hand, "Vauxhall built on Saab technology" would go over very well -- people would see it as Vauxhall incorporating elements of a premium car.
The moral of the story is: you don't release a budget model and work your way up; you release a premium model and then bring it downmarket to cultivate the image of bringing luxury technology to the masses.
Your comment actually reminded me of an old Top Gear episode [1][2] where they described how Saab were instructed by GM to change only the body and the badges of a Vauxhall Cavalier when producing the Saab 900, but they ignored them and modified so much that the two cars only shared 1/3rd of the parts [2, 03:59]. The same thing happened again with the Vauxhall Vectra and the Saab 9-3, but to an even greater extent.
It certainly sounds like Saab didn't want to be associated with GM or Vauxhall or use any of their inferior technology or parts.
[1] http://www.topgear.com/videos/jeremy-clarkson/tribute-saab-p...
[2] http://www.topgear.com/videos/jeremy-clarkson/tribute-saab-p...
80% as good for 20% of the cost wins. You just have to be willing to accept selling for 20% of the cost.
The problem Mozilla has is that their hardware is not going to be any better/cheaper than somebody else's because it is somebody else's, and they can't undercut Android on price because Android is free.
What might have been an interesting strategy is to create a Firefox-branded version of Android that ships Mozilla equivalents to the Google apps.
The main problem with Firefox OS and also Canonical's Ubuntu phone was that they treated the lowend market of certain countries like second or third class citizens, assuming the cheap price would make up for the fact that there were no apps and the performance was terrible. What those companies didn't count on (but frankly should have), was that Android would just get cheaper and cheaper and the those countries would be fine with running two or three year old hardware (especially since apps frequently support old versions), rather than running a second-class OS.
I would always ask Mozilla what they would do when Android simply got as cheap, and I never got an answer that was in any way encouraging. And the answer was, they would accept defeat and give up.
A friend of mine had a Firefox OS phone at one point that she got for free at a conference, and I just remember at the time it was very difficult to even purchase a low end model outside of Europe at the time.
Part of it is carrier lock-in, but another huge factor is that you can't just install Firefox OS onto any old mobile device. Back in the late 90s/early 2000s, you could install any Linux on any PC/x86 system. PC was and still is a solid standard. The mainline kernel does a really good job of supporting the PC, both old and new (with really old support getting dropped and forked into things like the Linux/386 project for people who still use 386/486 embedded systems).
There is nothing similar for the ARM market. There is no standard. Almost no phones support Device Tree config (and definitely none of the flagships). With Windows and Linux, you install your base, you might need to install some drivers/modules and then you're done. ARM is a spec sold to SoC manufactures and then vendors attach whatever the fuck they want to whatever random pins. There's no unified boot loader. No standard way of determining devices. No standard platform. ARM isn't a platform. It's just an architecture.
http://penguindreams.org/blog/android-fragmentation/
There are plenty of x86 chips out there that aren't in PCs (The Wonderswan and the PS4 are both great examples of totally-not-a-PC), but they are the exceptions.
Ubuntu Mobile could have changed all this with the Edge. We may have finally had some standardized phones for open source and alternative operating systems. As it stands, every rom you see out there has to be customized for the hacked-n-patched together kernels of each and every single phone. It's not always an issue of binary drivers and no standard Kernel ABI, as some of these vendors patch things deep in the kernel in totally hacky, non-upstreamble ways for their kludged together hardware. Combined with binary blobs, closed baseband firmware, etc. etc. it's just a mess.
Currently there is no, convenient hackable mobile device platform, and that's keeping us from the same Linux revolution on embedded devices.
I'm surprised that Google and in particular Apple aren't coming under scrutiny from competition watchdogs as Microsoft did with IE in the early 2000s.
Competition watchdogs in almost every other first world country, however, are investigating Google for various antitrust claims.
Apple doesn't get a lot of scrutiny from competition watchdogs because they aren't a monopoly anywhere. Heck, outside the US, the iPhone has a pretty tiny market share.
I don't find patents or lobbyists particularly agreeable - but for an organization of a certain size to go without them in the 21st century is likely a very expensive strategic error.
> Thank God we nipped that in the bud.
Furthermore, many exploits don't care if their running on a JIT or on a scripting engine - that's an implementation detail. And if you really cared about security, you could design a verifiable native subset (as several systems have done) - webassembly shows that even slow standardization processes that need much more complicated cross-device compatibility can move meaningfully in that direction.
Disallowing non-first party JITs completely for security reasons is at best delusional, but more likely intentionally anti-competitive. Minor security bonuses are just gravy.
I imagine you never used a mainframe OS.
No, I don't. But all my friends wanted an iPhone and they're not programmers.
I think most people didn't know or even consider one could develop apps for phones at the time. Or why would someone want apps on a phone. Or even what an "app" is. They only knew "programs" on Windows.
People bought what was available. There were starting to appear some apps for Nokia phones but it wasn't widely popular. It was also a hassle to download / update.
The wow factor of the UI and interface design more than made up for it though, but there is a famous interview where Balmer laughs at the iPhone because it was expensive, had no keyboard, and no applications whereas Microsoft was selling millions of Windows phones a year with all of those.
And to counter your anectode - pretty much none of my friends wanted an iPhone and they're not programmers either ;P
In fact people wrote apps for rooted iPhones before iOS came out with official app support and an Appstore.
It was crazy how after apps came to the iphone suddenly people did know and there was even a little cachet to it.
Because what the globe needs is yet another company pandering to tech elites and ignoring the huge numbers of people out there of modest means? I mean seriously, Apple does all this stuff you're saying, pulling in devs with the shiny stuff, and targeting the SF yuppie... and this helps the people in Spain and India how? Not to mention that you're talking about the market segment already occupied by Android. Mozilla was trying to cater to those left behind.
Mozilla's raison d'etre isn't to push libre software per se. It's to enable the masses; libre software is merely an asset in that mission.
Read again what I wrote: the point was to get the phones into the hands of hackers, so they would write apps and create that ecosystem to ultimately benefit people elsewhere. (If there's a place with a more active hacker culture than the Bay Area, let's bring the phones there.)
I agree with amyjess' point made elsewhere. A quality phone is the means by which you get people interested in a platform, particularly developers. I think that's what's happening with Android and iPhone, in that the first phones are expensive, but the cost is spiraling ever downward. I just would rather see a freer alternative succeed, and hoped FirefoxOS would be it.
> iPhone ... but the cost is spiraling ever downward
The iPhone 1, the one that got people excited, was US$400. The iPhone 7 is US$650 (for the bottom model). Inflation in the US has not been 50%+ for the intervening decade.
You misunderstand--I desperately wanted FirefoxOS phones to succeed, precisely because an Open Web and free software is important, and ultimately a phone that can run any arbitrary software or OS. I know FirefoxOS wasn't that, but it seemed to be a step in the right direction. But if a phone is a lousy application platform and if developers can't be enticed to hack on them, then the question of freedom is moot.
One could argue which browser is a little ahead in any area, and which one needs "revitalization", to use a word from the article, but Firefox would have to seriously fall behind before I would switch browsers. Do you think ad-blockers would be a thing if it was between Chrome, Safari and IE? A lot depends on a single number: Firefox' market share.
Browsing with a Google browser make me feel like riding an Exxon car.
They changed Firefox users' default search engine to Yahoo, not only in new installations but overriding existing settings, after Mozilla cut a deal with Yahoo.
Mozilla also backed EME, eventually, a big threat to free internet as we knew it, among many other things.
If you take this history into account, portraying Firefox as being unblemished by Mozilla Corporation's monetization schemes and guardian of the free internet is just romantic fiction.
No they didn't. They argued and fought against EME until it was clear that there was no way they would win. At that point they implemented it so that they could stay relevant, without it their market share would be even lower and they'd have zero chance of getting market share again.
And market share isn't a "corporate" concern, it is vital to their non-profit mission.
All that being said, that doesn't mean I'm happy with everything they do. Just arguing on that one point.
> At that point they implemented it so that they could stay relevant,
...instead of fighting it without giving up.
> And market share isn't a "corporate" concern
This literally makes 0 sense to me. Do you actually believe this? Market share share is vital to Mozilla Corporation's business, which they have been using to cut million dollar deals with Yahoo, Google, etc. I don't wanna go all the want and say "you're the product", but they basically monetize their collective user base. So regardless of how they/you spin it, I don't buy that it's not a corporate concern.
"Bug 923590 - Pledge never to implement HTML5 DRM": https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=923590
From 2013: https://brendaneich.com/2013/10/the-bridge-of-khazad-drm/
From 2014: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/05/14/drm-and-the-challen...
Seeing as Firefox has terrible market share on iOS, and Apple still offered Content blocking... I think it's clear Firefox has no impact on the matter.
http://www.cvedetails.com/product/3264/Mozilla-Firefox.html?...
I wouldn't say Firefox was leading the way or the biggest innovator in the last few years, but for me it's kept up-to-date enough not to feel at all neglected.
I honestly don't understand (from a consumer standpoint) why people complain about Firefox. I can understand devs having browser preferences, but to say that "time forgot" firefox is ridiculous as a general user.
I keep Chrome on Linux only for its developer tools, which are clearly more performant, and for its updated and sandboxed Flash.
But I only bring it up for those two features. Otherwise Firefox with a ton of extensions, including Tab Center, is my default choice. I don't see in what way it would be inferior to Chrome.
In fact, it has several user-level features that I miss in other browsers, such as column / rectangular selection of tables, automatic saving of form input, Ctrl+I dialog with a list of pictures in the current page, and so on. Don't tell me these are "power user" or developer features!
Firefox for Android is also very good, IMHO better than Chrome, and it supports uBlock, Stylish, and so on.
I do love FF, and it is the browser I use everyday. But it's not without it's own warts, which Chrome is much better at hiding.
Ultimately I prefer Firefox.
This browser is seriously fast now on Linux. I couldn't be happier with it. I've used it for weeks already, browsing a lot and it's still as snappy as when I installed it.
Good job. And soon we'll start getting the Servo stuff...
I'm probably going to hate myself for my blase attitude towards security when I inevitably end up on some massive dump of hacked accounts, but I've kind of given up on privacy/security. It's just so convenient to be able to pull up on my phone the tab I had open on my browser when I'm in the kitchen cooking, or whatever.
Then you must not value security at all.
Firefox is by far the worst of the modern browsers in how easy it's to exploit. Don't listen to me, listen to the experts [1] [2] [3]
I would go as far as to say that if Firefox is your main browser, odds are you're owned by multiple parties, and I don't mean nation states. This can not be fixed by iterative improvements, Firefox needs to die. By far the best thing you can do for your online peace of mind is to switch to Chromium/Chrome or (on Windows only) Edge.
[1] https://twitter.com/thegrugq/status/803693249789509632
[2] https://medium.com/@thegrugq/tor-and-its-discontents-ef51648...
[3] https://it.slashdot.org/story/16/02/12/034206/pwn2own-2016-w...
My counterargument is that Firefox has always and continues to support tools such as NoScript and uBlock that prevent whole classes of attack. And Chrome, for example, is pwned like clockwork at every contest for exploitation. Behavior and not platform is the biggest determinant of security online.
I quote:
"For the last decade, the Pwn2own hacking competition has pitted the world's best hackers against web browsers to try and find zero-day vulnerabilities in a live event. The contest, which is sponsored by HPE and TrendMicro this year, is offering over half a million dollars in prize money, but for the first time, not a penny of that will directed to Mozilla Firefox. While Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome and Apple Safari are targets, Firefox isn't because it's apparently too easy and not keeping up with modern security: "'We wanted to focus on the browsers that have made serious security improvements in the last year,' Brian Gorenc, manager of Vulnerability Research at HPE said."
How is that for a slap in the face?
Selectively reading what you like and ignoring the rest [an entire section in the second link is devoted to Firefox issues that have nothing to do with TBB, including the conclusion] won't change the basic facts. Another point those not in the security domain miss, is that there are plenty of exploitable bugs that are deliberately kept private. Those who have visibility in these circles (such as thegrugq) are obviously in a much better position to appraise how secure a software system really is. Trying to determine how secure Firefox is just from CVEs and bugs that are made public will only lead you to a piece of the entire puzzle. In Firefox case, even that alone should be enough to trigger RED ALERT in somebody's mind.
The best we can all hope for is for people to stop using Firefox and flock to alternatives that raise the bar significantly.
[1] https://it.slashdot.org/story/16/02/12/034206/pwn2own-2016-w...
You can add espn.com, washingtonpost.com and nytimes.com to that list as well.
Blivetware.
However, I routinely run with tens of tabs open - usually 40-50 - and love the 'tab groups' extension so I can semantically group them (I have more tabs overall, but they're not all actively loaded). It can get a little slow with 50 active tabs, yes, but what doesn't? Modern webpages suck CPU and RAM dry.
Then again, I think these days what I dislike is the Web itself. You can't have a lean, responsive browser like that and support enough of the "advances" of modern CSS and Javascript to render 99.9+% of the Web more or less correctly.
Which in this case means trashing all the shitty ads and plugins from 15 different sites and synchronous JS trackers, since that happens to be what's klunking up the web. Which, fortunately for the browsers, gives them cover to do this under the guise of working for the user, because there's a lot of truth there, but in some sense it's still just cover, too.
It is in some sense a change of an era; browsers are moving out of a phase of enabling and empowering content creators and slowly moving into active conflict with them. As slowly as possible in some sense, because it's scary for them, but it's something they're being forced to do. It's the same effect where computer users will blame "Microsoft" or "Dell" for the computer being slow, when the problem is actually a slow hard drive or something; eventually it stops mattering that it isn't "your" fault and you have to do something about it.
Big changes in the browser space in the next five years here, I think. Content producers so far have only tepidly fired back at ad blockers and stuff because they're still very niche, but they are getting less niche very fast now.
That's what we said for years about computing power and the Moor law's : "transistor can't get tynier than xxx nm". It happened anyway because there used to be that much economic incensitive to improve computer. Now research in micro processor is so expensive that the gain in computationnal power are found elsewhere. But there is always ways to improve things. The question is : "is there people eager to fund research". As long as the answer is yes, we'll find ways to improve web browser.
In the web there is so much money involved that the answer will still be yes long after servo shipped.
That's the thing for me. Before Chrome, Firefox was the big innovator (trailing only behind Opera, and even then).
Then Chrome happened, Firefox took a bit of a backseat (not as bad as IE or Safari, but enough of one to let Chrome become the big innovator), and Opera became a reskinned Chrome.
It'll be interesting to see how Mozilla approaches the next few years. Firefox still offers features that the other major browsers do not (for example, and critically to my own use case, it's the only major browser that supports any semblance of an equivalent to Tree Style Tabs), and the emphasis on an open and standards-compliant web could reinforce the historical reason why practically every user agent under the sun includes the word "Mozilla".
Electrolysis: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/04/11/the-why-of-electr...
Apple should be legally stopped from doing this monopolistic garbage.
> In my experience, Firefox today is still only a meh product.
I wouldn't say that, but I do admit that Firefox on Linux is moving pretty slowly. Since it's not the highest priority for Mozilla in general I assume, it feels like it lags behind development wise.
IANAL but couldn't the MS case be relevant/provide precedent?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
There is one thing that Apple does that Microsoft did not do: it prevents the user from designating a non-Safari default browser. Every link you open will open in Safari, unless you copy it and open paste it into another browser. Microsoft let users install other browsers and designate them as the default (I don't know if this was always the case, but it has been for a very long time.) I'm not sure if Apple has a technical argument for why this is necessary, but it probably won't ever need it because of the market share threshold.
FWIW, I am a recovering lawyer, and I spent a summer in antitrust law. So I'm not an expert, but I do know how to calculate a Herfindahl-Hirschman Index for the purpose of determining market concentration...
How does a strong alternative help solving the following problem. Let's say you are a video service provider, and want to offer MPEG-DASH[1] based service which relies on browsers supporting Media Source Extensions[2].
Soon enough, you discover, that iOS users can't use your service, not only because iOS default browser doesn't support MSE, but because they can't even install any alternative that does (Apple doesn't let them).
You are literally forced to implement something[3] in addition to MPEG-DASH to address a substantial amount of Apple users and in the process potentially pay Apple and Co. for implementing it because they own related patents, or you need to agree to ignore them (which means a loss of money for you).
TL;DR: Apple stifled adoption of MPEG-DASH, and forced you to do double work and in theory can force you to pay them money too. This is just one example, there can be many like that, another big one is video codecs and etc., but you get the idea. All that bottlenecks on the same restriction - ban on competing browsers.
Shouldn't this be a subject of anti-trust regulation? If they managed to do it, they have enough control over the market. But again, may be anti-trust law simply isn't equipped to address this? I see it as a major problem.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Adaptive_Streaming_ove...
Apple has a complete iOS / iTunes monopoly in the iPhone/iPad market, which is pretty big. And Microsoft wasn't preventing the existence of alternative browser engines or banning apps competing with them, whereas Apple does.
Microsoft didn't restrict what software you could install on Windows. That creates a different market.
Someone who is buying a phone can reasonably choose between iOS and Android. Someone who already has a phone and is buying an app can't reasonably choose between the iOS App Store and Google Play. And someone selling an app can't reach iOS customers via Google's or Amazon's store. They're different markets.
That's not the legal distinction. What got Microsoft in trouble is that they told PC OEMs that they would lose their volume discount for Windows if they shipped another browser alongside Internet Explorer. This was troublesome because, at the time, Windows had a 99% marketshare of PC operating systems, which was judged by the courts to be a monopoly.
Apple has nowhere near the same marketshare in phones. Therefore, Apple is free to do whatever it wants with regards to its OS, as consumers are free to switch to Android.
You market it to the general public of non-tech people and no one cares. It looks fancy and shiny and you no longer need a stylus .. and doesn't crash twice a day like PalmOS.
I work for a large corporation and FF performs far and away better than Chrome. And I'm comparing Chrome Canary to FF stable build. You can probably say its not a fair comparison, but I do notice the performance difference when I'm testing our apps.
mo·nop·o·ly məˈnäpəlē noun 1. the exclusive possession or control of the supply or trade in a commodity or service.
What's the iPhone's marketshare compared to Android again? You can't just decide to define a monopoly as something that's inconvenient or even abhorrent to you - words (and the laws that use them) have real meanings.
As for it going beyond iOs, well, it's still not a monopoly, since those other options exist. They aren't buying out/shutting down competition, people are simply choosing to not use the competition. And you can't hold that against Apple.
Apple isn't even close* to a monopoly in phones. Regulators could come down on Microsoft for doing the same thing, because, at the time, Microsoft had a 99% share of the desktop OS market. Regulators said that Microsoft could not use this monopoly to suppress competition in a legally separate domain (market for browsers).
The difference is that Apple has, what, a 30% share of the phone market? All Apple has to say is that if a consumer wants a choice of browsers, they're free to switch to Android.
A situation that is much worse than the IE6 one - switching browsers on Windows of 2000s was significantly easier and cheaper than switching out of the Apple ecosystem.
Monopoly can be defined as however you fudge the numbers. Your way of counting is like we'd say "Hey, Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly, there's loads of Linux routers and servers out there, so it's fine!". It ignores important properties on how Apples actions hinder free market.
But that doesn't change the fact that there are now millions of people
pretty well locked into a platform (through iCloud, iMessage, proprietary
integration with Mac, etc.) which are limited to a single browser and are
forbidden to use another one.
1) Performance (and by implication UX)
2) Battery life
These are exactly the points Steve Jobs raised in his "Thoughts on Flash" missive from 2010: http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/. And this is the same issue: Flash was a runtime, just like third party JS runtimes.
Frankly, I'm with Apple on this one.
Jeff Atwood's post on Android JS performance might be getting bit long in the tooth ("The State of JavaScript on Android in 2015 is… poor" - https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-state-of-javascript-on-andr...) but, as recently as November 2016, he posted to the discussion indicating that performance still lags.
I can verify this myself. My 3 year old iPhone 5S equals or betters the performance of my one year old OnePlus Two, which I use for testing (and maybe I should blog on this topic). If you dig through Jeff's thread (warning: it's grown really long) you'll see that I wouldn't be having a much better time if I upgraded to a OnePlus Three.
So, do I want Google to be allowed to run a version of Chrome on iOS that uses other than Apple's JS runtime? No, not really.
Do I want Firefox to be allowed to do that? Hell no. There are bound to be data points that contradict this but my experience is that Firefox on the desktop lags Chrome, Safari (OSX, obviously), Internet Explorer 11 and Edge in terms of performance and framerate. (Again, I should post about this, with numbers.) My extremely limited exposure to Firefox OS back in 2013 suggested it was slow as hell and not worth the bother of developing applications for (too many compromises required) - doubtless not helped by low spec hardware.
Apple pour huge resources into making their iOS JIT run like the wind on a hardware platform that they know inside out. Nobody else is going to be able to do that.
IANAL but I don't think the monopoly argument (think it's in the parent post) holds water simply because Apple doesn't, and is never likely to have, a monopoly in the phone market. If people don't like Apple devices, or iOS as a platform, they have a choice: they can buy an Android or Windows Phone device, and run all the apps they need (particularly on the former).
That wasn't the case in the late 1990s with Microsoft and Windows. If you were a nerd you could run Linux, and you could tolerate the limitations of Star Office or KOffice compared with MS Office, and Apple were just getting back off the ropes, so maybe you'd run a Mac at home. But if you were a non-techy and/or you wanted to get serious work done and be able to easily collaborate and cooperate with other people you were probably running windows.
At one point Microsoft's market share was something like 97%. 97%! In Q2 2016 Apple's worldwide smartphone market share had fallen to 12.9% (source: https://9to5mac.com/2016/08/18/android-ios-smartphone-market...). That's not a monopoly. It's not even within hailing distance of a monopoly.
Going back to my original point, iDevices and iOS are Apple's platform, and I do not object to them restricting what can run on those devices in terms of runtimes and JITs because I care about performance, UX, and having a decent battery life. Some people aren't going to like, but then they can choose one of the alternatives.
Here's what that will take:
- Make Firefox the best browser in the world at the fundamentals: speed, stability, standards support.
- Become the free, open, OS agnostic app platform of choice: don't cede this frontier to Chrome and Electron. Make the open web platform the best platform for more and more apps. (MAYBE take a shot at a phone OS after the Firefox App ecosystem rivals Android and iOS.)
- Following from the previous bullet, quit wasting resources on browser UX experiments - browser UX matters less every year as web apps get freed from the browser.
- Be the absolute gold standard in user privacy and freedom - the stuff Brave is doing is the trail Mozilla was supposed to blaze.
- Invest in Thunderbird again and fix the client side of email - because messaging is just as important as the web and we are losing to closed competitors hard and fast there.
Mozilla's supposed to be our champion of an open web client platform. For too long they've just been a browser in decline and a bunch of random side projects. Cleaning up the browser is a good start but we need more.
From a passionate Firefox user (even though Chrome runs faster on Linux).
I was right with you until Thunderbird. I look at Thunderbird as one of Mozilla's many distractions. We don't need another open source desktop email client at the expense of the browser.
So long as we have a secure browser, there are others who can provide secure email services with a web client.
No thanks. I will keep using Thunderbird as long as I can.
I do use it, so I do.
If I want a javascript one I can run a browser to access it.
Why? Battery life and speed. Chrome is just a mess these days. Absolutely terrible on laptops.
This has been happening on Mac OS for about three years now for me, multiple devices: two macbook airs, and a 2016 5k imac.
I wish I could use Opera but it's been bought by a chinese company.
Well, there's Vivaldi.
https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/tab-center
I hope they just make it part of the standard release.
I had three primary complaints that caused me to go back to Chrome after a couple days:
- The UI feels old and clunky compared to Chrome, although this is likely just a personal preference issue for me.
- Performance felt lacking. Pages seemed to take longer to render. The browser UI itself felt slower.
- Stability. On a few occasions within a couple day period, it seemed like one tab would lock up the entire browser. Firefox would pop up a vague message telling me that "one of your tabs" is causing an issue (not telling me which one) and then I would need to randomly close tabs to try and get things working properly again. This seems insane and archaic and is not something I ever deal with on Chrome.
> The UI feels old and clunky compared to Chrome
Firefox needs to adopt the omnibar, yesterday. The plugin works well enough, but simply isn't as well-rounded as the Chrome omnibar for reasons that are hard to nail down.
> Performance felt lacking. Pages seemed to take longer to render. The browser UI itself felt slower.
Agreed. This is the main reason that I switched to Chrome late last year (after painfully using FF for two years). I'll probably only have another look at FF when Servo drops.
Did you have any addons installed? LastPass is a bit notorious for this, even the e10s-compatible version is quite bad.
Hopefully, the dev/privacy niche that Firefox seems to compete well in today will incentivize good decisions on that front in the future. I also hope that the allure of Yahoo/Verizon money and a single-minded fixation on increasing market share won't corrupt Mozilla too much.
1) Make background tabs completely frozen by default. No intelligent guessing. Simply assign zero CPU time to them. But give the user an easy to use switch to toggle the activity of a tab. So I can activate background tabs and freeze foreground tabs just as I like.
2) One process per tab. Even with e10s, all javascript in all tabs runs on a single core. So at the moment, using Firefox on an 8 core computer is like using Chromium on a single core machine.
3) Make the url bar functional immediately on startup. Right now, every time I start Firefox, it takes several seconds until I can start typing the url I want to go to. In Chromium, I can start typing right away.
4) Don't set a bookmark every time I press CTRL+d. Only set it after I clicked "done" in the bookmark dialog that pops up on CTRL+d.
Multiple content processes (e10s-multi) is in the works, see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Multiple_content_proce...
A lot of people will do things like listen to music, watch videos, etc. in background tabs. Stuff like slack/irccloud/gmail notifications would be dead too...
I see a lot of people around the internet (not here, HN users are much better about this kinda thing) say things like "Firefox just keeps getting worse" but not once is that statement ever qualified.
It almost seems like Firefox's slow decline in use is tied in some small way to this memetic catchphrase. "Firefox just keeps getting worse." I simply don't believe that most folks are even capable of qualifying that statement, and a good bit likely don't have the technical qualifications to even gather supporting arguments for it. If that sounds a bit familiar...
It's almost identical to what is said by people that clearly believe that Java and the JVM are the same thing, and will rag on the JVM as Java, the former or which is definitely not the problem. There's even at least one troll account on Reddit that is heavily dedicated to screaming about non-Java JVM languages, both on Reddit and on Medium, including posting their own Medium articles in JVM language subreddits (usually /r/scala). It's a bit surreal, honestly.
I assume there's at least one similar account, but for Firefox. I don't visit browser-centric discussion boards or subreddits, though, so I can't say for sure, and won't.
I suppose I don't have much of value to contribute to this thread, I apologize for that. I just felt like sharing some casual observations of mine.
Firefox is the browser I have to restart the most frequently, because otherwise it slows to a crawl, or hogs so much memory (Despite only having 1-2 open tabs) that I'm constantly paging on my MBP with 16GB of ram.
There's also little UI quirks, such as not being able to natively look up a word in OSX dictionary, that make browsing less pleasant.
Despite this, I've completely wiped out both my settings and firefox install on several occasions in an attempt to keep things stable.
It doesn't help.
I'm aware that my addons are likely a big contributor to the memory-hogging and eventual crashes, but if I didn't want to use these addons, I'd just use fucking chrome. The ENTIRE point of Firefox is for the customizability. Dropping addons to improve stability just isn't an option for me.
I'll keep an eye on it to see if there's a specific addon triggering my issues, but it will likely stick around.
I sideload Chrome, Safari and Firefox on my work machine because we work with mTLS with smartcards and honestly none of the browsers work reliably (it's not a very high use case).
The biggest difference I notice to my browsing experience is when I switch over to Safari (Webkit). It's not that it's slow - it just renders pages slightly differently, whereas Firefox and Chrome seem to have aligned over the years very well on how to interpret stylesheets.
I'm never doing anything intense enough in the browser (besides maybe streaming a single video?) to notice significant performance differences.
Go to this page http://pastebin.com/FFSQUML9 (on HN now) with FF. Zoom. See what happens to the text. Go there with Opera. Much much better. Tldr: text reflow.
And it's not even that useful there. Go to http://darkf.github.io/posts/problems-i-have-with-python.htm... also on HN now and repeat. You can't read it with any browser but Opera.
My suggestion: implement text reflow and some people will start using it and tell to friends.
Next suggestion: save for offline, another feature from Opera.
I wish I'd be able to write an Open with Opera extension.
To narrow it down to the add-on(s) causing the problem, disabling all of them under about:addons then re-enabling one at a time is a good approach, although can be time-consuming if you have a lot of add-ons installed.
Also - about:performance might give you some clues.
And on the add-on screen you will be able to tell which addons are compatible with multiprocess and weather it is enabled or disabled.
You may need to change a few extra things for multiprocess to work, like, accessibility features can block it from enabling.
(my post is now a bit redundant since I didn't refresh it to look for any new comments)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compat...
I think there's a pattern where products first get into a great state for power users/hackers but then pivot to evolve to be the lowest common denominator for mass adoption.
I think what I'm actually using now is a tweaked version of the addon that bumped some of the compat flag and signed it (per http://hemenkapadia.blogspot.com/2015/12/get-old-pocket-expe... ). Because of that, I'm actually way behind on the FF update curve, and holding out as long as I can.
(If anyone has a pointer to an equivalent modern addon, I'd be interested.)
For that matter, I'm also a die-hard TreeStyleTabs user, and I'm still not clear on whether that's going to work properly as things go forward.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=866522
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=233903
Mozilla is testing a "TreeStyleTabs Lite" UI called Tab Center. You can install it using the Mozilla Test Pilot addon:
Firefox's decision completely prevented that. I wasn't going to ask Mozilla for permission (every time!) to tweak. And beyond that Pale Moon's exclusion of bloat technologies (webgl, websockets, etc, etc) and performance for >>tabs sessions just fits my use case better.
Chrome dev tools are superior to firefox where I remember a time nothing could compete with firebug.
The chrome extension API is now better than the upcoming "Web extensions" which removes extensions access to XUL and dumbs down the API to make it compatible with chrome extensions.
They've been trying to replicate the chrome sandbox for years and it still hasn't made it to production.
It goes on and on. They are catching up and doing it poorly, not leading nor innovating.
Firefox also does stuff that Chrome doesn't. I like having about:config, I like having some things from Test Drive, and a bunch of other things. But let's not make this a "which is better" thread.
Let's assume that Chrome is indeed leading the way. I'm quite okay with that. Firefox is still very clearly ahead of MSIE and Safari -- and even if it wasn't! Even if it was the worst popular browser. Someone has to be last, right? If it is being maintained and kept current (and it definitely is), I'd still use Firefox for not being tied to some big corp. That's what it's really about for me: independence, open source, free (as in freedom).
There are no ties to big corp unless you want to. You don't get features from giant cluster of computers for free.
When firefox implements voice recognition, translation etc., I will look forward to how they decide to monetize it.
Regarding "about:config", that's a great feature. Let's see if it still exists in the future versions. After all, wouldn't it confuse the mainstream masses they are so desperate to appeal to?
When they start caring about power users again, I will switch. Until then, they can keep dumbing it down til it's garbage.
I don't want that anyway: I'd prefer everything to run on my own laptop. And even if I didn't, that are examples of big projects that are open source and owned by a non-profit like Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, etc.
This means I can't use DownThemAll.
I can't use Tab Wheel Scroll. On Windows I use an AutoHotkey script to simulate Tab Wheel Scroll. On Linux, it seems to work somehow. On Mac I have learned to live without it.
On my phone, I get bombarded with useless ads all the time on Chrome since it has no uBlock. I have learned to live without it.
Firefox seems to be better than Chrome at recognizing password fields for 'Save Password' feature. I have learned to live without it in Chrome.
Why ? Firefox still feels slower in loading and showing web pages. It seems to freeze up occasionally. The new tab opening and scrolls have occasional jitters, sometimes sufficient to bring me out of my "flow".
Firefox mobile is a disaster. It sometimes loads desktop versions on some sites. Once it failed to load a favorite site of mine completely, due to uBlock ( that has never happened on the desktop, on any browser )
I want to use Firefox, I do. But, I spend an extra-ordinary amount of my time on my browser. Only the best browser is 'good enough' for me
In my experience: You should "refresh" your Firefox, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13227658 It help in my case.
By which you mean "it doesn't send _exactly_ Chrome's UA string", right?
And what's even better if you point that out here they'll come with their completely artificial benchmarks to show you how Firefox is x1337 faster than the rest of browsers.
Only that it isn't.
And what really worries me is that they actually believe what they say, which would mean they are refusing to work on making Firefox faster, because they think Firefox is fast already.
These two threads converging here feels like a collision of parallel universes :-)
Knowing Mozilla, the project could be dropped at any time.
According to all of the browser usage share data I've seen, Firefox's share began to decline around the end of 2010 or the beginning of 2011, about two years before Mozilla shifted focus to Firefox OS.
So, what went wrong between 2011 and 2013, when Mozilla was still focused on the Firefox product but its market share declined from more than 30% of the market to less than 20%? That's what really went wrong. The change of focus made a bad situation worse.
Here's some links that might help:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Swap#Performance_Tuning
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Sysctl#Virtual_memory
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox/Tweaks#Performa...
EDIT: and one more...
I switched from Chrome to Safari when I switched to macOS and I'm relatively happy with it, even though it is not as fast, but recent trends have me so worried about the future. With all the BS going on at Google, I have kinda began not to trust companies who develop browsers with closed source to keep their customers' interests in line with their own goals. Now I appreciate Firefox a lot more, I have great respect for it. If these improvements turn out to be completely accurate and FF can at least approximate Chrome on performance, I would happily switch back and stay with Mozilla.
As an aside, as a Linux-all-day dev I use Firefox almost exclusively. I can do Chrome, but something stops me. One of those things is the idea that we need browser diversity. Also chrome just isn't "better enough" than Firefox for me - in fact I find the difference very marginal now.
It's basically the 1 reason i stopped using Firefox, zooming (pinch to zoom) absolutely sucks as opposed to Safari/Chromium. Pinch to zoom in Firefox feels like going 20 years back in time...
just google "chrome vs chromium", here's the first hit: http://www.howtogeek.com/202825/what%E2%80%99s-the-differenc...
I even tried the U2F Firefox extension, but that doesn't work on all websites (some of which I need).
Now, Mozilla/Firefox has faltered in too many product deliveries in the past 5 years (I am mostly disappointed in their Firefox OS effort) while neglecting the browser. So the brand name no longer inspires me, whether or not the browser itself is good.
A few off the top of my head:
* Firefox doesn't respect Windows 10's titlebar accent colors
* No option to set a default zoom level for web pages
* Firefox for android ignores intent filters
The first two have addon or userstyle workarounds which makes it even more baffling that they have remain unsolved issues for years.
I love firefox on Windows, and really don't like the font rendering of Chrome on standard DPI screen. Firefox feels snappy and responsive.
On my Mac the opposite is true. Firefox feels significantly slower, and the font rendering is horrible, especially light text on dark backgrounds.
You do unfortunately lose the ability to whitelist sites you want to support with Adguard DNS, and addons like uBlock offer much more granular control. But they both work well enough.
Not my experience. I'm happy I switched, I find Firefox to be faster and it has several features I like, like the ability to stay in your current app when clicking on links.
I mean, in the desktop world, we have many Linux distributions, BSD derivates, many desktop environments, etc. May Firefox OS fit some use case that Android could not?
Until about four years ago, he used to get all these exclusives based on his position at the Wall Street Journal. But those days seem long ago. Mossberg is hardly discussed today, and his page views have cratered...
;-)
Everyone has love and good will for Mozilla and Firefox because Firefox showed the world what a browser and the web could be if designed correctly to some open standard.
However, the developer tools, JS performance, and overall browser tech have languished. So while we all are cheering for them to catch up, we do it sadly from a Chrome. Debugging a modern SPA on Firefox is painful.
What should have been an "oh crap, we need to up our game" moment for them was a whoosh just like the iPhone reveal was for Balmer.
Au contraire...
At the time. It's a much different story today.
Unfortunately, Chrome mouse gesture addons are all terrible, none work perfectly, all have inconsistent performance, and most are spyware to boot! Firefox has Firegestures, the gold standard. With 20 years of muscle memory mouse gestures are non-negotiable for me. So, I stuck with Firefox.
It's little comfort for desktop-users to be able to dodge Google's browser logged into Google's services and serving Google ads, or Microsoft's browser on Microsoft's OS-and-apps-as-a-Service which surfaces Microsoft ads, when one can only meaningfully avoid it on mobile by switching to the premium devices offered by Apple, who runs an equivalent walled ecosystem, with the sole exception of not monetizing your browsing habits and content.
That being said, it's a hard problem, and if Firefox the Desktop Browser sinks into irrelevance the battle will be completely lost.
On the desktop, Firefox faces mounting challenges from having to appeal to distinct demographics [3][4] who have conflicting needs and wants, and having to simultaneously compete and cooperate [5][6][7][8] with Google, an entity that uses its position in controlling both the client and the server to rapidly further its goals and advance the Web in a way that promotes their interest [9][10][11][12][13].
[1] http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/ [2] https://www.eff.org/mobile-devices [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13425956 [4] https://blog.mozilla.org/ux/2013/08/firefox-user-types-in-no... [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12338170#12338445 [6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12042767#12044962 [7] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13390846#13392833 [8] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12129691#12131403 [9] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12296616#12299230 [10] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12453646#12454524 [11] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13383006#13386719 [12] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12174503#12175561 [13] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12863565#12867493
When I develop (HTML, CSS, ES6+babel) on Chrome, then test in Firefox there are some inconsistencies that require minor fixing. The same is true the other way around: develop with Firefox, then some fixes are needed for Chrome. These fixes are usually quite easy, make sense in retrospect and make thigs work in the second browser without breaking the first one. What I find strange, after years of hacking around IE bugs, is that everything usually just works in MS Edge.
What it boils down to is that a person perceives the browser that they develop on as being "right" and the other browsers as "wrong".
Political activism (free internet) is first.
"Introducing Our New Mozilla Identity." takes the second most screen estate.
Scrolling two pages down there is Firefox.
If it's like many companies, then the people who made these decisions and are responsible for the sad state have already moved on.
(I'm currently a Firefox user and have been a user since the Netscape/Mosaic days with some Chrome usage over the years)
There is a download button on the upper right corner of the page.
2. In which way does focusing on Firefox not support an 'open and free internet manifesto' or is at odds with such an manifesto?
Though it's a first time I hear about their abuse. Where can I learn more about the impact of activist agenda on these two projects?
2. The impact to Firefox: Slow browser that is way behind Chrome concerning features, or as in numbers: Lost the leading position in browser market share with no plan to regain the leading position again.
Now it seems that Chrome has pulled far ahead, and Firefox is often in 3rd place. I can't think of too many recent features that FF has been a leader on. SW kinda, I guess, but that's it.
Often either Edge or Safari is also faster to adopt (Safari with web components, for example), depending on the feature.
Google also spends tons of money paying companies to stealth-install Chrome when users think they're installing something else from, for example, Adobe.
I'm not saying Chrome is a bad browser but it sure as heck ain't a level playing field....
Screenshot:
I don't think it has never kept pace with Chrome. Or if so, not for very long. Even if the products had been equally good, which they weren't, Google just has far more market power.
I'd like more evidence to back this claim.
I'd like to point to this comment of mine (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13227907) about CSS properties.
Chrome is ahead on things like Web Components because these are features that Google has wanted and pushed. It's not due to lack of implementation effort that they're disabled in Firefox, it's because Firefox wants to wait for the standardization process to continue for a bit. I mean, Firefox has XBL internally so it's not hard to imagine that most of the framework for web components already existed. Firefox was also using ES6 internally for years.
When it comes to browsers being "leaders" in features it's always a bit more nuanced than that due to standardization and the features the browser vendor itself wants to push before it is standardized.
It's a feature that Firefox wanted and pushed as well, in the past. They've stopped being leaders on this particular feature though (partly because some of the proponents left, i imagine).
> It's not due to lack of implementation effort that they're disabled in Firefox, it's because Firefox wants to wait for the standardization process to continue for a bit.
You're talking about the old v0 specs that they implemented and disabled. The v1 specs are already standardized and in Chrome stable, shadow DOM is in Safari stable.
That's my real point, not that Firefox is behind Chrome, they're usually in 3rd place on most things.
Because FF has been ridiculously slow compared to Chrome.
Because FF crashed when one tab crashed.
Because I didn't care about higher RAM usage - RAM is cheap.
Because I used so many Google services, and Chrome is (obviously) better integrated.
Because Google's update cycle has been faster.
So even if FF fixed all these issues (it didn't), the only argument that remains is privacy. And I don't care. I just don't give out the information that I want private.
Google is an excellent leader in this space because their revenue and expense is directly tied to the quality of the browser platform. Firefox, as well as Microsoft would help everyone if we all got behind a single open source browser engine. I believe blink is the best and the architecture underlying Chrome is the best. Opera has shown you can innovate on the browser UI while still providing excellent content rendering.
I get there is value in competition, I just don't see a lot of value in creating competing engines. Even within Mozilla they are innovating on the rendering engine and that is great news - why shouldn't Google and MS consider this engine as the next engine to power the web... I believe Mozilla's resources would be better served if they focused on UX as Opera has done. I also believe the same is true of Microsoft. Why compete on browser engines when we can make the same engine better. It's in Google interest as well as many others. It's the same model that works for Linux and why so many companies contribute to Linux is to improve their own capabilities and bottom lines.
(awaiting the downvotes - but would love to have a discussion ;))