Chrome Won
andreasgal.com
andreasgal.com
I worked for Mozilla for a few years, after seeing John Lily (CEO at the time) speak. It was right after Chrome started getting popular, and a smug person in the crowd asked him about how he felt about Chrome.
John's response was awesome. "This is the web that we wanted. We exist not because we want everyone to use Firefox, but because we wanted people to have a choice" Firefox was a response to a world of "best viewed in IE" badges, and it changed the browser landscape.
Now, we have options. Chrome is great, but so are Safari, Edge, Brave, Opera and Firefox. There's a lot of options out there, and they're all standards compliment. And that's thanks to Mozilla.
So, in my mind, Mozilla won. It's a non-profit, and it forced us into an open web. We got the world they wanted. Maybe the world is a bit Chrome-heavy currently, but at least it's a standards compliment world.
I hope Mozilla sees that. I hope they take credit, and move on to what's next: privacy and net neutrality. Our privacy is under attack, and Mozilla is one of the few companies that can (and would want to) help. I know, I know. Nobody cares about privacy. Nobody cared about web standards, either, but Mozilla bundled it into an attractive package and it worked. It's time for Mozilla to declare victory, high five the Chrome team, and move on to the next big challenge.
We really need someone to fight for our privacy and neutrality. And I really believe that this could be Mozilla's swan song.
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EDIT: Hey cbeard - My email is in my profile; I'd love to talk.
I definitely run into sites that only work on chrome and not in any other browser.
In my opinion chrome isn't doing a good job either. It's a massive energy hog and waste more CPU than it needs to. Unlike IE and FireFox and Safari it comes from a company that is notorious for wanting to know everything about you.
The time to celebrate victory was a few years ago. Now it's starting to look like the new boss is the same as the old, maybe worse.
As for privacy you could use the open source chromium, there's a fork somewhere which has all the Google removed.
I've always assumed people talking about having hundreds of tabs open just don't understand how to properly use a browser. My grandmother, for example, usually has 100 or so open by the time I get a call about her having computer problems.
There's no logical reason I can come up with for doing this instead of using bookmarks.
Then throughout the course of the day I end up looking up API docs, get linked to blog posts, news articles, and YouTube videos, and read articles which themselves have relevant links to follow. Most of these I just open in a background tab to check out later in the day. These accumulate until I have time to go through and quickly review them. Those that I want to read and don't have the time currently go to Pocket. The rest get read or summarily closed out. I find bookmarks to be a terrible way to triage tabs.
This workflow works for me (and evidently others). It's faster than bookmarking. It's less prone to failure, in my experience (I've suffered bookmark corruption more than once). And a modern computer ought to handle many background tabs just fine. Moreover, if browsers aren't expected to be used in this fashion, they really should set an upper-limit on the number of tabs that can be opened.
Hopefully this gives you some perspective on alternative use cases. It sounds like your workflow works out well for you. I've tried it and couldn't get it to stick. If that means I don't know how to use a browser, so be it. At this point, there's enough of us (your grandmother included) that maybe the browser vendors should just find a way to cope with it better.
Each browser instance is tabbed completely across, I keep them open until I read the page fully, and then save it in keep to keep forever.
By Friday I can have hundreds of tabs that I go through and clean up. Web apps are a huge pain to constantly log in.
I run Korora with 24GB RAM and an I 7, Chrome is never a system hog for me, and most of the time it surprises me how well it handles my use.
I have hundreds of tabs open at a time. Instead of searching for something, then going to the Google page, clicking and waiting for it to load, in Firefox I search for what I want in the bar, it presents the tab as a result and opens it instantaneously.
In addition with the vertical tab bar extensions I can see a list of about 40-50 tabs open at a time, using the additional horizontal space monitors provide that web pages don't use to keep an easily visible list of tabs.
I open pages that interest me, I might read them later like I did this discussion or just drop them. Add in open tickets, reference pages, the build server, youtube, etc. and the number grows over time.
> My grandmother, for example, usually has 100 or so open by the time I get a call about her having computer problems.
Maybe she should use Firefox instead of Chrome?
> There's no logical reason I can come up with for doing this instead of using bookmarks.
I did this when I started, by now I only use bookmarks for high interest pages, no point in bookmarking everything.
So has cVim, but that has no relation to any of this.
It's nice there working on it, but why didn't they ever care before?
Chrome using less resources than Firefox and IE was their sales pitch.
Now they've become what they made fun of, while Firefox is smooth as a baby's butt.
Chrome is still a huge improvement compared to the browsers it was competing against. Chrome changed the market and now the other browsers are competing in the world Chrome created. So while Chrome might fall behind in some areas now, it's naive to say that it's become what they made fun of.
"Always after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again." -- Gandalf
Chrome works on every platform. It hogs memory but its fast. Chromium & v8 are open. This is the kind of things that gave us Electron, nodejs and everything that is built on top of it. I appreciate Google for working on it.
Regarding privacy, I totally agree. Would be nice if the most popular web browser wasn't developed by the world's biggest ad company. I still think they do a descent job of isolating the two orgs. I can technically install extensions that stop much of the ad invasions.
So you're saying that Chrome is but a Sauron to IE's Morgoth? ;-)
Except anything MIPS-based. Or Power. Or in fact anything that isn't x86 or ARM.
And it's not just a matter of compiling it for those platforms. There's a bunch of architecture-specific porting that would have to be done (e.g. you _have_ to implement a V8 backend; there is no platform-independent way to run V8 just with a C++ compiler).
Not sure about Chromium support on those platforms, but V8 support is pretty impressive.
An what Chrome is giving out is "Tier1" search results only fed to their browser (Thus search results are more accurate using Chrome.... and now Google Earth is "Chrome Only" which uses WebGL and the latest tests show Firefox is still over 3x as fast with WebGL content then Chrome.
Electron is HORRIBLE, enabling people to write apps in Javascript while using all your PC"s resources is insane. "Etcher" a program written in electron who's sole purpose is simply an "ISO USB Writer" comes with a payload of 180mb's on disk and over 200MB's of RAM and runs like an old dog with cancer... along with the other electron apps. This could have been written with something we had for decades with little overhead and small payload, it's called Python...
I've run into several other complex sites that fail on Firefox. It's sad, because I've used it for years. I'm using it right now. But my default just switched to Chrome because I started having too many Firefox issues.
Once I became aware of this, I've been trying to be more diligent about thoroughly testing things on Firefox.
I wonder how many other developers are in a similar situation, where Chrome is their default browser and/or their main debugging environment. Part of the problem for me is that I find the Chrome dev tools superior, and that makes it so much easier to just forget about the rest (not that I'm justifying my behavior, btw).
(Also, I think a lot of people discount how good Edge's Dev Tools have gotten. There too my corporate mandated environment is mostly stuck with Windows 7 and an intentionally broken IE 11 due to Oracle and using their terrible software internally.)
Upon googling, I discovered that drop-down menus have been an issue in chrome (even not using vbox). I'm using zurb foundation for the menu js/css, fwiw.
I still use Firefox as default, both for developing and for general web browsing. It and my set of extensions fit my preferences too nicely and have no equivalent in Chrome. I use Chrome at work primarily for Google Hangouts / Meet, the occasional debug session, or just to have another session. (Trying to get into Chrome's Profiles feature too.) At home I just use Chromium from time to time, mostly because my computer is starting to age and I notice the performance difference for certain things.
That's not true. Microsoft has now gotten into the spying business, and is infamous for the Windows 10 telemetry. They're basically copying Google.
Firefox and Safari are the only ones that come from companies that aren't notorious for wanting to know everything about you. And Firefox doesn't try to get you to spend scads of money on massively overpriced but mediocre hardware that locks you into their ecosystem.
Firefox has its warts, but it's the only choice that really makes sense if you care about privacy and freedom and avoiding vendor lock-in.
Sure, error reporting feeding in to a QA database is one thing. But is there the capability to target Win10 OS ads to, say, folks with old video cards? I'd be very surprised if someone in Redmond didn't think of that.
(I highly doubt that there is any truth to this claim)
> One of the most persistent misunderstandings about Safe Browsing is the idea that the browser needs to send all visited URLs to Google in order to verify whether or not they are safe.
> While this was an option in version 1 of the Safe Browsing protocol (as disclosed in their privacy policy at the time), support for this "enhanced mode" was removed in Firefox 3 and the version 1 server was decommissioned in late 2011 in favor of version 2 of the Safe Browsing API which doesn't offer this type of real-time lookup.
Firefox 3 - That was 9 years ago.
https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/how-safe-browsing-works-...
This hasn't happened to me in a while, except for occasionally government or bank sites which require "IE or Chrome". In many cases, spoofing the user agent works just fine for those. I agree it's bad, though.
The one exception I've noticed is Yubikey (U2F) support for Google services. Firefox has an add-on that provides Yubikey support, but last I checked, Google blocked access to those (I believe even if you spoof the user-agent).
spoofing the user agent works fine
By all means, politely warn a user that "your browser is not tested". It's getting to feel like a marketing driven decision, where pages just about say "our site is so powerful, we only work with the greatest browser ever, Chrome, so come back when you have it".
A local airbnb competitor currently does this.
[0] https://philipwalton.com/articles/loading-polyfills-only-whe...
God I miss the old Opera....
I'm fairly conscientious about this myself since I'm working on plotting data, and the dumb client-side number crunching involved is actually pretty good at eating CPU cycles.
Most plotting libraries want to show off how smooth and incredible their animations are. What I really want to know however is: does your library keep updating the canvas at 60FPS, or does it only refresh when the data does and idle otherwise?
I know there are all sorts of flags etc, but consider old Opera, where switching the status bar between none, simple and advanced was right there in one of the main menus. That was a good start, that stuff would be compact and super useful by now if we'd just keep going.
Sure, it doesn't explain to average users why the webpages they view might be slow, but average users don't care.
The average smoker probably doesn't want to hear smoking is unhealthy. Does that mean doctors should adjust their advice respectively? At what point does "professional" really mean nothing other than "gets money for it, like a carpenter or a thief or a drug dealer might"?
We don't even have the right to "just give people what they want without any judgement on our part", but we certainly don't have the right to ignore those with legitimate concerns because ignorant or apathetic people are more in numbers. That goes for everything, everywhere. That goes to how you are supposed to look out for little siblings when parents are away, and it goes for expert knowledge or intellect.
But what is any user supposed to do with a blinkenlight telling them what they already mostly know: that a website is bloated/slow/eating their machine slowly? If there was an alternative website, maybe they'd already be using it. If they thought complaining to the site's owners about it, maybe they already had or are already aware that they'd be shouting into a careless corporate void. That mostly just leaves uselessly blaming their browser for a blinkenlight that tells them something they already know and can't care about.
I think some of it is also that the web has numerous things about it that are fundamentally expensive operations, going back to things like "the default table sizing algorithm reacts to the flow of the content within it, which also depends on how the table decides to format it". It's not hard to create a pure HTML page that has no interesting images or scripts or anything, but still is fundamentally slow to render. (You probably wouldn't want to write it by hand, but I've accidentally written programs that output such pages over the years.)
Are you suggesting that Chrome gathers data about you? Because unless you tick that box (which they show pretty prominently) it doesn't. It doesn't by default in most linux distribution packages.
> Unlike IE
I don't know if you've been following, but Microsoft is now the king of knowing everything about you. They record things about their customers' computer activity which should horrify anyone. Sometimes they don't respect user selections either, even all the way up to Enterprise editions (where it is often mission-critical not to send competitive information to Microsoft by accident in a core dump), which is infuriating.
> In my opinion chrome isn't doing a good job either. It's a massive energy hog and waste more CPU than it needs to.
My impression is that at this point, most unique performance problems in Chrome are either an inherent cost of multi-process, a mediocre implementation choice in that model, or a performance tradeoff toward better application latency at the cost of heavy initialization. Chrome could display many pages more quickly if they ignored the GPU, but they use it across the board so that they don't have to restart into "GPU mode" when they realize there is a lot of compositing on the page. Chrome has converged toward other browsers recently, they'll now run multiple tabs on the same process as long as they share a FQDN (sites that host together, crash together), I suspect they do this to save memory.
If we're talking about runtime speed of real web apps and sites, Chrome has everyone matched or beat.
> The time to celebrate victory was a few years ago. Now it's starting to look like the new boss is the same as the old, maybe worse.
The problem with IE6 was not Microsoft, or IE6 itself. Microsoft did not win by literally forcing people to use IE6. The problem was, and probably always will be, greedy unscrupulous web developers (and their managers) who want all the cool new toys at any cost. Microsoft was doing the cool, "html5, bro!" type browser innovation that google is doing now, and developers (and their managers) lapped it up. People forget that Microsoft made box-model: border-box, XMLHttpRequest, favicons, <ruby>, and bi-directional text on the web. They did this all in IE5, this put IE6 ahead, and people loved it too. Microsoft did the right thing and didn't break compat for honest customers who just wanted their webpage to work, so IE5 quirks are the way of the web.
The problem is not that nobody likes the boss, the problem is that everyone likes the boss.
No, I didn't forget. But you forgot to say that MS did all that with draft specifications or even no spec at all (XMLHttpRequest), just to beat everyone to market, then refused to correct their implementation once the standard was revised and agreed by others. And they sprinkled ActiveX on top, for good measure.
> developers (and their managers) lapped it up
Disagree. Developers were the ones that pushed Mozilla and then Firefox (and then Chrome) as soon as they could.
> Microsoft did the right thing and didn't break compat
Microsoft did the right thing for their own bank account: they smashed the competition with bundling then left IE to flounder, even obliterating their dedicated team, because they had reached their objective, which was to dominate the web so that they could sell what they really cared about: ActiveX and other Windows-only technologies.
> the problem is that everyone likes the boss.
No, the problem is that people are lazy. IE won with OEM bundling on Windows. Chrome is winning with OEM bundling on Android. As long as the default is good enough, people won't switch, especially 15 years ago when downloads took a degree of effort (waiting several minutes, restarting after failure etc etc) and now on mobile where it is awkward and/or completely forbidden to switch browser. This is basically what the article says as well: they couldn't push a browser, they had to push an OS with a browser bundled. If people don't switch, developers can't build for alternative browsers, because their managers won't allow the additional time and effort.
No, the DOM put into IE was legitimately better than that in the old NN. MS won that war because their browser was BETTER, period.
They then sat on their laurels and the rest of the world passed them by, so now they're still trying to play catchup.
But at the time? No, anyone who had any experience in the DOM of IE vs NN would hands down push IE. It was just better in every way.
Where did I mention Netscape? I didn't.
IE5 is from 1999, IE6 from 2001, and they were undoubtedly better than Navigator; but the first 0.x releases of Mozilla with the new Gecko engine are from late 2000/early 2001, and were better than IE (although the suite was slow and bloated). Firefox was branched out in 2002 and took off very quickly because it was a great engine without the bloat of full Mozilla. That's why people pushed it (or rather Phoenix) right off the bat.
If you were pushing IE6 over Mozilla or Firefox in 2001/2002, you weren't paying attention. Navigator all but died in 1999.
When developers were pushing IE was when it was IE vs NN.
"Microsoft has lost over 300 million browser users in 2016, mostly to Chrome, tracking site shows"
No. Microsoft had a non-standard box model which was an utter pain in the ass, regardless of their box model being more sensible than everybody else's in theory[0] (and ultimately standardised as an option circa 2010) having to code for a single standard documented box-model is way the fuck easier than coding for two different box models.
Also it's box-sizing not box-model.
[0] because in practice MSIE's layout engine was a buggy pile of shit
The sane way of doing boxes pre-dated the "standard", which in hindsight appears as though it was specifically crafted to spite Microsoft.
It was a silly time to be a developer.
"Microsoft has lost over 300 million browser users in 2016, mostly to Chrome, tracking site shows"
Not going to take very long at this rate. Appears to be accelerating. Personally just use Chrome as for me extremely stable and when tried Edge it was not stable. I do a lot of surfing and often times have a lot of tabs open and can not remember the last time a tab crashed.
You spend too much time working lurking around HN sites and young web developers.
May be.
I see this as truly the case of making the pie bigger.
All devices include 2 Billion Android devices. That's a bigger pie that Chrome owns now, but FireFox can target in future.
Watch out for Opera's add block, it works through a proxy to compress data, thus they know your every move online too...
A world with Google owning a monopoly on web browsing isn't any less bad than if it were Microsoft.
Now with the web, it's much easier to make something work across all platforms, except at the bleeding edge, which is generally where you'll find those sites. Almost all the ones I've seen were tech demos of new browser tech that wasn't available everywhere yet.
That was the case with sites only working on IE 6. What did you expect?
And after some market share point, it's not about laziness either, it makes business sense to not waste time for a small percentage of users (100% reach is not always better than 90% reach -- there's this thing called "opportunity cost").
This is what we want to avoid.
A lot of companies that thought short term like that our paying through the nose for the decision now because they are still stuck on IE6. There is a business case for avoiding vendor lock in, but it's not quantifiable so it gets ignored.
Not about not caring to test/optimize for other browsers, or using standard stuff some browser gets out faster -- which is what some companies do today with Chrome.
How many of them will remember the lessons?
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
You said "Microsoft owned the whole stack" (OS, Office Suite, Browser). My response is, that Google is trying to achieve the same thing: The blurred O/S+Browser that is Chrome, and browser based software like Google Apps.
You're right, that what they intend to do with said monopoly is not relevant to that specific point. The point is that both saw an advantage of some kind that made it worthwhile having control over a large portion of the software their user's ran.
Where it does matter though, is that in the Microsoft monopoly, it was a monopoly of defaults and business contracts only. Nothing technically prevented someone from installing a separate browser, a separate office suite, etc., on their computer.
With a Chromebook, which Google is pushing heavily in education, what options do you have when it comes to installing an office suite? What options do you have when it comes to installing a different browser?
If your answer is "Android Apps", I suggest you read up on Google's own docs, which show that just 10% of devices support that functionality, only 7% support it without using a Beta.
It is official, Google is the new Microsoft.
Microsoft lied to the Justice department, microsoft intentionally broke software on other system, microsoft actively tried to kill open source, microsoft tried to co-opt standardization bodies, microsoft has bought competitors only to fire their staff, microsoft has...
Microsoft has a plethora of criminal charges levied against it.
Google.... Reads your email if send to or from Gmail and sometimes some of its things don't work in FireFox and even then they try to fix it. Google open sources a bunch of things, even when there is no obvious profit motive or requirements to do so.
There is a world of difference. Google's shit doesn't smell like roses, but they are only human and not overtly evil.
EDIT - If you downvote me, please comment so I can know what part of what I said was wrong.
IE was (is) closed source
It currently has a very large relation to the open source Chromium project. But Google could change that tomorrow if they wanted to - they could also gradually move more and more to their closed source Chrome builds (as they have done with Android).
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/54kzpc/psa_...
There is some debate inside Vivaldi about making it open source and it would be easy enough to do. I'd guess that it probably doesn't make economic sense while it has such a small market share, but I don't know if that's true.
I disagree. There's a difference between having 99% of the source available and 0%.
If the internet exploded and we had to rebuild it from the ground up, there would be no html/web, and no 3rd party search engine which attempts to reconstruct the web by viewing it as a blackbox. We would build search into DNS, since that's basically what DNS is supposed to be for, and along with the monetization of search (register your site for x search keywords, pay the root DNS for additional keywords.) All of Google's revenue is but a hack of a patch on a chaotically formed system.
Google needs the web, but the web is terrible. It's made for showing static documents with hyperlinks to other static documents. But that's clearly not what people want to view or build, they want apps. So we have 1 million javascript frameworks trying to vie for support on various browsers on various operating systems. All this infrastructure to support 'web apps' that can only call into http and dom manipulation apis. Mobile apps have proven there are other ways to make apps, with security and containerization and allowing full (but secured) access to all OS apis, and easier compatibility. All Google's endearing endeavors to create cool, web-based tech, are just efforts to prop up the terrible web platform, to prevent it from being superseded by a better open system. Facebook (which uses the web only non-exclusively) shows us a better system is possible, but it is not open.
So, back on topic, Google won't stop being good to the web, because the greatest evil of Google is that they're good to a platform which doesn't deserve it.
Servo and Webrender[0] will completely shake up the browser landscape, and will allow web apps to match (maybe even surpass?) native mobile apps in terms of rendering performance. Unless Chrome, IE, and Safari can develop an answer to Servo and Webrender by the time those technologies are ready for prime time, I wouldn't be surprised to see "Best viewed in Firefox" badges start popping up everywhere.
[0]
So it's not entirely unreasonable to suggest that Mozilla's next-gen engine efforts could be first-to-market, and that everyone else might have to play catch up.
Mozilla won the browser war. Firefox lost the browser fight. But there's many wars left to fight, and I hope Mozilla dives into a new one.
What's next isn't clear to me
Secure messaging is also still a hot topic. Join forces with Signal or Wire or Matrix or XMPP. For example, Wire intends to open source their server code and enable federation [0].
Voice control requires some weight for an Open Source solution. Specifically, we could use something which does not rely on the internet. PocketSphinx is an ok foundation, but needs more work.
[0] https://medium.com/@wireapp/open-sourcing-wire-server-code-e...
However I would say that among those who do know, Lineage OS has a fairly good reputation for quality. You wouldn't be targeting mass adoption with this, you'd be targeting the influencers.
Apple lost it by getting boxed into a market share corner by android. Google lost it by losing control over android. Android OEM's lost it by getting stuck in a cutthroat competition. Microsoft lost it by being microsoft. Users lost it by having no good choices left (either go with the golden cage iphone, or go with the privacy and security mess android).
Apple was never likely to license iOS to other manufacturers, nor were they likely to have enough capacity to satisfy the whole market. I reckon they are where they always wanted to be: owning a very profitable and locked-in niche.
You mean the corner where they are the premium smartphone vendor, taking 90% share of global profits? That's a great corner to be boxed into :)
Because iOS users are a significant source of potential profit.
Apple doesn't need to maximize usage in order to control the ecosystem - they just need to maximize profit potential.
Now OEM have to obey to Google because losing the Google apps and services licence (thus losing the Play store and the whole ecosystem) basically means they're dead as an Android manufacturer.
That works in China because Google is relatively weak there. It also works for Amazon, which has its own store for Fire products.
As technology shifts to a world where most people do not have a monitor on their home computer or a screen on their phone, what it means to be a browser will dramatically change. Certainly, we could post-it the current user experience into whatever we will have tomorrow, but if VR, AR, Speech, and AI and ample cheap private computing power don't excite people for the future of browsers and user agency, I don't know what will.
I know we've been working on tech such as Servo for a long time, but sometimes even just being "better" isn't enough, especially when there's a large legacy gap to close. You also need to get lucky with a point where consumers are making massive changes and open to new things.
I think that time is much sooner than the "always 5--10 years quoted", and you're going to see mind-blowing things on the web in general and supported by the browser and related services specifically. And I'm betting (at least with my current career) that Mozilla will lead the charge.
The Vivaldi browser has copied the original Firefox user interface and stole the best ideas from the Firefox extension makers so if you want the Chromium web rendering engine with the original Firefox user interface you are served by the Vivaldi browser. Hopefully they will become profitable and release their modification under a free software license.
Not that anyone cares, because MathJax...
The web is better without JavaScript.
But I am assuming that a browser offering a gigantic leap in UX through native-like rendering performance will entice web app developers to recommend that browser over others, because it's nigh impossible to build a consistently 60fps non trivial app with native-like interactions and transitions on the web today, while Servo and Webrender aim to make 60fps on the web the norm rather than the exception.
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1347543 [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1054016
And it's proving to be fast, safe, and the future of browsers.
First of all, I think the idea behind Servo is awesome, and I follow it. But I've been testing it on Mac OS and Windows, and it is not a runnable browser, nor fast (as expected!). CPU is often fully pegged and it's very iffy if any UI elements or page loads work. Not to say they won't get there, but it's still very, very early and buggy.
We had a similar issue with Stylo (Servo style system in gecko) recently where there were bugs in the parallelism code making us slower than gecko. Fixed, now we're faster again. We only recently started tracking performance properly, and it was caught and fixed in a few weeks.
As Servo would be a mobile app itself, I think no ;)
Unless Firefox (and Servo) gets it GUI to not feel alien and clunky, it wont matter if it has a faster rendering engine. Rendering engines are plenty fast as it is anyway, it's CPU use and battery impact that matters to users. And when performance does matter, it's mostly Javascript performance, which Servo doesn't address.
It also wont matter for mobile, since Android will still keep Chrome browser, and iOS will still keep Mobile Safari -- they're both made by the platform's creators.
You make it sound like these are two orthogonal aspects. When rendering is faster, CPU usage obviously goes down. As does battery impact, since the CPU can go back to a sleep state faster.
Only as much as its the rendering, and not the core logic that consumes the CPU.
Degenerative case: a page with a single text entry field, where you enter a number and it calculates e.g. the fibonnaci sequence up to that number or factor primes etc. There's hardly any rendering, but lots of CPU.
And as for Firefox on Android, I have plenty of hope for it. I'm seeing more and more people switch to alternative browsers for speed (the most common one is samsung's "browser" which everyone says is "super fast" but really only is a weird hack to make scrolling smooth which breaks a few standards).
Ios is another story, but at least on android if they make a damn good product, people will use it.
That's at odds with almost every single sentiment I've seen regarding native vs. Web apps. Take one look at any HN thread about the two.
> And when performance does matter, it's mostly Javascript performance, which Servo doesn't address.
If that were true, then there wouldn't be a performance differential between native and Web, since Objective-C and Dalvik are slower than modern JS engines. (Look at how method call dispatch works in Objective-C!)
Besides, a lot of what shows up as "JS performance" in a profiler is actually blocking on DOM operations. With off-main-thread layout, these operations can be done in the background, resulting in improved DOM performance.
If we're talking about e.g. Electron apps, the problem I see mentioned (and felt myself) is almost always the memory hogging, the GC-pauses, the battery impact and such -- not the rendering speed. Although, there is talk of getting to 60fps web apps etc.
For something like Atom, is the slow redrawing because "DOM is slow" or because "doing the calculations needed for a sizable file, with syntax highlighting regexes, compiler checks, freeing memory, etc takes lots of processing time"?
>If that were true, then there wouldn't be a performance differential between native and Web, since Objective-C and Dalvik are slower than modern JS engines. (Look at how method call dispatch works in Objective-C!)
That's not entirely true, as Objective-C dispatch was thoroughly optimized [1]. Besides, the performance differential is also in the time to process logic (and the network latency) which you don't address. And of course, aside from rendering (which often is just "show a few forms, buttons and lists" for most apps) a part of the heavy logic in Objective-C for lots of tasks is done in C or C++ frameworks at much faster speeds than modern JS engines.
[1] https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/performance-comparisons-of-co...
I see the opposite. VS Code feels somewhat slow, mostly because of rendering—it doesn't hit 60 FPS.
You cite GC pauses. One of the best ways to mitigate GC pauses is to move the noticeable rendering logic off the main thread so that your app doesn't freeze during GCs, which is precisely what Servo is designed to do.
> For something like Atom, is the slow redrawing because "DOM is slow" or because "doing the calculations needed for a sizable file, with syntax highlighting regexes, compiler checks, freeing memory, etc takes lots of processing time"?
The performance differential is because of many things, but regex performance and freeing memory relative to native aren't among them. JS engines' regex engines are best in class and easily exceed the performance of popular C regex libraries; this is a side effect of SunSpider and V8 including regex benchmarks. Memory deallocation in popular JS engines is faster than in native, because sweeping takes place all at once and generational GC nursery evacuation is very fast.
> That's not entirely true, as Objective-C dispatch was thoroughly optimized [1].
Those numbers are precisely what I'm referring to. In most cases, JS method dispatch is more like a C++ method call or an IMP-cached message send than a slow hash table lookup. Often it's even better, because the inliner kicks in, while inlining is very difficult in Objective-C. Objective-C's "fast path" is the slowest path in JavaScript, one that's only hit for megamorphic call sites.
> Besides, the performance differential is also in the time to process logic (and the network latency) which you don't address.
Pure computation in most apps is not appreciably slower for the end user in JS than it is in Android or iOS. And if it is, there's always Web Assembly! We're doing lots of work to improve JS performance; it's just not all under the Servo umbrella.
> And of course, aside from rendering (which often is just "show a few forms, buttons and lists" for most apps) a part of the heavy logic in Objective-C for lots of tasks is done in C or C++ frameworks at much faster speeds than modern JS engines.
That same "heavy logic"—by which I assume you mean audio/image/video decoding, JSON/XML parsing, image filters, vector graphics work—is also done in native code in browsers. And it's those very same tasks that we're optimizing in Servo.
[1] http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lan...
Well said.
I certainly hope it is not a PR stunt, but WordPress is probably the other big player in the fight for the open web. It might actually benefit all of us if Automattic starts making a lot of noise about privacy.
And ultimately, its not as if anyone wants any of these tech giants to completely fail (well, maybe Facebook). What we want is to not have the nature of the web changed to suit the whims of a handful of companies.
I feel like we're ten years late for this concern.
At the moment, there are only two kinds of employees at Facebook. Those who care and are getting irritated each time these issues are raised on HN (see here [1]), and the dregs who bury their heads in the sand. I bet there is someone who works there who is reading this and realizing that either they will have to change their attitude, or soon the company will turn into another Enron. We don't still have Enron in our midst anymore, do we?
Once one company goes down, it is only a matter of time before the rest fall in a domino sequence because people will start wondering about the practices of its peers. I would like to think that these companies are a little more sensible than to imagine they are somehow infallible, its better for them to change now before it gets to the point where they are made to.
sure, but if Chrome de facto controls standards does that really matter?
Sucks that they don't have an IOS version, but Apple is the problem there, not Mozilla.
Adblocking is more than pure resource blocking (which afaik Brave, Samsung, iOS et. al.) currently implement. In fact, the smaller amount of ads I would see would be blocked this way.
I have Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, reddit and in the past Tumblr ad free due to element hiding capabilities that are non-present in any other browser I know except Firefox mobile with ublock origin.
Edit: I replied to the wrong comment. I guess it's early.
I think the idea of TFA is that soon we wont have as many options, since Chrome seems to be dominating. Opera is also using Chrome's engine, ditto for Brave, so they're basically just sells. And Safari is from the same DNA, and only really relevant on Mobile and OS X.
So Windows users basically have just Chrome and Firefox, and Linux users basically have just Chrome, Firefox and Edge. And even in Windows, Chrome dominates, almost to the point that IE dominated back in the day.
So where's the choice? If it's just about availability of other rendering engines, people still had choice in the "optimized for IE" days. But it's mostly about rendering engines having competing market shares, and nowadays they increasingly do not.
Plus, who will keep paying search placement money to Firefox if it gets to small single digits of use? And without those, how will development be continued?
I'd be interested to see the evidence for that....
This was not just competition. This was a deliberate campaign to break the web in a way where IE would work but Netscape would not.
As I said, this is from memory, and I can't find the source. I have read a copy of the Microsoft memo, though (but you only have my word for it...)
Microsoft was much more co-operative than Netscape in the early days. It was one of Microsoft's advantages when Netscape was winning and running on pure arrogance. See How the Web Was Won, High Stakes No Prisoners and a few other books for details.
Microsoft did introduce ActiveX, which Mozilla considered supporting, and then decided not to.
One of the facts of the case is that Microsoft got as close to the standards bodies as it could, and part of its marketing was that it was making IE more standards compliant than Netscape. This is actually very common in computer history (the market leader does whatever it wants to innovate, while the losers band together around standards).
In the end, of course, it didn't matter. Microsoft out-programmed Netscape and then Netscape made several disastrous decisions that amounted to browsercide.
As I said, if you've got any evidence, I'm interested. Specifically, what did Microsoft add that was non-standard and that Netscape couldn't have added?
As far as I know, not even ActiveX qualifies. I discussed this with Mitchell Baker, and she clearly said that Mozilla could have implemented ActiveX if they had wanted to.
Mozilla _is_ fighting that fight. See their posts here: https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/
i disagree. Google built chrome to protect their monopoly in search. and they have protected that monopoly well, and added another one: browser.
i dont disparage Google for doing it, in fact both are great products that I use. But to say mozilla did it to 'give people a choice' and that they 'won' doesnt seem right to me.
>> We really need someone to fight for our privacy and neutrality. And I really believe that this could be Mozilla's swan song.
I deeply care about privacy. I fight for privacy. I work in information security. Every day I help my customers write code a little more securely. I educate them about implementing end to end encrypted communication systems. I am slowly migrating away from systems that don't respect privacy or can't function at scale without violating privacy.
You have made a great point, and we do need big organizations to fight for privacy too. But the "someone" also has to be you and me. We have to reject operating systems like Windows 10. We have to make Linux and open source tools the ones we want to use. Even merely quitting Macbooks, which trendy firms and developers are so fond of, even if just one more person does that /today/ matters.
We have to claw our data back. Byte by byte, we must earn it back and never accept being the product again. We must suffer the almost inconceivable inconvenience of perhaps not using Amazon for every online purchase. Amazon, Facebook, Google... they are slowly eating the world and even if they are "good" that sort of absolute domination enforces a mono-culture onto the world.
I'm much less pessimistic.
Besides a cross platform and extensible browser we see also the following coming out of Mozilla:
* Rust, a modern low-level programming language with cutting edge "safety" build in at zero runt time cost, luring many system programmers.
* Servo, tomorrow browser, from scratch, in Rust.
* Thunderbird, x-platform desktop email client (interesting for those not trusting the cloud enough).
* MDN, everything MSDN and w3school wish they could be. :)
A lot with revolve around privacy and safety in the future, a space that Mozilla is very well positioned to florish in.
Chrome is a good product. But I prefer Firefox. And seeing what is becoming of Servo I will soon start using that. Form me Firefox has won, and is not at all losing. I dont need the "most popular" browser, I need the most secure one.
And when I see what programming languages Google came up with... (Seriously? Is Go the best money can buy?) Then I think Rust shows single handedly that Mozilla beats Google in that arena as well.
The amount of funding they get is in direct correlation to how much market share they have in Firefox at the time they negotiate a search deal with one of the big search sites.
1. A programming language, that hasn't yet shown "escape velocity" to go beyond D and other would-be-C++-successors in traction.
2. The only major application of that language... a pre-alpha browser engine, which may or may not eventually replace the engine in a browser that is seriously declining in market share with no reversal in sight.
3. A desktop email client, from which Mozilla has repeatedly made clear their intentions to divest and move on.
4. A JavaScript and HTML reference manual.
Mozilla is an organization with over $400 million in annual revenue. Where that money is going baffles me.
You may be interested in https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/friends.html.
There are other promising applications. For example, it could be used for web technologies-based applications (e.g. hybrid mobile apps, Electron, ...).
This is astonishing. Anyone looked at their accounts?
Besides that, a few things to consider:
* Mozilla is currently doing financially well, no one ever claimed otherwise. They are putting money to the side and also diversifying their income strategies, in case their market share falls even lower and revenue from search engines drops out. * They are still by far the smallest of the big browser vendors. Google, Microsoft and Apple could all easily invest far more money than that, if they wanted to. * Mozilla is currently developing two browser engines in parallel, implementing a new extension model, making Firefox multi-process capable and just in general dealing with a lot of technical debt. No way to truly know what Google, Microsoft and Apple are up to, but I can hardly imagine them currently doing more than Mozilla in terms of innovation and development.
Anyway, $400 million a year, if you spend it all on developers (salaries, payroll taxes, benefits, desks, monitors, etc) gets you at most 2000 people in the US. And that's if you really stretch things, honestly.
That assumes you don't need a continuous integration infrastructure (which is actually a pretty large cost in practice). And that you don't need legal, payroll, marketing. Or any project management or management at all. And that you're not doing any documentation or anything like that.
In practice, Mozilla has a bit over 1000 employees and isn't spending all its revenue (so pays taxes on whatever it doesn't spend, and saves what's left).
I think you meant this disparagingly, but such a reference is remarkable. Comprehensive disscussion of a massive standard, in a well-written, usable form is a huge accomplishment.
From FY2015, actual budget is $372 million. $227 million is applied toward investments - mutual funds, bonds, etc, presumably to ensure longevity and continuity. They paid $29 million in income taxes, $6 million in employee benefits. I can't really comprehend rest of the audit report in any practical terms I understand, but that leaves about $100 million to try to understand and rationalize (actually probably a lot less than that.)
At 1,000 employees, that's $100k per person on average, which doesn't sound so far-fetched (of course in reality it's a curve, but it suddenly doesn't look so alarming). Somewhat noteworthy, they donate about $300k/year and a full-time employee to Let's Encrypt. Which, well, I personally benefited from that, so kudos.
Servo is an "experimental" browser engine. While Chromium is cranking out features, servo is yet to reach version 1.0.
Thunderbird - was "discontinued" by Mozilla
MDN is a mess. The topics are all over the place and its hard to navigate. php.net docs is much more organized.
You can criticize Go but it has a more thriving ecosystem than Rust.
As much I'd like them to succeed, I dont think Mozilla is doing very good right now. They churn out technologically good products, but business wise, they dont know what they're doing. And without money, they wont be able to fight the big companies like Google, MS, FB.
I think Go has already become unavoidable for those working in cloud like environments, thanks to Docker and Kubernetes.
Anyone working on those areas needs a working knowledge of Go, even he/she dislikes the language.
This would be a more convincing point if any of memory safety, parallel styling, parallel layout, retained mode rendering as suggested by the GPU vendors, and so forth were on Chromium's roadmap.
Servo is a nice goal and a technological feat but its a big business risk for Mozilla without clear return of value.
> Servo is a nice goal and a technological feat but its a big business risk for Mozilla without clear return of value.
Doing nothing is an even bigger risk.
I don't understand why "you shouldn't even try to improve" is such a popular sentiment on HN, of all places. What possible benefit can complacency bring? Why advocate it?
Disclaimer: I work on Chrome.
This is a case in which looking at the numbers without digging in more closely can lead to misleading conclusions. Yes, the Chrome Profiler reports that a lot of time is spent in JS (though ~25% of total CPU time on styling, etc. is not what I would call "paltry"). But what is that JS doing? It's usually not doing raw computation but rather doing custom layout, interacting with the DOM, etc. People do synchronous reflows (no matter how much you evangelize, people will still do it), which means that layout performance affects what looks like script time. And, due to ads, a lot of the performance cost is cross-domain iframes, which have no reason to run on the main thread (process isolation is too heavyweight to scale this far, which is why Chrome-style Site Isolation isn't a solution).
The real problem with browsers is that so much is synchronous. We need to make everything as responsive as possible, and the way to do that is to aggressively multithread. Unfortunately, that's very hard to do in existing browser codebases. Hence Servo.
The solutions that the Chrome team keeps proposing—Custom Layout, Custom Paint, CSS Compositing, etc. are all targeted toward rendering (and they're essentially short-term band-aids at that). If rendering really weren't a problem, then we wouldn't be spending all this time on Google's Houdini proposals! If layout were fast, we wouldn't see people implementing layouts in JS, and therefore we wouldn't need Custom Layout. If painting were fast, then we could use SVG and CSS and not feel like Custom Paint is necessary. If the main thread weren't so bogged down all the time, then people wouldn't see the need to move a random subset of the Web platform to the compositor thread.
To be honest, I think that Houdini is largely misguided: there is a huge amount of performance left on the table that would obviate the need for Houdini if we simply chased it.
Chrome's profiler actually shows synchronous layouts and style recals forced from JS as layout/style so it's not misleading in that way. The traces I've looked at (admittedly, not something I do terribly often) showed those to be typically ~20% or less of the time spent while content is loading.
> And, due to ads, a lot of the performance cost is cross-domain iframes, which have no reason to run on the main thread (process isolation is too heavyweight to scale this far, which is why Chrome-style Site Isolation isn't a solution).
I suppose the proof will be in the pudding, but I think process isolation could actually be a solution here. You don't have to have a separate process for every cross origin iframe. This is something desirable to do anyway for the security benefits so you might as well leverage it for performance as well. IMHO, this is the biggest problem with web perf and I don't see Servo as directly addressing it.
> If layout were fast, we wouldn't see people implementing layouts in JS
Are people re-implementing layout/paint because it's slow? Or because we didn't bake in the little detail they want into the platform through a multiyear standardisation process? I think it's naive to think developers will just stop writing JS if the browser gets x% faster.
> If the main thread weren't so bogged down all the time, then people wouldn't see the need to move a random subset of the Web platform to the compositor thread.
I disagree. Developers will always find something to fill it with. IMHO, the real goal - and the reason for the compositor thread - is to separate rendering from input and make it difficult for a page to tie the two together (or rather, easy to keep them separate). A user wont notice if the page takes an extra few hundred ms to render. She will notice if her scroll is delayed by 200ms.
I don't see Houdini as the main thrust here, there's lower hanging fruit. Practically speaking, non-blocking event handlers have had a bigger impact on user experience than anything I've seen in the last few years. I expect IntersectionObserver to have a big impact too. I think chasing the long tail of UX antipatterns, while not as sexy, is far more productive.
In any case, I'd be happy to be proven wrong here - Servo is doing some really cool stuff and no one would be sad to see things get faster; I just don't see it as the silver bullet it's often promoted to be. I think this is a great example of how having multiple rendering engines is healthy for the web. Lets all innovate independently and let the results speak for themselves :).
If you can multithread iframes, then I think Amdahl's Law will start to kick in unless you improve style and layout performance. For instance, if I block the ads on washingtonpost.com, then style + layout is nearly as big as script.
But in any case, you have to look at how that affects the user experience. If done properly—i.e. everything remains responsive—the user won't notice slow script very much.
> I suppose the proof will be in the pudding, but I think process isolation could actually be a solution here. You don't have to have a separate process for every cross origin iframe. This is something desirable to do anyway for the security benefits so you might as well leverage it for performance as well. IMHO, this is the biggest problem with web perf and I don't see Servo as directly addressing it.
Servo definitely does address it, because it runs all cross-origin iframes in separate threads (and has from the beginning). Even same-origin iframes get separate style/layout threads, even though they share the same DOM thread. It can also do process isolation, as ipc-channel lets us abstract over the thread/process distinction.
I think multithreading is a more scalable solution for performance than process isolation, because with process isolation you need heuristics to avoid ballooning the number of processes out of control. You could have a throttled "ad process", but then you'd have to figure out what the ads are and hope you don't mess up, or else you might hurt iframes that matter. It's a lot simpler to just put separate origins in separate threads to begin with.
> Are people re-implementing layout/paint because it's slow?
Yes, because they've been told to use CSS transforms instead of real layout because those "run on the GPU".
> I think it's naive to think developers will just stop writing JS if the browser gets x% faster.
They won't, but we can certainly help things along a lot by making it easier to just use the platform. (I think we're in agreement here.)
> IMHO, the real goal - and the reason for the compositor thread - is to separate rendering from input and make it difficult for a page to tie the two together (or rather, easy to keep them separate). A user wont notice if the page takes an extra few hundred ms to render. She will notice if her scroll is delayed by 200ms.
I agree with the general principle, but I disagree with way it's implemented in existing browsers. The compositor thread is super limited; it's a thing that handles a weird subset of CSS that you have to be careful not to fall out of or else your performance drops. This is no way to treat Web developers! It's a historical accident, too, one that stems from the fact that Core Animation was developed independently of Mobile Safari for the iPhone 2G, Mobile Safari retrofitted a subset of CSS to that API, and then everyone copied Mobile Safari.
It makes more sense to have a dedicated thread for all style and layout and another thread for all painting, eliminating the paint/composite distinction. No matter what you do, the styling/layout runs off main thread, and the painting runs in yet another thread. That's Servo/WebRender's design. It's not easily compatible with existing engines, but that's why Servo exists :)
> I don't see Houdini as the main thrust here, there's lower hanging fruit. Practically speaking, non-blocking event handlers have had a bigger impact on user experience than anything I've seen in the last few years. I expect IntersectionObserver to have a big impact too. I think chasing the long tail of UX antipatterns, while not as sexy, is far more productive.
The problem with focusing just on adding new stuff to the platform is that, while Google's evangelism operation is impressive, it's hard to get existing Web developers to move to new stuff. It's the classic Itanium vs. x86 inertia problem. To take Washington Post as an example, they layout thrash like crazy when loading, despite it being known for years that that's a massive performance problem. By contrast, by making existing patterns faster, we improve the user experience for all Web sites, old and new.
To be clear, we should both introduce new APIs (IntersectionObserver is a very important one) and work on improving performance of the old. They're not mutually exclusive.
> In any case, I'd be happy to be proven wrong here - Servo is doing some really cool stuff and no one would be sad to see things get faster; I just don't see it as the silver bullet it's often promoted to be. I think this is a great example of how having multiple rendering engines is healthy for the web.
Oh, it's hardly a silver bullet. Those don't exist. By the same token, though, new APIs and things like AMP aren't a silver bullet either ;)
> I think this is a great example of how having multiple rendering engines is healthy for the web.
I agree, which is why I disagree with the "Chrome Won" defeatist attitude of the article.
Yeah, it's too bad that Google's Chrome-first/Chrome-only approach to Web development these days is making that increasingly difficult to sustain.
I do layout in JS because the existing layout capabilities don't cover my use cases. I create complicated visualisations in SVG, and SVG's layout capabilities are so pathetically anaemic that I have no choice but to take over and use a mixture of D3 and custom JS to arrange things.
Similarly, I don't do synchronous layouts because I'm a moron who doesn't understand performance, but because I need to measure the size of various data-bound elements and feed those dimensions back into my custom multi-pass layout algorithm.
AFAIK, Houdini is an actual attempt to solve both of these problems: It will let run my custom layout algorithm in a worklet, and give it access to the font metrics and element sizes it needs to run efficiently.
The Houdini people seem to be the only web platform people who actually "get it" with respect to these kind of problems. Everyone else seems to be either ignorant or dismissive that these problems even exist.
Of course, I agree with the rest of your points.
True. But Mozilla is betting on servo which I see as a big question mark as well. Are you sure that people will download firefox over chrome when servo lands? How long before it will finally ship? 1, 2 years? Was there a market research before hand? Like I said its a big question mark. Cant blame me if I have doubts after Firefox OS.
> I don't understand why "you shouldn't even try to improve" is such a popular sentiment on HN, of all places. What possible benefit can complacency bring? Why advocate it?
I dont know and I dont have something to do with it. Personally, I think the popular opinion on HN is pro Rust and pro Servo.
> I'd be more than willing to hear your technical thoughts...
Wait, are you using the "if you cant talk technical GTFO" card on me? We are straying from my original comment.
To make this perfectly clear:
Im not against improvement. Im against Mozilla's poor business decisions. You can see that was my point in the original comment.
No im not downplaying all your hard work. But ive seen this happen before. Happened to me as well. "Oh this will be great when it ships" at the expense of the company. Im trying to give an alternative opinion here contrary to the constant positive reinforcement when Rust and Servo is posted on HN. Nothing personal.
Bits have already landed, and another major piece is being worked on right now. That's the whole idea of Quantum; no need to wait till Servo is done for Firefox users to start seeing benefit.
Are you sure that people will download Firefox over Chrome when Mozilla does nothing?
This is just one of many examples!
There are not a ton but there are more than zero.
It's definitely put it firmly on my radar as something to pick up recently, and since I don't already know C or C++ it feels like a good starting point.
I love Rust, and advocate it among other memory safe systems programming languages, but right now it still has an uphill battle against Swift, C++17 and .NET Native, on the desktop and mobile OSes.
Adoption is growing slowly, even Microsoft has recently added a Rust library to VS Code, but it will take years to become a major systems language.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vertical-tabs...
It seems Mozilla is very much aware of what will disappear when WebExtensions becomes the only extension API, and what will need to happen to replace it.
Google may focus on specific types of exploits, but they let everyone bad just walk right in the front door.
You can hit a single accidental click on a malicious Google ad (yes, there are many), and end up with a voice telling you to click the "Install Extension" button to regain control of your browser, which alternates between a JavaScript alert popup message and the extension installation prompt to make it hard to get out of any other way (it's doable, if you're not a layperson). Approving it installs an extension which can inject ads into web pages and collect data on everything you visit and anything you type into Chrome.
Sure, it's removable, but most of the victims of this behavior don't even know what Chrome extensions are, much less how to remove them.
This is absolutely something Google has failed to address, and it's really not accurate to refer to Chrome as "the most secure browser" while this is so rampant and unhandled.
Assuming you know better than installing adware or installing random chrome extensions, Chrome is the most secure browser out there.
Btw, regarding extensions, before Mozilla switched to WebExtensions, you could do nasty stuff like extension-reuse attacks.
then you really ought to be using chrome
Some problems with Mozilla are that they don't do community management well any more. In the old days, there were amazing grassroots-driven projects like spreadfirefox.com. It is not like that any more. Grassroots supporters have trouble participating, even if they try.
For example, I tried to create a Firefox programmers' meetup group in Berkeley, and even though some community people from Mozilla joined the group, no one from Mozilla would reply to my inquiries. (I still would like to restart that idea, but I don't have time to chase them down. We have 4,000 members in our various meetup groups at the moment.)
Another problem is that they are doing things that make their most-dedicated core users lose interest. They should have realized the incredible enthusiasm for Firefox that plugins like Pentadactyl were creating. They're killing off the API that it depends on. Instead, they should have funded the development of Pentadactyl and made it a reason why tech-savvy users choose Firefox. Tech-savvy users drive adoption, but they have abandoned many of their tech-savvy supporters.
There is still hope for Firefox if they are able to get the messages about privacy across. Chrome is slower to use out of the box, partially because of the auto-completion algorithm that tends to send people to Google Search to click on ads before reaching their destination. The older Firefox search box didn't waste users' time like that. (Recently it changed so that it shows titles rather than URLs, which is also slow, because there is an extra security risk of going to phishing sites, if you don't stop to look at the URLs.)
Also, Firefox is the only mobile browser that allows add-ons, so that's another benefit that they should be promoting.
These two suggestions -- Mozilla getting involved in meetups and not deprecating an API allowing vim navigation in the browser -- would take Mozilla even farther from relevance, assuming any nonzero opportunity cost to those actions.
I think that they do to some extent. People ask their tech-savvy friends what to buy/use, or they use what work computers provide, which are configured by tech-savvy users.
> Mozilla getting involved in meetups
Not only meetups -- I'm talking about the feeling of the community in general. I've been using the browser since Mozilla Application Suite and was a very active early evangelist. The community was much different back then.
> not deprecating an API allowing vim navigation in the browser
I think that you are underestimating the enthusiasm people have for some of those Firefox tools. :)
> would take Mozilla even farther from relevance
Re-creating the grassroots-driven community would not make Mozilla less relevant. It's exactly what they need to do to survive.
There are no new engines that aren't forks of existing engines aside from Servo which is still experimental.
Aside from EdgeHTML all the major browser engines are open source. It takes several years and lots of money to create a from scratch engine compatible with the majority of websites people visit.
There is no money made directly from the browser itself. All of the money is made from products or services around the browser. Which is not a viable model for anyone but the biggest companies.
Not enough people care about how unwise monocultures are. Network effects push people to the thing everyone else uses.
For Chrome on the other hand, its near-monopoly situation is worrisome but it's actually a pretty good product. So there is no pragmatic reasons to leave it for Firefox, only ideological reasons and it's a driver nearly not as powerful as suffering every day.
If Firefox can deliver near-Chrome features with better battery life, I'll switch and never look back.
Chrome sold people on the promise of a much faster, lighter-weight browser than the heavy but competent Firefox of the time, a promise that Chrome no longer delivers on. The "added users" Mozilla has claimed in 2016 were developers realizing Chrome wasn't light or speedy anymore and if they were going to use a browser hogging all the RAM on their system they may as well use one with a functional extensions ecosystem.
Chrome may not be comparatively "as bad" as IE was at the peak of Firefox's success, but it's still suffering from the same disease.
Many of those core supporters have been lost, because Mozilla stopped listening to them.
Chrome was able to gain users rapidly, because Google put a Google Chrome ad in the corner of the search results pages, claiming that it was faster, even when that claim became dubious.
Maybe, but they're getting rid of extensions instead, so they're effectively committing suicide.
For me, firefox became completely unusable few months ago when somebody decided that pulseaudio is the way to go and nothing else should be supported.
Because they have to. Firefox could remain an unusable single-threaded XML behemoth, but what point is there in your wonderful extensible browser if it's an unmaintainable slow mess?
I don't understand this perspective. Browsers are legacy technologies that are not particularly influential? What?
I feel like the web dominates our lives more than ever, and everyone uses a laptop or desktop for any actual work they have to do, professional or hobby. While people use their phones for internet access throughout the day as they move about, it must be one in 1000 or fewer who uses their phone or tablet for real work.
Does someone see a replacement on the horizon for the supposedly "legacy" laptop/desktop power combo?
It scares me, to be honest. I wonder where this tendency in people will lead in the very long run, particularly when you consider the ideas suggested by companies like Neuralink. It brings Black Mirror to mind.
Will people permanently have an inexhaustible feed of vapid garbage playing in their mind while they ignore most of everything going on in reality, in their actual real life?
However, this is unrelated to the original point. Just a side thought.
Is that not already how it is? Each time I've been the new kid at school or new guy at the office, it seems there's nothing for people to talk about if you don't know all the TV shows or all the memes or all the movies or music or the celeb gossip or latest sports happenings or news or video game releases or this weeks anime developments or whatever it is each person chooses to fill their thought process with other than the world immediately around them.
It seems it's probably comforting to be consumed by external things over which you have no power, instead of being sober about closer things - some of which you could influence given significant effort, some of which you are powerless to influence with any amount of effort.
15 Million Merits isn't about the future.
I just wish people didn't ignore the world all the time in favor of carrying their computer (phone) around with them and staring into it all day long.
I don't ask that everyone read books, god forbid, but it would be nice if people weren't using their phones to put themselves into hibernate nearly all of the time. The phrasing of your question implies that the train is an isolated circumstance, but in my experience I see people out on dates with both people on their phones ignoring each other, and even whole groups of friends out together, all on their phones.
I just wish people would engage more.
I was interested to find that in India, things are named in a way that brings out little points like this. For example, Indians call the little snacks you can buy on trains (like roasted, spiced peanuts) 'timepass.' A way to put the mind on hibernate and pass the time until the next desirable experience, presumably.
Maybe that's just what people want most of the time? The world can't always be the way we'd like it to be, and we're just passing time in a way that takes minimal effort. To get to the next desirable experience.
For most, the phone is where they go when a situation becomes uncomfortable or unfavourable. It's easier to do that than meet and correct the situation (if it's correctable at all). Or learn to see beauty in the mundane.
We need to build a culture of reasoned, purposeful existence, rather than one that is constantly buckling to the whims and fancies of our immediate demands.
> I just wish people would engage more.
Some people loose themselves in their phone, others loose themselves into a book.
They're both the same.
If you do, then you must agree that you could replace every moment in your life that had been spent reading a book with you perusing your phone, and you would be the same person today.
Do you believe that to be true?
The most popular TV shows are of things with similar content or at least content quality.
What made you think that the internet or mobile would be any different? :)
What amuses me is when I see someone reading an actual physical book. It is so rare, and it is almost every time someone trying to be hip.
Reading a book is an almost entirely introverted activity. How is the motivation to be hip going to be enough to sustain one's attention across the length of an entire book?
And that's precisely why mobile is eating the world. Facebook, Instagram, and other social platforms drive a lot of traffic.
I don't know anyone who does banking on their phone -- it's all desktop. Granted, I haven't taken a formal survey or anything.
Bills become much easier to pay via the phone, as you can scan the information from the invoice with your camera (for those companies that refuse to make electronic invoices available). Many invoices now use QR codes as well, so you only have to scan one thing to get all the information needed.
On light days about an hour.
I'm usually on a laptop/desktop for 8-10 hours a day.
Even on a phone/tablet, communication often includes web hyperlinks. The obsession with mobile is a reflection of business model. If you are in the advertising / surveillance capitalism business, mobile ("sensor phone") devices provide non-desktop signals that can be monetized.
Unfortunately, desktop software was hurt by piracy, with a few large ISVs making the most money. Today, Apple makes money on desktop hardware rather than desktop software. Microoft has tilted Windows 10 towards hosted services and data collection, but ISVs cannot abandon the large incumbent Win32 device market.
As laptop/desktop security improves, operating sytems could be reducing desktop software piracy and improving the profitability of ISVs. Instead, "app stores" are following two leaders who don't care about ISVs: Apple (hardware revenue, 30% ISV tax = tiny ISVs) and Google (data revenue, "free" apps).
We have the security technology and social network/marketing experience to design laptop/desktop software ecosystems that protect data/IP and support new ISVs. If Mozilla/Firefox wants to help, they can make it easier for web/extension developers and content creators to get paid.
Uh, App Store? http://appleinsider.com/articles/17/01/13/revenue-from-apple...
From that article, the top 10 mobile "apps" by revenue can be mapped to the modern equivalent of TV, radio and telecom services. None of these are creative software apps like those from large ISVs on desktops/laptops. Instead we have many mobile ISVs who are not very profitable.
Read what you wrote (in the context of the current discussion). Desktop software is alive and well. I don't like the size of the Apple Tax any more than you do, but to suggest this market doesn't exist is laughable.
- pre-app-store (side loaded / direct download) desktop revenue on Windows and Mac
- "app store" desktop revenue on Windows and Mac
Where the 30% tax exists in a distribution model, there are few successful ISVs that use only that distribution model. Where sideloading remains on Mac/Windows desktop, there are successful ISVs even with software piracy. On iOS, there is no alternative to the software distribution tax. Developers have been given an artificial choice between software piracy and 30% tax.
Both mobile and desktop ISV software revenue could be improved by app stores that enforced software licensing and provided optional marketing services that added up to 30%. Over time, the relative uptake of those optional services would lead to developer-oriented capabilities in app stores, i.e. serving the needs of the people paying the 30% tax.
The reality is that computers are still computers. Mobile is the new TV.
I run EUC in a large diversified enterprise. We have about 0.05% pure mobile users, mostly iPad based. That is growing quickly, but probably won't exceed 3% in the next 5 years based on the current pipeline. There are exceptions, iirc Comcast has 50k iPads. Other field service orgs are similar.
Server based computing is a thing though. There's alot of BYOD and thin clients in our future. Thin clients are approaching $100 and going lower. VDI/Citrix has a positive ROI for me.
I think the future looks more like Issac Asimov's multivac.
Right now it's a split of app and desktop. If you have the leverage on the OEMs, teradici clients are cheapest, but they are at the edge of not having sufficient lifespan for us. There are newer Intel devices that are getting close that we're using on a trial basis.
I can't get into specific dollars, but all-in the cost for VDI delivery is about 10% more, and we end up in the black with a longer client device cycle (which basically skips a rollout cycle) and dropping field service contracts -- FedEx is cheaper than a tech.
We're big enough that the component makers are willing to discount parts like CPUs for us though. Our pricing is generally 18 months cheaper than the market.
I wish people on HN would use less unexplained acronyms.
Thanks for this. It summarizes succinctly my uneasy observations of large numbers of mobile users.
For desktop power users, however, the mobile is somewhat an extension of their desktop.
My MacBook is my work life. My phone is super important to me, but given some devil's choice, I'd go back to a StarTac before giving up the laptop!
My wife is the opposite. For her, in both professional and personal contexts, the computer is more like a screwdriver -- just another tool. The phone is where the computing happens, and you'd have to pry it out of her cold dead fingers.
Another time she had tried to open a link to a Word Doc and didn't realize it downloaded it. I showed her where it was in the downloads folder and she proceeded to upload it to Google Drive to open it instead of using Word.
Very few functions kids do these days require a specialist app, just a particular browser.
Her sister was complaining about having to log into Netflix and I suggested she install the App. Her response was "I don't like Apps, I prefer websites."
for netflix, the website has more features, so yeah.
While my perspective isn't as strategic or metrics-driven as his, I had a lot of time to observe and think as both a community member and Mozilla employee. FxOS also wasn't my baby, so there's that. Note also that I speak for myself here and my own observations and paraphrases--whatever I say that pisses someone off is something I'm saying, not that Mozilla said verbatim.
My primary takeaways were twofold:
(Long, TL;DR at bottom)
1) I agree with you. Desktop and mobile are two separate markets, period. The first mostly serves a workplace audience and the second a personal audience, but most people with a desk job at the very least will use a web browser as part of their day. Desktop may be a minority of the overall, but it's a minority that won't go away anytime soon and so will continue to influence HTML and standards disproportionate to pure market share.
That's important because Mozilla's gambit for preserving the open web was pretty simple (I say was because I think they're just not that focused at this point):
Have enough people using your browser that websites absolutely have to support the emerging standards that browser relies on-- and perhaps in doing so make it less attractive for site providers and browser providers to spend time on proprietary tech that isn't significantly better than those standards, thereby making other browsers move to those standards too.
Doesn't mean these people have to use it everywhere, or that it has to be a majority share (10%+ was what I commonly heard as "enough") or otherwise "win". But it does have to be enough that people will complain if the website doesn't support their browser and that testers are influenced to test the site against it.
(BTW, as a test professional, the fact that Firefox no longer appears in most test matrixes I encounter due to lack of a blip on analytics is very telling, and Firefox has a serious risk growing around site incompatibility or instability in their browser).
That brings me to my second takeaway:
2) The grand majority of people don't use a web browser because of the browser itself; they use it for one of a few reasons:
a) It's default on their system.
You will not win these people over because they're not there for any reason other than it being the easiest or most integrated path. Note that this is pretty much the whole mobile market, and why it was a dire mistake for Mozilla to conflate the two markets, decide mobile was more important due to combined market share, then go tilting at windmills.
It's also, any altruistic reasons aside, why the moonshot was to create an OS so Firefox could be the default mobile experience.
b) Ethics/Community. This was a relatively small but very vocal part of Firefox's userbase. Probably more people were there "against Chrome" than "for Firefox," but whatever. Firefox succeeded in the first place because of "against Internet Explorer" so it's a valid reason to be there. The nice thing about these people is they pull in more people.
Unfortunately, one side effect of Firefox OS as a project was working with proprietary partners who emphasized confidentiality such that you couldn't share with the community in the way Mozilla did before. When Mozilla diverted most of their effort to Firefox OS, it froze out a lot of the community efforts.
I think Mozilla-the-org also became less skilled at working with community, both for that shift and perhaps because they brought in a lot of people from the mobile and other sectors who didn't have that background.
Whatever the case, this base wasn't well-maintained, and I don't think operates as a core in the same way it might once have, at least for Firefox.
c) Customization, and this is really why Firefox (and Mozilla) is where it is today IMO:
The add-on ecosystem is the most compelling reason both to start using but especially continue using a non-default browser, and Mozilla chased theirs away.
Here's the thing:
You have one browser, whose job is to get the hell out of the way of the content and fade into the background, and several installed extensions whose jobs are to solve specific problems you have. 1 browser. Several extensions. 1 invisible, generic browser. Several hand-chosen extensions that make it your own.
Which bit are you sticking around for? Probably the extensions. The browser is a platform, a means, not an end--not just for the web but for its own functionality.
That's why all the complaints are performance and crashes and things that make you notice the browser, not generally native features or UI. It's the whole rationale behind browser-as-OS efforts in the first place.
Syncs and reading lists are nice, but with an ecosystem you can get them after the fact. With no ecosystem, you'd better either really like what you're handed or be trapped into using it a la iOS--and even Apple has figured out they have to be somewhat customizable or people will even switch OSes to get it.
That's where Chrome won.
Specifically, when Mozilla pretty much cargo-culted Google's rapid release program without first creating a version-independent extension store and add-on API, they seriously fucked up.
A ton of add-ons couldn't keep up with release and broke--Firefox's add-on "API" was to either essentially monkeypatch the internals or to create binary extensions, neither of which had any real abstraction from implementation. The need to manually update the compatibility version number and reupload to AMO for every single release froze more out (this was fixed server-side by auto-incing the number but it was just a workaround to a real problem as now extensions might not be really compatible). AMO always had a problem with turnaround on submissions, and this didn't help.
In general Mozilla sent the message of being out of touch with the add-on community, and that it wasn't a clear priority.
Jetpack/Add-Ons SDK was there as a not-really-mature portability measure to mitigate this, but it wasn't powerful enough to support a lot of the best extensions. It also happened in parallel with the rapid release shift, not before it when it was strategically needed. Then Jetpack kind of died off, probably partially because of the shift in efforts towards mobile/FxOS and partially because Jetpack never really became kick-ass enough to make the type of impact that gets more resources.
Meanwhile, right before Firefox stepped into this and never stepped out again, the Chrome Web Store opens in 2010, ready to receive any disenfranchised add-on makers. Talk about right place at the right time. Now Mozilla finally is adopting Chrome's extension API, both because it probably works better with multiprocess but maybe also to get some cross-platform extensions back. I imagine that'll work OK, but maybe too little too late.
AMO isn't what it used to be at all. Meanwhile, Chrome's Web Store is phenomenal. Combined with the (yes, unfair) Google Suite integration in Chrome there's a lot of friction to keep people on Chrome as a platform, and short of Chrome making a huge mistake that shakes people off like Mozilla/Firefox did, there isn't much reason to switch browsers for a cross-platform extension that's already on the one you use.
And when I look at the blog posts re: Firefox improvements, etc., I keep coming back to "it's a platform, not an app" and wonder if they'll ever take that ground back. Maybe if they somehow completely redefine the browser experience or otherwise stay deeply opinionated (Opera is sort of going this route) but otherwise, it'll just be parity and parity doesn't move people.
I'm thoroughly convinced Mozilla won't achieve much impact with Firefox until they understand and execute on building the ecosystem as the vast majority use case and never damage it again. However, that means them also understanding that people came to and left Firefox for any number of reasons other than Firefox itself or its native features, interface, etc., and I don't see that yet institutionally in their execution.
Some bright spots: Rust and WebAssembly are both fantastic. In general, I think Mozilla has been great at addressing the developer segment, both with the browser dev tools themselves and especially with MDN. Maybe what'll eventually preserve Mozilla is getting drummed out of the web browser business and into more of a core tech business. Regaining browser relevance is going to be a heck of an uphill for them.
TL;DR: Mozilla should never have gone full-tilt at mobile and made a grave mistake in assuming desktop was becoming irrelevant to their mission; and by far the biggest fuckup was alienating the add-on community since customization is the most compelling reason why people would use a non-default browser. It's entirely possible they won't come back from that. Their biggest recent impacts have been peripheral to or completely orthogonal to the browser, and might be their brighter future.
The extension ecosystem was always one of the strongest distinguishing facets of Firefox. I think Mozilla panicked when Chrome threatened Firefox's market share, and started trying to compete hard on things like being at the forefront of new technology adoption at the expense of the existing extension ecosystem. And in the process, Mozilla lost control of the messaging and it came to be seen as constantly doing little more than aping Chrome. The Web Extensions stuff is an example of the marketing issue. Mozilla new as far back as 2010 that extensions were the biggest stumbling block to getting multiprocess working. What they should have done was start developing the new extension APIs that far back, and made Firefox use multiprocess mode only if no legacy extensions were installed.
I never worked on the previous Firefox extension API but I find it ridiculously easy to have a cross platform extension that works on Chromium and Firefox. That counts for something.
This point is proven again by Mozilla forcing the new extension API before the extensions are ready.
What do you think about Firefox mobile, the only browser that supports add-ons , could it use it to get some relevance or is that battle lost too ?
That said, Firefox for Android is a great technical accomplishment, and a valuable project. The fact that they are able to differentiate themselves with extensions is very powerful.
The fact that this awesome accomplishment hasn't made much impact in share probably proves that "customization" isn't going to significantly outweigh "default" in that market, though my guess is it would still be a leading factor for the very small number of people who aren't using the default browser.
I don't mean to say that Mozilla should avoid mobile efforts entirely. Fennec is necessary, and I think Firefox OS would have been a fantastic reference implementation if Mozilla hadn't chased partnerships and commercial releases in combination with it.
The problem wasn't that Mozilla put time or resources into these things, it was that Mozilla bet on these things to the detriment of their core competencies and, frankly, mission.
And those fume hallucinations inspired the 'convergence' bandwagon which lead Canonical/Ubuntu, the Gnome project and Microsoft astray for years before they finally started rolling back those dumb decisions.
The markets for smartphones and tablets are now at absolute saturation point and, to a first approximation, no-one is abandoning their laptops/desktops en-masse in favour of working off of a 6 inch screen.
They're market shares & hence bounded by 0 and 1, so exponential seems pretty unrealistic. The logistic curve is a better starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function#In_economics...
Saying "Chrome won" now feels like saying "IE won" in 2002 or so. Look at the chart here:
What strikes me is the diversity. Chrome has mostly been stealing market share from IE; Safari is growing too and is by no means dead; FF has been declining, but not that much. There are 4-ish strong browsers in the market now when before there was only 1 (IE) and a half (Mozilla). Certainly a different picture from the chart in the article.
They remove anything that violates the terms of service of a website. Like popular extensions that modified youtube or reddit in ways the sites didn't approve of. The only reason they don't remove adblock is because it has so much momentum and there would be an uproar if they did. But they do pay to have their ads whitelisted on the most popular adblock extension, and see to it that it's the top result.
They also try to be a minimalist browser and shove any functionality to extensions that can be shoved there. Since 99.999% of people never change the default settings on anything, they miss out. I wonder if a browser could be successful going the other way. Being "batteries included" and bundling it with lots of useful extensions and features.
If anything, I'd say my experience between the Chrome and Firefox extensions are completely opposite to yours. For one, Firefox has some 1-3 different extension types/apis, so you have first understand which one to use from their convoluted developer docs. Secondly, when you submit the extension, some volunteer "reviews" it whenever they have the time, which can take days to weeks. Once I got feedback and got rejected because there was a typo in the extension.
With Chrome it's very easy to create an extension, you basically only need that manifest.json file and then you can submit it to the store and it's online less than an hour.
I thought Firefox allowed third party extensions, have they changed that?
I wouldn't be surprised if a sizeable portion of Chrome users were in a similar boat, quietly waiting for some small aspect of Firefox to improve.
We'll see.
I think it's mainly just because it's different. A lot of people don't like gratuitous change (something most tech companies don't understand at all). I'm sort of in that camp myself. I basically abandoned Office when they came out with the Ribbon UI, and I still haven't liked any new Windows compared to the "classic" NT desktop.
Just installed Chromium to compare. When maximized, the Chromium title bar is 65px high on my system, whereas Firefox's takes 70px. I should note, though, that I have set my window manager to hide the default window decoration on maximized windows, which helps.
I started Firefox OS in 2011 because already back then I
was convinced that desktops and browsers were dead.
Not immediately–here we are 6 years later and both
are still around–but both are legacy technologies that
are not particularly influential going forward.
...snip...
To stick with the transportation metaphor: Google makes the
best horses in the world and they clearly won
the horse race. I just don’t think that race matters
much going forward.
But the browser certainly still matters to all those Firefox users who switched to Chrome, and are using it every day.
"Legacy" isn't seen as sexy in tech. It might not be exciting for someone who wants to explore the next frontier or create the next platform. But, legacy is important for users (customers). Legacy is your brand. It's your influence. The foothold that will help you set the direction of what happens next. It's what you bootstrap your play in the next tech wave upon. Legacy is yesterday's hard earned success ready to be leveraged as a head start for tomorrow. (It's just important that you remember to do the leveraging part, and not just sit pretty and self-satisfied with your legacy).
Firefox's decline is abysmal and a failure of leadership.
FirefoxOS was a terrible, terrible decision.
How much influence does Mozilla really have on the direction of web if they have don't have influence on the desktop? Don't many features in mobile browsers start on the desktop browser first?
I hope whoever is in charge of Firefox now is a true believer of the power and importance of the web browser, and the desktop that it's used on, by the most influential band of users you can wish to have: creators.
Edits: formatting
So now Firefox has to look for more partners but there is little sense in partnering with a browser vendor for anything outside of websites. Among those nothing is as lucrative as and ubiquitous as a search engine.
Now a OS vendor could maybe get funded and promoted by a manufacturer or a phone service company.
To me, this article was written from the perspective of a zero sum game mentality. The author clearly wanted to be #1. Does this mean Firefox is failing? I think the evidence is lacking there. And all the guy really offers as evidence is, "From these graphs it’s pretty clear that Firefox is not going anywhere." But Firefox market share was going up at some point... by the same standard, why wasn't that valuable evidence that Firefox would take over everything? As an explanation, it's devoid.
The article would more sense if it were critical to Mozilla's mission that Firefox have a dominant market share. But 18% of desktop installs is far more than sufficient to influence standards (recent studies show that as little of 3-5% of a market can basically set standards).
IMO Mozilla should just focus on a browser that 10-30% of users -- especially 'influencers' and those who care about digital freedom -- love, and consider that success.
A response is that even if Firefox's share falls, that the absolute number of Firefox users continues to rise. ie that the total market is growing. In this case Mozilla would still be generating the revenue it needs to keep going. The author brushes this possibility off in the beginning of the article, saying that browsers are a thing of the past.
What would the browser war look like if google.com advertised Firefox instead?
This motivated me to go even further. I'm sick of the 1999 style popups and redirects I get on mobile sites, especially the Android webviews that so many applications have. I'm setting the AdBlock Browser to my default and disabling in-app web browsers where possible. Until I can trust mobile sites to have respectable ads, they lose revenue.
The more I think about this, the more annoyed I'm getting. The Youtube app has also been redesigned to have a less 'friction free' UI. You now open a video, see an ad first. Ok, that's fine. Back out of a video, it minimizes and you view 'suggested videos' (which feel like more ads). Swipe video away, you're still on the ad screen. Back out of Youtube. I want to watch a video and get out, maybe be pestered by 1 skippable ad for a relevant product. Not hit back 8 times and swipe a video away.
The time might be right for disruption. On the other hand, I might just be spoiled by debt supplemented user acquisition strategies that have very low monetization. We'll see.
It's a tossup for me whether I'll go back to Chrome or Safari (there's positives and negatives for both of them in my case).
YMMV.
What should the conclusion have been from growth graphs back when IE was growing? Everyone else just give up?
The growth of phones doesn’t make desktop irrelevant. Phones can’t replace the desktop paradigm for many tasks, so desktops will stick around. When they stick around, things are better if desktop browsers stay in good health.
As for mobile, people do browse the Web a lot of mobile. Maybe the numbers for Facebook and Twitter apps are even greater in terms of minutes of use, but that doesn’t make the Web on mobile irrelevant or not worth caring about.
Whether on mobile or desktop, we’d all be worse off if the Web becomes less healthy due to neglect arising from being thought as not growing enough to be cool or being left to only to operating-system-bundled browsers. (The low switching cost of browsers due to not having to switch devices keeps the browser space competitive even if also tough for Mozilla when Mozilla doesn’t have an OS as an anchor.)
Sure, non-Web things (IoT and other) will exist and individual people may be a bit tired of doing Web and go do those other things. That doesn’t mean that the Web isn’t worth caring about anymore or that it doesn’t continue to be important for the health of the Web for Mozilla to be there with an independent engine–doing what Mozilla has always done without pivots to new shiny.
When individuals grow tired of Mozilla or the Web, going to do some other thing elsewhere for a change is cool, but I think spreading defeatism about what those of us who stay do is not cool.
Google Chrome is not Open Source and your privacy is not guaranteed, you don't know what's happening under the hood.
Please wait for the Servo project to complete, then you'll know who won.
Mozilla Firefox is not just a browser, it's the community of freedom, it's what I have grown up with. Finally Firefox with Ublock Origin is just enough to enjoy the Web. #MozillaFirefoxMasterRace
If you read the end though, he really is just using an attention grabbing headline and article to bring up his startup. Not very classy.
The entire article he didn't take any ownership for this failing and then goes on to mention how he is heading up another company.
> All browsers work pretty well, and being slightly faster or using slightly less memory is unlikely to sway users.
I call BS. When Chrome came out it was a lot better experience than Firefox. That is IMO how chrome got so much velocity. Chrome was more stable and faster. Now that may not be true now but it was the early technical failure of Firefox that caused a great deal of uptake of chrome.
But once you make it to the top these days even after failure you still get funding and get to to lead another company.
Andreas is rightfully very impressive but maybe he shouldn't be an executive.
In fact I would visit https://arewee10syet.com every couple of months and sigh for years wanting to switch back.
On Firefox I used to have hundreds of tabs open and no visible ui chrome most of the time, just vimperator/pentadactyl and usually hidden treestyle tabs. Along with a rotating collection of adblockers and privacy extensions.
These days? I just use Safari on a Macbook with Content Blockers (https://webkit.org/blog/3476/content-blockers-first-look/). My battery lasts double digit hours and everything is always snappy. Readability and integrated 'read it offline later' mode is a cherry on top.
Ultimately I think we forget that with Flash being truly dead and buried on pages with no junky javascript trackers even a NeXT computer, far less powerful than your phone, should be enough.
And all the browsers are now able to limit the damage a heavy/crappy page (like gmail) does to its own tab.
tldr; And Jesus wept for there were no more worlds to conquer.
Pocket was a good move, but it is still not fully integrated to Firefox like the 'read it offline later' mode of Safari. I really wish it was.
This rings untrue to me, because I cannot believe he wrote this on his smartphone. I get that desktop/laptop are no longer the main entry device to the connected world, but they are essential to the connected world in a way that horses are not important to the world of transportation.
I stuck with Firefox through the times where it was much slower than Chrome for idealistic reasons as well, but now I feel like speed is less of an issue because they are both pretty even.
Having said that, Firefox also has its issues. It is so unresponsive sometimes, giving long hangs. That's the main problem to me. There are others, like it being slower in some pages and some of its extensions UI give me a pre-web 2.0 vibe or look abandoned. (But its Mendeley importer extension is way better than Chrome's).
Multiprocess Windows 0/1 (Disabled by add-ons)
Asynchronous Pan/Zoom none
EDIT: I tried toggling browser.tabs.remote.autostart to true in about:config, but it still gives the same message. Looking into it now.
EDIT2: I did it!
Multiprocess Windows 1/1 (Enabled by user)
Asynchronous Pan/Zoom wheel input enabled
EDIT3: Wow!! This is so much better! I didn't know project Electrolysis was already out. Thanks!
This is what you get when you force a perfectly technical CEO out and let the MBA types steer the ship. A browser is a forever bleeding edge tech; you need engineers all the way to the top. They chose political correctness over technical prowess and the product has lost the edge.
How about Brave [1]?
Firefox had a big decade because Microsoft put IE on a starvation diet after Netscape folded but Google shows no sign of making a similar level of error. Firefox has never been better technically but at the end of the day they're fighting on the wrong side of a war which will be decided by budgets.
And if you think it's as simple as "political correctness"... I don't even know how to begin talking to you.
Remember: we're not talking about someone "just expressing an opinion" here (as many discussions tried to claim at the time). Brendan didn't just say something, or write something: he actively worked to have his personal opinion -- of whose lifestyle was acceptable and whose lifestyle wasn't -- written into the fundamental law of the state where Mozilla is headquartered. And that opinion, once it became law, hurt employees of the company he was trying to lead, and told them they were effectively second-class citizens.
Such a complete and utter lack of regard for one's fellow humans is disqualifying no matter how much "technical prowess" someone might have. His only choices at that point were to come back in line with the bare-minimum requirements of a free society (such as equality of all people before the law), or be shown the door. And any attempt to dismiss that as "political correctness" reveals a lot about the nature of the person attempting to dismiss it.
"Since then, there has been a great deal of misinformation. Two facts have been most commonly misreported: 1. Brendan was not fired and was not asked by the Board to resign. Brendan voluntarily submitted his resignation. The Board acted in response by inviting him to remain at Mozilla in another C-level position. Brendan declined that offer. The Board respects his decision." [1]
The only people who were "forced out" against their will were the Californian citizens who were forced out of their existing legal same-sex marriages, thanks to the anti-gay propaganda than Brendan Eich willingly and unapologetically paid for.
You're the one who is choosing to propagate the political correctness of homophobic politicians fighting against marriage equality, by misstating the facts and parroting lies to make a politically motivated point in the defense of bigotry, then projecting your own political correctness onto other people.
And you're also wrong to believe that he could have steered the ship away from where it was inextricably headed. Or do you honestly believe that homophobes are the growth market for web browsers, so as a high profile anti-gay-marriage pro-Prop-8 poster child, his bigotry-inclusive outreach to countries like Indonesia, which he claims have many oppressed gay-marriage opponents who support him but don't "have quite the megaphone", could have turned the ship around? [2]
"Now, in his first interview on the subject, Eich is responding with a message that Mozilla is at its core inclusive -- not just of gay-marriage supporters but also of people like him or gay-marriage opponents in Indonesia who also are part of the Mozilla cause."
"For Mozilla, it's problematic because of our principles of inclusiveness, because the Indonesian community supports me but doesn't have quite the megaphone."
Eich also stressed that Firefox worked globally, including in countries like Indonesia with "different opinions," and LGBT marriage was "not considered universal human rights yet, and maybe they will be, but that's in the future, right now we're in a world where we have to be global to have effect." [3]
"Actually, Mr. Eich, right now we’re in a world where you have to not be a bigot if you want to be an effective leader of an organization like Mozilla. And it’s about time."
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat...
[2] https://www.cnet.com/au/news/mozilla-ceo-gay-marriage-firest...
[3] http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/04/03/brendan_e...
Faster browsing and less memory use is the only reason I've ever heard anyone switch browsers outside of privacy issues. If Servo is significantly faster and uses less memory, and if it can keep that up for years like Chrome did, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see this flipping in a few years. Thankfully, he's no longer CTO at Mozilla so this actually has a chance of happening.
Stability.
License, at least for me. I would only use a free as in speech browser.
Add-ons and success blocking ads.
The author is right that Chrome has a massive share, but everyone knows that. Any analysis more specific than that requires more than just overplotting exponentials on a graph.
- If it is indeed too challenging for Firefox to compete against Chrome with a separate browser, there might be value in Mozilla maintaining an open-source fork of Chrome. This would allow Mozilla to borrow the good bits of Chrome for relatively low effort, and focus development effort on the the things that Google might not value so much (e.g privacy). It would also be a hedge against a Google monopoly by having an open source competitor available.
- I'd love to see a solid open source clone of Android—including a full clone of Google Play Services. I think Mozilla could help a lot here, especially if they integrated their fork of the browser.
As for an open source clone of Android, it already exists and it's called Replicant. Mozilla already tried the mobile OS thing and failed. Not sure why you think they would suddenly have success. It's all about ecosystems in the mobile space and Mozilla doesn't have it nor will they ever.
I guess I was thinking that Mozilla could both contribute to the core browser (Blink?) and maintain a fork similar to Chromium, but perhaps with more independent features.
This is obviously not ideal for the ecosystem, compared to having a separate browser engine. However it could be a useful approach if Firefox has trouble getting enough users to be relevant, because at least it would mean that Mozilla is influencing the web and its development.
> an open source clone of Android, it already exists and it's called Replicant
I don't think Mozilla needs to start an independent project. They could fund, promote and improve one of the existing open source forks of Android.
Then that would mark the day when I no longer use Mozilla's software. There'd be no point.
The world doesn't need yet another Chromium-based browser. Firefox's continued development of Gecko and new development of Servo are among the main forces (alongside Safari, maybe) preventing Chrome from becoming the next Internet Explorer.
I have been using the Web since 1993.
I always thought the Web had the definition given in its Wikipedia entry.
Web servers and hyperlinks.
Apparently some people believe "the Web" is actually a browser, or a small set of them.
This is like suggesting a galaxy is actually a telescope, or a small set of "standards compliant" telescopes.
Browser-centrism is truly myopic.
What is relevant is the ever expanding practice of installing web servers into all sorts of devices, not simply racks of computers in server rooms and offsite data centers.
If I used this argument 16 years ago it would have meant "Internet Explorer won". Browsers will rise and fall and eventually a series of bad decisions by Google will pave the way for a new leader.
I will never leave Firefox as long as Mozilla fights the good fight. As internet privacy becomes an increasingly public issue, Google will face evermore scrutiny over Chrome and all it takes is one fuckup on their part for people to realize they've been supporting the wrong company.
Vivaldi is basically Chrome without the annoying Google bits.
I still use Firefox occasionally, but mostly for testing.
I'll admit I hold a rather strong resentment towards Internet Explorer. Aside from having made me waste countless hours dealing with its quirks, I also feel a bit better supporting browsers that are more open. I haven't heard a single person in real-life saying they use Edge as their main browser.
Also the unsung heroes behind KHTML, the HTML layout engine from the Konqueror web browser (part of KDE), the ancestor of Webkit and Blink, the technologies that power modern web browsers such as as Chrome, Safari and Opera.
The proliferation of Android devices with Chrome is where that popularity is coming from. Ironically, had FirefoxOS been a success, we'd probably see a very different graph. Safari shows up for the same reason, just a different platform.
As for a turnaround, I'm using Firefox to type this. It's easy to think desktops don't matter in a world of tablets, phones and mobile devices but they do.
Firefox is about choice and an open web. Chrome is about user tracking and advertising. As long as Firefox exists, there will be people using it.
I'm hoping Servo will change that.
(I know you can launch multiple Firefox profiles, but it's awkward at best.)
On Android, Firefox is my favorite browser. So much better than Chrome. Thank you Mozilla :-) Now please make using multiple profiles on the desktop as easy as Chrome does.
Either built-in (activate with `privacy.userContext.enabled` and `privacy.userContext.ui.enabled` in about:config) or if you don't mind some telemetry (non-sensitive stuff but YMMV) and random updates you can use their Test Pilot experiment https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/containers (or you can just grab yourself an XPI and update on manual basis).
Mozilla can choose to be arrogant. Well.. guess what? We can also choose to move on without you.
Broken apps make users to switch browsers. It's that simple. Mozilla can only blame itself for the vicious cycle.
Mozilla is failing because they are being arrogant and don't listen to developers. It's not just on desktop, but also on mobile. At first, they refused to make a browser on iOS because they have to use "WebKit". Well guess what.. they missed the bus. After realizing it, they caved. But it's already too late.
Oh, and I don't like that Google tracks everything I do while using it...
If you're looking for a Chrome experience without the privacy concerns, take a look at http://iridiumbrowser.de. It's Chrome will (supposedly, I've not personally verified) all the Google tracking stripped out to the extent possible.
On the Windows machines at work, I use both Firefox and Chrome all day long for customer support and light web development. They're both pretty interchangeable for me, neither really being any better than the other. Since such high adoption of Chrome means the general public are using it, not just the more tech-saavy people like us, I doubt the reason is any deep developer niceties. So I don't really know why...
Edit:
Err correction, looks like 3,294 of those FF hits are from a bot trying to break into my fake wp-login.php page with an agent id of "Firefox/34". But still, minus those hits, FF is neck and neck with Chrome.
There's a pretty popular sort-of-fork of Chromium called Electron. People claim it's bloated though. Could Servo do better?
Also, this looks interesting from a privacy standpoint: https://beakerbrowser.com/
Do you think all this people is wasting their efforts in trying to make web apps much more like native apps?
Well, there's an addon for that: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compat...
If you install it, it will mark on the panel which of your extensions are not using the new plugin API, and it will tell you at the top of the panel if Multiprocess Firefox is enabled. I got mine enabled by cleaning house. I'm curious to see how well it behaves under load now!
Also use about:support to see if e10s and async pan/zoom are enabled.
This helped a lot of developers to switch from Firefox (which was the best at the time) to Chrome and the result was that most websites were first Chrome compatble, then the others. Visitors quickly understood it, and made the switch too.
I sincerely believe that the core reason is the developers, and if Firefox would focus more on that part, it would help get back many of it's old users.
I don't say here that the dev toolkit on Firefox is garbage, absolutely not, but it feels clumsy, and a lot of elements are not evident to use and requires more thinking than Chrome. (this is MY opinion).
I'm curious to know if you feel the same?
With IE Microsoft was originally driven to use the web to maintain Windows lock in, to control the platform.
Google (I would assume) is driven by the desire to keep the web as desireable a development platform overall. Web usage means ad sales. Google has knocked it out of the park on this one. Chrome really is an incredible piece of software.
IE by comparison has always been a piece of shit because it never mattered. Microsoft was leveraging it for OS adoption not a successful web.
Today it's the web vs. apps and who knows what it will be in the future. This may sound crazy to some but the web will become a "truck" to some other technology's "car". Sort of how desktop office productivity apps are a monoculture and no one really cares.
Based on this I wonder whether web browser benchmarks should be based on how fast they are after adverts are blocked, not only their rendering engine per se.
If you're going to make a new browser engine from scratch, why not use a language that already exist? I understand there's reasons but stuff like that is just wtf imho.
Also, they've done stuff like Firefox Hello, that login thing etc. Many were good ideas but they should really focus on their core product and making it solid as a fucking rock. I still feel that Chromes developer tools are better, that Chrome is snappier and doesn't crash as often etc. etc.
I use Chrome at my work computer but Firefox at home because Chrome developer tools is still better when it comes to stuff like debugging, viewing json and profiling.
I mean why is that not more awesome in Firefox?
All of your complaints are technical.
> They do stuff like Rust which must be an incredible investment of time.
Rust is a very small team.
> If you're going to make a new browser engine from scratch, why not use a language that already exist?
Because no language other than Rust offers good support for safe concurrency and memory safety without performance compromises.
> I understand there's reasons but stuff like that is just wtf imho.
> Many were good ideas but they should really focus on their core product and making it solid as a fucking rock.
The desire to do that is the reason for Rust.
I love Firefox and I really like Mozilla (even though they like everyone else does stupid stuff sometimes, like fireing Brendan). I hope Firefox will take back some market share from Chrome.
The two biggest internet trends over the last decade have been app store distribution of mobile apps and the social graph.
Mozilla has did little, maybe nothing to make either of those open and accessible to all. This is due to an ongoing lack of vision and leadership for an organization that tries to do 1000 things and fails at doing the 1 or 2 important things.
It's pretty safe to say that the nextgen decentralized internet will be built, but it won't be built by Mozilla. Instead, they will do probably do something silly like buy Brave. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'd really want to see a browser that's a collection of very loosely coupled independent cooperating programs. There are Uzbl and Surf, but they're only modular systems around a big monolithic core.
That would mean the real end of the browser war, because there won't be any browsers. There will be rendering engines, there will be UI layers, cookie storages and databases, data synchronization programs, etc - and compilations of those (because while everyone wants to have flexibility options and ability to customize and control, no one normally wants to build system piece by piece).
I doubt something like this would happen.
Then let's see how long does it take from start to watch a youtube video. Will beat default Chrome experience anywhere between 20-90 secs. Let's see whether Google can match that.
Very true. There is absolutely no point in spending dev hours on a browser that might net you . . . I don't know . . . a fraction of a percent of whatever audience or target you're after? I had to do that before, it makes the developers upset and their managers even more upset.
performance is great already. but firefox would be even better if it 'loaned' these two features from chrome.
1. built-in flash player. i do not like that i have to install chrome just so that i can view flash videos on ubuntu. html5 is not everywhere yet.
2. better debugging. although i like the ui, the debugger suffers from a real flaw. today i was evaluating the value of some piece of code in the debugger. i expected it to be 1. it reported a 0 because the code had not executed yet. chrome does this better and does not report anything. then after the code has executed it gives the correct value, 1.
these two issues make firefox hard to recommend to 1. users and 2. developers, unless they are vim addicts.
oh yeah: perhaps firefox should do something to support vimperator. perhaps incorporate it into firefox. support it. vim users are a small group but they are the people who will be advising others on technical things.
FireFox probably had the greatest contribution ever to modern browsing though giving us developer tools, plugins, and tabbed browsing.
I personally wouldn't switch to chrome just because it doesn't have tabs on the side (tree style tabs on firefox). This headline doesn't make much sense for many of us.
i try it usually once a year to confirm there is no progress and experienced this few weeks ago, loading and rendering pages it's slowest compared to Chrome, CAF browsers or Brave, heck Firefox doesn't even have pull down to refresh which is showstopper, add-ons are nice but most of the users don't care and i can block ads just with adaway
as for desktop, again unable to handle more tabs properly, freezing and unresponsive while no such problems on Chrome
i dunno maybe Chrome devs test their browser on actual real life desktops and mobiles, while Firefox devs think everyone has flagship and computer with 16gb of RAM?
TLDR: Firefox is significantly (not slightly as article honey talk) slower on mobile and freezing and unresponsive on desktop compared to Chrome and real users notice this, they don't care about add-ons
Personally, I never understood Chrome hype, though I admit, that Mozilla's focus on FirefoxOS was distracting, and slowed down their desktop progress. It's good they are back on track now.
Do you really believe that? The way I see it, most people just don't care. At all. Else they wouldn't sell their souls to private companies (e.g. Facebook and Google) without a second thought and we'd see more outrage against government surveillance that's being pushed in nearly every country all over the world.
Firefox is unlikely to gain much of a market share with only privacy-focused changes. People care about ease of use and especially performance. FF lost a lot of market share due to its horrible performance, compared to Chrome.
The most common (pretty much only) answers I get are that I'm nuts or that they don't care. And this is in Germany, a country where data protection laws and privacy are usually valued and cared about. But recent development over the last few years has shown that it's really just a small subset of the population that cares.
Besides, why is it a competition? It's not a zero sum game to see who is the biggest, best browser.
Wakeup Mozilla, this sounds silly.
Right there is why Chrome is eating Firefox's lunch.
These days with chome being so popular linux users can feel like a first class citizen. Reminds me of the comic showing a dog using a computer and "On the internet nobody knows you are a dog". With chrome nobody on the internet knows you are running linux.
You can even gasp use office/adobe clouds based apps.
Er, Firefox and Mozilla are/were both Gecko.
Everytime FireFox got some new feature I checked if they still don't support GPU accelerated Video on my Linux machine. No. They don't. They don't to this day.
This is how I imagine FireFox Devs: https://xkcd.com/619/
Chrome is simple and fast. And that's why it won. I wonder when the Google devs will forget about it and some other browser will take over by focussing on making core features work fast and flawless.
From My Memory:
If we look back now from a grand Overview, IE5, IE6 and IE 7 wasn't that much difference. And these browsers were formed and used widely during the Internet explosive growth era. M$ didn't care about Web Standard, and they dont want to improve either. So in the very early stage of Web and Internet we have a Industry Giant stopping all the improvement to make the Web usable.
And the Firefox "movement" started, not only is Firefox leaner, faster, better and there were a lot of love and organisation pushing for it, at least from a Web standard prospective, they ALL wanted something better then IE. From Macromedia, Adobe, Yahoo, etc.
And Firefox wasnt that good of a browser, it was simply better then IE. So you could argue Mozilla were simply in the right place at the right time. And it didn't really succeed like Chrome had now, at its best Firefox only had 30% of the market share.
We all wanted a faster browser. And Firefox didn't deliver, somewhere around 2008 Google show the world what a fast browser really meant. In reality we already knew how fast it was possible looking at ( old ) Opera. ( Opera failed to gain traction because it wasn't playing well with old IE code. ) Being Google they get a lot of press about it. And since Google being the Gateway to the Internet, we all knew if your site dont play well with Chrome, what the possible consequence were.
If I remember correctly, 2008 was around Firefox 3 time. Lot of bloat were already added to Firefox. People wanted a Multi Process ( a la Chrome ) and a much faster browser. And e10s ( Electrolysis ) were born. What was suppose to be an Firefox 4 features nearly became Duke Nukem Forever, shipped sometimes this year, in Firefox 5x.
Reading from the post and comment, Mozilla never intend Firefox to win the browser war and hence it didn't matter. Sometimes in 2010 or 2011, Firefox 4 was released, If I remember it was a long delay at the time when Chrome was rapidly improving. But Mozilla didn't give a damn, they thought offering an alternative was enough. And they were happy with their market share. They thought both Firefox and Chrome will both eat into IE's market.
They thought they were safe on the Desktop, or they didn't care, or they really think they could do another Firefox in Mobile Market. So they decide to neglect the much needed attention of Desktop Firefox, and start chasing the Firefox OS for Mobile. Only this time, their oppenont is no longer Microsoft sitting still with IE, it was Apple who has a head start of nearly 10 years if you include the R&D spent before the release of first iPhone. And Google who has a head start of nearly 5 years with 100x the resources of Mozilla, and Google actually has an Engineering company culture compared to Microsoft.
You could argue Mozilla were very noble to put up a fight ( if it was ever a fight at all ), or they were, silly. Not only did they choose the worst possible tools to develop on, ( They wanted EVERYTHING to be Javascript ) they also aimed at the WORST possible market segment, the low end $25- $50 dollar Smartphone. So they want to use an inefficient system + tools with the lowest end Smartphone. And they thought it was an good Idea.
Fast forward a few years where they still could not accept defeat on their Mobile OS, no pivot, their Desktop Firefox was making a slow death. Browser Market share used to an Interesting Story, Ars used to run an article on it every month, and now no one cares.
And Later Firefox OS was stopped, my guess were the new Desktop Firefox finance wasn't enough to continue it. Mozilla relent and supported H.264, which it didn't support for the longest time it could. The Never Firefox on iOS became an Abandoned Firefox Sync, discontinued, and reappeared on iOS again.
So Mozilla, by putting it Values and Ideals first, even if it is against its own users' interest or UX, lost its user base, and with that also lose the influence it onces ( barely ) had on the Web.
All it took to make that prediction was a basic understanding of network effects and the history of client platform businesses.
Jumping into the mobile market after Google and Apple had carved it up was insanity. As a consumer, changing the platform you use to access your apps and services carries a high switching cost--most likely you'll lose some of those apps and services and be forced to find replacements.
Customers don't like to make that switch because it's hard, and it's exceedingly hard to think of cases where it's happened. Microsoft established its dominance over the APIs for building IBM PC software in the 1980s and is still the only game in town. It established its dominance over the formats for business documents in the 1990s and is still the only game in town (nearly - Google Docs is at around 20%). Facebook established its dominance over the social graph by the end of the aughts and, you guessed it, is still the only game in town.
Now the web platform is an interesting case because Mozilla and Google really did succeed in wresting that away from Microsoft, but this situation was special for two reasons: one, because Microsoft stopped investing in its browser for more than half a decade (discouraged in part by government action), and two, because the web platform was largely standardized so most sites that worked with IE worked with other browsers. But it was still a tough fight.
Perhaps winning that battle made Mozilla overconfident and contributed to their belief that they could lay a claim to the mobile platform as well. But it was almost impossible from the beginning because there were no users left to win. Once people have settled on a platform they just don't want to leave it. Mozilla did identify the necessary strategy: you have to go after people who aren't yet locked in, and it was their intent to do that in emerging markets. But there really weren't that many people left who were ready to own phones yet didn't, and this time they were facing incumbents who weren't asleep at the wheel.
So, they lost, and underinvested in the desktop browser market in the process, and lost market share there too.
When your management team makes bets it can't win and loses its core market in the process, it's just called bad management. Anyone who was involved in these decisions and is still at Mozilla should be sacked. I think Andreas is wrong about the desktop browser market being lost because in 2017 a website will still render just as well in Firefox as it does in Chrome. In 2022 that might not be the case.
As an aside, with a $400M annual budget and a big win against Microsoft back in the day under their belt, I can see how hubris could have gotten the better of Mozilla. But what I cannot see is how Mark Shuttleworth went and did the same thing: fighting an unwinnable platform war against Apple and Google. He is a smart guy. The decision to do Ubuntu Phone boggled my mind from day one.
If I were at Mozilla I would focus on the desktop browser and I would aim to win there. It's where they have the best shot. If they lose and Google comes to truly dominate the market then Google will use every dirty trick they can to lock it down, control it, and turn it into profits, they are a corporation. If they're going to try to fight some other battle, it should be for a blue ocean, preferably one they can leverage their existing position into.
Removal of Firefox Hello took only 6 months: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1287827
Videos are not seekable in Chrome unless the server implements HTTP 206.
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=66631
This has been a bug since 2010. I simply cannot seek in arbitrary h264 videos without glitching and failure in any version of Chrome.
But I trust it a bit more than I do chrome. I don't feel like they are storing all my data like Chrome does. Maybe that's the angle they should be pursuing.
Not really. Buy a cheap laptop and see Firefox freeze all the time rendering pages while Chrome keeps up like a champ.
All your remaining users are the die-hard users like me, who stay because they like the addons, or some other thing. But Mozilla has decided they'll remove those too, so...
Heck, even Microsoft Edge can run ad blockers now. There's no shortage of options if ads are the primary thing keeping you away from competitors.
Not to mention the million hooks Google's apps put into Chrome search, browsing history, etc. If you use the Google Search launcher to open an app, it sends which app and the time it was opened to Google!
I'm disappointed that the death of Firefox OS and Ubuntu phone leaves us with little choice for FOSS smartphones.