Thank you, Chris
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
But I also believe that Firefox's dominant past plays against when it comes to analyzing the product right now.
Firefox is amazing, it works wonderfully, it continues to improve, respects privacy, adopts Mozilla's ethical values.
Yes, not many people use it, but criticizing this point so aggressively I think it is also influenced by the culture aiming at hypergrouth, dominance, monopoly, "Move fast and break things".
I am very happy with what Firefox does for me right now. Imagine a situation in which Firefox does not exist and today the product comes to light, it would be a great celebration, and the market share would be zero.
Thanks Firefox, I love you very much, although there are few of us who use you and maybe that doesn't change.
It's a good 300 million people. Might be small in the grand scheme of things, but it's that's bigger than all but a handful of countries.
For most people, they can already see the internet in Chrome, or Safari, or maybe even Internet Explorer. Why would they switch when they don't even know what they're switching to or why?
Meanwhile Chrome has the full force of Google behind it, and Chrome is actually one of their important projects that they aren't going to abandon any time soon. It's really Chrome vs. the world, and Chrome is winning.
Why would more users make the effort in 2018 than in 2019? This doesn't explain the trend though it's probably an accurate assessment.
I'm firmly in the latter camp, and if it weren't for the security implications I'd still be running pre-57 Firefox with the full set of extensions I found useful. If I didn't need to use all the major browsers anyway because of my web development work and I wasn't so untrusting of Google in terms of privacy, I might easily have decided at that point that Firefox no longer had any compelling advantage over Chrome and switched. Presumably some people did.
Also, K. Lars Lohn is the man. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSfe5M_zG2s
Here's one from 10 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAoKG5RW8Lk
I'm sorry, what? It was either the underdog of MSIE or of Chrome, it never was dominant the way the actual dominant browser at the time was dominant. The peak was 30%, and when Chrome took over from MSIE, it had 21% with MSIE and Chrome at 30% each.
It's easy to increase market share if you're willing to play dirty and have lots of money to throw around. When you have neither... well, I'd hate to be the new CEO.
Firefox used to be the only better alternative to IE.
Then Chrome came along and it used to be the best at tabs and resources.
Then Brave came along with automatic ad-blocking.
Firefox needs to match the competition and surpass it. What would the next killer feature be?
I don't think I will ever use Brave due to how it "blocks ads" I think the industry should be doing the job of Brave which is to ensure ads aren't infested with bad code. No ad server should serve arbitrary JS that hasn't been tested and secured. If it costs money to ensure this then they should charge more for ads. If an ad infests machines, the ad company should be liable, and they should really go after the person who paid for the ad too.
People shouldn't break the law, but until that never happens, I will do what I can to protect myself.
We already pay users 70% of revenue for ads that go in the user's own space, not in any publisher slot.
Whether user or publisher ads, in Brave neither kind uses any tracking. Matching is done locally against an objective (same for all users in a region on a given day) catalog; views and clicks confirmed using a Privacy Pass like "blind signature" protocol. No user identifier or linkability among events on any server, even ours.
If you acted on incorrect information, I hope you'll stop repeating it and give Brave a try. Thanks.
Rethink the whole thing from the ground up with privacy in mind. This includes transparency to whats going on under the hood, an integration of important plugins (your average video downloading plugin is likely siphoning all kinds of information), sandboxing, privacy-aware defaults, and banning and blacklisting a whole lot of known crap!
Had Brendan been able to try these ideas with the firefox userbase it could've advanced the privacy conversation much further...
Safe Browsing in "update" mode, with an IP hiding proxy as Brave uses, is ok.
(Yes, in theory people can also own say, Google stock, but BAT is directly tied to the browser's success.)
How does a browser grow from zero share? Hint: it's not by "influence" alone, with zero benefit to the prospect being pitched by the influencer.
At some point Google will get tired of this and will withdraw from the agreement. They won't be the default search provider, but that will play to their advantage - Firefox out-of-the-box user experience will take a sharp nose dive. Say all you want about DDG and alternatives, but they still can't hold a candle to Google's search quality. So what Mozilla will end up with is (a) a dip in funding and (b) a dip in the user share. This might be just enough to either make them reconsider their ethics or to kill Mozilla altogether.
So, yeah, a good CEO that can shed the Google dependency is very much required.
If on top of that, they manage to do it using Google's dough, I say bravo and hope they'll remain smart enough to feed from the vampire for a long time
There's a monthly option right there
I've read about this before I think, for some reason donations cannot be used for development and has to be used for outreach etc?
I'm rather torn on this point. On one hand, yes, DDG for example feels some years behind Google in its relevance ranking. On the other, Google itself has been degrading the quality of its own results with ads, etc. so badly that they've seriously degraded their own "above the fold" relevant results.
There's still some things they miss, and my main complaint with DDG is it's too aggressive in taking the search you asked for and substituting in results it thought you meant. I suspect that problem comes from their upstream providers like Bing, which has similar issues.
Google removed that after pressure from the copyright lobby (they got sued by Getty). It'll happen to DDG too if they ever become big enough.
Middle-clicking or control-clicking will load the original images.
Bing direct links images as well so they'd probably go after Microsoft well before DDG, so I think we're safe. But I can always do the same for DDG if need be.
Nowadays, I still use !g when out of luck with DDG, but 90% of the times, Google don't give me the answer I'm looking for either. And I don't feel it's because DDG improved that much but because Google declined.
These days, I'm getting a sense of deja vu, because Google is slowly getting worse and DDG is slowly getting better. Most of the time, I'll get the desired result right away, regardless of the engine I use. But sometimes, I'll be surprised at how bad the results are on one and then I have to try the other. And although it's not happening very frequently, I have to do it more and more often.
I guess that's good, in a sense. Sure, it's nice when things just work and you don't have to think about them, but we've all seen that lack of competition is, in the long run, bad for the users.
The page I was after was not to be found.
Well at least on the first page, I didn't bother checking beyond. Did the !g thing and got the page I wanted straight up first hit.
Here are the searches for reference:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=maker+pro+install+tensorflow
https://www.google.com/search?q=maker+pro+install+tensorflow
I've tried DDG so many times, but it just doesn't find relevant stuff. Sad, because I don't want to rely on Google.
In any case, I just connected to my work PC and did a search from a clean VM there, we don't do anything remotely Raspberry Pi or TensorFlow related there. The link you posted was the first hit at work, but the one I wanted[1] was the third hit.
Yet for DDG the results were the same, no hits. I even tried pressing "more" once, still nothing. I even tried "maker.pro install tensorflow" (without the quotes), and similar result. I tried "maker.pro tensorflow raspberry pi", still not finding it.
Maybe I just need to learn what DDG focuses on in a search string, and I've been trained to what Google weights.
But the reason Google got big was because it was the first search engine where, for 99% of the time, I didn't have to spend several minutes optimizing search terms just to find the right thing.
I don't want to go back to that.
[1]: https://maker.pro/raspberry-pi/tutorial/how-to-set-up-the-ma...
If having Google as the default search is so important, couldn't they just make it the default without the deal?
(Of course, if Google didn't want to pay it, it might cause a crash in the 'market value' of such a placement anyway).
Sadly I agree. I use DDG almost exclusively but when ever I use "!g" I often get better results there.
I've been using DDG, finally, for a little less than 1 year. For most part my DDG searches have been sufficient, in the sense that I generally find what I'm looking for and my need is met.
On few occasions where my need is not met, I do a !g and sometimes Google gives me what I want, but not in all the cases. I have to refine my search query in many, if not most, of those cases.
One area where Google is definitely better than DDG, for obvious reasons, is where Google shows better YouTube videos and I believe also Image results. But for regular searches, DDG has been satisfactory.
In other words, I went from Google to DDG because of privacy. Why should I move from DDG to say StartPage, does it provide any additional benefits?
To clarify, I'm totally open to other search engines, just an trying to understand more.
I don't understand the stuff too much at a really high level to know which is more private, DDG vs Startpage.
>On 29 March 2016, Ixquick.com was officially "merged" with the same company's Startpage search engine[3] (a search engine with the privacy features of Ixquick, but using only Google search results[4]). Users entering ixquick.com are now automatically re-routed to startpage.com. Ixquick had long declared on its sites, that it operated in compliance with European Union privacy standards, and it retained its original European search engine, Ixquick.eu,[8] until about April 2018, when it was also redirected to startpage.com.
>Prior to the release of Tor Browser version 4.5, Startpage.com was its default search engine.
You can change this in Settings, but it's stored in a cookie which my devices clear from time to time. (Not that I'd rather they store it a different way, the situation is just unfortunate.)
Googling a paper or article, skimming it, then searching for something that's in the text makes Google appear like magic. When I enter the first word of my follow-up question, Google will often suggest a complex 10 word query exactly like I would have entered it.
Apparently, many people have the exact same follow-up questions that I have after reading the same text.
That doesn't require a whole lot of tracking. It does require a session cookie, but that's not the sort of tracking I'm opposed to at all.
Another thing that Google does well is searching for local content. I think this is very difficult to replicate for DDG.
But for context free and non-local queries, Google is usually no better than DDG in spite of all the wealth of data they have on me. For some niches DDG is actually better than Google and they don't fill half of their result pages with ads.
Sometimes I wonder whether the entire ad targeting thing is a fraud. Maybe Google doesn't actually track us after all ;-)
I'm 100% sure that's why they give me better results.
The options seem to be:
(1) Don't use the web,
(2) Give up decent search results and engage in a (probably only with limited success) tedious eternal war to prevent Google from tracking me,
(3) Relax and let Google track me, but still give up the good search results, or
(4) Take the payment Google is offering in exchange for tracking.
I use DDG as main search engine since a while. It usually works, but occasionally (less than 10% of searches however) I have to repeat the search using Google. The point being that even if I had to revert to Google for half of my searches, this would mean for Google 50% less information about my search habits, and exposure to their injected ads/information, which wouldn't be a trivial figure at all.
One doesn't use DDG because it's superior to Google (it's not and won't be for a long while) but rather to send a message to corporations making profits out of user information. I'm convinced Google doesn't give a rat's ass if ten thousands users like me don't use their search engine and services as we're already flagged in their database as users with adblockers, therefore immune to advertising (including ads that manage to defeat the blockers), but they would surely panic in terror should DDG use become somewhat trendy among Joe Users after some media coverage, social media campaign etc. The reason being that "normal", usually non technical, users are the ones providing Google mostly with real numbers because they allow webpages to analyze their habits and don't obfuscate their online behavior. Should a big number of those users make the transition to DDG or alternatives, we would likely hear of flying chairs at Google headquarters.
I prefer DDG and I almost never Google, except out of curiosity, but I see this sentiment a lot.
I started using DDG, believing that "it shows me inferior results, but privacy-wise, it is worth it." Yet I've come to learn that DDG's results are often on-par or better than Google, and inferior only a small fraction of the time.
Often when I "!g" a query, I find that I get pretty much the same results with Google too. There are maybe 10% of cases where the results significantly differ.
My perception now is that Google performs better on programming-related queries, and much better on giving me local results (especially results related to my city). But when searching for content that you'd often find on blogs, or looking for reviews of products, DDG almost always beats Google by showing less SEO-heavy, more authentic results.
Edit: typo
Right, like from 2014 to 2017 when Google wasn't the default search provider for Firefox. It was such a shame to see their income go from 300 million to 500 million.
AFAICT, the situation is not so different from the days where Microsoft was paying Apple to avoid a defacto finding of monopoly.
I use Firefox now because I care about privacy, and I'd rather use a browser developed by a non-profit that cares about that as well. But I suspect that's a bit too abstract for most people to care about, at least at this point.
Chrome's advantage seems fairly baked in; people aren't going to shift unless there's a decent reason to. I wonder what that reason could be. Can privacy concerns become a sufficient motivator for people to shift browser; or even, thinking a bit bigger, to change the fundamental architecture of the web?
imo this would be the step from chrome, which will never implement it because they depend on it. but the web is not ads. the web can survive without ads.
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/06/04/firefox-now-availab...
Chrome might be better than Firefox for some use cases, but the difference is definitely not as big as it used to be between Firefox and IE. Yet its market share is way higher.
Which leads me to think it's not (just) about being better. I'd guess lock-in/cross-product marketing is another major factor.
Firefox is way better from a performance standpoint than it was during Chrome's climb, but Chrome gobbled up all of the "not built into my OS" market share and unless someone is severely for privacy, does it have enough to differentiate to get people to switch? To me, they seem to be very much peers of equal value.
Now at least, users have choice of what they deem the "best browser" to be and I honestly don't think they're inherently wrong for feeling that way. If someone uses Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Edge (though with that last one, I feel for them because it doesn't have the best tab recovery when Edge closes unexpectedly), or some derivative of any of the above, I think they're going to be reasonably okay.
But the sort of people who use whatever's put in front of them because they don't know or care are exactly the sort of people who need a browser that isn't actively hostile to their privacy and autonomy.
Greedy businesses are preying on vulnerable technophobes, and we who grok should make sure those vulnerable people have their best interests looked after by organisations whose motives genuinely align — not by big tech firms behaving like ambulance-chasing quack doctors, who'll sell you any number of appendectomies.
And then we end up with Chrome, and Facebook, and Slack, and Twitter, and WhatsApp, and GitHub, and LinkedIn, and nobody ever seems to learn that if you don't insist on an open ecosystem, even if it's “just for now”, then eventually we all lose that option altogether.
> And with social networks, the interest in them is pretty proportional with the availability of the people you want to interact with being on there.
That's kind of my point. If we geeks stop jumping on the closed thing, and instead support the alternative open federated/decentralised network, then the open network has a chance of gaining the bigger/better pool of users.
As any tool becomes common, it becomes easier to figure out, because mainstream websites run “howto” articles: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=howto+instagram
We understand the network effect. We should apply it for great good!
> Decimation (Latin: decimatio; decem = "ten") was a form of Roman military discipline in which every tenth man in a group was executed by his cohorts.
I think decimated is the right word, as it seems it took somewhere around 10% of IE's market share.
Originally, decimated came from when the Roman army would conquer another group, and would assert dominance (and instill fear) by killing off 1 in every 10 soldiers. So it literally meant removing a tenth.
English has mutated the meaning to mean "nearly wipe out", which is very different from the original meaning. But that's common in language. Confusing.
Which they do, if you access them using a non-Chrome browser, or at least used to... I confess I'm not sure because I still use Chrome. I agree with you about the advantage of "if you're already using it, something has to be a LOT better to get you to switch".
And also on gmail, googlemaps and YouTube… They even paid for ads in the subway here in Paris! They also bundled it with software like Adobe Flash, which made it available on virtually every computer circa 2010…
And they ship it as their default browser on Android…
GSuite pages constant suggest downloading Chrome.
2019 Google has a lot of ads for Google.
This is probably just me, but whenever I see an advert for a web service on TV or on a billboard (especially for stalwarts like Google or Ebay), I always apply the same logic: their product must be crap if they're having to advertise it the old-fashioned way — it feels desperate and demeaning to the product.
It's not the default browser on most Android phones sold. Samsung Internet is.
Android has more than 80% of the smartphone market and Samsung has around 20% of the whole market, which makes 25% of the android market.
Simple, offer a better browser.
Now the technical core of firefox seems now very solid(if they keep the extensions api stable), with long term decisions like rust and quantum paying off.. But the problem seems to be, that many websites are developed and tested in chrome only, sometimes with chrome-only features.. so it does not help only implementing nonstandard feature after nonstandard feature. They need to get the developers back and that can only work with a massive investment in the firefox dev tools as they are far, far behind chrome devtools. I sympathise with firefox and mozilla a lot, but even for me, it would require a huge improvement to even consider changing back. I am annoyed enough from the occasional firefox debugging. No wonder more and more developers simply skip firefox due to low marketshare and save the effort.
This isn't a universal truth -- I consider them much better in many respects. It's much better to point out concrete deficiencies as these can be acted upon.
Or they could be innovative with their browser. Sometimes I have trouble telling chrome and Firefox apart. They are so similar.
On the bright side, Servo is designed for embedding, although it's a lot more work than something like XULRunner or Electron.
(There’s also not much point to disabling XUL extensions entirely since Firefox now requires extensions to be signed).
Recently I've been using Firefox preview for Android and really enjoying it. Looking forward to it replacing Firefox for Android
https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-android https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-ios
That being said, the F-droid version is probably out of date.
I sincerely hope it's neither. I'm well aware that a third party can't direct Mozilla as to how to channel its resources. They can however ensure there are sufficient contributors external to Mozilla to maintain the features they wish to keep.
Even if the end decision is still made by Mozilla internals, the decision to keep functionality is much easier if they don't have to battle for resources to maintain it thanks to external contributors being willing to do so.
At the end of the day, being an open project does not require the maintainers to do work simply because a subset of users wishes it.
Can you please edit out gratuitous swipes like that from your HN posts? It breaks a number of the site guidelines and your comment would be fine (with higher signal/noise) without it.
What's gratuitous? Is "naive" considered an insult on Hacker News?
It may have been a bit of a stock comment, but I see no evidence that it wasn't in good faith.
On the other hand, it only takes me a few seconds to complain on the official channels when they add a feature I don't need or remove one that I use so I think I'll keep doing that. Maybe enough users will agree and Mozilla might react to the complaints. Probably not though, they've been pretty deaf to the community lately. A change of CEO might be a chance for that to improve, so that's why I made my comment.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla_and_Yahoo_Holdings_Oath_Cou... hasn't been updated since January 2018.
I used to love Metacrawler. And I see that it's back, but just drawing on Google and Yahoo!. Also by InfoSpace, Dogpile, which draws from more sources. But I haven't used either enough to say much.
Chris Beard will be leaving his role as Mozilla CEO
I would say none of those are euphemisms, they just put the emphasis on the reason why as opposed to the act of leaving itself
I think you’re reading much more into this.
In my opinion, this conflict of interest between users and Mozilla's search revenue share held back tracking protection in Firefox over the years. We (I was there, this is all in public bugs and news now) rejected third-party cookie blocking three times.
Meanwhile Brave has a transparent rate card, where we pay the user 70% of the gross revenue for user-private ads, and 15% for publisher ads (not yet deployed; the publisher makes 70% and we take same as the user). So we get <= what users get, and we will fail if our users don't like the private/anonymous ads+donation model enough to opt in at sufficient scale that we can cover our costs.
Every time when I need to pay something web sites redirect me to my bank site, which has good mobile app, Firefox doesn't open necessary app, which forces me to log in again and again from browser, Chrome opens banking app, where I already have all things set up.
This is one example of how Firefox Android is annoying, please fix, or keep losing 90% of your market share, because people on mobile want this simple feature by default.