Mozilla’s 18-month effort to market without Facebook
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Everyone likes to say they don't use Facebook, but they do. Or at least 10 people they know do.
Local businesses use Facebook relentlessly because, lots of times, it actually works to get people in the door or calling your number. Small businesses almost have to use its ad platform (in my opinion). I don't think local businesses can afford to look away from a top performer like this.
When I ran an escape room business, my fill-rate on weekends was typically dependent on whether or not I was spending money on Facebook. Google ads were second. Anything else barely had any ROI. Well - in the first few months of running the business, the local newspaper actually brought in some people, but nothing compared to my longer ad runs on Facebook.
I feel like this is a "you don't need Facebook" chant, but I feel that's not true for all industries, and I hope the take-away here is that maybe a huge online business with a giant ad budget can find other means, but if you are a small local business with $300 a month for marketing, I personally believe that you kind-of need Facebook.
Anecdotally, based on my experience working with over 250 local businesses across the business spectrum, this doesn't reflect reality. A very small percentage of my clients "actively" use "organic" Facebook, an even smaller percentage use their ad platform (much higher usage of Google Ads). The ones that do (buy FB ads), typically do so through local "media company" who tack on their own fees, which in turn makes it a poor investment. I can count on one hand (out of hundreds) the number of our clients who effectively use Facebook. In fact, in the last couple of years, the number of businesses forgoing a "real website" and choosing Facebook (a common theme just a few years ago) has basically disappeared.
The only businesses still relying on Facebook are event-based: concerts, parties, exhibitions, etc. Because they use FB Events. But even Instagram is taking over in that area.
Other than that, Facebook business pages are just becoming a place for marketing to dump stuff.
Because the audiences are different?
The audiences for Starbucks Latte and Cappuccino are different. Starbucks is indifferent whether you buy one or the other though.
My analogy would be that Yum Brands doesn't care whether you visit Taco Bell or Pizza Hut. In the same way Facebook (inc) doesn't care whether you visit Facebook or Instagram.
I think that you're being a bit over simplistic, there is a lot of decision making based around company component performance, poor sales number within the Facebook native platform may influence more money being redirected to support Instagram which might end up as a personnel cut in an extreme circumstance.
1. Reeeeeally loosely defined, since AFAICT Facebook isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
I have an interesting approach. Maybe it falls flat on its face, but maybe it could work.
Create a "liberally themed" Facebook clone and onboard a bunch of people during the run up to the election. Give them tooling under the guise of campaigning, but also get them to use Facebook like features.
Ban any conservative thought or commentary. It's harsh, it's undemocratic, but it plays into the attack. Especially if you can drum up press coverage on Fox News.
Hypothetically, a polarized platform could create a stir. Maybe liberals on Facebook get interested. Maybe it leads to a small migration. This furthers the right-leaning polarizarion of Facebook's userbase, causing more liberals to flee. Thermal runaway.
This "Facebook is for Republicans" narrative is aided by the recent rumors that Zuckerburg has been meeting with Republican leaders about campaign advertising.
If you completely brain drain Facebook of the liberal demographic and make it skew far right, are the engineers, predominantly liberals, going to continue to be excited coming to work to build that product?
I think it's an interesting approach. It's far-fetched and kind of sneaky, but I'd love to see something like this attempted.
It would prove a new vector of attack for entering the social space. Something that even Instagram might be vulnerable to.
In my post I just mentioned which beverage my customers prefer, I never implied that Starbucks is closing or should close...
Facebook (the product) is an absolute dumpster fire that is primarily used to spread propaganda that Facebook (the company) is unable and unwilling to stop.
Facebook (the company) is doing just fine, because they quickly realized social media sites are basically dating sites, where each new age cohort attaches to a different one. That means Facebook (the product) can indeed be awful and not affect the company much since all the users just moved to Instagram.
Wait, are you talking about me?
In my post I don't even hint at anything even close to that, I don't have any bias against Facebook, the company or the website. I'm not even talking about the future of Facebook AT ALL in the post. I'm just stating some metrics we gathered at my last workplace that might be helpful for people using social media.
Are you sure you're not projecting, or being over-defensive?
That seems less an indictment of the performance Facebook ads, and more of an indictment of local Facebook ads consultants. As an experienced marketer, I can tell you that in most niches, ROAS from Facebook ads done correctly vastly outperforms that of AdWords ads. AdWords tends to deliver higher quality traffic, but at a CPC that is so much higher than Facebook that it makes Facebook’s lower quality traffic the better buy.
https://www.investopedia.com/news/facebook-google-digital-ad...
Between Facebook and Google. Facebook has about 34% of the ad spend (36.2 + 19.2)/19.3.
Have to chime in here. I run a small brick and motor business with a membership model (climbing gym).
FB/Insta are paramount to our marketing and communication. Like the parent comment said, people like to say they don't use Facebook/Insta but that doesn't seem to be true at all.
Our ad budget on FB is an easy choice and is the only method of adverts that have given us any sort of consistent return. Groupon can get people in the door as well, but then you need to convert them directly with strong sales. It's good, but hard.
Organic FB/Insta are also the best way for us to communicate with our members/community about events, specials and closures. People check these platforms all the time. I believe these work so well for us because of the visual aspect of our business. If we were more informational, perhaps email would be a better tool.
I fantasize about not using Facebook properties, but it would come at a tremendous cost to the business and our community.
On the other hand, my family's bookshop relies a lot on social media to get the word out. I suspect social media is more important for businesses that aren't viewed as necessities or are competing with convenience. (people tend to view wellness, beauty, anti-aging, facials, etc., as necessities if they depend on them regularly even though they aren't true necessities, which is why such industries tend to fare well even during recessions)
This probably isn't all Facebook's doing, but just the changing nature of how people get their information. Before Facebook, it was TV ads and ads in the newspaper, but nobody viewed those platforms as being nefarious. Now people are on the internet and watching cable less and less, so something's got to take the place of TV ads.
This matches my experience working for small biz owners as well. It's funny, years ago we (techies) all told these business owners what a waste "traditional" advertising was. "Shift your print/radio/tv ad budgets to digital" we said, "it's trackable" we said, and now it's shifting back as digital ads are not returning the same value thanks to ...very accurate tracking. Meanwhile, local radio was destroyed and rebuilt, local print is also currently rebuilding (not quite there yet) and TV is becoming more affordable as they have to now compete with digital.
We (a local micro-business) tried tracking our print adverts by including coupons and found nearly the only people using them were current customers.
Direct word-of-mouth was by far our most successful advertising (either from customers, or staff handing out leaflets in the street).
IMHO the latter. Returns were and are always terrible, with occasional "home runs" that then get parroted by every marketing guru as an example of how powerful social marketing campaigns can be. But of course, your plumbing business, or accounting firm doesn't have the same business model, market or customers as said example.
My point is that social media is no worse, or better than traditional marketing, it's just that, we can prove it's terrible with data. Of course, if everything is "terrible" ... none of it is.
Well, it's just advertising that's terrible. Businesses can spend their money in lots of different ways. If advertising is understood to not be effective, perhaps we'll see more investment in things like wages and product quality, which, unlike advertising, deliver real social value.
We found that:
- Our market was too niche and local for adwords to be super effective. We basically didn't have enough volume with productive keywords to make it work, and broadening the keywords resulted in alot of spend for junk results. It did pull in some people though.
- Facebook, Instagram and Bing ads were useless.
- Facebook and Instagram content was shared by the community and generated conversions for events. They didn't make a dent in new admissions/tours.
- Many people saw and were were excited by Waze ads, but no new folks were attracted to it, and existing people used it as a lazy way to navigate to school/church. It was interesting though, I literally had people coming up to me to tell me how cool Waze was, which was surprising.
- Newspaper ads were expensive, but generated 5x more response than all of the other channels.
- Signs, lawn-signs and flyers were expensive in terms of labor, but 2x more response than newspaper.
Facebook Messenger is like the ultimate opt in for contacts. People you don’t know at all get filtered when trying to contact you, but people you know tangentially or see once every few years are still reachable. I would have no reason to have this person’s number.
There are plenty of people that I might contact about something but I wouldn’t have their number.
I was also planning a surprise for my wife’s birthday and coordinating for her to have a girl’s night out with her friends. I wouldn’t have her friends numbers, but I was able to message them.
Facebook serves the same niche as the local newspaper used to. Those newspapers are disappearing, and people pay little attention where they do. Everybody reads Facebook. (If the "kids" have moved away from it, well, they're not really our target market anyway.)
No they don't. Far from it.
> Those newspapers are disappearing, and people pay little attention where they do.
Local newspapers are coming back. There are at least three glossy free newspapers where I live (published weekly or monthly) that are packed full of local advertising and local news stories, local identity profiles, etc.
That's technically correct but some 1.6 billion active daily users is kind of a big deal. "Everybody Uses facebook" is about as close accurate as you're going to get for an "Everybody does X" claim this side of "eats".
I can confirm there are certainly people who don't use Facebook. I'm one of them and don't have any regrets dropping the platform years ago. It's just a boomer-meme-filled wasteland now.
Locally things look a little better as long as you aren’t in a metro that is dominated with bogus traffic. Works great for small business outside of major metro areas.
It's funny because I was going to comment on that about the escape room of my SO and about how Facebook in her case was quite ineffective. I was taking care of her campaigns because she isn't tech savvy at all. I was spending 150$ a month on Facebook and the same amount on Google Adword, but we had a much better return on Google.
There wasn't much advertising for escape room on Facebook for our area either, so that may explain why. There's quite a bit of them on Google Ads, but we only have ads on Google Adword for now.
I'm not the best in advertising though and didn't spend that much time on it, so we could most probably optimize that quite a bit and maybe then Facebook could be better. We are exclusively on Google now and I did optimize it a bit to reach 4.75% CTR. I have an hard time tracking correctly the conversion with Resova (we are going to migrate out of them too, so I won't spend too much time on it either) so for now CTR is good enough.
Or is the advertising "discovery" more organic, in that escape room ads are just showing up in people's FB timeline or alongside unrelated Google searches (or on sites that display Google ads), and people think "oh, neat, I like escape rooms, I should try this one"?
Originally I was planning to put them all on Facebook because I was expecting our market to be there (young adult who want to do something with friends). I was only taking ads on Google because even with the exact name, the result was too far. I was planning to remove it but as the CPC was much lower than on Facebook, I kept it with a few dollars per day.
> I'll do a web search, or possibly open Google Maps on my phone and search for it.
That what seems to be happening. Google Maps is one of our best source of conversion. During the first 12 months my SO asked most people where they found the escape room and a majority were from Google Maps. On Google My Business their stats show that in the past 30 days it was displayed 20k times, which is quite good. The CTR isn't amazing but it's still something and the number of calls is actually not too bad considering that I don't expect most people to use the call button of Google Maps to book.
I'll probably try to pay for ads on Google Maps and Waze soon.
Because the subscribers weren't willing to pay the full cost of producing these papers, the publishers would let local business owners pay them to include their own blog posts advertising their business. The people reading these papers each day would learn about local businesses and events from these advertisements.
I often wonder the same.
And also:
Why there is an official Facebook container[1] but not an official Google container?[2]
Why a fresh install of Firefox sends multiple calls to Google, including services that track users such as Analytics?[3]
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/06/04/firefox-now-availab...
[2] there is a third party Google container at least https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-contai...
[3] https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11658588961766604...
The GP is not trying to defend Facebook here. Their argument is that Mozilla is not acting fully ethically, by seemingly treating Google specially. Therefore tu quoque does not apply. (Moreover, the argument is logically sound.)
https://www.cnet.com/news/google-firefox-search-deal-gives-m...
Or use a Blink based web browser whose development is steered by Google.
Of course, you have to give up a few things to use it...
If you know something, feel free to say so. Otherwise you're just one more person on the internet spreading FUD instead of knowledge about one more company. We have enough of that already, don't we?
Completely, utterly hypocritical. I'm sorry if you are blind to it.
Twitter links seem to rarely work without having the app on mobile, it's disgustingly blatant dark pattern stuff.
> The http://mozilla.org tab discussing the importance of Privacy loads in the background, bringing along with it the Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics. Hello, Google.
Anyway, I think Mozilla should address all these concerns ASAP.
If you click yes, it tries to set a cookie. If it can't set a cookie, it throws up a page saying "We've detected that JavaScript is disabled in your browser. Would you like to proceed to legacy Twitter?" etc.
Historically Google has been a really close Mozilla partner, not only sponsoring search, but also developers.
Today, Mozillas relationship with Google is extremely complicated.
ZDNET had an article back in April [1], that somewhat sums up how the relationship soured, but doesn't really touch on why and how they are still intermingled.
> Google, including services that track users such as Analytics?
Mozilla has a special deal with Google, that does not allow Google to use that information as part of their greater analytics or sell it to 3rd parties, as per [2].
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...
Sorry for being pedantic, as I'm sure this is what you intended anyway, but I do think its worthwhile pointing out explicitly: it does not contractually allow Google.
There are no technical restrictions in place; e.g. Google haven't provided Mozilla with an alternative analytics mechanism that consumes less data. All data is still sent by Mozilla to Google. They've just then promosed to do nothing with it.
A small but, I believe, notable distinction.
> data sharing settings in Google Analytics [1] letting you control how much analytics data is shared with Google.
It's in Google Analytics. It's all shared with Google. Or—more accurately—none of it is "shared" with Google, Google is just sharing some of it with you.
There may be settings allowing you to indicate your preference for what they will use for whatever internal purposes, but... Google have collected the data. There's no question of whether they receive it or not.
This really depends on your trust model. Do you trust Google engineers to implement their own permissions correctly? Are you concerned about mistakes, or that they're entirely lawless?
Physical control means you can independently verify that no sharing is done, but it's not the only trust model.
This is obviously not a viable approach pragmatically (Mozilla must e.g. trust the hosting provider for their own data, distribution pipelines for their software, etc.), but these are all cases where reasonable precaution can be taken (signing, etc.). Google Analytics' APIs support no such measures.
> Are you concerned ... that they're entirely lawless?
This is a bit of a strawman / hyperbolic question. A company or its employees needn't be "entirely lawless" (whatever this extreme phrase even means), to be outside of regulatory compliance. And the latter is something Google are found to be on a very regular basis.
They aren’t operating like a charitable trust that accumulates money during good times and then lives off the residuals. Which means if they ever piss off google we’re kind of fucked.
Never trust businesses talking about values, or believe they are out there to protect you. Some of them are better than other for sure, but at the core companies don’t have values they stand for - they have hobbies, that they like to use to get more publicity.
Note that "customer" doesn't mean "user," the customer is the person that pays you money. Sometimes user and customer is one in the same, but with regards to free (as in no purchase by the end user) software and services the customer potentially has a very different set of values than the user.
So they don’t object to Facebook’s data privacy practices. They object to Facebook’s media-perceived role in Trump’s election. The reality is that if they applied the standard they are using to exclude Facebook from their advertising plan in a non-hypocritical way, they would quickly run out of places to advertise online. Most major online media outlets, including Google, have data practices that actual privacy activists consider to be abhorrent. Their policy isn’t about privacy - it’s about politics.
Eich was kinda a moron and I don't think they realized that after he was onboard. IIRC, he saw no reason to move forward with the Firefox Quantum support and generally had some other bad software decisions.
I suspect the anti-gay stuff was more to justify a way to get rid of him and score some points in the process.
Not even Brendan's worst enemies have ever accused him of being a moron.
Brendan was a leading figure at Mozilla since the very beginning of the project. Everyone very well knew who he was.
I didn't agree with all of Brendan's decisions. For example I think we should have prioritized process separation higher than we did, and Brendan was partly responsible for deprioritizing that, which I viewed as a serious mistake. But Brendan made a lot more good decisions than bad ones and from that point of view, everyone I know was confident in him as CEO.
Engineers certainly weren't looking for an "excuse to get rid of him". I assume executives and the board weren't either, or they wouldn't have made him CEO just before the controversy exploded.
Quantum (or part of it; much good work done in C++ code too) is based on Rust and Servo, projects for which I was sole executive sponsor from 2010 onward: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12224047.
It's fair to say Rust and Servo would not exist as such if I hadn't been at Mozilla.
I'm among the actual founders of mozilla.org, we started working on it in fall 1997. Earliest wayback snapshot: https://web.archive.org/web/19981202152141/http://www.mozill...
So please do not accuse me of “making stuff up”. I was simply repeating what literally every article on this matter says. If the entire media got that wrong, then fine. Ultimately only you know why you left. But I “made up” nothing.
You also seem to have assumed that the “employees” who called for my resignation reported to me. Not so: they all worked for the smaller Mozilla Foundation, which has arms-length structure as parent non-profit to the for-profit Mozilla Corporation of which I was CEO.
Again, that’s not “made up”. It’s a logical conclusion based upon the facts of what happened. You are saying that the facts of your case are not evidence that this could possibly happen to anyone else at that organization in the future. I hope you’re right. But the reality is that if they pushed one person out because of ideological differences, it is quite probable that it has happened to others and will continue to happen.
The bottom line is this: You made a minor donation to a conservative political cause years before you became CEO. That ultimately led to your departure. I don’t think even you would dispute either of those facts. This pretty well supports the conclusion that anyone with even mildly conservative views is not welcome there. I’m not sure how else anyone would interpret that. You seem to have a much more charitable interpretation of it than the facts support, but that doesn’t mean that people interpreting what happened in the most obvious way are “making up” that interpretation.
I'm disputing your absolute-sounding "Mozilla’s employees are fiercely liberal". Even if you define "liberal" broadly, are they all? Really, no moderates or righties? As I happen to know some, and so do other people, you seem to be using hyperbole at best, if not making things up.
Also your absolute, unhedged "If you have a conservative bone in your body, you are not welcome on the Mozilla campus." Again, counterexamples are known personally to me and others on HN such as @roca. So instead of persuading, you're exaggerating for some reason (to divide and conquer, to get sympathy, it doesn't matter -- the exaggeration is the point and it blows back, assuming you are actually trying to persuade anyone; perhaps you are writing not to persuade?).
Mozilla would have trouble with state law if they actively fired or demoted anyone over past political acts, per California Labor Law 1101 and 1102. Let's agree that is not the case.
That leaves subtler biases. You could be right, especially after I left, that anyone who is known to be "on the right" (conservative is almost useless as a clear political term) would face subtler kinds of hostility, skepticism, pressure. You are probably right about executives, but that's true at a lot of places. Anyone pushing buttons by boosting Trump at lunch or water-cooler time, wearing a MAGA hat, etc., would run into complaints and escalations.
But at this point we are far from your absolute, unqualified assertions about "are fiercely liberal" and "not welcome". See what I mean?
P.S. See https://robert.ocallahan.org/2014/04/fighting-media-narrativ... including all the comments. I'm not taking anyone's side there, but if it were as absolute and simple as you asserted, many righties would have quit too and we'd hear from them. If I missed such testimony, please link.
I probably should have hedged it to some degree, but I feel like you’re being pedantic. Of course there are exceptions to every rule. This was a comment on HN, not a research paper. I was making a generalization, perhaps one worded too broadly, but one that you seem to eventually concede to in the latter part of your last comment.
FWIW, I mentioned your case as an example because I think you suffered a terrible injustice. I can’t stand hypocrisy, and to have things like this being brought forth by people that belong to a party that calls itself the “party of tolerance” disgusts me in a way that I couldn’t fully describe in writing. I don’t even agree with your stance on the issue you donated to, but I think that incidents like yours have a chilling effect on free speech, and that isn’t good for anyone. Too much of this kind of thing happens across the board. I find it fascinating that you seem to be defending the other side in your situation, but I am sure you have your reasons.
Thank you for taking the time to respond.
And only few technical people care about minuscule difference in performance anymore, so they need to advertise what Google, their main competitor, doesn't offer - privacy. Best way to advertise would be either tech news on articles related to privacy issues and possibly tech influencers who can properly explain privacy benefits.
Another way to strike favour with tech crowd would be eliminating bloat from Firefox (e.g. Pocket, still no idea why they bought them, as an extension it worked fine).
"Google is breaking ad blocking in Chrome, try a browser that works for you."
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-2009...
(At least on Android, on iOS it's just a skin on top of whatever engine apple forces down their throats).
Ublock origin on Firefox mobile is a godsend.
Brave sometimes totally fails to block Outbrain-like junk at the bottom of articles, and that seems like it must be intentional.
If you enjoy FF I recommend signing up for their beta program. New versions come out every couple of weeks and tend to make noticeable random differences or feature enhancements.
Has nothing to do with performance, but I agree - to be clear I use FF but that doesn't mean I have to justify/defend "it's slow" with other reasons I choose to use it.
> It is not true, FF on Android is pretty great.
https://cnet3.cbsistatic.com/img/dzNTI91dH4nch-WEKzTkp_WWza8... https://greenspector.com/assets/img/articles/2018-11-19-navi... (Firefox Focus was on still on the WebKit base when that benchmark was done, not their own engine)
Even posts about how great it is have to contain qualifiers https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/97vqb2/firefox_for... "I know a lot of people complain about Firefox on Android... "es, the scrolling isn't as good as Chrome".
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/c2qovb/how_stable_... top comment " but it can have somewhat poor performance... But yeah, Android Firefox is actually being rewritten for that reason. " and only other comment "Yes you can sync. Performance is still abysmal. "
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/bxr3yc/why_is_andr... "I've used Firefox, Firefox Beta, Firefox Focus, and Firefox Nightly. They're all absolutely glacial browsers on Android." top comment is basically what I said "Firefox Preview or fenix is a promising browser . It has modern superfast Ui . Better page loading time and benchmark scores . It is currently under development (that's why it's called preview ) ."
.
I could go on, these aren't cherry picked they are just going straight through searches and clicking top results. These aren't rare opinions, they score decently high on forums dedicated to discussing FF. The comments on the rewrite are the complete opposite, praising performance and fixing laggy scroll, but it's not done yet. This is a constant source of discussion.
If the current version of FF on Android didn't have issues they wouldn't be rewriting it.
I read from my phone very often in the dark environment, and Chrome usage became excruciating even on the minimum screen brightness. So removing that option was a final straw for me, and I switched to FF on both mobile and desktop. And honestly, never looked back, learning to appreciate what I have with FF. I never noticed anything laggy about scrolls, and power usage on Android is about the same as Chrome (likely less, due to everything being NOT SO FREAKING WHITE!).
[1] https://support.google.com/chrome/forum/AAAAP1KN0B0rbZd_cEpW...
Nope, but it doesn't need to be protected from criticism for coming dead last either.
Again, workflow and theming are completely irrelevant to anything I mentioned. "hot pile of garbage __in terms of performance, power usage, and scrolling__." (emphasis added). You're reading "someone said something bad about FF, I've got to say how it's better than Chrome!" instead of what was said. I then provided hard data to validate it's not just my anecdotal experience.
> one day the wiseguys in Google decided that everything should be extreme WHITE [1].
Just to note they have since added native dark mode and the native ability to automatically convert sites you browse to into a dark theme. I'm hoping FF adds the latter natively but in the meantime it's doable via extensions so it's not as big a deal as finishing the Firefox Preview rewrite for Android.
Thing is, it is not. On Chrome I regularly had unresponsive pages that once cleared led to all tabs being closed, and it happened more often when I had more tabs open, the critical number is 10-12. Once you are over that limit, expect "App stopped responding" modal. On Firefox, I currently have 36 open tabs, and it works without any slowdowns.
In Chrome, if start typing something in a webpage, open another page to do some fact-checking, go back to the first page, and see all my typed text gone. On Firefox, I do this all the time, open different apps, and all my tabs and their contents are safe (with the exception of private tabs, sadly).
Power usage is about the same, scrolling is also fast enough for me (I am aware it does render fonts in lo-res while scrolling, but I only learned about this in an online discussion about 'horrible font rendering', never noticing it myself in more than 6 months of usage at the time.
So no, I don't agree with your assessment of Firefox as a "hot pile of garbage". I think it is a great mobile browser, and I think it will get even better. YMMV, of course, but I'm very happy with Firefox and have no plans of going back.
To reiterate: When I mention power/performance I'm referring to the benchmarks showing it's last not whether or not I personally think it feels fast and when I mention the Firefox communities common opinion I'm not referring to your personal experiences or whether or not you personally found Chrome worse in the same regard.
Also I'd like to point out once more something I've already pointed out: At no point have I said or Firefox on Android as a whole is a hot pile of garbage nor have I mentioned anything about Chrome being better/worse/relevant. Please stop saying I have and particularly please stop using cut off quotes to imply I did. It's not what I was talking about and, more importantly, it's not even the opinion I hold.
In short: more people should be using Firefox and DDG.
The performance is not stellar on OS X and plugin support is tiny by comparison so I find myself drifting back to Chrome.
Anyway, it's supposed to be out next week [1] :)
Previously Firefox was barely usable for anything with animation on OSX. They've been making steady (if slow) progress for the past year or so, now it's subjectively on-par with Chrome and Safari for me.
Are you saying that Firefox has less addons than Safari? Is that even possible with the restrictions on Safari browser (ads blocking)?
Interesting to see that Safari has risen and is still slowly rising, even with no Windows version anymore.
There's an entire generation of internet users that _only_ know Chrome. I am a huge Firefox fan and use it myself, but trying to convince others to switch is a futile in my experience. Those who understand or care about the benefits are either already using it or some other Chrome alternative, everyone else doesn't want to be bothered.
At this point I don't know it will take to de-throne Chrome. As much as I want to see Mozilla succeed, I don't know if it will be Firefox. I'm not sure what else they can do to make it enticing to the general populous. I just hope they don't give up and keep pumping out wonderful features.
I picked those examples as a mix of language markets, the two largest non-English speaking EU countries and an East/West EU comparison.
What links Germany and Poland in Firefox adoption on desktop?
For technical folks, I really don't understand it - I'm not a web developer, so my use case might be different, but I really don't see what exactly people are missing. I've never had issues with browser performance (I use FF on mac, Windows, Linux, and (slow out of the box) development Linux VMs).
People here usually complain about performance, but how does one even objectively measure that? Do people's browsers freeze up? Do websites load noticeably slower?
This is a genuine question - not just a rant.
As a side node, syncing to your own server is a huge feature for me - as far as I'm aware, Chrome can't do that. That + DDG as default search engine is an open alternative to Google's/Chrome's monopoly, which in my opinion should take precedence over pure convenience for the audience of HN.
>[...] which in my opinion should take precedence over pure convenience for the audience of HN.
is a no from me. Maybe I've done tech too long, but I don't feel obliged to ditch convenience for nerdcred or the feeling of authenticity or whatever your frame is. Several years ago, FF was slower -talking margins of magnitude- for me, both on windows and linux-machines. Maybe it was due to addons and whatnot, but I migrated to Chrome, and, in simple words, had no UX-related reason to switch back ever since. Chrome does what I want it to do, and I cba to switch back to FF unless I'll actually start seeing ads again. And I'm not a webdev either, for that matter.
That's an awfully dismissive way of putting it given the prevailing topic of this thread: privacy. Firefox isn't perfect in that regard, but I trust Mozilla a hell of a lot more than I trust Google.
Not to mention I don't want Google dictating how the web works through sheer force of market share. It's like nobody remembers the 90s and IE anymore. Do we really want a repeat of that?
Obviously there's a line to be drawn: when "convenience" turns into "browsing is actually a difficult chore because FF has bugs X, Y, Z", then sure, it's of course understandable that you'd ditch FF for an alternative. But I don't think that experience should be common.
[EDIT] to be clear, I'm rooting for them. I've used Firefox since it was Phoenix. And Firebird. Back then I evangelized it, hard. I've not loved it since somewhere in the 2.x range, but I wish I could again. It's just, you know, been a while.
It's not necessarily an issue for me, I won't switch back because of it, and I like Firefox for development, though the Chromium dev tools are still a bit better in some regards, but yeah, lower performance has been noticeable for me.
I don't remember what made me switch on Desktop, but I had switched on android before, simply because the internet was unusable on Chrome with ads.
Also, firefox implements kinetic touchpad scrolling on linux, whereas chromium still does not (this is a huge missing feature IMO)
[1] https://venturebeat.com/2018/12/31/mozilla-ad-on-firefoxs-ne...
[2] https://www.ghacks.net/2017/10/06/mozilla-to-launch-firefox-...
[3] https://drewdevault.com/2017/12/16/Firefox-is-on-a-slippery-...
[4] https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/update-looking-glass-add/
[5] https://github.com/Pocket/extension-save-to-pocket/issues/75
I've switched though to using Firefox despite the above on MacOS at least.
On Linux however, Firefox seems quite a bit worse than Firefox to the extent that it's approaching "painful" levels to use it - scrolling is very laggy (messed around with hardware accel, drivers, etc), downloading / rendering is noticeably slower, etc. (Same setup of only plugin in each browser on Linux being ublock origin). Even starting it seems much slower (with cold FS caches). This is on several Linux machines, and seems pretty universal in my experience.
At work, we have to use the internet through a VDI terminal (main network is completely segregated from internet), and I've noticed that with this setup, Firefox is even slower than my "native" Linux comparisons. Also, as I can see the network traffic between the VDI and my machine, I've also noticed that a single blank page window in Firefox keeps sending updates (300KB/sec, like it's refreshing constantly in an event loop or something), whilst a blank page window in Chrome has no updates, which seems a bit weird to me, and indicates something's non-optimal in Firefox, as I don't see why a blank page should cause firefox to apparently re-render stuff...
They're kinda in the same boat with Chrome that they were with Microsoft/IE way back in the day, but the composition of the company and user base has changed a lot!
I imagine this impacts their data.
What do they all do?
I don't think I've ever seen an ad for firefox.
- Acquisition: Managing channels like search and social ads to grow the user base, upsell browser usage across devices, etc.
- Branding: Working on display and out of home media that reinforces values like privacy and security with how people think of Mozilla
- Partnerships: Working with other tech companies to co-promote or integrate directly (like Ubuntu, etc.)
- Product: Writing release copy, blogposts, etc for new feature launches, announcements, etc. and ensuring they highlight what users want
- Events: Having a presence at major tech events to showcase new product features, reinforcing the brand, making users happy, etc.
- PR: Working with media companies to share assets, messaging, and updates on releases, announcements, etc. to make sure referral moments (like this very article) are favorable
Which that much money, couldn’t they just use the majority of advertisement budget to pay a team of great developers for decades?
All of this not to mention that, while it makes sense for Firefox, the thought that my donation to develop Firefox ended up in some marketing budget irks me deep down.
OK, they could pay some more great developers, but as a developer myself, even I agree that 100% development 0% marketing is not the ideal resource allocation.
Mozilla’s pivot away from Facebook followed the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Now, the majority of the company’s digital spending goes to Google properties — Mozilla’s Firefox competes with Google’s Chrome — as a part of its digital acquisition strategy. According to Netshare, as previously reported by Digiday, Firefox’s market share is 9.3% of global monthly on desktop; meanwhile, Google Chrome’s is 66%. Aside from Cambridge Analytica, it’s unclear why Mozilla is fine with Google’s data practices but not Facebook’s as the company did not immediately respond to a request for clarification. The rest of the digital budget goes directly to publishers.
It's meaning is fading today too much.
The issue is that these platforms change over time and across generations.
In short, as firms, markets, and societies change so will effective marketing strategies.
We can still bicker about whether or not FB has reached its high watermark. It looks like it has for Firefox users though.
- 50% US / 50% "rest of the world"? Nah. There's little to no chance to make a strong dent in the US, home of Chrome and Apple and Microsoft etc. Pivot to 99% "rest of the world" and switch to my other point entirely for the US. There's much more need, reason and room for Mozilla to grow internationally.
- forget about ad spending, whether Google or TV, it just doesn't suit Mozilla's image, mission, product, nor customers. What we want is to attract the core deciders, from a grassroot kinda move, which spreads to peers, circles, and grows up, towards the corporate. What we want is the 'elite' or 'nerdy' segment even if we'll never call it that. The 1% that make a community thrive because they're so quintessential to tech in general, locally in their projects / cities / worlds. The few that are blessed with speech and some social presence, aura, authority. The ones others follow and listen to for 'tech stuff'.
So move worldwide now, and spend almost exclusively on these people. Influencers, media, awareness, image, mission — maybe even some communities living on forums could become advocates. Coordinate locally through bigger advocates to form an army of legions.
Maybe find a big thing, like "we'll be in space for humans day 1 to assist expansion" — moon, mars, satellites, whatever rocks the boat for the next decade (think really big, above yearly trends, give a face to a "superior" company). (I'm a space geek, perhaps this is just my taste)
Working with people directly, podcasters and youtubers gitlabers and whatnot, hordes of them, is a more tedious, longer approach, but as well a more long-term and much more engaging way to reach people. The money paid in sponsorship goes directly to 'building the world' (these people are evangelizers of principles and values, they're teachers, they're coaches, they play a valuable role in society), not some indirect major ad platform engrossing. It fuels communities that become grateful, with good reason, for marketing money. It becomes "clean" money by virtue of being used for something good.
- Don't dictate the message, let your 'influencers' feedback your way to browser supremacy, publicly so; make it a topic not a mandate — this is not just a 'strategy', it's a "why" materialized, a life path, a superior way to accomplish the mission. It's immortality through the software we give now and leave after us. Pivot to meet that, to meet your dearest users needs and wants. That's how you beat the faceless Google Chrome, imho. By giving the browser back to the people, by being a positive company not in some abstract "PR-humanitarian" way (although that's good!) but in a more direct-to-user way. By serving the worthy movements and people you find in this world. Grassroots seeding. Think: for a browser company, connecting people and stuff is pretty much what we do. Let's show the world how much good we can do when there's a whole company behind that!
It'll take 10 years. There's no "too late" — until someone else does it, but that's also considered a win for Mozilla in that regard. By 2030, it can be done. And by virtue of being a dominant OSS, it has a staying power far greater than its rivals.
It's possible, Mozilla. This is just one rough draft, maybe not the one, but just to say: reinvent that sh--.