At the same time, I can't shake off the dreadful feeling that it will eventually die one day. The market share keeps falling year by year.
What is the most realistic future for Firefox?
Microsoft basing Edge on Chromium was a really stupid move on their part for this reason, and I suspect they are starting to realize it.
That being said, I only expect it to be maintained at a hedge level, not enough to shoot for dominance again. Think of it like Valve's Steam on Linux efforts -- it's not a major effort on their part, it's just enough to keep Microsoft honest.
I read a post here on HN a few months (years?) ago where a developer was really trying to use Gecko for their own application and got frustrated so much that they gave up and switched to Chromium.
It predates KHTML/Webkit by several years so some additional legacy baggage is to be expected.
I see the main asset of firefox as being
a) not google tech
b) mobile browser with ublock
c) tech nerds with tons of custom FF addons, never wanting to switch
So I don't see them go away anytime soon, but I also see nothing to stop the decrease of their marketshare. That means, unless mozilla would focus on their core values again. They lost much trust with quite some shady actions now, over the years.
Imagine what kind of HN thread pops up if Firefox is abandoned by Mozilla.
Also Firefox is a single licensed product that is MPL, and for anyone who wants it that way commercially may support it.
It is not true at all. After a long time Microsoft's browser share in increasing. They probably are quite happy about it,.
Having more instrumentation over the platform they're doing it on is probably reasonable and realistically blink is already on every platform with over 1% usage share so that's a much easier road than supporting Trident, EdgeHTML or Chakra - the engine is not their core product - it's the stuff built on top of it.
I've used edge on linux - other than the weird thrill of seeing software that says "Copyright Microsoft" running on linux it's just a typical functional webbrowser -- that's exactly what they need.
Mozilla also don't have the brand power to push their browser to people who don't actually care but just want the notification on google.com or youtube to go away, or had it bundled with flash player or their windows install or their AV program like a lot of Chrome's rise.
My hope is it bottoms out and finds a new stable equilibrium at brave/vivaldi levels. The question is if that's a large enough position to actually maintain a browser engine.
Yeah, the initial launch was pretty bad. However, this has improved quite a bit from the initial launch if you haven't tried it in a while.
It's compatible with many add-ons missing from FF on Android and has some additional features that were "lost" in the Fenix release.
Safari and Edge are defaults on iOS, MacOS, and Windows, and Chrome is the default on Android. I imagine we're primarily seeing the effects platform capture everywhere else.
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-apple-search-deal-doj...
So I would be concerned.. they're actively bleeding users... not just being outpaced in a growing market.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/28/mozilla-publishes-its-fire...
Realistic isn't a word I see often on HN.
It wont die. Google will keep funding it just to say they dont have a monopoly in browser market. But it will continue its path towards irrelevant by mainstream usage. They will continue to shrink the engineering as budgets are cut. Until no more silly 20% project and management goals that drains resources ( they wont have that luxury anymore ).
And someday Firefox will require a reboot, not its code base but from a management perspective.
From a user point view, Firefox will stay pretty much the same for another 5 - 6 years at least. Both the Browsers and its Cooperation. There are still quite few improvement coming from Rust Servo in the pipeline. So technically it should be competitive enough.
- From someone who has been watching / following Firefox since before its birth.
It works on both Xorg and Wayland.
But TBH, the last few releases from 79 showed some bugs and regressions that affected my user experience. From 79 to 81-82, I had to disable vaapi support otherwise it made video playing stutter.
And in 83, webrender caused some extensions popup Windows to be blank.
I hope Linux Wayland user experience will stabilize. But I switched to Firefox full time on my home laptop thanks to hw acceleration support and also tab containers.
Vivaldi is a configuration juggernaut in my experience. Reminds me of the glory days of Opera.
It has a wonderful vertical tab bar too - built-in.
- Brave: it has been pushing opt-in-by-default ads and crypto widgets
- Vivaldi: 5% closed source
- Edge: not open source (yet?)
- Chromium: lacks too many features
you can't contribute to it like you can with something on github, but the source is open none the less
browser ux really seems like 'one step forward, two backward' over the last two decades.
It's the pie that is expanding (especially on mobile, where Firefox has hard time competing).
I'd love to give towards Firefox but have no desire to fund Mozilla mismanagement.
* Use Firefox; * Consider Pocket Premium; * Subscribe to Mozilla VPN.
If so I'm probably in (even if I don't use Pocket :-)
Firefox VPN isn't available for me yet.
I am willing to donate to Mozilla in spite of their mismanagement given that we are creeping ever closer to another browser monopoly. Ignoring bad financial decisions, Firefox is a good product and I've been using it exclusively on PC since Quantum came out. I feel that people here hold Mozilla to some impossibly high standards and turn it into outrage porn. I mean, I don't see top-ranked comments on HN about threatening to stop using Chrome because of whatever sleazy thing Google did last.
But the fundamental reason is that donations are only ever going to be a drop in the ocean. Google gives them $400m/year. Mozilla Foundation donations are like $3m/year. Even Wikipedia donations are only about $100m/year and they have way more users and push really hard.
My fresh computer works fine.
And I'm currently using the Android app. It's buggy, but it could be Facebook or the Google keyboard. Chrome has different problems. Duck duck go has been my newest install. I still need to transfer over.
Still more than what's available on Chrome and Safari on mobile, so it always remained my browser of choice on a phone.
Also isn't there more telemetry on by default in nightly?
Mozilla uses Firefox telemetry to fix bugs, identify areas to optimize, and guide product decisions. How else can Mozilla know which devices or problems to prioritize?
I'm really waiting for this
Mozilla still does not allow non-store extensions on their new firefox. Until they're back I have to keep old Firefox around. ...which sucks.
(I keep a Firefox Developer edition which I use for reading documentation, news etc. It is fully stashed up with all my favorite extensions except Bitwarden.
My main browser is almost bare bones, just BitWarden, uBlock origin etc.
As for why: I'm conservative in more than one way. The more separation I can add between customer data and auto updating extensions the better.
r.e. market share: one problem is developers - web-oriented devs who deal with node.js invariably must use chrome simply for the server-side devtools, and then stick with it, leading to 'only in chrome' sites and 'all the cool kids' / new developers using chrome..
would love to see a well-supported spidermonkey-based server-side JS engine, electron replacement, and corresponding firefox debug tooling