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Comment by etempleton | Hacker News Reader

I will make the same comment I made on another post regarding Firefox and Mozilla:

a few tips from from no one:

1. Rewrite the Mozilla mission statement. I read that and have no idea what your organization does. Mission statements seem like corporate naval gazing, but if it is honest and well written it keeps everyone focused on what you are working towards.

2. Refocus on Firefox R&D and core technologies - Firefox needs to be the best browser. It is the thing that makes the company money and makes it recognizable to the lay person. You will never be able to outspend Google, Microsoft, and Apple, but they are always going to have more competing priorities pulling their best engineers away and causing political infighting about what should be crammed into the browser. Mozilla does not have to have any of that.

3. Invest more in Thunderbird the application and develop Thunderbird the privacy focus email service for independent professionals and small businesses.

That is it. I like some of Mozilla's side projects and I agree with the business philosophy that they should be looking to diversify their revenue stream, but I think they should all be part of two core products: Firefox and Thunderbird. Why Thunderbird? Because I think there is an undeserved niche in the business email service provider space and I think Mozilla can have a universal client on desktop, phone, tablet, and browser that is the trojan horse to up sell that product.

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Please don't copy-paste comments on HN. These threads are repetitive enough without literal repetition.

If you want to refer to what you wrote before, a link is the way to do it. And of course you're welcome to add information that's specific to what's new in this article. There should be something different somewhere...

> 3. Invest more in Thunderbird the application and develop Thunderbird the privacy focus email service for independent professionals and small businesses.

I know Mozilla's non-Firefox projects aren't popular here, but if Thunderbird really wanted a niche in the business world Mozilla would need to start an email service to go with it. The age of non-integrated email clients for the average user ended a while ago.

I think you're spot on here. The only people using desktop mail clients are techies with multiple accounts (such as us HN users), and business users (who all use Outlook).

Half of my sales group thinks that the name of our email service is Thunderbird.

I am not so sure. Windows default Mail app has multiple account support quite visible.

Huh, I've been using Windows forever, and didn't know that!

As a counterpoint, the non-techies in my family have become so used to the iPhone and iPad mail client that they look for (and find, and use) the desktop mail client on their Macs. Even my mom knows she has to "find the mail and give it my GMail" when she gets a new device.

Agree. Mozilla should focus more on online services, nicely integrated in the browser. Online email, password management, vpn services, file storage and sharing, ... All privacy focused and with paid offerings, to make them more independent from Google.

They wouldn't even need to provide these services themselves. They could act as independent auditors in exchange for revenue (as they do for search).

I disagree - the feature they need is better calendar integration with Exchange based services and the Exchange address book (GAL). As a corporate user this is the Achilles heel and always has been for 20 years, like it or not Exchange is king of the hill in large sprawling companies and Thunderbird has always left it to 3rd party add-ons (some of which they just killed due to the extension redesign) to try and handle.

I recently had to buy an such an add-on (Owl), because my umiversity's IT department killed IMAP support and only offers Exchange (which is stupid, but what can you do?).

Solutions like Owl are actually kind of nice, I have been using a similar one on my phone (AquaMail) for many years and it's worked out great. Thanks for the tip, might give it a shot - I see it's by the same author as ExQuilla which has been around for awhile as well.

> The age of non-integrated email clients for the average user ended a while ago.

As someone currently beta testing Mimestream (3rd party Gmail desktop client for Mac), I couldn't disagree more. A good UI and a responsive interface makes an absolute world of difference. Gmail's web interface isn't bad, but a desktop client is just so much better to use.

But that is a "Gmail desktop client". So, it's integrated with Gmail. I use Kiwi for Gmail - same thing.

Yes, it is integrated with Google, in that it uses the Google API.

However, relevant to this thread, it's not developed by Google, as Thunderbird would not be. And so Thunderbird could still provide value as such a client.

> for the average user

I think this was the key. No average user I know uses an email client on their PC, outside of the corporate one. It's one more thing to take care of and average users rarely want that.

It's easier on mobile where people are used with the "app" concept, not really on the PC. This is one reason why Thunderbird doesn't enjoy the kind of popularity browser based email does.

I know quite a few (older) people who are familiar with Thunerbird and use it instead of the web interface. None of them is particularly tech savvy.

Of course it's not impossible. But also they must be tech savvy enough to go look for an email client where they already had the usual web interface, get to testing a few and settle on Thunderbird, then configure and stick with it.

But that obviously it doesn't happen that often or else Thunderbird would boast a lot more users than it actually does. Relatively few users use it at all, and it's a reasonable assumption that the usage is higher among the more tech savvy than the average user.

I'm a fairly average user, in reality. One personal email address. Few rules. No integrations.

I still find it to be a significant improvement, even if most of my interactions involve arrow keys and the backspace key (ironically the keys I can't use in their web interface).

> for the average user

Very much this. Gmail (well, all of Google properties anymore) is pretty terrible from a UI perspective. Not to mention the abject privacy considerations with anything Google related.

I would love for Mozilla to start a competing email service that focused on performance, UI, privacy and integrated well with not only Thunderbird but other desktop mail clients.

In my experience, the vast majority of corporate is hooked on Outlook, which is actually quite unreliable in its 365 version and constantly has annoying bugs and performance issues.

It still might be a good idea to host an e-Mail service or create an Exchange pendant.

I often wonder why there never has been a popular open pendant to domain controllers in Windows. I think there were multiple attempts, but I don't think anything really caught on.

I suspect corporate is hooked on exchange, not outlook. Outlook 365 just goes along for the ride.

What many don't realize is the reason open/free software doesn't easily make it in the corporate zone is that there's no company behind them to put their name behind an SLA. This and integration with the ecosystem (MS has an easier time selling Windows+365+Exchange+cloudstuff).

The jump from "providing an email client" to "providing a privacy focus email service for independent professionals and small businesses" is already quite large. Being able to sell that by giving some guarantees (in signed SLA form) is yet another jump on an entirely different scale.

Or just nobody to write the RFP. So many ways of doing business assume that something will be purchased.

> Or just nobody to write the RFP

Then look no further than public institutions, where (leaving everything else aside) almost every tender is public [0]. You'll never see Thunderbird in any of the submitted bids because there's no company behind it to write the bid and put its weight behind it.

It's a good canary to see if a service or product has anyone capable of supporting it, or if it can be monetized in any way. This doesn't have to be the developer, just any company that can realistically push it into the corporate world.

[0] https://ted.europa.eu/TED/main/HomePage.do

There is a ton of public procurement out there. It all has some level (sometimes an insane level) of hoop jumping and domain knowledge to be successful with. In my limited experience, the people who understand this don't have a lot of overlap with people who advocate and use open source solutions - although I have seen a few (e.g. CentOS rollouts).

Not to mention that companies like Google and Microsoft also offer different levels of technical support alongside their products.

For smaller companies, or companies that want to invest less in their technology stack IT department, it sounds like a better deal to have all services provided and backed by a larger computation corporation (even if that's not always actually cheaper in the long run).

For small/new companies, approx $15/head/mo for 365 (however it's branded now) is pretty hard to argue with. That gives you sharepoint/onedrive exchange & teams, and all the usual word/excel/outlook etc.

You can go quite a ways with that before you would get close to breaking even on even a single dedicated IT person. Assuming their cloud services etc. fit your business needs of course - but that's an awful lot of companies.

> there's no company behind them to put their name behind an SLA.

I agree that this is a sticking issue; most procurement offices have vendor/supplier questionnaires that ask about their cash flows etc., because companies want to deal with going concerns. FOSS without an org doesn't check that box.

BUT isn't this exactly the point of having a Mozilla Corporation, as separate from the nonprofit???

> ask about their cash flows etc.

That's just the "smaller" half the story.

> isn't this exactly the point of having a Mozilla Corporation

This is the critical part. If I am using Thunderbird (or the hypothetical mail service discussed above) in my company today and have an issue or request (bug, configuration error, need assistance with a deployment, want additional features in the product, want additional integration with other products) can I contact someone directly and know that this will be treated according to my specific expectations?

In other words can I call someone at Mozilla Corporation now and ask for dedicated tech support, for a bug fix in a specified time frame, for a consultant to listen to my needs and come up with a solution? Because if my business relies on that product or service and I get no guarantees then I won't be happy to pay you just so I can queue up on Github and raise issues, and I'll go with %prominent software vendor% who gives me that.

RedHat doesn't sell you "Linux", they sell everything that comes with it, and create an entire ecosystem to go with that (partners that offer certification, training, consultancy and support, dev support, etc.).

Yeah, and Outlook is available on Android/iOS so it's something many business users are already accustomed to. Then there's the entire domain integration thing (ex. Intune) which is a bit more cumbersome to set up/manage for sysadmins for OSS.

I think there's tremendous space for people that want privacy and doesn't want Google/Microsoft to have access to all of their data.

Pendant?

I would use Thunderbird in a heartbeat at my current job if it could seamlessly connect to Exchange.

Even Microsoft seems to be moving to the cloud, but your point has been valid for a very long time.

That’s an orthogonal issue as Microsoft’s cloud email offering is still (a version of) Exchange and supports MAPI/EAS all the same.

Besides this rather serious bug, which does not allow you to accept Exchange meeting invites from within Thunderbird [1], everything else works perfectly with this extension.

[1] https://github.com/jobisoft/TbSync/issues/54

If standalone email clients really are dead for the average user, that to me would suggest Thunderbird should focus on power-users and/or corporate deployments, not that it should shift its focus to being part of yet another "service". It's perfectly fine to make a product with an audience that isn't everyone on Earth.

It should to treat special characters first (somehow cannot search for ä,ö,ü)

It might be because it's searching using the IMAP server, for some reason those can't often deal with non-ASCII characters. Searching with diacritics seems to work for me in locally-downloaded folders.

Well, wasn’t email designed in a time when the only supported standards were everyone’s form of Extended ASCII? So it would make sense that IMAP only supports ASCII. Heck, attachments are encoded in some base## form before being sent because the entire standard is based on text.

Here I like to quote my favorite penguin:"don't give me excuses, give me results". MS products somehow can do it, and it is a big showstopper dor adaptation in (a lot of) countries with special characters if you cannot search for the product name/customer name/project. (But maybe I remember wronfly and MS also cannot do with IMAP, so exchange it is)

Outlook manages to do that even with IMAP server (at least if I do not remember wrongly)

Thunderbird stopped being a Mozilla project a couple years ago

I hate to bring it to you, but every single one of your priorities have been long rejected: Thunderbird was officially discontinued like ten years ago, Mozilla had just let go a large number of devs in early 2020 and then again a couple weeks ago, among them all Servo developers.

Even if you wanted to financially support Firefox or Thunderbird development through donations, there would be no way to. Your money will go to the Moz foundation, and end up in all sorts of endeavors except the ones you care about: Moz spends money on discontinued mobile operating systems and new languages and language runtimes (Rust, WASM) nobody needs (sorry Rustees). Above all, your money likely goes to salaries and pension plans for CEOs and upper management.

When it has been suggested many times that Moz just needed to put the money they got from Google into a fund to finance FF development.

As to TFA's point about "sitting on the table to decide about web standards", that also hasn't worked out. It hasn't helped to keep "web standards" in check, nor did Mozilla's own contributions become part of them. All in all, Moz just acts as a fig leaf for the web end-game, pretending there's a community or some such.

With respect to "web standards", our best bet could be to demand that W3C, WHATWG clear up their shit and publish formal standards (possibly in an executable language to base a new formal browser/viewer app on). The way it is now helps no-one except Google.

Agree with all points except Rust and “standards”. The performance and stability of Firefox Quantum was largely driven by Rust. W3C standards are just out-of-date documentation. Do what’s good for the Web and the W3C will eventually document it.

W3C published editorialized snapshots of WHATWG HTML5 specs only until 2017; they're now just redirecting to WHATWG github's HEAD. SVG2 (part of HTML5) has reached CR status in 2018, and ended up to include only minor amendments vs 1.1/1.2 anyway.

W3C is mostly involved in CSS specs today, with significant influence on this past decade's advances, and also source of a lot of the complexity of browsers. CSS is a primary candidate for a formal spec among web standards IMO, since HTML5 the markup language is sufficiently covered by either the procedural spec or SGML.

> demand that W3C, WHATWG clear up their shit and publish formal standards

WHATWG was founded explicitly to avoid that, i.e. "let's get shit done without ceremony, and whatever comes out is the actual standard". Going back to W3C-like processes would remove the very reason for its existence. Google has been very good at leveraging this, but that's mostly because other players seem unwilling to dedicate as many resources to browser-dev as they do (even when, like in Apple's and Microsoft's case, they have more than enough money to spend).

> Your money will go to the Moz foundation, and end up in all sorts of endeavors except the ones you care about: Moz spends money on discontinued mobile operating systems and new languages and language runtimes (Rust, WASM) nobody needs (sorry Rustees). Above all, your money likely goes to salaries and pension plans for CEOs and upper management.

This is simply incorrect. The Mozilla Foundation is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, which have strict laws delineating how they are allowed to spend money. "Education" is one endeavor where charities can spend money, which IIRC is where most of the foundation money goes: to educating people about the web and web development. Notably, "software development" is not an endeavor for which such a charity can spend its funds. Donations don't go to Rust, or even Firefox, because they legally can't.

> As to TFA's point about "sitting on the table to decide about web standards", that also hasn't worked out. It hasn't helped to keep "web standards" in check, nor did Mozilla's own contributions become part of them.

This is also simply incorrect. Enormous swaths of the web spec have been authored by Mozilla representatives, and we can point to plenty of instances where Mozilla has torpedoed proposals from other organizations (e.g. WebSQL, PNaCL).

> Notably, "software development" is not an endeavor for which such a charity can spend its funds. Donations don't go to Rust, or even Firefox, because they legally can't.

Not OP, but I think the comment was saying that donating to Mozilla will result in them using the funds on all sorts of stupid shit not FireFox related. Not to literally donate to FireFox as a stand-alone software dev endeavor. Mozilla could easily accept funds in a legally compliant way if they had some sort of “please direct my funds primarily on FireFox” if they wanted to do so. This is similar to how many charities take donations from donors (eg “Here’s some money, only use it to build a building with my name on it.”)

But I want to donate to Firefox development and Mozilla is straight up telling me to eff off. That sucks and should be changed. Let me GitHub Sponsor or whatever FF development not throw money at a foundation that doesn't put the money where I want it to go.

Why in God's name did Mozilla even do this to themselves? Sitting up Mozilla into a Corp and a Foundation. The Corp which is supposed to be a money-printing machine has been shanghaied by a person who has gone on the record saying it would be unfair to reduce their salary because of dependants yet has consistently run this machine into red.

Why isn't Mozilla taking any action? Why is Baker continuing to be allowed to destroy the dream of a multiplicity of browser engines? It kills me.

The Rust and Webassembly folks:

1. Were a very tiny part of the overall Mozilla budget

2. Were also employees of Moco, not Mofo, and so donations could not go towards them either.

> nobody needs (sorry Rustees)

Industry adoption says otherwise, see for example, the CTO of Amazon's comments during re:Invent yesterday.

(That being said, you could absolutely suggest that it's not Mozilla's job to help the industry in this way. That's a much better argument than "nobody needs Rust.")

Also, the main executive pay people complain about is paid by the Corporation, not the Foundation, so, suggesting your donations would go towards that is also incorrect.

> That being said, you could absolutely suggest that it's not Mozilla's job to help the industry in this way. That's a much better argument than "nobody needs Rust."

Exactly what I mean, of course.

> Also, the main executive pay people complain about is paid by the Corporation, not the Foundation, so, suggesting your donations would go towards that is also incorrect.

Thx for clearing that up.

This comment confuses me so much.

Mozilla absolutely has been helping to keep web standards in check. Maybe not to the degree that you would like, but if it were up to Google, we'd all have some ancient under-specified version of SQLite and LLVM encoded in web standards, as they tried to just drop those in for database storage and NaCL.

Mozilla pushed back on those, demanding documented standards that could have independent implementations.

WASM is the cross-browser, much better specified alternative to NaCL.

Formal standards in an executable language are by far the exception rather than the norm. For something with as big a surface area as web browsers, I'm sure they would cost an ungodly amount of time and money to complete. And while you may prefer to reduce the surface area to deal with this, no one wants to break compatibility with existing sites.

I'm a bit puzzled by what you actually want. Mozilla did scale back its investment in Rust, WASM, and the experimental browser engine Servo, to focus more on its core browser, in the recent round of layoffs. But the existing investment has paid off; a number of projects that started off in Servo, and were written in Rust, like the CSS parser and Webrender, are now part of Firefox, providing safe, parallel styling and GPU rendering. WASM is widely supported across browsers, providing an efficient compilation target which is much better specified and easier to work with than JavaScript as a compilation target, or something like NaCL.

And some of the other efforts, like Rust and WASM, have now achieved sufficient industry adoption that other companies are picking up the slack; Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Fastly, and others are all hiring and paying people to work on Rust and WASM full time.

It seems that other than funding Thunderbird development, Mozilla is doing what you want, but you somehow still seem unhappy with it. Why is that?

> nobody needs

With Rust and WASM being funded and pushed by MS, Amazon, Google, Nature, and many others, I'm afraid you're dead wrong.

Firefox is already the best browser and has been for a long time. The problem is that most laypeople don't even know it exists. Combined with dark patterns used by microsoft and google to steer users toward their own browsers, it's an uphill battle. I'll stick firefox and appropriate extensions on a friends computer so they can watch youtube etc completely ad free, which is a major tangible QOL improvement, but then find them watching ads in ms edge a few days later without having realized.

It's definitely not the best browser on macOS.

or in Windows

I’ll have to disagree there. It’s by far the best on Windows.

Agreed with you, the best Firefox experience is on Windows. Hardware acceleration is on point, always very snappy rendering with no lag. Can't say the same about FF on macOS or Linux, where the experience is worse.

Support for CoreAnimation compositing was added last year. Support for hardware acceleration on Linux was added this week.

It's so weird to me this type of comment pops up on every firefox discussion, but I use firefox on mac everyday and it's rock solid, never run into any problems.

I think it's for non default scaling.

And the non-standard UI, the weird animations, the increased power consumption, the general non-macOS-ness of it all.

That's when you change the edge icons in the shortcut bar and on the desktop to point to firefox.

I don't know about Windows or Linux, but on Mac it's far from the best browser. It uses more resources (power/battery, memory, etc) than Safari (and sometimes Chrome[ium]), the UI is a mix of old and new code, and system integration is worse than Safari and Chrome.

I use it, but both Chromium and Safari are better on this platform.

It's not that Firefox isn't an excellent browser on its own, but on macOS Safari rises the bar very high if you care about details (most people don't).

How's that? It seems to be the least standards-compliant browser with any significant user share.

Yes, Safari is the most buggy browser in common use other than IE11. It's also the one that uses the least battery life, it's standards-compliant enough to render most web pages, and it's the only option on iOS.

> It's also the one that uses the least battery life

Battery life has always been very top priority for Apple. That's the reason why Apple stopped supporting Flash and basically killed it (thank gosh).

It's somewhat a myth that Safari is less standard-compliant. True, Safari's release cycle is slower and Apple has the motivation to prevent PWAs to become too good, but in many things Safari has always been very innovative browser.

Built on top of KHTML foundation, it then became webkit and later the most successfull engine. It was the first to implement full ES6 support, and basically invented CSS transformations/transitions (really amazing stuff back then but not really used until all major browsers caught up years later), was the first to ditch Flash support, has argueably the best privacy policy, has superb font rendering, etc.

Internet explorer is also a very innovative browser. It introduced XHR and a bunch of other stuff. But that is a different measure from standards-compliant.

Yes, IE was very innovative in its heyday (up to version 4). But back then there was no strong standard body (sort of status quo) like we have today, and due to Windows monopoly they could come up with stuff which was never even intented to be implemented by other vendors (well, Mozilla). You cannot really compare that era to today's situation.

Well, at least for me, Safari is often still the fastest browser and has long been the best at power management (important when you're running on battery power). And I like its UI a little more; its tabs, for instance, are native macOS tabs. Firefox and Chrome both make up their own stuff.

As far as "least standards-compliant," I understand that when it comes to supporting progressive web apps, Safari has largely dropped the ball, but in day-to-day practice there just aren't many sites that I have trouble with on Safari. (The biggest one seems to be new Reddit, and I am not entirely convinced that issue is on Safari's end.)

I disagree with this. Safari and Chrome are both noticeably better than Firefox on OSX.

I'm a Firefox fanboy, still use it on OSX because it's important to me, but the amount of random pauses, crashes, etc is just painful on OSX. It's like none of the Firefox developers use it on OSX or something.

And before someone says "oh it's your extensions", that IMO leads to two talking points

1. It's 2020 and major extensions still cause memory leaks in Firefox. Debugging them isn't easy at all. Almost all of the resources say something like "Run in safe mode and see if it fixes things" and then lots of posts of "post your about:memory here and I'll analyze it." I'm a software engineer by trade and it's been difficult for me to diagnose...

2. Nah because I don't run any extensions on my OSX firefox install

Sorry for nitpicking, but it's 2020 and OS X has been called macOS since 2015 ;)

Well, if we’re nitpicking, it was 2016, not 2015 :)

And wow. Has it really been that long? I thought it was like 2 years ago, so when I first saw your comment, I had to go check myself!

In places. In some places it's still called Mac OS X.

I've run nightly on crap macbooks for 3 years and had 0 of this experience. I run uBlock origin as one of my only extensions.

if you care about details (most people don't).

Most people don't care about battery life?

This. I was a FireFox long time supporter, but switched off when I started using Mac as my daily driver. It crashed more, used more resources, etc than Safari, Chrome, and Brave.

I also stopped recommending it to randos when they started coming back and complaining about weird behavior. Now if I don’t know someone and want them to just have the simplest working experience I recommend Safari on Mac and Brave on windows.

There's some kind of longstanding bug with non-default scaling on Mac apparently. It's great on Linux, but it's hard to get Mac friends to switch over.

For me Firefox has been chasing the Chrome market share by trying to replicate the Chrome user experience for so long it's no longer distinct from Chrome in a meaningful way. Give me the Firefox experience from ten years ago and I'll drop Chrome on the spot.

So, slow? I switched from FF to Chrome back then because Chrome was much faster. Before Quantum, FF couldn’t hold a candle to Chrome performance-wise.

Disclaimer: For my use-case, which did not include having 1000 tabs open forever.

Slow and does what you need it to do beats fast while not doing what you need it to do.

I disagree.

I've had so many issues with the Firefox Developer edition I stopped using it and have switched to Opera for my browsing needs.

Way more reliable, doesn't constantly hang and time out, and isn't a total resource hog like Firefox has become.

Speaking from personal experience doing user support in firefox IRC channel on freenode and formerly moznet, the vast majority of "resource hog" complaints are due to the user running AdBlock with a million block rules (or some similar addon). Occasionally it is a particular long running website with JS memory leaks though. Like a gmail pinned tab. In terms of performance, until recently a common issue was lack of default graphics acceleration on linux, requiring manually enabling layers.acceleration.force-enabled

How can someone determine this? I wonder Firefox itself does not tell me the resource issues are due to an extension.

Firefox has a suite of `about:` URLs[1], one of them is about:performance which will show you the Task Manager (their name) which has a sort of CPU and RAM column. It even shows you when it's javascript on a tab chewing up resources and not the extension.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/The...

about:about is the fastest way to look these up. :-)

I don't know if the situation has improved, but at least in past it seems about:performance has a problem picking out problems created by an addon doing a ton of DOM manipulation that chews up resources in the tab. Bisecting addons or my preference, a clean profile or safe mode, was usually what I suggested, but YMMV.

Firefox ought to have native blocking with a fast rules processing engine.

Firefox isn't even the best browser on Linux.

On my aarch64 devices, Chromium in a Docker image loads faster, never dominates the CPU, renders video and websites faster, and has working DRM. Firefox is slower in every respect and can't render Netflix.

Really? Firefox works fine with netflix on my pop_os laptop.

GP is talking about aarch64 Linux laptops, and IIUC Pop_OS uses x86_64.

The key is `aarch64` ;)

I don't think you can make a blanket statement like this. My experience has been almost the opposite, Chrome always uses significantly more CPU for me.

I think it really depends on hardware, drivers etc.

Opposite experience. For starters, Chromium doesn't even support video hardware decoding on Wayland properly.

That's unfair. Not even Emacs master works under Wayland. It's nowhere near a replacement for X.

> It's nowhere near a replacement for X.

It is for me and many others. Emacs works great under XWayland but Chromium HW video acceleration doesn't.

Emacs is a community project whereas Chromium has billions poured into it. Even Wine's getting Wayland support now and that ran under XWayland fine.

I don't think it's that unfair. Firefox on Linux is just better. Leaves some to be desired, sure, but a lot less than Chromium.

> The problem is that most laypeople don't even know it exists.

How can most people not know it exists, when it had a majority user share at some point?

>Firefox is already the best browser and has been for a long time.

I used FF for years before switching to chrome when it came out. Every attempt I've made since to switch back (windows and macOS) as been a disaster. Hogging resources, pages that skip around while scrolling, and rendering issues (perhaps GPU related) are a few of the numerous issues I've run into.

I try to switch back to FF about twice a year. I'm going on about a eight years with no success.

Using Firefox every day, somewhat on principle. The experience is nowhere as good as Chrome.

It takes FOREVER after starting Firefox to load saved tabs -- like 30 seconds to 1 minute of delay before the first tab starts to load.

Recently, it also has been updating quietly in the background and FORCING me to restart Firefox to view any content. I'm sure there's a setting I can change somewhere that makes it require manual updates. That should be the default.

I don't think any of this fundamentally beats the main problem.

That being platform control and advertising.

Google advertises chrome with it's services and is the incumbent. It's also preloaded and unremovable on Android.

Microsoft advertises edgium on Windows and makes it unremovable.

Apple only allows webkit and safari clones on their platform.

Firefox even if it's the best browser in the world would have the same problem that Linux has. Namely that Linux may be better and fit the needs, but people aren't going to bother installing it. Just look at Windows 10 and how many people are pissed at various aspects from telemetry, updates, ads and still these same people can't be bothered to flash Linux. Linux has something like 1-2% of the desktop market.

The other issue with (2) is that R&D into Firefox will not return money. Not unless they choose to basically switch to blink and offload the R&D costs onto Google. Heck Microsoft themselves did the same because they realized the R&D costs weren't worth it.

If Mozilla wants to stay alive, it needs to diversify and find a niche not dominated/controlled by Google, Microsoft and Apple.

Chrome didn't dethrone IE and displace FF because google advertised it, it was legitimately the best browser at the time. FF was awful, and so was IE.

I keep trying FF, but I honestly haven't found it sufficiently compelling to go back. I don't mix work hardware and personal business, so I don't need multiple profiles. I prefer chrome's debug tools.

Maybe we will see how manifest v3 plays out with uBlock, that might actually be enough.

There were definitely enough dark patterns and advertisements around Chrome to increase its market share. Chrome may have been faster, but it was also had more rendering issues early on.

> because google advertised it

For a time, chrome was bundled along side JRE updates. I went over to my mother's multiple times and saw that Chrome had, yet again, replaced Firefox.

Not to mention the constant advertising/banners to switch to Chrome on all of Google's web properties.

Chrome was also bundled with Adobe's Flash installer, which is ironic because Chrome bundles its own Flash plugin. So a Firefox user wanting Flash would download Adobe's Flash installer and (if they didn't watch the installer's default settings carefully) would be switched to Chrome. If a Firefox user wanted to switch to Chrome, they would have downloaded Google's Chrome installer, not Adobe's Flash installer.

Adobe had no incentive to change this relationship because they got paid by Google twice: for bundling Chrome in Flash and bundling Flash in Chrome.

Yes enthusiasts care about adblock, manifest v3 and performance. That is a very tiny minority of users.

>Chrome didn't dethrone IE and displace FF because google advertised it.

This I almost heavily disagree with. Surprisingly, marketing and advertising is far, far more effective than product performance. Performance helps retain users, but advertising is what moves users. That is nearly always the case.

> Chrome didn't dethrone IE and displace FF because google advertised it, it was legitimately the best browser at the time. FF was awful, and so was IE.

It started that way, then it dominated because every google search not using chrome popped up “Better with Chrome” or “Try Chrome.” Same with all of Google’s properties. There’s no way to disable this. That’s billions of free adverts every day. It adds up.

I think similarly back in the 90s that IE4 took off because Netscape4 was horrible and then stagnated, but dominated because Windows bundled and required it. They had bundled and required IE2/3 but those were inferior to NN3.

So being good gets them to critical mass and then anticompetitive forces got them to owning.

Firefox got to 30% by being a good browser. An alternative take on why it is now lower: not because of dark patterns but because Google genuinely built a better product. I'm a Firefox user, but because of stubbornness. In all honesty, I find Chrome easier to use and less cluttered.

yes, back when browsers sucked. Performance is hardly the reason of choosing a browser these days, personal preferences, what you are used to, what is given to you, etc...its a good argument for why Google needs to be broken up.

Chrome/Chromium/Edge has more features, does more things. Why would I use Firefox except for being stubborn?

I personally moved to Edge from Chrome after they forked Chromium because of better integration with Windows. I wouldn't have before, because it was lacking. Now with feature parity, the integration with Windows has a value.

Chromium can be configured for all of the privacy things Firefox has. There is no inherent other difference. Normal people will always value utility over privacy.

Mozilla can chose to fork Chromium, and come ahead. Chromium/Blink was a fork of WebKit. They made it better. Mozilla can chose a better starting point with Chromium.

I still remember moving from Internet Explorer to Firefox to Chrome now to Edge.

I was blown away by Chrome when it came out. It was just better. Way better.

> Apple only allows webkit and safari clones on their platform.

Firefox runs on macOS

Yea from the old MacOS sure. However, now that iOS apps are looking to be pushed to desktop, do you really think that is gonna continue in the future?

As soon as universal binaries/iOS apps becomes fully fledged on ARM Mac I can imagine Apple just removing support completely. It's almost inevitable the way Apple is progressing to basically move to the iOS style platform control to OS X.

Even from Mozilla's economics perspective, it doesn't make sense for Mozilla to be spending engineering effort maintaining both the iOS and OS X variants for something like 4% of desktop. If it was up to me, I would have just migrated/maintained the Firefox Wrapper iOS and called it a day.

Yes. I do really think that is gonna continue in the future.

I've said this before and I'll probably say it in increasingly irascible tones, but "next year macOS is gonna become just like iOS" is becoming the new "next year is the year of Linux on the desktop."

Yes, Apple will almost certainly keep making security decisions people (including me) don't like, but there's no compelling business decision for trying to lock the Mac down to only App Store installs. Yes, I know Apple gets 30% of software sales that way. No, that is not enough of a reason for them to take the hit to their hardware profits that would undoubtedly entail. Even if it were just a loss of a few percent of Mac sales -- which I think is extremely optimistic -- it'd be coming out of the sales of the most expensive Macs, and making up one lost Mac sale literally requires hundreds of sales on the App Store to make up for it. Any executive at Apple who suggested that would be beat senseless by their accounting department.

There are plenty of compelling business decisions including from the developer houses themselves.

Development houses now have an opportunity to bring their software to a larger market share (iPad, iOS and MacOS) whilst maintaining just one code base.

Development houses would also have much stronger piracy prevention (same kind of benefit that enables console games to function).

Development houses would have much stronger control over the running environment (preventing adblock, preventing VPN region bypass etc...).

Development houses would have much more control over updates.

Surprisingly just like the now defunct Mac Servers, Apple doesn't really care about the high end hardware Mac platforms. They only care for those graphic designers/video editor/MS office crowd and their software is coming in iOS forms.

The developers that I hear from have different opinions than what you're expressing here. Many want direct relationships with their customers, for a start, and if you want that, the App Store is right out. And I can't think of a single developer who would say they "would have much more control over updates" if they delivered them through the App Store. (They'd say "oh, honey, no," after they finally caught their breath after the laughing fit.)

As for "Apple doesn't really care about the high end hardware Mac platforms," well. It's possible that they rolled out the Mac Pro just last year as an elaborate ruse to distract us from how much they don't care about the Mac Pro, but it strikes me as relatively unlikely. (And if you think the "graphic designer/video editor" crowd, either users or developers, is on board with moving everything to the App Store, oh, honey, no.)

You raise a great point, I'd like to add that growing antitrust concerns are another danger that lies down that path for Apple.

That's also a great point! Apple has not been doing too well at reading the room on this one for a while now, granted, but in a year they've literally been called before Congress over concerns about their control over the iOS application market, "and now we're going to do the same thing for macOS!" would not go over very well.

Of course it would be stupid to cut it out suddenly.

The real successful strategy is to do it very slowly and gradually. With each release make it a tiny bit more annoying to install and run non-store apps. Make them slower - "this app is not trusted so it needs to be monitored for your safety which might negatively affect its performance". Users will prefer store apps and will put pressure on app developers to publish on app store.

If they do it well then hardly anybody will even notice they finally killed the non-store apps.

For all the reasons I've elucidated in other replies, I simply don't buy this. Also: this year has seen the move, after nearly two decades, from OS X/macOS 10.x to macOS 11.0, a new UI redesign clearly modeled on iOS, and a change to Apple's own processors derived from the ones they use for iPhones and iPads. There would have been no better year to make such a move than this year. It would have been the absolute perfect cover.

If and when both iOS and macOS are replaced by one unified operating system, this would be back on the table. But personally, I wouldn't bet a whole lot of money on it happening even then.

It's not that we can't be bothered to flash Linux, but that we can't be bothered to deal with the incompatibility issues we will have after we have flashed it.

Again if you are talking about words like 'incompatability' then you are probably closer to the enthusiast techie type 5% than the 95% majority.

That majority doesn't even know about Linux or what flashing even is. They just bought a box from bestbuy/amazon so they can access the internet and email. They stick to the manufacturer defaults and would be stuck with Chrome, Edgium or Safari.

I was indeed talking about normie stuff like games or simple applications. Those are the reasons why I will happily be staying on Windows for the next few years.

> 3. Invest more in Thunderbird the application and develop Thunderbird the privacy focus email service for independent professionals and small businesses.

While I agree that Thunderbird as a standalone Windows/MacOS/Linux desktop email client is a very important project, and needs to be continued, maintained and refined, the paradigm of email has moved on somewhat since 2003.

People need to be able to do more than just access email on a desktop or laptop.

I'd like to see two new things under the Thunderbird/Mozilla name:

a) a fully open source GPL licensed, self-hostable, webmail server application that fulfills the same functions as rainloop or roundcube, implemented in the Thunderbird name. Maybe it could have its own new GUI to run inside the browser, or it could offer an optional "traditional" GUI that is similar to the Thunderbird desktop client. This has a possibility for a natural symbiotic relationship with Firefox, as the best and most optimal web browser client to view the webmail.

b) a Thunderbird Android email client. There should be no reason why people should be locked into the default Android google/gmail email client. I can't even view message headers on it. I want a full featured "power user" IMAP-over-TLS + SMTP email client for Android that is also open source.

> b) a Thunderbird Android email client. There should be no reason why people should be locked into the default Android google/gmail email client. I can't even view message headers on it. I want a full featured "power user" IMAP-over-TLS + SMTP email client for Android that is also open source.

K-9 mail should satisfy these requirements. It's been slow moving development wise the last two years, but it is not dead:

https://k9mail.app/2020/06/01/Whats-Up-With-K-9-Mail

https://github.com/k9mail/k-9

> a Thunderbird Android email client. [...] I want a full featured "power user" IMAP-over-TLS + SMTP email client for Android that is also open source.

Here it is: https://email.faircode.eu/

Unlike K-9, it is very actively developed.

I've been using Thunderbird for close to 15 years and 2021 is probably the year I'll stop because of how poorly it works with Office 365. It's kind of a bummer but hard to get that upset about it because I really don't like email to start with.

> a fully open source GPL licensed, self-hostable, webmail server application that fulfills the same functions as rainloop or roundcube, implemented in the Thunderbird name. Maybe it could have its own new GUI to run inside the browser, or it could offer an optional "traditional" GUI that is similar to the Thunderbird desktop client. This has a possibility for a natural symbiotic relationship with Firefox, as the best and most optimal web browser client to view the webmail.

If this shares neither the thunderbird feature set or UX, why does it have to be called thunderbird? I still use thunderbird because it's UX efficiency for dealing with large volumes of mail blow away the Gmail and Fastmail web interfaces.

"UX efficiency for dealing with large volumes of mail"

You should definitely check out mutt for this.

I really like a). More broadly, I’ve thought for a long time that we should to make it turnkey-easy for people to deploy their own services, to start re-decentralizing a lot of the services that have trended toward centralization - email, blog/personal news hosting, photo sharing. Like built-into-their-router easy, to avoid the need to set up port forwarding. Mozilla seems like a great place for a lot of this to start, given their focus on the open web, privacy, etc. Many of the details involved in hosting this stuff can be a bit messy for laymen, but I think defaults could be chosen and a minimum subset of the features could be polished to the point of user friendliness.

On 2, I actually think that the right sideproject does have the ability to market Firefox and grows its userbase better than making incremental gains in the browser. For example, Firefox Send was a clever way of putting the brand in front of many people who might never have seen it.

On 3, I too would love to see that happen, but, from the outside at least, the project has seen so much upheaval [1]. I don't really understand the significance of the latest change, at the start of the year [2], but hopefully it's a good sign.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Thunderbird#History [2] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/

I agree with your numbers 1 and 2.

But I couldn't disagree more with number 3. Thunderbird is always going to be a niche product with a much smaller potential user base than Firefox.

More or less every corporation and every individual user out there is a potential consumer of Firefox--every single one who uses the web.

Thunderbird? Not so much. Many consumers prefer web-based e-mail clients or e-mail clients tied directly to the e-mail platform they are using (Gmail, Outlook.com, etc.). And Thunderbird is never going to replace Outlook for corporate mail. Thunderbird is only useful when you want a generic feature set, and it mostly competes with other niche mail clients.

Basically, every dollar invested in Thunderbird is a dollar that could be better spent on Firefox (or MDN). If anything, they should spin off development of Thunderbird into a separate company with its own independent funding structure.

> If anything, they should spin off development of Thunderbird into a separate company with its own independent funding structure.

They already did that.

- In 2012 Mozilla (the corporation) started this move by announcing that "Thunderbird was not a priority for Mozilla" [1]. At this point Mozilla (corp) stopped actively investing in Thunderbird.

- In 2015, Mitchel Baker made it clear that the Mozilla (corp) wanted to get rid of Thunderbird [2]. At this point the Mozilla corp started shutting down support services for the Thunderbird project.

- In 2017 Thunderbird was legally moved to the Mozilla Foundation (instead of the corporation) and started surviving mostly on its own, with some minor help from the Mozilla Foundation [3]. Here Mozilla (corp), the company responsible for Firefox, already got rid of Thunderbird entirely.

- In 2020, it became clear that Thunderbird can survive entirely on its own donations and could even try to provide commercial services. Thus, the Mozilla Foundation created a new "MZLA Technologies Corporation" that is now the legal entity responsible of Thunderbird [4]. MZLA Tech is not responsible for any other product that I know of.

[1] https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/07/06/thunderbird-stabi...

[2] https://groups.google.com/g/mozilla.governance/c/kAyVlhfEcXg...

[3] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2017/05/thunderbirds-future-hom...

[4] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/

I really like the idea of businesses focused on their core value proposition. However, in tech, these businesses get crushed by larger platform plays see for example Firefox vs. chrome, slack vs teams, Aws vs digital ocean.

There are a few factors at play here, but I’ll call out a few I’ve observed.

1) If you hire good engineers and give them autonomy, branching into new markets is cheaper than you think. “Focusing” engineers tends to just cut back on autonomy, both lowering productivity as well as limiting the quality of engineering talent one can attract.

2) Unified, integrated solutions, with great default options are preferred by nearly everyone on the market. Sure lastpass let people store passwords easily, but how many consumers bother changing the default password manager in their browser?

3) Investors recognize this pattern and funnel money to the biggest “platform” they can in any given market.

I never understood how bad point solutions were from a business standpoint until I worked in the application performance monitoring space. For any given monitoring feature there are dozens to hundreds of small, high quality point solutions targeting one market niche or another - but most customers will simply purchase their preferred all in one solution and forget about the other options.

I agree with points 1 and 2. I also think it's a reasonable idea for Mozilla to focus on Thunderbird the email client since there aren't a lot of great alternatives.

However, when it comes to a hosted email service, there are plenty of good options already out there (e.g. Fastmail and Protonmail). The same goes for VPNs.

I would much prefer Mozilla spend that money making Firefox better, or putting that money in some sort of mutual fund, the proceeds of which would fund browser development if Google ever stopped paying Mozilla.

The reason is, VPN services are not hard to build. Email services are not hard to build. Browsers are hard to build, and if Firefox development ever stalled it would probably go away forever.

> VPN services are not hard to build

Maybe not hard to build, but they are decidedly non-trivial to maintain. Their whole purpose is to get around the business/political decisions of one organization or another, and those organizations are making it increasingly difficult to be got around. A "real" VPN company has to deal with service providers on both ends of the tunnel trying to detect and block them, compliance with complicated legal situations in every country (and state) they have a presence in, law enforcement demanding access to logs and traffic, fraudsters trying to create accounts with stolen payment methods, attackers trying to make their way into the system for a variety of nefarious reasons, and semi-regular zero-day vulnerabilities being discovered and patched throughout the whole service stack. To name just a few of the most obvious hurdles.

No, I would not want to be responsible for running a VPN service in this day and age.

Email hosting is not much better, for most of the same reasons as above, except that spam filtering is also a whole full-time profession unto itself as well.

But yes, I agree with your point on Mozilla's lack of focus. And management competency, I would argue.

You won't be able to beat Chrome by technology alone. I actually don't know how Mozilla can beat Chrome.

Google has an extremely strong incentive to capture the web client market. Whatever Mozilla can do to make Firefox more popular, Google can outspend them by a factor 10 and do more, or better, or both.

I want Firefox to win but unfortunately I just don't see a path for it. My mindset at the moment is "I'm going to use Firefox for as long as it's possible, and then I'll find the least crappy Chromium fork available".

I don't know if it'll take 6 months or 6 years to get to that point but I really don't have faith in Mozilla righting the ship.

> Whatever Mozilla can do to make Firefox more popular, Google can outspend them by a factor 10 and do more, or better, or both.

Firefox isn't struggling on technical grounds though. It's not a charity case, it's a perfectly competent browser. Whether Firefox outperforms Chromium depends on which benchmark you use. As far as the user is concerned, they're both technically solid browsers.

I wasn't talking solely about technical merits. I was also talking about marketing and everything else. Google can (and does) push Chrome aggressively through a multitude of channels. How can Mozilla beat that?

I wonder why Firefox even has to beat Chrome. Wouldn't it be enough to have 30% marketshare again? Or even 10% would be enough to consider Firefox a serious competitor.

Somewhere along the line we got this idea that if you're not #1 you've failed. You don't need to crush every single competitor into oblivion to be successful, you just need to succeed at what you set out to do, and in Firefox's case, isn't that just to build a good browser?

The only way to beat Chrome, is the same way Firefox beat IE: Someone else will have to do it.

On some level, Firefox has to 'beat' Chrome in order to get/keep a significant level of marketshare. It needs people to see it as better in some way if they're to choose to use it, especially on mobile where Chrome is the default.

For some of us, it still 'beats' Chrome on some kind of principle - I'm not giving Google yet more control. But are there enough people like me to actually keep a modern browser going?

> I wonder why Firefox even has to beat Chrome.

In that sense, Firefox's competition is not Chrome: it's the other "non-mainstream" browsers like Chromium Edge, Brave, or Opera. What can Mozilla do to attract those users to Firefox? Google doesn't want to crush Firefox to 0% because Google profits from Firefox searches and presumably wants a non-Chromium browser to exist to avoid antitrust scrutiny regulating Chrome.

I'm probably a niche user, but better crypto and web3 support (still cannot make firefox recognize my hardware wallet on Linux). That's the singular most important reason I switched, after many years.

... It'll raise trust if they follow through their promises. Open source Pocket, yet?

One big area where Firefox could win is privacy. The problem is that currently most of their money comes from Google, which means privacy will always be pretty limited. Perhaps £5/yr fees would fund an alternative?

You are right but think about the following :

Rust to solve the problem with memory and runtime safety a super important issue for browsers that run code from anyone

Deepspeech - so Firefox can support web speech api, extremely useful api to enable accessibility

There are so many more as the web as a platform grows to support an increasingly complex web...

WebRTC is massive having software tools to exercise the use cases is important

Just my 2 cents

Nothing wrong with "We're Building a Better Internet", but they should up their game a bit by actively participating in privacy and projects to decentralize the web (again). For example, I have once envisioned a so-called 'privacy box': A physical box one put's in their own house and provides user friendly decentralized functions by installing extra software (ie using containers) for the local residents. Think filestore (like NC), mail, pihole, contacts, calender, pw vault (like bitwarden_rs), etc, etc. Mozilla could activily participate in the software and get a cut from the selling of those boxes or the sw subscriptions on top, which is probably even better.

I have always wanted this "privacy box", but in a portable form -- a brick that your phone/laptop/TV/&c. uses persistent storage. No more cloud.

sounds like an Unraid appliance.

I agree. I also think they should own the Privacy/Security/Confidentiality niche as well. Inventing and rebasing on Rust put them in a good position to provide reliable and provably-correct privacy-focused communications platforms as well. Double down on that, and pitch enterprises, govts, and other potential customers on that angle. Secure comms is an increasingly top-of-mind concern these days.

I've been using Thunderbird for years probably since it was created. I was going to write a message about wishing they would invest more in Thunderbird and fix a particular bug.

As I was typing this it made me starting looking a bug I've found using it. So then I started Googling around to see if someone else found it. Looking at it, it appears it's been open for 3 years. But in the bug ticket they had steps to fix it. I now know few more menus in Thunderbird that I never considered clicking on. The bug now seem to be resolved and happier.

But then I also wish they would trim it down or at least give me the option to turn stuff off. I don't want an events and task organiser and all this stuff. I just want a mail client. I also wish their spam filter would be more consistent and stuff keeps getting through that I've flagged and is clearly spam as it's the same message I've been receiving for the last couple of months.

> It is the thing that makes the company money

Sort of. Google basically is what makes the company money, which is more or less indentured servitude. If it were to break away and find another way to monetize I think it becomes a very different browser.

#3. I agree. Amd yet Ian has this to say under "Firefox was never enough" -

All encompassing: The web hosts most of our desktop applications. It should host even more of them, it should host mobile applications, it should be the universal platform. More APIs. More ways to package and present sites. (See Project Fugu)

I fundamentally disagree with this one. There's just too much of a bad security track record on all 6 of the first 6 levels of the OSI model for me to use web apps for office apps.

And so, as I said, I strongly agree with your #3.

What about a @firefox.com webmail service. I’d pay for it.

Way to devalue the brand. Would be like Google giving away @google.com addresses.

In countries where GMail is/was a pre-existing trademark Google is/was giving away @googlemail.com, didn't seem to devalue the brand.

I’m not against that. They could sell @firefoxmail.com addresses

The parallel there would be giving away @mozilla.org addresses. @firefox.com to me feels somewhere closer to @gmail.com, both being products, not companies.

Only that Firefox is a much more valuable brand than Mozilla

I think that Mozilla partnership with Google has made these goals difficult to achieve. Mozilla gets its money from Google, so it is implicitly part of the monopolist game played by them. What this means is that they're happy to be second in the browser development game, and are richly rewarded for doing so.

Firefox's relationship with Google is a Rubik's cube of its.

Mozilla takes way too much of Google's search money for them to stand up to Google. [0]

If only another investor could save Firefox from the clutches of Google's dependency.

[0]: https://hothardware.com/news/mozilla-firefox-google-doj-anti...

I'll add,

4. Pocket, add daily news to it.

Pocket already knows what I like, has one of the best reader mode, TTS, has millions of mobile users already and is deeply integrated within Firefox.

Mozilla's values could even help it sign some deals with independent news media.

Seems an easier solution to me would just be to disband Mozilla and rebuild from the ashes an org that is actually interested in building a browser.

Mozilla is already too bloated, too rotten and too stuck in it's ridiculous ways to salvage.

I mean, I don't think (2) is controversial -- the issue is that there are many dimensions you can measure to determine "best". There's not a settled single definition.

a) I would add matrix or an open chat system. b) Allow for profit companies to leverage the base mozilla apps. c) Keep slim, smart and global...

I think thunderbird is a dead end.

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