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Comment by throw_m239339 | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla doesn't have a real sustainable business model right now.

FireFox OS could have provided such model, in fact, its successor kaios is doing very well and one can imagine that in the future, it will be the primary OS of half the mobile users on the planet. 'Feature phones' aren't dead. They provide a cheap alternative to touch phones, are usually more robust, and allowing them to run web apps instead of MIDP stuff is a giant opportunity for any web actor.

Ditching Rust as a core component of the future of Firefox is also a demonstration that Mozilla isn't a tech focused corp anymore. Rust is going to yield a lot of result when it comes to security, memory saftely and maintainability and firing Rust devs was terribly short sighted.

So yes Firefox was always enough. Leadership at Mozilla doesn't get it.

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>Ditching Rust as a core component of the future of Firefox is also a demonstration that Mozilla isn't a tech focused corp anymore. Rust is going to yield a lot of result when it comes to security, memory saftely and maintainability and firing Rust devs was terribly short sighted.

Ugh, this is nonsense. Mozilla has not "ditched Rust as a core component of a tech focused corp". Mozilla has ditched the idea of developing entire components of Firefox in a silo for 5-8 years, and then spending 3 years trying to integrate that component back into the browser, the entire time trying to keep both components maintained and up-to-date with ridiculously fast changing web standards.

They want to continue using Rust, but it will be done more piecemeal and in-place, rather than trying to keep two entirely separate browser engines maintained and standards-compliant for the next 5+ years.

They did however ditch a lot of resources they were putting into Rust, and in particular making Rust a great language for making a secure browser.

Largely because Rust has grown massively and Mozilla isn’t even close to its biggest sponsor at this point.

Azure, AWS, Google Cloud are all major Rust sponsors at this point. It doesn’t make sense for Mozilla to remain a major sponsor for a product that almost certainly can and will exist, and likely flourish even more, as a more independent project.

At this point Mozilla’s ownership of Rust would likely only cost resources and serve to limit the growth and development of rust.

I can't understand how Mozilla failed to execute on Firefox OS.

From where I am at it was a massive opportunity for Mozilla and Web developers all round the world. They didn't have to take on Android and iOS directly, but may have gotten there eventually thru 'worse is better'.

Imagine a web developer learning just a few APIs and being being able to customize their web app for smart TVs

For some reason, yesterday's HN post "I can't keep up with React" came to mind :)

Out of curiosity, which post is that? I cannot find it.

https://medium.com/swlh/sorry-react-but-i-cant-keep-up-anymo...

> Imagine a web developer learning just a few APIs and being being able to customize their web app for smart TVs

This was WebOS in 2009.

Windows Phone, WebOS, Meego and Ubuntu Phone all "failed" around the same time period as Firefox OS. I have a hard time laying blame solely on Mozilla there.

FWIW webOS is still alive and well.

https://www.webosose.org

https://github.com/webosose

LG also has it running on smart TVs. I had the Pre over a decade ago, and having webOS in my pocket was great.

Hey, thanks for this link. I was a huge fan of webOS since the days of the Palm Pre. I noticed that this runs on the Raspberry Pi 4. Do you know what the use case for this is? Store displays?

The lg smart TVs use webOS as their OS. So I guess everything you do with the TV uses it

Also see Enact, the Enyo framework's sucessor.

https://enactjs.com

What was the hard part that caused Android and iOS to win? Was it convincing manufacturers to ship with them? Or was it just the first mover advantage for iOS and the network effects of the Play Store with Android?

Some part of it was MS buying Nokia and killing Meego, just as the N9 won glowing praise and awards with it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N9#Reception

> The Nokia N9 was announced at Nokia's Connections event in Singapore, June 2011. The reception for the device has been very positive, citing the MeeGo v1.2 Harmattan UI, pseudo-buttonless design, polycarbonate unibody construction and its NFC capabilities. Still, many reviewers did not recommend to buy the N9 only because of Nokia's earlier decision to drop MeeGo for Windows Phone for future smartphones – often questioning this decision at the same time. Engadget's editor Vlad Savov said in June 2011 that "it's a terrific phone that's got me legitimately excited to use it, but its future is clouded by a parent that's investing its time and money into building up a whole other OS." In a later review, Engadget writes: "Love at first sight — this is possibly the most beautiful phone ever made," and "MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan is such a breath of fresh air it will leave you gasping — that is, until you remember that you're dealing with a dead man walking."

Yes. Mozilla couldn’t get the mobile operators to sell a phone pre-loaded with FirefoxOS. And no one is going to buy a phone and reimage it.

> I can't understand how Mozilla failed to execute on Firefox OS.

This is naive. They did execute, and failed. That’s different than not executing at all. You can’t break into this segment without cooperation from the mobile phone operators... even in India and Southeast Asia whom were the primary target markets (less disposable income than Americans)

I had a Firefox OS phone. There was nothing great about it. It was average (by intention in order to work on restricted devices). I never used it to make calls, I used it for development. And it only had a wifi connection because I did not buy service for it.

There was nothing really “disruptive” about it as I recall. $20 Android phones destroyed any hope after the mobile operators turned a blind eye.

p.s. I still have the phone.

So I guess the question is what made KaiOS able to succeed instead of fail if we're saying the problems FirefoxOS faced weren't execution? Was it simply different timing and now more operators are willing to partner?

The GP is mostly wrong. What killed FxOS in the market is the lack of official support for one extremely popular messaging application starting by W.

Then Mozilla's leadership didn't have the patience to wait for the right opportunity.

Firefox OS predates the 'F' acquisition of 'W' by about a year, right? Did that have anything to do with it, in your opinion?

No I don't think this is related in any way.

Lack of WhatsApp support did not kill FirefoxOS.

Commercially, it totally did. Without Whatsapp we could not sell enough devices, but without enough volume Whatsapp was not interested to build an official app. Chicken, meet egg!

I wonder what markets WhatsApp is important to. In the UK quite a few people used it while briefly lived there, but in the US, Thailand, Vietnam, et.al. I didn't see anyone using or ever talking about it.

it's huge in india. a phone that did not support it would definitely be a non-starter.

European countries.

It is _the_ chat app in Brazil. Brazil is pretty big

Adding on to the other comments, I understand it is the default messaging app in Australia / New Zealand.

More roughly, my understanding of the messaging space was:

- USA: Facebook Messenger

- Japan, Taiwan: LINE

- China: WeChat

- Everywhere Else in the World: WhatsApp

And the comments here seem to basically bear that out.

I find it curious a lot of friends are getting back to Skype, for personal use, across continents, and not CorporateSkype/OC. Is this a huge selection bias thing? Don't know. Several have also recently deleted GMail.

I'm seeing a lot of push towards Discord in the USA as well; it's a bit awkward in that kind of usage, but when basically everyone is already using Discord on PC it's not hard to convince people to use the phone app.

Thailand is very much LINE and a close second is Messenger

India. I'm pretty sure they mean India.

In the Netherlands WhatsApp is so ubiquitous that it always surprises me to hear other countries are not 100% WA. (Besides China, for obvious reasons it doesn't surprise me China has their own app.)

The only people I know who don't use WhatsApp are very privacy focused and therefor use Signal.

These answers have been insightful. Not sure why asking got me downvotes.

If it was literally make-or-break for the entire platform, especially in the markets it was targeting, I’m surprised Mozilla never volunteered to subsidize or build a WhatsApp port.

Why do you assume didn't try anything?

We actually:

- have been friendly to 3rd party clients developers, like Loquim (https://loqui.im/). Once WA turned on e2e encryption, the situation for 3rd party clients changed from "difficult but fun" to "mostly impossible".

- wrote a JVM in JS to run the S40 version of WA (https://github.com/mozilla/pluotsorbet).

- partnered with a company specialized in bringing android apps to other OSes (they had Windows Phone support for instance).

This doesn't really answer the question any it just adds more speculation in between again. But to rewrite the question with the new speculation - what made KaiOS able to succeed in starting without WhatsApp support and eventually getting it (last year) instead of failing on both counts like FirefoxOS did?

I.e. if you've got something to claim as the reason it can't also apply to KaiOS unless there was something KaiOS did right that Mozilla didn't.

KaiOS got enough users thanks to Jio Reliance in India. That convinced Whatsapp to build an app for it.

> And no one is going to buy a phone and reimage it.

People do this all the time. I did it with my first android phone, a Nexus S, despite having bought the phone with no intention of doing so. The Chinese crapware it came loaded with didn't really leave any alternative.

Apps. Google refused to build apps for Windows Phone. Microsoft even went as far as building a YouTube app for Windows Phone themselves (a very good one at the time) but Google quickly forced them to remove it.

MeeGo was a bizarre affair. There was I think Maemo, Moblin, LImo, SLP, Bada, Leste, MeeGo, Mer, Tizen, Sailfish, Nemo... all forks, merges, reforks. They seemed to spend all their time and energy continually rebranding, forming and disbanding consortiums, creating new websites and logos. They never just got on with it.

> seemed to spend all their time and energy continually rebranding

So, what would have happened to Android, if Google didn't have the Maps / Play Store big stick?

Every device manufacturer wants to differentiate. None of them are good at it.

Except one time they did and it was wonderful - the N9. Then Elop came and canceled it, as ordered by the the Nokia board that hired him.

Well, wonderful... It was a huge mess. Maemo was gtk based until Nokia bought Qt. Guess there was some friction in the conversion. Maemo was deb based until Nokia management brought Intel into the boat for no technical reasons, then they switched to rpm. Well, the packaging is a relatively small detail, but many other parts of the distro saw similar switches from choice A to choice B for no real benefit. Friction after friction.

Elop was an incompetent leader, but he had not been involved in creating the mess. He went for a worse option, but that does not say that Meego would have ever succeeded.

Yes, I am stuck in the past myself, typing this on SailfishOS. But one has to see the realities.

The main problem with Meego etc was that they never released a damn phone. The N9 was both released and a very good phone. That was the "wonderful" part. I know that it was a bit of a mess technically behind the scenes. But it was also a mess that was possible to clean up.

> Windows Phone, WebOS, Meego and Ubuntu Phone all "failed" around the same time period as Firefox OS. I have a hard time laying blame solely on Mozilla there.

I've seen a number of comments on Windows Phone since then (on HN), and one and all they emphasize how much better and nicer Windows Phone was -- from a consumer perspective -- than any other phone.

What was the failure? This isn't a retrospective that makes any sense.

I feel the same way about webOS: it was better and nicer than Android or iOS, and we had to wait half of a decade before Android and iOS adopted some of the features it shipped with in 2009.

As of 2019, however, 52.4% of the mobile OS market belongs to iOS, and 47% to Android[1]. Neither of our favorite mobile phone OSes have succeeded in comparison.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held...

> As of 2019, however, 52.4% of the mobile OS market belongs to iOS, and 47% to Android.

This doesn't pass the sniff test, unless you're doing something weird like measuring the mobile OS market in dollars spent on phones.

> Neither of our favorite mobile phone OSes have succeeded in comparison.

To be clear, I have no experience of Windows Phone. I'm just bemused that 100% of comments about what it was like are so glowing. For some other product, you'd expect to see some comments saying "this was the greatest product ever to be commercially available" and some others saying "no, I had one of those, and it sucked". That doesn't seem to happen for Windows Phone.

The source is for the US, where it's at least plausible.

> What was the failure? This isn't a retrospective that makes any sense.

No YouTube, no Snapchat etc.

With YouTube Google used their position to keep it that way.

It also wouldn't surprise me if someone told certain app developers that "that's a nice app you have there, it would be shame if there was a bug in the Play store that made it hard ro find".

When it comes to App Store I have heard it is pretty well established that you won't get featured, no matter how great your app is if it is available on other platforms.

> No YouTube, no Snapchat etc.

> With YouTube Google used their position to keep it that way.

YouTube is available to anyone with a web browser, such as people using a smartphone.

Yes, but YouTube on mobile (in Firefox at least) is crippled in comparison to the mobile app or the desktop site, probably intentionally.

>What was the failure? This isn't a retrospective that makes any sense.

Windows Phone had great, snappy, intuitive UI (which was really surprising coming from Microsoft). However it had no apps. If you look at the top 10 iPhone apps in the app store, only Facebook and Netflix were officially supported on the platform. I recall there being (great) 3rd party apps for apps like Instagram, but there was a dearth of anything else.

Windows Phones biggest problem was a lack of major OEM support.

They needed Samsung and HTC to have adopted them at the time.

WebOS wasn’t tried in any meaningful sense. It was abandoned within less than a single product lifecycle by the various companies under which it operated.

Windows Phone was an epic disaster in how badly it was rolled out. It was Ballmer at his worst. MS kept oscillating between whether they wanted Windows Phone to be an iPhone competitor or an Android competitor. They picked the worst of all worlds, by choosing to focus on distributing through 3rd party vendors, but refusing to allow them to make any changes to the interface, therefore basically eliminating any major vendors from adopting and promoting Windows Phone. It’s still amazing that MS was unable to unseat Android at a time OEMs were desperate for an Android alternative thanks to the uncertainty around the Oracle lawsuits (and were already paying more to MS than Google for Android! thanks to MS’s OS related patent portfolio).

Ubuntu Phone never made any sense, targeting the most expensive niche of the market as it did.

Google forced Microsoft to remove Youtube and other apps. Also Microsoft kept 're-inventing' the phone OS multiple times requiring app authors to keep rewriting the app to new API's.

A lot of patent fees paid to Apple and Google for every phone sold.

Windows Phone was really good and it had millions of fans. It would probably do well in today's duopoly market if relaunched but MS has lost interest in phones presently.

> What was the failure? This isn't a retrospective that makes any sense.

People didn't buy it. Simple as that.

Doesn't matter how much better people think the consumer experience is if nobody's buying it.

Except that, again, that makes for a completely nonsensical theory of what happened. You can't just say "it was vastly superior to everything else, so it failed because no one would buy it". You need to explain why no one would buy it, because the only data in your model says that people should be buying it in droves.

> You need to explain why no one would buy it

I don’t need to do anything!

The only thing that matters is people didn’t buy it. It wasn’t a success.

Well you know what's really tragic: FFOS is a pretty big success. It was forked and became KaiOS, which has decent market-share in India.

It didn't need to be KaiOS. The OS on jio phones is severely crippled and it could be any OS with a webview. I don't count it as success of FFOS, at least on technical merits.

> I can't understand how Mozilla failed to execute on Firefox OS.

Because this product could only be sold to a hardware maker. It doesn't matter how good it was/is, because hardware makers are smart enough now not to rely on a 3rd party supplier of an OS, in fact they've been working hard on degoogling Android as much as possible.

Another failed alternative that comes to mind is WebOS, and yes indeed, it got acquired by LG for the reasons above.

> I can't understand how Mozilla failed to execute on Firefox OS.

Wasn't it initially too slow and bloated for the hardware they released it on?

Bill Gates explained why everybody but Google and Apple failed at mobile OSes:

> “In the software world, particularly for platforms, these are winner-take-all markets. So the greatest mistake ever is whatever mismanagement I engaged in that caused Microsoft not to be what Android is. That is, Android is the standard non-Apple phone platform. That was a natural thing for Microsoft to win. It really is winner take all. If you’re there with half as many apps or 90 percent as many apps, you’re on your way to complete doom. There’s room for exactly one non-Apple operating system."

https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/24/18715202/microsoft-bill-g...

Looking at wikipedia KaiOS seems to be the second mobile OS in India now, ahead of the iPhone. I don’t think those rules apply to a system which relies of web technologies, because you have such an enormous base of developers and development infrastructure.

KaiOS is a joke though... More akin to your desk calculator than a phone that we have become accustomed to. They sell because they are cheap, not on any other merit.

Being cheap is the greatest merit of any consumer tech.

you'll never convince apple of that.

Was he implying that a duopoly in the mobile space was a foregone conclusion?

Remember launching a phone just isn’t FirefoxOS: you need a device to load it on, a carrier willing to support it (this is the biggest hurdle by far), and to negotiate the baseband blob that you have absolutely no reason idea what it does and has DMA.

I have personally gone through carrier negotiations and they’re the reason why Android phones come with bloat ware and people go to such lengths to build and distribute minimalistic Android systems.

When the pandemic is over and the world opens again go visit Mobile World Congress. Bring a tissue because the industry might make you cry.

The short answer, they were too late.

I didn't pay much attention to the project at the time, but:

Might it have something to do with the word "OS" in the title? It's never worked except for Apple, but because Apple is selling a whole product, not an OS, it doesn't seem to hit in the same way.

Marketing something as "____ OS" appears to more or less guarantee a marketing failure.

The techAltar youtube channel might have some useful content on the subject.

A lot of smart TV apps are already HTML and JavaScript webviews. You can create a webview app on Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, a ton of proprietary devices like cars or TVs. What benefit would Firefox OS bring here, besides creating another kludgy abstraction layer over the vendor hardware?

They just needed a bit of persistence. In a 5K run, they sprinted for 2K and then gave up and threw away the baton. Other companies picked what they ditched and profit now. Deeply irritating.

> Mozilla doesn't have a real sustainable business model right now.

This is the meat of my problem with Firefox as it stands. I've not stopped using Firefox since the mid 2000's but come on, you need something more than just checks from Google. Charge me for a commercial version of FireFox that includes a VPN subscription and funds its development. Just do it ten years ago.

Honestly, if they're not going to embrace Rust and Servo becomes completely usable I may just jump ship eventually. My hope for Servo is that it becomes 100% Rust as much as sustainably possible (I understand for codecs and some things recreating them in Rust might be overkill when there's standardized libraries just use them), even the JS engine.

This most common thing I write on HN is that I can’t believe I can’t pay to use Firefox.

“How will we ever earn money here at Mozilla? All we have is this world class web browser that provides massive value to millions of people, but we refuse to directly monetize. Oh whatever will we do?”

Charging money for the browser will quickly push them down to single-digit marketshare, and will make "works on Chrome, ship it" the only correct way to develop for the web.

If you want to pay for using their browser, you could always donate to them.

the donations never went to firefox. it was dispersed to many of their other misguided and failed revenue gen efforts. they redirected a ton of servo engineers to focus on VR/Magic leap, ffs.

Both of those projects were part of MoCo, not MoFo, and so your donations would not have gone to them either.

Yes. The money should gone towards dev, but also testing.

According to the author, the problem contributing to this misprioritization was that “Firefox exists just to give Mozilla a seat at the table when the web is defined,” such that they didn’t care if it was the best. I doubt that’s true. Few want second, third, or fourth place. So let’s assume they wanted it to be the best. Where did it go wrong?

As much as Rust is great and FF was a great project to try it out on, I’m not convinced that FF needed a full rewrite, and in my experience there were significant problems with performance as Rust wasn’t fully there and the developers didn’t test adequately on all platforms, which they should’ve pushed more for if the funds were there.

> they redirected a ton of servo engineers to focus on VR/Magic leap, ffs.

That was the straw that broke the camel's back for me.

The day I found out about that I stopped using Firefox and switched to qutebrowser.

Not with a freemium model, which is what would make the most sense for Mozilla, IMHO.

also completely baffled by this. i'd have happily paid $100/yr if it went directly to firefox dev, not their other marketing shenanigns.

they fired so much talent to focus on junk to drive revenue, that it's not something i can do anymore. very sad.

It's weird that when I tell my kids that when they want to help, but they won't help in the way that someone needs help, that they aren't actually helping, they understand it.

Mozilla has buckets of money, between the Corporation and the Foundation. They are separate, for good-ish reasons? But they are separate. If they start allowing customers or businesses to pay for Firefox, then they will have to provide an entirely different level of support. They will need a billing and support team that is beholden to those paying customers.

It will shift the focus that Firefox has on attracting and retaining users to attracting and retaining paying users.

It will mean they need to meet various warranty and regulatory requirements around the world, and potentially introduce new business risks and liabilities related to those requirements (e.g. non-compliance with specific regional legislation).

What you are asking for is to pay Mozilla for Firefox, and to get there you need a radical shift in the organization that supports and ships Firefox.

Or, you could do what the rest of folks who want to support Firefox do, and make a donation in the way that Mozilla is signalling is the best way to support Mozilla's mission and Firefox development.

If that isn't good enough for you, track down an OSS contributor to Firefox, and give them money. Direct action for the win!

> support Mozilla's mission and Firefox development.

That's the rub here. Mozilla's mission is a much larger scope than just Firefox. Some people want to support Firefox, but don't want to donate to Mozilla's mission. One such reason is because it's important to have more than one browser implementation. There's no way to support that without Mozilla allocating some portion of your donation to some unrelated part of their mission.

Ok but now you're asking for something weirder and more restrictive than "paying for firefox", right? If I buy a laptop from Lenovo I don't get to say oh I don't want to pay for tablet development, I just want all of this money to go to your laptop division.

But you do, you signal it with your money that you want tablet or laptop, it's very easy. FF is open source but you have to donate to some bizarre American social issues that you have no interest in or don't want to participate.

I basically agree with you, but there is a difference too. When you buy a laptop you're not strictly dictating how the money is used, but you are signalling pretty clearly which product you actually wanted. Can you do that when you give a donation to the Mozilla Foundation?

(Maybe you can? I haven't donated to them...)

> If I buy a laptop from Lenovo I don't get to say oh I don't want to pay for tablet development, I just want all of this money to go to your laptop division.

9HZZRfNlpR is right. Not only do you get to say this, you have no other choice but to say this. Buying a laptop sends the strongest possible message that you're giving your money to the laptop division, and not to the tablet division. If you wanted to support the tablet division, you would have bought a tablet. And Lenovo will keep very careful track of this. They may choose to cross-subsidize, but your message will be received loud and clear.

I feel like they would lose a lot of funding if they branch out Firefox's Non-Profit into its own thing because most people care more about Firefox than the kinds of things the EFF is already doing.

People, at least here, want mainly to donate money directly FF development not their political junk. And it's not currently possible.

You can have a separate version of Firefox that is commercial and complies, and still have open source Firefox. Chromium is open source, but Google Chrome is proprietary.

I might pay for Firefox now, but I wouldn't pay for Firefox 5 years ago, when I started using it. As a consumer, it's really hard to start paying for something that used to be free.

As a world-class browser, Opera did that route. Opera died. I believe that might be in thinking but far from an insider in either, simply a happy Firefox user since 0.7 and Netscape before that.

But then the VPN product is the revenue driver, not the browser. You still aren't making money off the browser. The whole point of the article is decrying the lack of focus on browser in order to focus on other revenue streams. I don't think one other other revenue stream is the solution.

The money would go towards the browser, just like the person suggested. How is that a bad thing? Maybe some nice mods like VPN, excellent RSS feeds, power user addons, etc for a couple bucks a month (or $5? )

>Honestly, if they're not going to embrace Rust and Servo becomes completely usable I may just jump ship eventually. My hope for Servo is that it becomes 100% Rust as much as sustainably possible (I understand for codecs and some things recreating them in Rust might be overkill when there's standardized libraries just use them), even the JS engine.

Have you ever compiled and run servo? I have. It's really cool but nowhere remotely close to being ready for a full production browser.

Mozilla are embracing Rust, they are just no longer interested in the idea of developing entire components of Firefox in a silo, maintaining both at once during the entire process, and then spending multiple years trying to integrate it back into the browser.

Back when the Servo team was let go, what they basically said is that moving forwards things will be done more piecemeal and in-place, rather than hundreds of thousands of LoC at a time.

> Mozilla doesn't have a real sustainable business model right now.

I've said this many times and I'm going to repeat it again; I wish Mozilla would offer me a way to purchase a monthly subscription for Firefox.

I want to support the open Web and I want to support FireFox development (but not any n+1 random Mozilla products / experiments) and I hate that they don't offer this.

I actually love this concept.

Though would Mozilla grant some type of premium version of Firefox or premium support for your subscription monies?

You can donate to the foundation. I'm not sure why that would turn out any different -- even if you paid a subscription for Firefox directly, what would prevent Mozilla from using that money for their other products?

The problem with optional subscriptions is that most people will never opt-in. If subscriptions are made mandatory, the general public will be driven to one of the other major browsers.

The difference is that the Foundation legally cannot spend their tax-free money paying the salaries of employees of a for-profit entity, to develop a product that pulls in significant revenue.

It's a matter of "can't", not "won't". Subscription revenue would go to Mozilla Corp directly and therefore has no restrictions, because it's taxed as income. It at least has the possibility of being spent on Firefox development even if it actually goes to Rust maintainence or whatever else.

However, money can go the other way. Paying a subscription might end up just sending at least some of the money to the Foundation, rather than Firefox (or even Rust) development.

I think they own pocket, which you can pay for.

I don't think very many people actually like Pocket. I wish it would die. It makes Firefox look like it's no better than any commercial browser -- not even Chrome installs that kind of stuff in my toolbar by default!

Pocket is easy to dislike before you start using it -- it's just UI bloat, as you point out.

But the feedback from people who do use it is overwhelmingly positive. A lot of people love Pocket. It's enormously popular, despite the impression you would get if you exclusively went by HN comments.

Personally, I've just recently started to try using it. It hasn't really captured my enthusiasm yet, despite addressing one of my larger pain points with a browser. I still think I'd prefer management capabilities that felt more built into the standard (well, Tree-Style Tabs) tabs/history experience. But it's early days, I'll have to see how my Pocket experiment goes.

They're certainly good at surfacing appealing-looking content that isn't vapid when I try reading it. That's worth something.

I love pocket. What do you use instead of pocket?

kaios is "doing well" in the sense that it is on a lot of phones.

It's execution is not actually very good, if "doing well" means quality. I was actually avoiding getting a smartphone for a while, but the rise of kaios-powered phones, at least the ones in the US, drove me to smartphones. Contrary to the promise of firefoxOS/kaiOS, there was no kind of "app store" or other way to install custom apps, it just had the usual featurephone features. What there was, was a phone where every keypress had like 750ms-2000ms of latency until it had an effect on screen, making it almost unusable. It ruined feature phones, at least for now. I tried a couple. It's a pretty terrible product on every US phone using it I have seen; whatever led to it being on those phones, it was not quality.

It may be that KaiOS phones available in other countries (always the target market) are better, and an improvement from what came before. (But why are phones available in the US using it for such awfulness worse than what came before?) I would like to think if Mozilla had stayed involved, it would be better.

The business question of course is how the current (Chinese?) company behind KaiOS found enough runway to get it to market when Mozilla did not. Lowered standards/expectations might be part of it though. But it may not at all, I have no idea the story behind what happened. This thread has people giving their reasons for why FirefoxOS failed... but most of their reasons fail to explain why someone else could somehow take the open source IP behind Firefox OS and have a succesful company which succesfully got it onto phones. What was the difference?

Application programmers often dream of writing some different layer when we're frustrated because it's not working as is. Sometimes it ends well, like git. Most times it's a huge waste of time. I don't really think of Firefox OS a an operating systems, more like a layer to connect the web with the phone, so not so megalomaniac, actually it would have been a practical idea if hardware wasn't involved.

Out of all internet users out there, how many would choose Firefox just because it's written in rust? An insignificant fraction.

That said. I've been using Firefox as my main browser for years. I only use chrome when a website needs it or works better in it.

If you read GP carefully, they're not making the argument that users will choose Firefox because it's written in Rust, but rather that the improved security and performance brought about by Rust would be what attracts and retains users.

Are users very worried about browser security nowadays? It was a major concern a few years back, but I seldom hear that kind of complaint. I do hear about surveilance and privacy, but not so much about catastrophic failures.

Sometimes you just need the differentiator in your feature set. Then you let your marketing team go to work.

If you stipulate that 'Rust is going to yield a lot of result when it comes to security, memory safety and maintainability' (see parent comment), then a great many Internet users out there would choose Firefox if as a result of being written in Rust it's more secure, memory-safe (less crashing/bugs) and maintainable (more and better features).

Maybe in the Hacker News bubble but that's not "a great many Internet users". People either use what is pre-installed, what they are used to or what their techy friend recommended them.

That "what their techy friend recommended them" does a hell of a lot of work. It pretty much drove Firefox up to 30% market share once, remember.

A counter point to that is that the impact of the tech sector on recommendations like that is ever shrinking - tech is normalized; everyday stuff where people feel comfortable making their own choices (and where the number of people that haven't made those choices pretty solidly yet is ever shrinking). The market is more mature, in essence.

Yap. People ask the internet now maybe more than their techie friends, and the marketers are probably as likely to be the ones amswering.

I think it's why Firefox's market share is declining too. I don't recommend firefox for non-technical users anymore because of its relative complexity and incompatibility with the modern web when compared to Chrome.

What complexity are you referring to? And do you actually encounter issues while browsing using Firefox?

I am curious as I don't relate to this and recommend Firefox to friends and family.

I've seen things that don't work quite right in Firefox. The Zoom webapp doesn't recognize some of my audio devices, but Chrome does. The Citrix gateway also fails to log in on Firefox sometimes.

I don't know whether those are bugs in Firefox or if Chrome is doing something funky that causes it to work but not Firefox.

Zoom is using experimental API in production. Just another on a list of their cowboy tricks.

I haven’t tried using Citrix for years. It used to work fine in Firefox, but given the quality of it I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve broken something.

I switched my wife to FF from chrome and completely uninstalle chrome. She hates the inconvenience of any minor glitches or peculiarities - I hear a lot about it when she doesn't like something. I almost forgot she was switched over b.c. I didn't hear a thing about it from her.

Firefox is already sufficiently secure and low-crash for my tastes. I guess it's possible that more features would benefit me, but I'm not convinced.

Neither Firefox or Chrome right now crash for me, they're actually both very stable and have been for a while, and memory consumption and performance bottlenecks seem to have largely moved from the browser engines themselves to the rich web applications.

I'm not convinced changes to the browsers themselves at this point is anything other than a very marginal improvement.

Changing languages is not a magic bullet. Browsers written in C++ can be just as safe and maintainable -- especially with the resources of large companies behind them, with tons of engineers and testers etc.

> Ditching Rust as a core component of the future of Firefox is also a demonstration that Mozilla isn't a tech focused corp anymore. Rust is going to yield a lot of result when it comes to security, memory saftely and maintainability and firing Rust devs was terribly short sighted.

Mozilla was tired of getting smoked by Chrome, which actually invested in browser development using what the tools they already had ("engineering"), as opposed to subsidizing PhDs on programming language theory.

Now it's too little too late. They've passed the point where they could catch up on technical grounds, so they make appeals to morality to market their software. Yes, I agree it was bad leadership.

Even if Firefox does well on feature phones like you suggest they should, how would that give Mozilla a source of revenue other than the money from Google's search deal?

I was using Firefox on both mobile and desktop for a significant period of time.

I was little infuriated when they added pocket.

Google meet does work well on chrome only. (Not firefox's fault completely)

I didn't like how they suddenly changed layout on Android and made many extensions unusable.

I didn't like Mozilla the corp / foundation's political alignments, a personal opinion and actually I don't even care about politics. But we Indians (much like South America I guess), have an aversion to SJW virtue-signalling politics because we have seen how it brings too-much right leaning parties into power. Why would a tech company get into politics at all unless it's about some virtue signalling execs pushing their agenda?

They fired some actually talented programmers but kept the C-suite, with their non-technical CEO being paid big amounts despite company being in losing game. While I personally don't like some aspects of rust community, the language itself is solid and could be a differentiating point for firefox.

As soon as I have seen their management take such decisions and their pushing of political agenda, I can't trust these people to maintain a browser well. No offense to engineers I was telling about Mozilla itself. So I somehow migrated to chrome. I miss UBO on mobile but bromite is good enough. Google is not much better

They may not lose much from a middle-class Indian dude switching to other browser. But think about it. Bringing politics and favoring useless C suite execs is a great way to lose future donors. A company should not do politics. They say they do politics for open web, that's not what I am talking about. FSF has done much better than Mozilla foundation in this regard. Mozilla just favoured execs and their agendas before technology, and lost the market.

>So yes Firefox was always enough. Leadership at Mozilla doesn't get it.

that is why founder started brave.

We've all been curious how Brave would have panned out as a Firefox for instead of Chromium

Is there any background on that decision? I'd use Brave at the drop of a hat if it didn't involve giving yet more market-share to Google-based browsers.

Chrome only sites[1] and DRM module licensing[2].

[1] https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/959909542246019072

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22062636

yeah and we see how poorly that turned out

> Ditching Rust ...

have i missed something?

They laid off their Rust and Servo developers.

They did lay off their Servo developers, and a few of their Rust developers.

They did not lay of all of their Rust developers, or even most of them. WebRender and Stylo are now integral parts of Firefox, and are actively maintained by teams of people, and a lot of new code continues being written in Rust.

The Servo DOM and HTML engine is massively complex - far moreso than Stylo or WebRender - and nowhere near ready for production use. Mozilla decided that rewriting the remaining parts (read: vast majority) of Firefox slowly, in-place, would be a better path forwards than maintaining two massively complex browser engines in parallel and trying to swap it out completely.

No, you haven't, because it's not happening.

Mozilla business model :

1. Ask that the DOJ strips Chrome from Google. You can't make the browser, search, and ad platform. Monopoly power. Google needs to exit Chrome right now.

2. Ask the DOJ to force vendors like Apple to allow other browser engines. They can't lock down all "code execution" on generic computers they sell.

3. Integrate Ad Blocking in Firefox.

4. Collect money from advertisers willing to make non-invasive ads that want to be seen.

Brave's business model, but with much more badass tech.

After revenue comes back, make a mail service.

What isn’t bad ass about Brave’s Basic Attention Token initiative? At least it theory users and content creators get better compensated for their work/attention?

https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/wp-content/uploads/2019...

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