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Comment by jonny383 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if Mozilla regrets laying off 25% of their engineering team [0] given their rapidly declining browser market share [1], and their rapidly declining performance. Not to mention their forced adoption of the new Firefox on Android which disables all add-ons except Mozilla approved ones, despite their promises to correct this [2].

Mozilla _used_ to be about open internet and security, but that's just a false pretense at this point [3][4].

I believe it's time to embrace Chromium / Blink, throw away the idea of internet freedom and just use the best performing browser of the week.

[0] https://thenextweb.com/insights/2020/08/11/mozilla-firefox-l...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

[2] https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/09/03/firefox-update-face...

[3] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2021/01/08/we-need-more-than-d...

[4] https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robo...

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> [...] throw away the idea of internet freedom and just use the best performing browser of the week.

I'm not sure if you realise the ridiculousness of your statement.

I think many of your citations are used on a surface level to push your point. I don't think you considered the reasons for Chrome's dominance in the market, which is more to do with other issues such as Google's position of power than the issues you brought up here.

Chrome on Android has never supported addons, and now with Google spear heading changes such as manifest v3, I would consider these worse than decisions Mozilla have made with Firefox. You fail to mention decisions such as Mozilla's continued investment into tracking protection, which have been inheriting protections originating from the Tor Browser project.

I think the reasons why Mozilla have decided to slowly reintroduce addons to their new Android release should be considered. Their efforts to work with uBlock Origin to create a better mobile interface seems to point towards a desire for quality control, one that Google avoids with Chrome on Android altogether.

Nice trolling.

You can use general extensions on Android in Nightly, so this is in progress: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...

But sure, if you want to "throw away the idea of internet freedom" then that's your choice.

Not the parent but just to clarify:

The ability to install non-store extensions got completely removed on Firefox for Android and there is (AFAIK) no hint at whether it will ever reappear. That's pretty frustrating and clearly not a win in internet freedom.

Store extensions can be used if you create a Firefox account and use their Nightly, which is really hard to justify, IMO. To me it looks like they wanted to push their account numbers and I have great difficulties to find any potential hidden greatness in this policy.

What rapidly declining market share? Did you even open the wikipedia page you're referring to? There are no graphs over the last few months, and if you look at the sources[0][1][2], it looks like their market share declined BEFORE the layoff (from January to August 2020). After the layoff, it seems pretty stable.

As a reference, I'm going to post the values here:

  Source: Jan 2020 - Aug 2020 - Jan 2021
  netmarketshare: 3.61% - 3.00% - 2.98%
  wikimedia analytics: 5.2% - 4.6% - 4.7%
  statcounter: 4.7% - 4.09% - 3.77%

Also I'm actually pretty satisfied with Firefox.

[0] https://netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?options...

[1] https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#all-sit... (change date range to Jan 1 2020 - Jan 21 2021, remove other browsers)

[2] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-2020... (remove other browsers)

You have to be joking right? You'd have to be blind to not see the rapid decline in Firefox marketshare.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#...

First, (as I understood) you indicated that the market share decline and the layoffs were somehow related. Given that the graph started in 2009, 1 year after Chrome was first released and only the last datapoint is after the date, I don't think they're related at all. We all know that Chrome captured the IE/Firefox market share in the whole last decade and that's what the graph's showing.

Second, your concept of rapid decline clearly differs from mine. That is an eleven year decline and I don't think it's "rapid" at all for a browser.

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