Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years
news.itsfoss.com
news.itsfoss.com
I don't use Ff because I can't approve with exactly one of their UI choices: tab closing button on the wrong side. I am on Mac and this just messes with my muscle memory too much. (It used to be that the buttons where on the right side, which is to say the left side.)
However, other than that I see a lot of UI love in both the macOs and iOS Ff interfaces. One can feel the team works from their hearts.
I wish they would use their brains more. Painful irony.
EDIT: Anybody an idea why this got downvoted?
I also used to use reader mode once in a while...
I'm happily on brave mobile, which does block ads.
There is also Brave Rewards, something that pays you for viewing ads but is disabled by default and can be totally hidden through another setting.
This straightforward set-up isn't something I feel deserves the number of negative comments I see on here. The benefits far outweigh the minor inconvenience of changing two settings.
This type of advertising doesn't go against any of Brave's principles. The user is in control. Trackers and their ads are blocked by default as these harvest user data and more.
Brave's alternative, privacy-preserving advertising model is based on user-control and consent. The user decides whether or not they will participate, and to what degree. And, the user's data is never sent off-device; users are rewarded (with 70% of the associated ad revenue) for their attention rather than their data or actions.
I was never referring to ads that Brave blocks.
I'm talking about the new tab ads. Those shouldn't exist. Period.
> This type of advertising doesn't go against any of Brave's principles
No but it goes against the notion of "ad free browsing" that Brave kind of marketed. Perhaps they toed the line with exactly what they consider "ads" but at the end of the day users installed brave wanting ZERO ads.
Replacing someone else's ad for your own is not what I'd call "ad free" nor "ethical", regardless of the use (or lack thereof) of trackers.
> Brave's alternative, privacy-preserving advertising model is based on user-control and consent.
I never consented to ads. Period.
> The user decides whether or not they will participate, and to what degree
And I never decided that I wanted ads in my browser, yet here we are.
> And, the user's data is never sent off-device; users are rewarded (with 70% of the associated ad revenue) for their attention rather than their data or actions.
And what if I don't want a browser that has all of this fancy mining crap in it? Braves stance is "it's okay to add bloat as long as we preserve privacy". Nobody seems to see the problem with this.
It's such a middle finger to users, in my opinion.
I notice such advertisement from time to time, but it's so unobstructive that I almost like them.
Yes, they put advertising where it doesn't bother me and where it doesn't slow down page loading.
That's brilliant.
Thank you for pointing that out!
Main reasons I also moved to Brave on all my devices. If these are fixed and Mac battery consumption is fixed I'd go back asap
---
- Scrolling up on Google search's results page and some other pages is not registered half the time, and sometimes triggers pull-to-refresh instead
- Scrolling up inside an input box while the page is at the top of the screen causes unintentional pull-to-refresh
- Bitwarden autofill is not registered unless you kill and restart the app after logging in
- You can't save images that require cookies to be passed to the request, such as under DDoS protected pages
- Links will sometimes redirect to about:blank unless you go back and click them again
- Most recently visited page is not restored when closing and reopening the app, even though it's saved to the history (closed as wontfix)
- Uses large amounts of memory, causing Android share actions to be silently killed due to OOM unless you quickly kill the app right after sending them
- Closing a tab and clicking "Undo" in the popup sends the tab all the way to the top of the list, instead of its original position (inconvenient if you have a large number of tabs open)
- Frequently loses open tabs in memory, even within ten seconds of navigating to another tab
- Startup time is noticably slower than Brave, taking at least a few seconds to show the UI and begin loading the page. It isn't much, but it impacts the user experience every time you start the app again.
I use it all the time now because it supports uBlock Origin and Dark Reader and I think it's good. And I have all my bookmarks on Firefox sync. I have some minor issues with it like the tab list that doesn't always scroll right but they're not deal-breakers.
I guess both opinions aren't popular :) But that's my reasons to use Firefox despite not being fully happy with it.
What upsets me is that there's no way to add it as default search in a browser, on purpose, because they want you to have to install brave browser to do that. Nothing upsets me more than when someone deliberately makes their product less useful. I do not like Brave, but I will use the search engine for now.
To make Brave Search default in another browser, please load https://search.brave.com/help/default. In Safari, there's no way we know of to add an alternative default. Apple controls the dropdown list's contents. But try this link in Firefox or Chrome.
I will try to do it again, thanks.
Very arguable that Eich's single handedly more responsible for javascript than Brave, engineering wise.
I'm not a crypto fan, or of adtech, but BAT is atleast a functional solution to directly supporting sites.
It's one thing for an employee to have private views but another for a CEO to actively try and influence the law. Especially for something that's in my opinion totally a private matter between people. I don't want to support the brand because of that.
But I'm not doubting his skills as an engineer. It's more about the brand and its values. For a public figure like a CEO these things are hard to separate, I understand that. But we live in a world where a brand is more than just a name on a sticker. If I'm using it I'm also supporting the associated values.
But I agree the way I said it was hyperbolic.
Which he did not. He wasn't CEO at that time. He made "small" donations from his own money under his own name years before his appointment. And at no point did he abused Mozilla for any personal political goal of him AFAIK. He just was an employee supporting his own private views. Just that he is a bit more famous than your average employee.
You can also switch in built in adblocker in Vivaldi. There's no reason to use Firefox.
In AdGuard, you can add "extensions" that extend the functionality of the browser. Its simple. For example, playing youtube in background or bypassing paywalls. Extensions are little javascripts.
At least there's a workaround for the bookmark issue. There's no workaround for renamed menu items and changed shortcut keys.
First the GUI to edit the GUI disappears, then the about:config option follows later.
That's what's been steadily happening. Less and less customizability for power users, more and more streamlining for new users.
If those are indeed the only other options besides users finding another product, I'd say you answered exactly why Firefox is in decline.
Yes, my point exactly. You can answer "just modify the CSS" every time someone complains about a change in Firefox, but in reality users will find another product instead.
(edit to fix typos on mobile)
User css and js, which were once first class are now very hidden and require messing with about:config. There's no way to prevent tabs from being on top. Many extensions are no longer possible Post-Quantum. And I do think switching to WevExtensions was the right move, but they've been slow in adding capabilities to make some extensions work as well as they did before. Removing compact mode (they added it back but behind an about:config flag). They removed SSB with no plans to ever add it back. True SSB didn't fully work, but I had high hopes that it could let me run web apps in a way that felt more native.
And part of my frustration is with the response. The reason for removing things is often "no one is using it." But then when people who show up saying they use it, and it is important to them, Mozilla generally either outright ignores them, or dismisses those opinions as invalid.
Now after this you may want to refer back to the article. I have seen various pieces and rants like this article that complain about this but none of them offer any more reliable sources of information. The article makes an unverifiable claim of "Almost everyone hated the changes" and unfortunately those type of claims seem to be extremely common instead of presenting some data. That's not enough to change anyone's course.
But in the end, I don't know what you mean by "systematically removed" in that way, frequent addition and removal of various features is completely normal for a large project. And technically only the setting was removed -- you can still customize all that but you'll have to modify the browser itself. No they probably won't add back in the setting but as I explained above, those have a cost, and when the cost-benefit analysis doesn't play out the right way, it doesn't make sense to blame an organization for cutting it.
You are suggesting that I replace a simple configuration change with familiarizing myself with a very complicated code base, creating a patch, and running a build that on my machine takes multiple hours, then repeat the process for every update? Yeah, I have no idea why more people don't do that.
> I don't know what you mean by "systematically removed" in that way, frequent addition and removal of various features is completely normal for a large project.
Sure. But from my perspective at least, the customisability is decreasing, more features are being removed than added. It used to be that Firefox was a browser built for power users, but it is becoming less so. That was one of it's major advantages over chrome.
I understand the cost of maintaining features, and the tradeoffs involved. The Firefox teams priorities are different than mine, and I understand that. For example, there are many features I would have rather seen worked on rather than redesigning the UI (and I do actually like a lot of the proton design). But I can accept that they have different priorities. But they are also bleeding users, so something is clearly not working for them. And maybe, as the OP suggests it is because of changes that anger a minority of their users. At some point, the union of many minorities becomes a majority.
I'll also mention that only one person needs to create the build, once you do that then anyone else can run that build. That's usually how development works, and in fact this is already the gist of how Mozilla tests their unstable builds.
>the customisability is decreasing, more features are being removed than added
I can't agree with this, maybe the amount of visible settings in the preferences has been reduced, but currently there are a few thousand about:config options, and the number seems to keep growing.
>But they are also bleeding users, so something is clearly not working for them. And maybe, as the OP suggests it is because of changes that anger a minority of their users.
For many years I asked people why they were switching to Chrome and I got various answers, very few of them were because of something negative about another browser, and most of them were about what they liked about Chrome. That's just my personal anecdote. It also just seems to me that Mozilla is in a bad place where people say they drop Firefox because they like Chrome, so Mozilla switches gears to make it more like Chrome, and then people complain it's not unique enough anymore and it's missing some old non-Chrome feature. How could they possibly win here?
> but currently there are a few thousand about:config options, and the number seems to keep growing.
But those configurations are not very discoverable, not well documented, are in constant flux, and if you set them incorrectly can really mess up your browser (I speak from experience).
> I'll also mention that only one person needs to create the build, once you do that then anyone else can run that build
From my understanding, if I were to distribute my custom build I would also need to change all the firefox branding, since Mozilla has trademarks on it, which increases the effort even more.
I think the huge number of about:config options is actually a major problem for Firefox, there is no possible way to test all those options and ensure they stay working forever and have zero regressions. You won't like this, but a lot of them probably need to be removed.
You would need to change the branding but I think some of the other Firefox modifications have systems in place to deal with that. If you ever need to do it, maybe it would be worth asking them.
Then why do you keep being so?
But, I bet you'll refuse to understand this too, and continue your bot-like repetition of non-answers. (Hint: Don't bother; nobody is buying.)
Sheesh, don't you even notice how you're coming off here?
And any firefox update could potentially break your css fix.
Yes an update could break your CSS fix, but if you follow the beta releases then this isn't a problem. You usually have at least a few weeks to update your patches before the release goes out.
> Firefox is not really any more difficult to build than any other large open source project.
That has not been my experience. Granted, chromium also has a very difficult and slow build, and browsers are big complicated things. But my point is it isn't easy.
It's true the build process is slow, but that's different from being difficult. I don't know what you mean by difficult. Maybe it was difficult in the past but it's entirely automated at this point. You can just start the build and come back some hours later, and that's only if you're starting from a clean repo and modifying the C++/Rust. For the CSS and Javascript, that doesn't need a rebuild at all.
[1] view-source:chrome://browser/content/browser.xhtml
And I know I've said this already but taking those "way too many steps" is exactly what you'd be asking them to do, so it's unclear why it's not worth it for you but it would be for them.
> That's what's been steadily happening.
You wrote this in a way that is (probably deliberately) misleading. Neither of those things have happened nor is there any indication that they will.
Especially about:config which (probably) provides an enormous amount of benefit for early testing of features.
> > That's what's been steadily happening.
> You wrote this in a way that is (probably deliberately) misleading. Neither of those things have happened nor is there any indication that they will.
You're not so much misleading as outright lying. That is exactly what has been happening, over and over again.
Drag the spacers from the toolbar into the element menu.
Click "Done"
If privacy is the ultimate concern, I can suffer usability.
I think the real issue is we've stopped advocating for privacy loudly and publicly. All the users know is convenience.
But with Firefox, all the UI choices are gone now, intentionally sacrificed on the altair of rewrites, UI changes, branding and some dubious security claims. You used to get the choice of vertical tabs (better on todays widescreen laptops), tree-style tabs, Buttons where you liked them, user-provided CSS customization for pages and the UI. Not anymore, all gone (they paid some lip service to some of the above concerns, but nothing relevant, and overall a massive downturn).
Now you only get the take-it-or-leave-it of one crappy and worsening Chrome clone UI.
I activated browser debugging, pressed ctrl + alt + shift + i and then hunted down the offending tab bar and put in "display: none" for it.
It gets harder and harder year by year though and on the tabstrip issue in Bugzilla there's at least one person who was annoyed and told me to not question peoples motives after I asked a simple question about it.
Anyone here working for Mozilla, I ask the same question here: are you overcomplicating it? I managed to get rid of that tab bar using a CSS hack, why can't we just get a function to apply that css, at least in developer edition?
That said, these days Linux is just more convenient than the alternatives for me personally. Same goes for Firefox (still).
I wish they could find a stronger inner core to work on, something more utilitarian than user-drafting.
There's a lot of people saying chrome wins because websites are better with it, sites with high requirements like zoom IIRC, but in my experience it's not common nor impactful enough (these sites work fine enough on my old laptop)
whoever has the solution i hope it comes fast
Judging by the HN and Reddit comments with each Firefox/Signal/Matrix releases, it seems most of the customers of privacy focused products want all the other features of competitors; most of the times without paying any money (or they think donations should cover for everything because they once donated, so all hundreds of thousand users would). And they dislike/have negative sentiments towards any UI changes or breaking functionality for new features. So core userbase for these products becomes hostile towards the product growth by definition. In this environment, either the product stops growing and simply becomes a niche product for those set of users or it dies.
This is a business model question, right? Nothing prevents someone from making a great privacy focused browser and actually charging for it vs being directly (Brave?) or indirectly (Chrome, Firefox?) ad-monetized.
Also in this context, referring to "customers of privacy focus products" is technically incorrect, they are actually users. Definition of a customer is "someone who pays for goods or services" thus Mozilla's main customer is Google (accounting for close to 90% of its revenue). Maybe looking through this lens, relation of Firefox product direction and what its "customers" want becomes more clear.
edit: simplified for clarity
Except the fact that nobody (relative to even their current userbase) would use it, and maintaining a browser is incredibly difficult and expensive.
It would be the death blow to their market share, which would destroy Gecko as a viable browser engine (not enough users to get websites to care about the bugs, or even necessarily get the bugs reported).
The only way that would work out is if they gave up on Gecko and switched to WebKit or Blink.
Their choice of business model isn't really much of a choice, it's the only viable option that gives them any influence whatsoever.
But the reality is that because of this, browsers are commoditized, and the average user will never pay for a browser if they can get Chrome or Safari for free. That's probably true of the average HN user, too, for that matter.
Assuming 100 people needed for Gecko, and $150k/year annual, world-wide, average developer expense, we come to $15M/year. Mozilla already has about ~$50M/year non-Google revenue from its products (coming from "true" users/customers).
Does Gecko really need more than 100 people?
Do most people use Firefox because it's "privacy focused"? I don't - I think people use it because it does the things they want ... and "privacy" is far down that list.
I know I'm an odd-ball, but I haven't upgrading my FF because I want ftp support in my browser. I upgraded the desktop my kids use, and the tabs went all wonky. The only reason I haven't switched is I trust Google less than I do FF, and I want to stave off a technology monoculture.
Yes, my clear desire for ftp support means I don't want technologically perfect security or privacy.
Concerning "privacy" as the article points out in the section "Invading your privacy at the same time as telling us “we value your privacy”
] Telemetry. Hidden telemetry that isn’t disabled when you click “disable telemetry”. Firstrun pings. Forced signing of add-ons. Auto-updates you can’t switch off, pinging every 10 minutes. “Experiments” which require a separate opt out. Now the latest offence is enforcing app based 2FA to login to a Firefox Add-on account just to make a custom theme, which you wouldn’t need in the first place if not for forced add-on signing.
> either the product stops growing and simply becomes a niche product for those set of users or it dies.
FF has dropped a lot of users, so I assume you mean it's decided to be a niche product in the "privacy" space, and not a generally useful tool?
Its marketing doesn't seem that successful, as my first thoughts are to switch to a tool based on FOSS Chromium.
Also, I must be blind but I didn’t notice any diff with the tabs in that recent update where everyone freaked out because the tabs were slightly different. The tabs are still fine!
Come to think of it I don’t have any complaints about Firefox, so I’m not sure why I’m bothering to contribute my thoughts here.
Except FF market percentage has been decreasing not growing. The technical foundation has gotten better, but it’s like Mozilla execs are completely out of sync with the market share they could have. They want a “shiny” app that in theory people should want, not the app people actually want.
I just hope some group of geeks decides to fork it and change it up.
[1]: https://www.waterfox.net/blog/waterfox-has-joined-system1/
Execs may have less to do with the decline than a changing market. Google poured resources and new ideas into a mostly greenfield effort, and leveraged its market position to push its browser. Edge and Safari also benefit from their makers' platforms and marketing.
It's a hostile world for an independent browser. And IMO Firefox is still the least worst option.
Sure, bit it would have been a little less hostile if they hadn't brought quite a lot of that on themselves with their long history of hostile-to-tech-savvy-users decisions.
I use it because I like it a little bit more than chrome. And because I don't want google to completely control the browser market. But the more firefox becomes like chrome, the less reason I have to continue using it.
And despite what Mozilla thinks and wants, I don't think most Firefox users care that much about privacy. I suspect most Firefox users use it because their tech saavy friend, relative, or IT administrator installed it for them and/or told them to use it. So losing core users also means using many other users in their sphere of influence.
Turning off telemetry by default is also not an option, because then they would have no data, and would just be making decisions at random -- I really doubt that would please you either.
And now because Mozilla lacks data from its most coveted “tech” users, it does make decisions based on data that it has, which is usually totally opposite (like in your example) which in turns pisses off these users even more and they jump ship, taking all their friends and family with them (because they are the “tech” person in their circle). That is how you lose users.
You can of course make a zero telemetry browser, relying 100% on your own research and what the users volunteer to tell you directly. And those most passionate about it with tell you the most, a wonderful positive feedback loop. But this would require a change of product development mindset to a completely user centric one.
From the developer point of view, this is incorrect, the developers are using it to decide which features to prioritize. If you are aware that it's happening and you leave it on, then I don't see what the problem is. Resource and bandwidth usage should be very minimal, if it's not then I would urge you to actually measure it and report bugs. It should be possible to compress it so that it doesn't eat up your bandwidth. Remember that it also takes bandwidth and CPU to post on Hacker News, so you will have to compare it to that to have any kind of meaningful data.
My point is, it if lacks the data from those users, it would make sense to start sending them that data. It doesn't make sense to me to complain about them having incorrect data on you when you intentionally don't send them the right data and then threaten to jump ship because of what seems to be your own actions. I personally also disable telemetry but I know full well that I'm opting out of an important system for them so I don't expect to get attention in return for doing that. If you wanted to help, I think they would very much welcome attempts to fix the telemetry and make it more bandwidth-respecting and privacy-respecting, rather than finding ways to just throw it out.
>You can of course make a zero telemetry browser, relying 100% on your own research and what the users volunteer to tell you directly. And those most passionate about it with tell you the most, a wonderful positive feedback loop.
In my experience, this is an unreliable way to make products, the type of user who is passionate and volunteers this information is not the average user. You will end up with a very niche product that way, and the cost would be very high since you would be expecting the same quality of features but for a smaller number of users. If you're interested to do this I would suggest you to fork Firefox and attempt to get funding, and try that out just to see how much work it actually is compared to how little those users are actually willing to pay. Take a look at Waterfox if you want to see an example of how this would be done.
Most people are not aware of telemetry. Most of those that are, disable it. So you end up getting what you call 'votes' from the people who are not aware they are 'voting'. That is not voting (for which a person need to be consciously doing it) but rather extraction of information.
Imagine in an election, the votes of those who didn't explicitly vote get automatically extracted and cast based on a biased algorithm produced by the government. If you do not like the idea of that, you should not like the idea of opt-out telemetry. What you want is opt-in telemetry (aka. voting).
> Resource and bandwidth usage should be very minimal
I fully agree, that is the other reason zero telemetry is a way to go and should be default. You can not beat that.
> In my experience, this is an unreliable way to make products
Not sure what your experience is but I already built one company like that and I am doing another one right now (incidentally a web browser) based on this same principle which is called user-centric product development. Btw. Mozilla practiced that too ~15 years ago (the "golden age" of Firefox, reference here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28493855).
Do you have some numbers to back this up? I would suggest getting that before making any major product decisions. Also if you read the privacy policy, the telemetry is spelled out in detail, or at least it should be, so the people who are voting should be well aware of what is going on. If nobody reads it, then the solution there would then be to make it obvious and easy to read, not to throw it out completely.
>I fully agree, that is the other reason zero telemetry is a way to go and should be default. You can not beat that.
I don't understand. That isn't a meaningful comparison because you're comparing it with nothing, you would need to present an alternate data source. This to me is kind of like saying "not having a stomach beats having a stomach because you won't need to worry about eating anymore" or something like that.
>Imagine in an election, the votes of those who didn't explicitly vote get automatically extracted and cast based on a biased algorithm produced by the government.
I'm sorry but this is exactly what various governments already do in a lot of cases. Not for general elections but for services or programs that they run or for appointed positions. They will do a study with passive data gathering and determine who is actually using what services, and if the results are good they will increase funding to the service, otherwise they will cut funding, fire people, etc. This is generally how any organization functions at scale, so I really don't understand what you're getting at here or what alternative you're proposing. If you want to apply this to product development, it would simply be infeasible for users to vote on every single ticket that a developer handles, so you need to find some other data-driven way to make decisions. That's what telemetry is put in place to do. I think there is a misunderstanding here of how this works, but it's not your fault.
I wish you luck with your company, but I suspect you will have difficulty getting funding on the level of Firefox or Chrome, especially if you have no hard data from some kind of telemetry or similar source. The privacy-conscious user is known to be a fickle market. I also would advise against making misleading and/or unsourced statements about other browsers if you intend to develop a competing product, this makes your company look bad.
This isn't true, Mozilla is making it very clear the first time you are launching Firefox and you have a button just next to the message to disable it easily without having to go to the settings. I don't know how they could be better about it.
Like, no matter what, telemetry is useful to the product, and defaults matter. Like the infamous “the opt-ot organ donor vs opt-in countries have a staggering difference of 90% difference”. Should firefox throw away 90% of its userbase’s useful telemetry, most of who would have no problem with providing it?
I want firefox to be good. I don't even need to have the newest features I just wamt a stable browser I can use. Don't we all? Removing features I actually use and adding things I don't need is counterproductive and I don't know which part of their telemetry helped them make those choices, but many I didn't like.
> Should firefox throw away 90% of its userbase’s useful telemetry, most of who would have no problem with providing it?
Telemetry should always be opt-in. Firefox throws enough messages your way if they would ask (like many other programs) "Help make firefox better" and then offer different level of reporting it would be fine. They ask me to change my theme at the start, but they don't ask me if I want to send them my data?
Well, this is exactly the point. If you disable telemetry, how do you expect them to know that you are using that feature and they shouldn't remove it?
Anyway for the longest time I send detailed information with all my crash reports and similar, but not only could I never find out where they collected the crashes I send in no no error (even the reproducible once) got fixed. The only times my problems got fixed where when I actively filed a bug report myself or fixed the cause of the issue manually.
After a few years I began to wonder if anybody even reads those crash reports and added a request for a quick pingback something like "empty message is fine. I just want to know if anybody is actually reading this". Did this _multiple_ times, never got any response. Either they don't read or they don't care. Anyway I'm over giving my data for aggregations that probably never get used.
If someone from mozilla could tell me that they actually matter maybe I would change my mind, but for now I'll drive my privacy is important for me train, because it really is and if the people that collect my data don't or misuse it I don't see the point in sending it.
Maybe I was expecting too much, but if this is too much of a response then I don't want to contribute anything (at least like this).
And you made it happen by your choices.
Stuff like AMP was mostly brought throughs search alone.
If they pivot towards "mainstream appeal", it usually comes to the expense of that user community. Their alternative is to be the best Firefox they can possibly be, and wait for users to join their audience organically.
It feels like Vivaldi has done a better job of sticking to a clear user persona model. They are clearly targeting power users and Opera 12 refugees, and it feels like that still informs what they do. Unfortunately, the one thing they can't do is make a browser that doesn't run like cold treacle.
There are always comments and complaints. One need to evaluate the quality of this complains to understand their worth.
> either the product stops growing and simply becomes a niche product for those set of users or it dies.
Successful products prove this wrong. The most successful ones barely change at all, they usually evolve for a decade or two and then adapt to a new generation. Stability is a viable road to success.
Heck, even chrome didn't really change that much since it's first version. Firefox is really absurdly extraordinary in how unstable it is.
Easily explainable
Mozilla been captured by "aspirational" MBA types who think they don't really need that userbase, instead they want to chase "what big boys do", and copy lame features in hopes that monkeying Apple will score them iDevices users — the type of people they psychologically want to associate themselves with.
I believe it to be corporate sabotage by Google ... due to the 100's of millions of dollars that Google gives to the Mozilla Foundation, they have a lot of influence over Firefox.
And most people probably don't make a conscious decision about which browser to use. A lot of Firefox's momentum comes from tech saavy users who recommend it to friends, family, coworkers, etc. So losing "core" users cause a chain effect of losing non "core" users.
Looking at why established users complain about Firefox isn't why billions of people moved to Chrome, from many sources. It was the default on our phone and that makes it an obvious desktop choice.
(Not to mention it does do some things nicely, I just much prefer FF for webdev)
I just hope it's not Nokia level deliberate sabotage.
> That might not go on for much longer, though.
I will use it till the end and will use what ever the FOSS community forks from it or existing forks. Because, I'm guilty that me not using FF and FOSS alternatives for Operating Systems, Browsers, Software has led to rise of the Mono/Duo/Oligopolies in-spite of possessing the skills to understand the outcome, In-spite of having access to the warnings for smart people who said exactly this would happen.
For me the main argument to use Firefox is not living in the Google universe which is quite a huge value in itself and the fact that it is open source.
Oh and they finally added proper dark mode on macOS and did quite some work for Firefox to look and feel more at home on macOS in the last versions. This is really nice to see and appreciated.
Btw Firefox has seen a bottom in 2021 June and user numbers have been going up slightly since then: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
The bug says fixed but the nightlies show it hasn't
The bug says fixed but the nightlies show it hasn't
Oh and I had to switch to Safari to edit this comment.
Note: I use Chrome for work to 1/ isolate my work from personal sessions without the hassle of containers or profiles, and 2/ because I work for a web app targeting Chrome (per the market share).
Besides, isn't this app a violation of Youtube's policies?
This is "hacker" news :)
I use Firefox most of the time, out of a desire to support Mozilla and promote a non-Google browser. Admittedly, this is a political motivation, but it comes at pretty much zero practical cost. If you are interested in trying out Firefox, I think the only significant inconvenience is disabling Pocket.
Like the parent, I'll occasionally switch to Chrome for separate profiles, or if I need something specific in DevTools. Chrome has much better multi-profile support, in the sense that it has it at all, but again, the differences between the two are so minor that I don't have any qualms switching back and forth.
But both are just fine. Never have issues with Firefox. But I do have issues with its UI. Too much wasted space, it's only useable in compact mode which they want to get rid of. And I hate that there's no clear visual separation between tabs anymore. Even Chrome and edge have this.
The idea is that MS, Google, and others really have no reason to donate to a direct competitor. Perhaps they did so because they knew it would give them control. That control was exercised over the years and now Mozilla is more a social justice advocacy organization than a foundation that develops a web browser. The sorry state of FF was the inevitable result.
Whether you buy this narrative or not, the fact is there remains no effective threat whatsoever to the massive data collection that occurs whenever you use Chrome or Edge. 10 years ago, MS/Google had no ability to spy on the web surfing of the vast majority of computer users. Now they do.
I would not be surprised if Google's support for Mozilla is based on similar reasoning.
Monopoly laws care about marketshare and Apple's was tiny at that point, especially in the business market
This is not what happened. Microsoft was involved in a lawsuit after paying one of Apple contractors to steal QuickTime code. "investing" in Apple was part of the settlement.
https://www.theregister.com/1998/10/29/microsoft_paid_apple_...
What sorry state?
The thing I don't get about this narrative is that Firefox works and works very well for me and so when I see people saying things like this it doesn't jive with reality.
However…
> That control was exercised over the years and now Mozilla is more a social justice advocacy organization than a foundation that develops a web browser.
I do think they’re happy to spend too much time/money on their pet projects. Given the layoffs and poor market performance, this has come at the cost of their product. I’m allowed to dislike that despite still using it.
Sorry state of Firefox, I disagree. Sorry state of Mozilla, yes. So I look at M and do expect FF to get worse.
Moreover, Mozilla's Firefox is deliberately hostile to the open source movement too - their code is a convulated mess by design, to discourage others from developing competing products with it. (Remember, that Firefox has provided Mozilla with 100's of millions of dollars - so the excuse of legacy code and all is just bullshit). It's no wonder that both Webkit (Safari) and Blink (Chrome / Opera) are more popular than Gecko (the browser engine of Firefox), with developers. (All that money is just wasted on them ... ).
This is total nonsense.
It's a mess because it has 25 years of legacy behind it, and because until a few years ago all of that legacy was considered a "feature" by half of the userbase, who was screaming at them not to remove the "mess" because it would break their addons. Even in this very thread you see people whining about removing XUL addon support. And ironically, most of the "competing projects" are based around preserving that mess.
It's only since 2017 that they've really been able to clean up the architecture at all. And saying that they're "hostile to open source" is practically defamatory. Mozilla has contributed more to open source across a broad swath of organizations than 99.9% of companies that are 100x their size.
They may have started with altruistic reasons, but after tasting Google's money, their greed corrupted them.
Mobile is a good example. Mozilla realised it was in a precarious position on the mobile platform, which is dominated by Chrome, Opera and Safari. And so they have now been forced to release the Gecko rendering engine for mobile ( https://github.com/mozilla/geckoview ) and are encouraging others to create mobile browsers, in the hopes that this may provide a fillip to Mobile Firefox. Desperation drove them to this move as the money is now in mobile platform (Google paying 15 billion dollars to Apple / Safari highlights this).
If they can do this for the mobile platform, why can't they do it for the Desktop platform too?
This kind of deliberate convulated code mess is like a "dark pattern" where in you know the developer isn't really interested in supporting the open source movement. Yes, there are many other open source projects that have poor code or lack documentation, but unlike the Firefox project, none of them has 100's of millions of dollars at their disposal - it's a travesty how they have wasted all that money!
If browsers were all private, and they had power and control, it'd be harder for G and MS to poke through.
So the 'erase' a layer of the value chain by making it all open-source.
One less barrier between them and the customer.
Chrome is as important to Google as many other things, it's just not where the revenue is captured.
The fact Mozilla squandered those "free" money is their management's fault.
Funnily enough, moving tabs to the top is actually one of the few UI changes I actually agree with and find more logical. Since the address bar and navigation buttons only control the active tab, they logically belong ‘inside’ the tab: switching to a different tab should also switch to a ‘different’ address bar and buttons. (Internally they may be the same object, but that’s just an implementation detail.)
There's an addon for that, but you no longer can hide the default tab bar! So now it just wastes space up there for me. Mozilla... just one day removed the option to hide it. First from the GUI, then from about:config. And also addons can no longer hide it either.
This assumes a landscape-oriented monitor.
I would suggest trying this out on a portait oriented monitor. Tabs on top make the most sense there.
Also, I would generally suggest trying out a portrait oriented monitor. It's quite useful for coding, reading, etc.
Tried, didn't work, chances are you need a browser or a terminal running test/grep or another code file/document side by side. There are very few intances when you only look at one file and whether you see 150 lines or 100 lines doesn't really matter much, when the file is longer than that anyway and a function is often shorter.
This is exactly how I'm using Firefox right now: https://framagit.org/ariasuni/tabcenter-reborn/-/wikis/theme...
After using tree style tabs it’s very frustrating for me to go back to using other tab styles in other browsers.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/
These days you have chromium based choices too: Edge and Vivaldi, which has just become Cinamon's default browser. On Edge you can turn off title bar, for Vivaldi it's the address bar. They look quite neat that way.
They're both simple vertical tabs and not automatically organized as a tree, but to me that trikes the right ballance because I don't want to feel too confortable opening tons of tabs.
Golden era was around 2005-2010 when Mozilla was running product innovation experiments such as Ubiquity or Tab Candy, "Design competitions", sending "Thank you" cards to beta testers, people like Aza Raskin having regular blog posts about development... My oh my, looking at those in archive.org and seeing treasure throve of comments, 100+ on each post, the excitement in the air with each new announcement feels just magical.
Roll forward 15 years and Mozilla Labs is about AR/VR(?), interaction with Firefox is through 3rd party sites like HN and real product innovation stagnates for years.
The real reason Firefox is losing market share is a simple fact that it is inferior to its competitors as a product, which is the direct result of this loss of connection with its userbase that it had and the passion for creating the world's best, most innovative, browser.
Which is a pity, because, besides the fact that Chrome has almost all of the marketshare, they also basically own Mozilla financially (is this still correct ?) and technologically Firefox uses Skia and Harfbuzz for rendering, both heavily dependent on Google.
So there is basically no competition for Google in the browser market.
This can't be good.
IIRC, Google Chrome (for Windows) was essentially built by engineers hired from Mozilla back in 2005/6? How tables turn.
Also there's really only one way to file bugs: bugzilla.mozilla.org.
Firefox (née Mozilla) is a terribly mismanaged company. Instead of focusing on their core business, making a great browser, they keep launching weird also-ran side projects that inevitably fail, to name a few:
Firefox VPN, Firefox Notes, Firefox Lockwise, Firefox Monitor, Firefox Send, Firefox Hello, Firefox OS, Mozilla Persona, etc.
It’s one thing to fritter away your fortunes and engineering talent on fun side projects when the main business (and money-maker) is doing well, but to do so when it’s floundering is massively irresponsible.
Baker & co. are making off like bandits, paying themselves lavish salaries while running the company into the ground. Unfortunately, there’s no Firefox stock holders that can sue them for mismanagement.
So as the Google/Apple browser duopoly is slowly cemented, we can only blame Mozilla management for destroying the only truly open and independent browser left.
Chrome just recently turned itself into a password manager on iOS. Agree about all the other projects though.
"Mozilla get 95% of their revenue from Google, that's terrible! They shouldn't be so dependent!"
"How dare Mozilla try to make money from products other than Firefox!"
They have been outright dismissive, almost hostile - they think they know what's right, they think they "know better", they may even really believe they're doing pro-"privacy" stuff - but in the end, they're wearing blinders.
For example, there's no reason in the world to change things in a way that's actively hostile to those who don't want those changes, yet version after version requires non-trivial amounts of work to figure out how to simply not change.
Then they do things like aggregating all DNS for people in the US to one monopolistic company WITHOUT ASKING, because, they say, people don't know what's good for them. They only relented after lots of negative publicity, not after sitting and considering that not everyone trusts Cloudflare just because they say they're not evil.
So it's the attitude that comes from design-by-fiat that has turned me off completely, and I see no evidence that anything is changing in any way that's good. To the contrary - I see more examples of making decisions without the slightest concern for technical discussion.
I fear that declining market share will only strengthen their resolve to force things on their user base.
Honestly, Mozilla has lost the big picture. The whole point of it was to have fewer messages that occupy the mind and disrupt tasks, and Chrome does it better, as long as I’m logged in.
And the open-source version of the sync server is bad software, age-old python, tons of code smells. I'd wager it is not what they are using themselves.
Proprietary software is often way worse than any of the OSS projects.
Are you exaggerating or does yours work differently?
Not everyone wants to spend time disabling features of their browser to be able to use it.
Especially if Firefox pretends to not get in your way!
Neither the path Firefox took, nor the path described here, would be enough to stop that decline. A bunch of hidden and obscure features that don't make sense in totality is not a great approach.
I personally felt strongly, when I was with Mozilla, that differentiated products would help get out of that quagmire. I never had any influence at a meaningful level - probably my own fault - so the idea never went anywhere. But with multiple products you can provide niche features that are meaningful and attractive. If there are ways to use interacting features to achieve some end that is not a marketable approach: there's no story, there's nothing to attract the user to return after installation. By saying "here's a browser for research" (or studying, watching videos, managing an online store, programming, etc) you come up with an understanding between the user and product maker about purpose.
Chrome had, and still has, a lock on the kind-of-good-enough-for-everyone market. A niche approach like Vivaldi is still less successful than Firefox is today. Firefox needs to find entirely different approaches.
I've been using an older version of Waterfox for years now because it kept the things that made Firefox great for me. However, as more and more websites are unusable with an old browser, I finally reached a tipping point that forced me to switch to something more recent.
I investigated every (as near as I can tell) offering on the market today. Sadly, the modern Firefox was the least bad option after all, so I'm now using that.
I despair for the state of web browsers these days.
It's finally pretty close and surpasses Chrome on many fronts but turning the tides is pretty hard.
I agree that listening to users is important but some users hold you back in a competitive market. Firefox takes cpu in the background because websites have JavaScript code and so do plugins. Chrome does the same thing.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
I think core "user base" is a misnomer in Firefox.
My 2 cents. I know there's a ton to the browser world and my view is just a tiny part of the big picture.
What did Firefox do to fix the compatibility e.g. with Teams? That should've been the highest priority. Instead, it took them years to get at least the GPOs right, autoupdate is the same story... so many things in corprote env were or still are PITA to set up in Firefox. So unfortunately no wonder it's Chrom(ium) for every single big company out there.
And don't get me wrong, I try to use exclusively Firefox whenver I can, but this is really frustrating to me as sysadmin.
1. Google basically controls the web.
2. Whenever a new Web API shows up, browser vendors have to decide between implementing the standard and copying the bugs, exotic behaviors and extensions that are implemented in Chromium.
3. Websites are tested on Chromium, so they start to rely on Chromium's bugs, exotic behaviors and extensions.
4. When a website breaks in Firefox (or Safari), people claim that it's the fault of Firefox devs and switch to Chromium.
The early web got tired of this when it was Microsoft at the wheels, but it feels that few people are particularly interested in fighting the good fight these days. Much easier to blame Mozilla.
I think that's the wrong way around. Why would Firefox need to change their browser for a specific web application?
Microsoft chose not to support Firefox, not the other way around. It's still choosing not to support smaller platforms (the Linux application is simply garbage, lacking basic features that have been available on other platforms for months).
When I ran into this problem, Teams didn't work because Firefox didn't allow the application to enumerate the audio devices hooked up to my computer, only exposing a "default" one. I don't even understand why that would be a problem, my browser already asked which input and output to use, why would Teams need to care?
Jitsi and Google Meet worked fine, so the problem was clearly with Microsoft's developers. They managed to fix the problem eventually, so Microsoft should take 100% of the blame here in my opinion.
I don't know about the sysadmin stuff. Honestly, with modern Chrome-clone Edge, I'd expect most business that roll out a browser to now simply stick to the built-in browser.
Same thing with MS login https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/p1ral4/firefox_91...
It inherently makes sense that all those apps would try to understand what devices were available and even allow switching between them. It's often required because that entire stack between the browser, os, and device is very unreliable even on something like macOS.
Yea it's on MS to test and fix their stuff, but FF is the one losing market share and honestly part it sounds like they make their apis more prone to misuse. At least in this case.
To be fair(ish) to Microsoft, I did spoof Chrome's user agent because Microsoft forced a "this website doesn't work with your browser" screen in Firefox. Perhaps the failing API was an unstable Chrome-only API that they assumed works because of the UA. The browser compatibility screen communicates that they definitely tested it, that they definitely knew about the problem, and that they just didn't want to fix it.
I just dropped Teams as an option and sent everyone who wanted to video chat Jitsi links. That worked fine while I needed it. If a company chooses not to support me, then I will choose not to use that company if I can.
Because Firefox has more to lose by not doing so. The blame game is pointless because in the end it helps Firefox in no way.
1: (original Raymond Chen link busted, but quoted here:) https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
Why use a browser for Teams at all?
Also this way you can use add-ons with it.
There's (IMO) nothing anti-competitive about not allowing other browsers. They all serve the same web pages.
Cynical take: if Mozilla were to start such a law suit, it would be to avoid Google having to disclose how much money they make from Chrome users.
Mozilla should use their money to improve their browser on desktop and mobile.
Firefox on iOS shows how little Mozilla cares about the platform.
For instance, no real adblock, they only have a tracker blocker which blocks most ads but misses a LOT of web annoyances like cookie banners and YouTube ads.
Example of third party browsers with full featured adblockers: - edge have adblock plus - brave have a built in adblock - iCab
Their reader mode is extremely amateurish compared to safari. Increasing font size makes the title of the article absolutely huge.
I agree, but also aren’t alternative browsers on IOS still just window dressing? Since the backend is always Safari?
* Removing "meritocracy" from the governance docs - https://blog.mozilla.org/careers/words-matter-moving-beyond-
* Changing "master password" to "primary password" - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/primary-password-replac
* Removing "crazy" from the codebase - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1675987
* Removing words deemed as reference to mental illness - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1675986
The difference in the project from 15 years ago is stark.
The Mozilla mission 2005:
"Established in July, 2003, with start-up support from America Online's Netscape division, the Mozilla Foundation exists to provide organizational, legal, and financial support for the Mozilla open-source software project."
The Mozilla mission 2021:
"Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent."
Where they once were just supporting a software project they're now a political movement. They spout "equity", "justice", and "advocacy" all over mozilla.org. No thanks, I just want a decent software.
meritocracy - To whom? Who decides? That's right: the kingmaker. And the kingmaker decides on those who share significant amount of the same traits. And most of these "kingmakers" in tech are 20-30 something white male.
master to primary - Again, "master" in US culture has a very very bad connotation that <drumroll> equates with US slavery of black peoples. ""find . -type f -exec sed -i 's/master/primary/g' {} \; "" takes seconds to run, and only infringes on alt-right sensitivities.
crazy - Is a garbage word. Has no real definition, and just really shouldn't be used. If there's a problem with a person and their choices, the issue with that should be stated, not by calling them "Crazy". Same goes for the rest of the words in your mental illness link. Enumerate the problem at hand, not by labeling the problem with a garbage word that equates to crazy.
> Where they once were just supporting a software project they're now a political movement.
FLOSS has always been political. The predominant license (GPL) is a anti-capitalist license that seeks freedoms from creators to make everyone owners. The AGPL was made to challenge cloud operators in using and not sharing their changes. Again, political.
And the whole FLOSS ecosystem itself is and isn't about computers. It's about how humans interact with computers and other humans using computers - and guaranteeing individual rights when using computers. FLOSS is a human rights issue. So yes, it's completely understandable that high profile projects would seek to include everyone.
GPL and RMS is not anti-capitalist, Linus Torvalds and Red Hat for example made lots of money.
So you can have Proprietary license <GPL <BSD and you have dudes that love both proprietary and BSD and hate GPL, my only conclusion that this dudes would like to grab others BSD work and make it proprietary and make tons of money, this is not capitalism ; this is the toxic "How to make XXX$ in 1 month(10 steps) people.
let me explain, I see people selling this idea of you buy this cheap crap from China then do a small change , sell the shit and make tons of money with almost no work(I seen other get rich schems too, with books or other stuff). I think some GPL haters would love to grab GPL stuff, put their cheap shit on top and sell it and make tons of money. GPL allows you to make money though, you have to share code though so others could make money too.
P.S. I would really like to understand why GPL is anti capitalist or communist in some people mind, is it some FUD or some wrong usage of the notions.
RH a bit more than LT, I'd wager.
But, with tabs specifically, I very rarely have more than two going at a time. That probably matters.
edit: Really just curious, I'm assuming I'm using it differently.
I run Steam on the same machine (AoE III) with Firefox, LibreOffice Calc open as well and it's just smooth. No overheating or anything.
I find that hard to believe considering no hardware accelerated video playback (although other linux browsers also have the same problem). At the very least, I think that statement needs to be qualified with a "under certain use cases".
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/icloud-bookma...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/icloud-bookmarks/f...
I think it does tabs, too, but I'm not sure.
I tried through the years, and always ended up with a main browser (Safari or now Firefox) and Chrome as a Google dedicated browser, because the experience would be miserable otherwise. At this point I stopped blaming the other browsers.
I can/could use any of the properties in a pinch, but something would give after a while. The worst offender for me was Meet, a few hours of here and there meetings would trigger weird interface scaling effects, or it just wouldn’t join any new meeting with the screen staying stale. On firefox Bluejeans or Zoom wouldn’t do it, just Meet.
1. Mozilla is competing against Google. Numbers are not public but I would be surprised if Google didn't have 10x more people working on Chrome vs. the number of people working on Firefox.
2. Mozilla is competing against Google. Numbers are again not public but I remember reading estimates that the equivalent ad budget for promoting Chrome during year 1 was about 6x the entire budget of Mozilla for that period (writing "equivalent" because webside, Google is its own ad agency).
3. Mozilla is competing against Google. Google owns countless properties besides Chrome, from Google Docs to Google Translate to Android, and leverages all of these (great products) to lead users towards Chrome. Case in point: many properties that don't/didn't work or work correctly with Firefox could be made to magically work if you changed your user agent to Chrome.
4. Mozilla is competing against Google. While Mozilla was front and center on many things open-source, relying on volunteers, Google employs countless (talented) Tech Evangelists and managed to attract considerable goodwill, much of it at the expense of the army of volunteers who used to help Mozilla.
5. Replace "Google" with "Apple" in the above points, adapt product names and repeat.
6. In 2011, predicting that the only way out of this was to outmaneuver Google and Apple on mobile devices/silos, Mozilla bet the farm on Firefox OS and lost. Mozilla never recovered.
7. During the Brendan Eichgate, Mozilla became a hapless victim of the US culture wars, mostly acccidentally. Mozilla never recovered.
Now, I'm not claiming that Mozilla never made any other mistake wrt technology or UX or PR. We've all seen a number of them. What I'm claiming is that these mistakes have next to no influence in comparison to the points above.
I wonder if they'll continue bothering with the deal when Edge continues to grow. Sure, Edge is just a reskin of chromium but it's run by a different company so that'll be most likely enough for market regulators.
Pretty damning that Google was never slammed with a huge fine for anti-competitive behavior for that.
I've been saying this for over a decade, and facts like just continue to make this clear.
It's not a bad thing for there to be only one HTML & JavaScript engine that you have to deal with. In fact it's the opposite. The dominance of Chrome has made development much easier.
It's easy and fun to point to half a dozen of your favourite Mozilla missteps over more than a decade and say "those are why Mozilla is losing". Maybe if Mozilla had done none of them, they wouldn't be losing. But in reality every vendor makes missteps. It's the unrelenting competition from Google that really made the difference, via the avenues you mention and others.
An authority with the effective power to cripple the finances and business practices of Google for the purpose of reducing its market share to an arbitrarily lower percentage would be immediately detrimental to furthering the development of Google's products, and consequently detrimental to the utility of its users, while in the longer term it wouldn't be obvious that conceding the lesser competitors to scramble for this stolen market slice would yield better alternative products, nor that users would ultimately benefit from having more lesser competitors.
One approach is to split up the company in to separate entities. Search, YouTube, advertising, technology products and OSs, etc...
Nothing ever is, a priori, so this is a non-argument.
> lesser competitors to scramble for this stolen market slice
Wow, "stolen". That certainly tanked your credibility at least in my eyes.
Fast forward 12 years, and little has changed. I dont keep 1000 tabs open, so chrome has never felt slow. I tried installing the developer edition of FF about 6 years ago on macOS and it refused to open.
Why bother changing?
If I were a tab hoarder (I.e. didn't know how to use bookmarks) or thought that Mozilla were any more trustworthy than Google (why is it that the for profit puts out FF but the not-for-profit collects donations that go to anything but?) then I would switch.
I'm waiting to see how manifest v3 shakes out- Chromes plan is still better than safari has been (she admittedly low bar) but until thr browsing experience is affected, I have no problem sticking with chrome / chromium.
I always wonder why Google do this. Sure, they could always have more Chrome users, but at the same time they're going to have to support Firefox forever whatever happens, and Firefox is a nice hedge for Google against being accused of having a browser monopoly.
They merely need to wait for a time when the regulatory environment is more favorable. It's just a roll of the dice every 4 years, sooner or later their number will come up and they can cut all support then and there.
But it's not really necessary. By making Chrome the preferred and optimal way to use any site, and making chrome intrinsics the expected behavior of a web browser, they are creating an environment where all the incentives are towards making your browser more like chrome. Eventually there won't be much difference in the surface between Firefox and Chrome and Mozilla will finally make the decision we all eventually expect, and just change Firefox into a true chromium fork.
Though that may happen sooner anyways. It feels pretty clear that there are parts of the greater Mozilla org that don't benefit at all from all the effort going into Gecko (or a web browser in general) and wouldn't be disappointed in the money going towards other initiatives instead.
Defending Eich is a hot take that you only see here on HN. He is a worthless individual who champions the cause of taking away personal freedoms of groups of people he doesn't like, pushes anti-mask conspiracy and smears public workers like Fauci, and his only technical 'achievement' since leaving Mozilla has been to create a fork of chrome that bakes in his companies ads and pushes a scamcoin on the user.
The fact you even have the gall to defend such a person is laughable. It wasn't that long ago the population would summarily execute such people when they revealed their status as societal bad actors.
Check your chronology: I wasn't a Mozilla higher-up when HTML 4.0 replaced 3.2. IE won the first browser war and MS was instrumental along with Dave Raggett in finalizing HTML 4. MS also was all-in on "JScript" by that point, having contributed to the ECMA-262 standard as I describe here:
https://www.pldi21.org/prerecorded_hopl.12.html
I was not a "Mozilla higher-up" during this period, I was not in management. From engineer role doing JS in 1995, I was promoted to Principal Engineer at Netscape by 1997. So your chronology there is bogus.
Also, mozilla.org did not exist until late 1997, and was not launched until April 1, 1998. Once again you are out to lunch on history, out of some bizarre desire to blame me personally for the web standards in full, and consequently browsers that implement them, being so complicated.
Rust, WebRender, Stylo, Pathfinder, wgpu, Dav1d, asm.js (which resulted in WebAssembly) etc.
And they helped bootstrap a lot of efforts that benefited everyone massively. Take the list above and add: LetsEncrypt, Cranelift, AV1, Opus, WebGPU, Wasmtime
Plus tooling like the reverse debugger (https://rr-project.org/) and sccache and Bors
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firefox-color...
Maybe it will help someone who has the same problem.
I really miss the old and customizable Firefox.
This is really the largest beef I have with Firefox. Firefox had been making poor (IMHO) UI decisions for a very long time -- but it didn't matter, because it was customizable enough that you could fix them.
Now that it's much less customizable, though, there is so much that can no longer be fixed.
Firefox lost because they couldn't keep up and there was little justification for why do you need to use it unless you have sophisticated needs. And the fewer users they had, the less money (coming from the deal with Google) they had to spend on development. This feedback look is what killed Firefox and left it a niche project.
Mozilla's management is also to blame. They expanded into a whole plethora of projects that all have been killed, they bought Pocket and did nothing with it. Yes, it's a non-profit, but there have been discussions on their salaries and bonuses that weren't exactly tied to the one and only metric that mattered – Firefox's share of the total market.
When I first started using Firefox it was Firefox 1.5. Back then it was literally useless without addons and you'd build it yourself, basically. And that made sense because the alternative was to use IE 6 (or Opera). But Google managed to produce a browser that was good enough and every tech person installed it at their parents' computers.
Pocket is one of the few external revenue sources they actually have.
It's a known issue for years. After I lost all tabs and bookmarks for a second time, I decided to bite the bullet and go back to Chrome.
It's been in chrome for more than 10 years already. It's such a basic feature, you earn a lot of time at not filling your address every time and even more with your card number you always forgot the number.
A few month ago they finally add the tab feature for directly researching in a site except it still a lot worse user friendly than chrome and it worked on a few website only
Yes please save all of your personal and payment information in your browser, I don't see how that could be a bad idea.
Otherwise I've been really surprised how much better Firefox has gotten in the last two years. Good to see old giant still alive.
Their core business is taking money from large companies and performatively acting like a company to look like 'competition.'
It explains, for instance, the conspicuously overpaid CEO: In this context, that's not only "not a big negative", but an actual positive: it's very "corporate".
Very good idea to have mapped the rants that have accumulated over time to the historical evolution of Firefox.
It is often that you hear that a minority of complainers are just adverse to change and that the majority agree with the stupid changes. But, in fact, the majority of person will disagree in silence and just switch to alternative solutions without a vocal complaint.
So, it is important to listen to vocal complainers, even in minority, because most of the time they are your canaries in coal mines. The one in front of new problems, ready to give some of their time and energy to save you.
An additional point not mentioned in the article is the general lost confidence with the Mozilla organisation that more and more looks like to use the Firefox cash cow to fund useless random activities and insipid Management.
That's an interesting point. The #1 Linux distribution on distrowatch for the last 12 month is now MX Linux, a non-systemd distro. Of course, the next 15 distros use systemd, so maybe that says nothing after all.
Maybe in some cases this is true, but I can't agree with that in terms of taking product direction from social media. In my (anecdotal) experience with areas where I have expertise, the loud and vocal complainers are almost always completely wrong about something or missing some key piece of information. In fact the angrier and more emotional the complaining, the more likely it seems to me that the complaint is based on false information. Maybe I'll have to do a comprehensive study on this at some point.
If you meant "listen" only in terms of hear what they have to say in order to educate them then sure, that can be important for marketing to explain product changes, but it's not a way to drive product changes.
The memory issue the post mentioned was a really long time ago, I remember they did Generational GC, Compact GC and the most important project from Mozilla, MemShrink from Nick. That was before e10s and all of that was what made Firefox memory efficient today. ( I think Nick is working at Apple now )
The failure of FirefoxOS, was mostly because of two opposing goal or ideal. They want the OS to be web based and everything to be made with JS or Web Technology. The believe of JS will be good enough and that JS VM will be fast enough runs deep inside Mozilla at the time to be point I remember FirefoxOS engineers were even afraid to speak out on why dont they just code this in C++. The other goal was they want Firefox OS to be running on low cost $50 Smartphone and somehow thinks the Smartphone hardware price will drop while performance continue to improve. I was surprised, and it was only many years later I realise most software developers have absolutely zero understanding of hardware, BOM cost, supply chain, and long term component cost development. And I still think, FirefoxOS was a distraction for Mozilla. Spreading themselves too thin while battling Chrome on PC. They really should have fought Chrome first before their move on Smartphone. And 10 years later we really do need a third OS option in the Smartphone market. Although arguably Firefox OS still lives on as KaiOS.
But again, I say this a lot on HN, and as someone who pushed through hundreds of installation of Firefox in different places, nearly every single response of switching away to Chrome was because Chrome was faster. Way faster.
And I thought it is a good time to remind ourselves, good faith and ideals only last so long. Ultimately you need to have a better product to retain your users.
Edit: And there was another point missing from the article. Mozilla refuse to support DRM and H.264 codec, a lot of users simply wanted their browser to work just left.
I switched to a little known Chromium-based browser and feel happy every moment I'm using it.
Firefox is still okay for its dev tools though.
Firefox never had a true chance to compete on the same level and I'm happy they didn't and still exist.
1. bug [New windows/tabs should inherit current page, back button/go menu history](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18808): `Opened 22 years ago` and `Updated 14 days ago`: they can neither implement nor reject a feature in 22 years?!
2. "We need more than deplatforming" blog post that promotes suppression of Free Speech. Would you trust a _browser_ that wants to _limit_ what you can read?!
That's incredibly naive. Only a tiny fraction of people who don't like it will complain. Others will just switch to another browser. And most will probably put up with it. And if that happens once, it might not hurt you too much. But when you do something like that over and over, you are going to bleed users, including the ones who initially put up with it as the list of things they don't like piles up.
> People don’t use Firefox because of add-ons. Our telemetry shows 80% of users never install any add-ons
Uh huh. You know why I started using Firefox over a decade ago? Because of addons. And as has been mentioned before, a lot of users disable telemetry, especially power users who are likely to install addons. So how reliable is that telemetry? And how many Firefox users are only using it on the recommendation of a friend relative or IT specialist that does use plugins.
I'm not optimistic for the future of browsers. I still prefer Firefox to chrome, but I'm not happy with the direction things are headed.
One final thought. Here's an idea for getting some funding independent of search engines: a Kickstarter like program for users to pay to get some of these features back. Though on second thought, maybe that would give Mozilla even more incentives to rip stuff out...
Use it on Android as well as my Linux machines.
I don’t grok that logic. Hard to maintain is about developers, not users.
“Code isn’t a lawn. It doesn’t change if you leave it alone for a few weeks.”
I disagree with that. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_rot
As to the main reason Firefox is losing users, I would say a) increased competition from (mostly) Google and Microsoft and b) lack of (short-term) incentives for Mozilla to listen to its users.
As to b), take a look at https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2019/mozilla-fdn-201....
If I interpret that correctly, contributions and subscriptions bring in less than $20M a year (probably closer to $10M, as $14M of that is labeled “Subscription and advertising revenue”)
Royalties bring in $450M. That’s money they get from search engines. “Other revenue” is $338M (can’t find where that comes from)
=> To me, it appears they have more income from advertising than the $3M they get from user contributions. They certainly get way more memory from search engines.
If you were CEO of the Mozilla Foundation, wouldn’t keeping the royalties flowing in be more important than raising user contributions?
Sure. Because as CEO my multi-million-dollar salary is dependent on money flowing in, more than my "Foundation" actually fulfilling its purpose.
If I were anyone but that multi-million-dollar CEO, though, i.e. if I maybe even gave a shit about what the foundation is supposed to be for in the first place, then perhaps I'd also listen a little to the actual users of the product that is ostensibly the whole raison d'être of the foundation. Idunno, maybe I'm odd that way?
If someone has a better one that’s not AMP, please post it. :)
This closing statement is missing so much context that it's misleading.
When you have more than a handful of users, their wants will eventually conflict, often directly. (Ex: Tabs on top vs Tabs on Bottom). Other times a majority of users will ask for things that provide fleeting short-term benefit but in the long-term could kill your product (ex: We need Flash support on Firefox Mobile). Telemetry and research helps you consider the needs of a silent majority, but it can alienate the vocal minority that proselytize your product. To appease both, you need to come up with a clear vision, validate it's right, and then ruthlessly steer your product toward it.
If there is a vision for Firefox, I don't know what it is. So why, as a user, should accept Firefox's many faults today when Mozilla has failed to paint a clear picture of tomorrow?
And I use Chrome to keep it logged in to my gmail only there, I'm logged out of Google (with blocked cookies) everywhere else.
Firefox only on mobile, and I'm quite happy. I haven't tried the others yet.
There are other means to get usage-numbers of addons, like server-side stats. And those numbers support this claim. Even the most popular addons have just some millions of users at best. Adblocker barely make some ten million, meaning they are used by just 10-20% of the users. And those number did not change much in the last 10 years.
Though, there were IMHO already heavy loses before IMHO. Firefox 3 & 4 (released 2008 & 2011) were heavy damage for addon-communiy, killing many beloved tools. The question is whether usage-numbers before this were significant higher.
Why Firefox, why?!
4 1/2 stars with over 4 million reviews. I use it regularly and have no real problems with it.
Initially, Google Play reviews got filled with 1 star reviews from users complaining that a lot of their workflows were broken, things that they liked were removed, extensions not working (unless you used the initial nine excluded extensions).
The rating dropped from 4.7 to 3.9 in less than a month. After that, some one star reviews were removed (maybe google thought it was review bombing or Mozilla used some kind of third party service for that). Ratings started to go up a bit after that.
And suddenly a lot of 5 stars reviews with little to no content (thumbs up emojis, Nice/Great/Good, or just dots) started to appear and the rating almost returned to the previous normal.
Nowadays is just a mix of good and bad reviews, most of them quite lengthy.
This mass feature removal is just one more data point in line with what is discussed on the article.
Thus if you had auto updates, which developers and security folks were so keen on recommending, you suddenly lost a massive amount of functionality and possibly could not do many of the things you need to do on your phone.
With no recommended way back. Oh, and many users lost their history, passwords and bookmarks with that as well. It's hard for users to see that approach from a software company as anything other than a statement of "We're smarter than you, we know better than you, get f**ed"; a big thumb in the eye from some product manager somewhere.
Get that experience enough times with Mozilla updates and you start to view all of their design decisions through that lens.
It was a great browser! I still install it once a month to see if they bring back the critical usability features. No dice yet.
What are your main pain points?
I like the new look, I even like the bottom URL bar placement that many reviewers seem to be negative about, and I like the concept of collections that the user base is protesting so much. Those are fine for me.
However, I'm regularly running into bugs ever since I updated from that latest "old" mobile Firefox. It took them months to support the certificate authority installed on my phone, and even now that's a hidden setting somewhere in a debug menu. Using said certificate with a HTTP proxy is still broken.
There's no setting to control DOH, even though there's no reason the browser might not support it. In fact, there's no way to use about:config AND use a stable version of the browser on Android; you need to run Beta or Nightly or the folks at Mozilla don't trust you to touch the settings. The addon library is abysmal, even after all this time, and the hack to get around that requires a Mozilla account and messing with custom addon lists.
I can't view the source of the current page anymore. It's been too long since I last had the option, so I'm not sure if this was an addon or a part of the core browser, but I used to be able to hit the menu button and click "view source". I think the view-source: URI scheme is still supported, but I can't figure out how to make the app respect it anymore.
For the past weeks, I've been running into a bug where using Swiftkey in combination with Firefox sometimes clears the entire text field. On websites that use native text boxes like HN I can correct that by opening another keyboard with a control key (Hacker's Keyboard) and hitting CTRL+Z, but on websites that provide their own rich editing that's impossible. This bug has eaten tens of posts of mine, some not at all short, and from what I can tell from Github the bug should already be fixed (it isn't) or will be fixed in Firefox 94 (which hits Beta in about 20 days, and then stable in November). All other browsers work fine with this keyboard, and it seems like everyone using Swiftkey and Firefox together should be running into this. I'm a little annoyed that this fix wasn't backported to current versions of the browser.
I would've been fine with all of this if this was the first release of Firefox on Android. However, it's simply not; there was a competent version of Firefox before the rewrite and the modern version still hasn't reached feature parity after dropping that version more than a year ago. Being able to hit install on any Firefox addon and being reasonably sure that it'll work was very liberating. Of course, some of the addons simply couldn't work because they relied on UI not present in the mobile apps, but I never saw that as a problem. Those addons got purged with the switch to WebExtensions anyway.
Perhaps people who switched from Chrome to Firefox after the release of the rewrite won't have as many issues because they never used the advanced features Firefox used to support.
All in all, it's a decent mobile browser, but the reasons I started using it in the first place have slowly been eroded away.
The last straw for me was the proton update. I updated on mobile, it was faster, I liked that, the UI was interesting, and then I went to install my usual add ons. No dice. "We are only allowing select add ons, most people don't use add ons anyway." Fuck. That. I raged out and removed Firefox from all of my devices.
They shortly afterward backpedaled and said it was temporary. There was no technical reason for it though.
I now use various chromium forks that have features I need and don't talk to google. Currently that's ungoogled-chromium, Bromite and Kiwi Browser, for it's extension support. If Bromite merges extension support in from Kiwi I'll stop using kiwi.
It would appear that Mozilla has become captive to a single person as their personal hustle to enrich themself and a few others to the organization’s detriment.
Maybe you could expand this out a little for people who aren't In The Know. Specifics on why each person on the page isn't qualified to lead a browser company will help a ton. Thanks in advance.
Switching profiles was unpleasant and confusing.
They already have them implemented, why not give it a good UI like Chrome?
if they got that sorted I would be a Firefox user for life.
a) change the hotkeys (!)
b) export the browser history*
*except by manually getting the needed records from the places.sql file
1. They still have good brand recognition, for now.
2. They lack the engineering capability to keep Firefox on par with Chromium-based browsers.
The usual objection is "but browser diversity, Chromium browser monoculture, monocultures are bad". To that I say: Why aren't you complaining about the world's most popular operating system kernel, the one with zero forks and also zero serious open-source competitors, you may have heard of it, what was it called, oh yeah Linux.
The whole point of Firefox is that it provides an alternative. What sort of alternative would it be if it's the same as Chrome?
> The whole point of Firefox is that it provides an alternative
Maybe to some people, but I think most people who use FireFox do so out of nostalgia or wanting to get away from FAANG-controlled browsers. Chromium rebranded to "Firefox" would be enough to make them accept it.
Did they do 'Tabs on Top' before or after Chrome, and how could that be a problem, given that it seems this is the way everyone does it now?
At least it's consistent :D
For me it is: I can't copy from the URL-bar to other apps. Inside of firefox works, copying from everywhere else works.
I didn't care to investigate though as I rarely need to do that and I was pretty sure it's my fault for locking it into it's own user namespaces.
Only Safari and Chrome will support captioning.
...because they fired Mr.Eich?
...because they are more interested in spending Google's hush money than listening to their users?
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28492732.