Ask HN: Can Firefox be revived? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Can Firefox be revived?

259 pointsDeathArrow307 comments

Since 2018 and management changes Firefox lost a lot of users. [1] Firefox has now 3.67% market share.[2]

Mozilla is mismanaged, to quote another commenter from HN:

>Mitchell Baker (Mozilla CEO) makes $3 million a year, and Mozilla asks you to donate "to help a nonprofit organization". >"On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."

>"By 2020 her salary had risen to over $3 million, while in the same year the Mozilla Corporation had to lay off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic."

>This lady then goes on and on talking about "social justice".

>Also Google deal produces 90% of Mozilla's revenue. I would say Mozilla is really controlled opposition.[3]

Mozilla derives over 90% from it's income from Google deal.[4]

If we take all these points in considerations, it seems Firefox is in peril. It can either disappear, become totally irrelevant or do what its biggest customer dictates it to do.

If web becomes a monoculture and only one company will be able to dictate its features, than the future isn't exactly rosy for users and developers alike. We need Firefox and other rendering engines and browser to have a healthy competition.

Is it possible that some company with deep pockets forks Firefox and hires what it's left from its development team to further develop Firefox and improve its market share?

Can it be in some big company's interest to push for web competition?

Since many big corps derive their incomes from the web, it should be. If they let someone control the web, it can be detrimental to their businesses.

[1] https://news.itsfoss.com/firefox-decline/ [2] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28926582&p=2 [4] https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-go...

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I think it would be better to look at Desktop Browser usage, which is at ~8%.

And here is another unpopular opinion. I dont care if her salary is 3 million or even 30 million. If she had managed to bring Firefox to 60% marketshare and bring down Chrome on Desktop, would you have still complained if she was paid 30 million?

The problem is Mozilla is in such a bad shape and she is under performing as a CEO.

Unfortunately people dont learn much from history. And history dictate the only way to solve this problem is Mozilla think of it as a problem. Otherwise its current status at 10% marketshare is enough to sustain the operation. Nothing bad enough is happening, no interest or incentive for changes. Inertia. Let's keep thing this way.

So yes, it is counter intuitive. The only way to save Mozilla ( or change Mozill's direction, I guess the word "save" is a hyperbole, at least from Mozilla's perspective. ) isn't trying to get more user to use it. It is actually push people to abandon it.

> I think it would be better to look at Desktop Browser usage, which is at ~8%.

Do you mean desktop-only use? From what I've seen many more people use the desktop than that (in combination with mobile). Nevertheless FF certainly is in bad shape.

What is meant is that Firefox's market share on desktops is 8%, so it is more popular on desktop than on mobile.

I think they dug their own graves.

Firefox is extremely pedantic and opinionated browser.

It became popular due to extensions, that is, it attracted power users. Then the other guys pretty much reached feature parity while Firefox was busy tossing XUL out the window with all its plugins.

At about that time, they started trying to "protect" me by stopping me from doing useful stuff (just warn and let me bypass).

There was one version, which was too much. It was borderline impossible to connect to a site with a bad certificate.

Yeah, I get the security speech, but for my old router or printer, I just don't care, let me skip the check and just do it.

It's gotten slightly better in the past few years, but Chrome is way better for most use cases.

> Then the other guys pretty much reached feature parity while Firefox was busy tossing XUL out the window with all its plugins.

In the case of Chrome, which ate Firefox's lunch, the new guy was built with isolation and security in mind, while the old guy was dragging a very modular but much less secure architecture.

There's a case for keeping the old XUL, but I'd much rather use the more recent multiprocessing, sandboxed browsers than a less secure one that lets me re-skin its UI at will. My understanding is that the two weren't compatible, and a meaningful sandbox could only be added by breaking existing extensions.

Firefox always had more features because of the XUL addons, Chrome addons wouldn't even compare, and only really developed after Firefox scrapped XUL

Chrome was practical and fast. But Firefox was where the magic happened. Chrome was like driving a car, simple controls for everyone, Firefox was like driving an airplane, a button for everything

At the time no one cared about sandboxing, and who did was using firejail, or similar, with multiple profiles, noscript, umatrix...

> lets me re-skin its UI at will

For me, that wasn't what made plugins great. What made them great was that they were powerful enough that they could be used to fix or work around the various bad functional decisions that Mozilla has long had a habit of making.

When they were neutered and could no longer do that, it made the browser much less attractive.

I find FF and devtools quite a lot better than when I used to use Firebug. The Chrome dev tools by contrast I find more difficult to work with.

The cetificate thing gets in my way as well. Our fossil repo worked fone with a self generated cert before they screwed that up and I had to waste my time generating a LE cert and setting up renewal. This is an internal service not a public web site. Someone enabled HSTS on a different vhost and FF wouldn't let me load the fossil web repo. The amount of babysitting is quite annoying.

My issue with FF is them treating their users as casuals or idiots. Like moving closing tabs to second level menu because someone complained that they accidentally clicked it... Or making the UI bigger and thus worse. It's a desktop program, we have very precise input mechanism. The elements should have option to be small. It is absolutely worth supporting powerusers. Maybe stop wasting resources on useless things and focus on making best possible browser for both powerusers and casuals...

Unless they change their attitude about who they target, I don't see a revival...

> It is absolutely worth supporting powerusers.

Not just worth it, that's who their userbase actually is !

Powerusers, privacy freaks and their immediate social circle that they managed to strong-arm into using Firefox.

That's their remaining 3% of market share and Mozilla remains absolutely oblivious to it.

"Let's add whitespace everywhere. Let's remove RSS support, let's change the UI and also let's add as much useless junk nobody asked for".

Don't.

And their CEO must go. The fish rots from the head.

FTP support too.

Which power user is using in browser ftp support?

The three people I know who use ftp for something have and always had a dedicated client for it.

Literally everyone? Not even just power users, but literally everyone.

I don't understand your position.

Are you claiming that no web pages link to download files on FTP servers?

Or are you saying that the right thing to do in that situation is to refuse to download the file?

Because both of those positions are self-evidently wrong.

Very few webpages link to FTP content. The right thing to do is to outsource that bit of functionality to an FTP client. Continuing to support a protocol that has largely been superseded and is very rarely used is self-evidently wrong.

Sorry. No. A web page links to a file, you activate the link, the link is valid, and the web browser... chokes? That is objectively a bug.

If it were still in widespread use, I might agree with you.

It is. Thanks.

But even if it weren't, the fact that a smaller number of people would run into the bug doesn't magically make it not-a-bug.

> the fact that a smaller number of people would run into the bug doesn't magically make it not-a-bug

I agree with you with respect to ftp, but I have to disagree with this. A site might link to a file with a gopher:// url or gemeni:// (these are real protocols) and the browser would of course spit out an error. That's not a bug, because that's expected behavior. No one, at present, expects a web browser to be able to access these protocols, despite the fact that both protocols are designed to access something corresponding roughly to "web pages".

The reason dropping ftp support is a bug is that there are a ton of real sites that link to ftp pages, and they do so because there is a history of ftp browsing support in web browsers and it was reasonably anticipated by these page authors that viewers would not have trouble accessing files made available in this way.

I've been online since 1995. I haven't seen an FTP link for a looong time.

And so... Firefox should cater to your use case and drop support for others'? Is that really what you're arguing?

It's none of my business what parts of the web you frequent. But I'm only a hobbyist and I see FTP links all the time. Most recently while looking for older character set information for a homegrown libiconv-type project.

Firefox 90 removed functionality that has been a part of the standard experience for a quarter-century and is still in widespread use. It is a bug.

> And so... Firefox should cater to your use case and drop support for others'? Is that really what you're arguing?

I can ask you the opposite question... I do mostly think it's sad that they're dropping FTP support, but if it's expensive for them to maintain it for the little percentage of users (I'm guessing, maybe this is an incorrect approximation) who use it...

Btw I'm just telling you my experience, please don't be rude, it's hard to find allies that way.

I'm sorry if I came across as rude. It was not my intent. Can you help me understand what specifically came across that way? I would appreciate it very much.

I would agree it's probably a small percentage of users who use it, but I don't think that's a good reason to drop support. If software only kept features used by a substantial number of users, SharePoint wouldn't allow exporting lists to Access databases, Excel wouldn't allow pivot tables, and so on. I think there's a cliché about how 80% of Word users only use 20% of its features... but it's a different 20% for everyone. As a result, adopting such a principle would lead to truly disheartening results. Will Firefox perhaps completely drop support for PIV tokens next?

I am not familiar with Firefox's architecture, I've only compiled it from source 2-3 times and only one of those times was setting up my own build environment (as opposed to a compiling package system). I've never hacked on it to any degree beyond the most trivial. So I could very well be wrong... but... I suspect it has not been very expensive to maintain, given that the protocol is simple and I believe has not changed in many years.

> And so... Firefox should cater to your use case and drop support for others'? Is that really what you're arguing?

The last sentence reads to me like "Are you for freaking real right now?!", incredulity mixed with anger.

It is not widespread enough to justify continuing to work on it, and making an active decision to not include a feature anymore due to little use is not a bug.

The Chrome team published some good information about exactly how widely FTP is used: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JUra5HnsbR_xmtQctkb2iVxR... (see heading: Usage information)

Removing insecure protocols is a good thing, especially one that is commonly used to download software of all things. If you're one of the ~0.03% (as of late 2020) that relies on downloading files through FTP for whatever reason, there's nothing stopping you from downloading a more specialized client.

I truly don't understand what your problem here is: if you install an FTP client and it registers itself as a handler for ftp links with your OS, the process of downloading a file via FTP when you click on an FTP link should be pretty seamless.

No it isn't. It's a bug that web browsers had FTP support in the first place - that's the job of FTP clients, browsers should just be handing off the link to one of them. cf the 'mailto' URI scheme - I think we've all come around to agreeing that web browsers shouldn't also be email clients.

Since the only job of an a browser seems to spit out whatever http protocol says, we can conclude that it is not its job to actually render HTML and interpret Javascript because the HTTP protocol says nothing about HTML or Javascript or Web Assembly.

Can you provide a real example from the wild where mailto: linked to a file for download? Because otherwise it's hard to see how that's a counterexample to the principle I articulated, which is specifically about downloading files, a function web browsers perform routinely.

magnet: links link to a file to download. Web browsers don’t handle these. ipfs as well. And plenty more …

FTP has nothing exceptional to it beyond it being a shitty, old protocol that is much more rarely used than BitTorrent.

Email is of course out of scope. But i'd be happy to integrate file browsers (local and remote) and web browsers, for everything file transfer, markup rendering and multimedia viewing. Of course that shouldn't be monolithic, with pluggable viewer programs. Several parts could be:

- navigation (contains: bookmark, history, tab/window handling, etc)

- networking (contains: configuring proxies, credentials+cookies, traffic shapping, requests filtering/rewriting, caching+capture+replay)

- content display (html rendering + js sandboxes, userscripts and content filtering, pdf, multimedia, ..)

The Vivaldi development team firmly disagrees.

You are confused about what a URI is. Or about what a web browser is.

You need dedicated clients for plenty of protocols that can be in an href.

ftp is not a part of the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web is in HTTP. That is the “web” part of “web browser”. That they support other protocols is incidental.

Not hard to land in a tab with Firefox complaining that it doesn't know of an FTP handler. Google Scholar returns results to papers hosted on FTP all the time.

On the other hand, as annoying as this is, this is the one time that maintenance overhead actually makes sense to justify removal (out of all the times Mozilla has invoked that excuse), given how nonstandard FTP is and how kludgy the implementation has to be.

Vivaldi is magnificent for superusers. You can tweak almost everything. But it is chromium... So no deal for me.

Last week I was complaining to co-workers that I don't want to donate to Mozilla. But if Firefox was separated, I would donate in a heartbeat. Imagine something like neovim. A Firefox repo on GitHub and people can donate. A team that works only on that, and they make decisions that are best for the user.

I tried Chromium yesterday as the next best thing, since I will not use any browser with "rewards", like Edge and Vivaldi and the rest. And today I found out that Chromium does not block autoplay and has no option for it. smh

Firefox is the best and I hope it lives for ever and it becomes even better that what it is now.

What do you mean by "block autoplay"? I use both Firefox and Chrome, and they behave the same, despite Chrome doesn't explicitly say "autoplay blocked": when you open a tab in the background, nothing plays until you switch to that tab, just like Firefox.

There are two things here.

One is that by "autoplay" I mean on a foreground tab. Say I open a youtube tab in the background, then switch to it. The video starts playing. I don't want that, and FF was blocking that autoplay.

Two is that I talked about Chromium. Apparently there is a way to do this for Chrome, for Edge, but not for Chromium.

Apparently, Chrome gets earlier fixes and in some cases Chromium is completely overlooked. It's like feeding on the goldmine (chromium, which gets contributions from other developers) and building up your own with extra features. Same for Android, VS Code or any other commercially backed so called 'open source' project. Imo, these projects should be in the hands of the community or some legitimate non-profit.

The AutoplayStopper extension works well for me: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/autoplaystopper/ej...

What do you mean by "rewards"? I've heard there are crypto rewards for watching ads in Brave, but I've never heard of anything from Edge and Vivaldi.

that was it actually. brave, not Vivaldi. edge has some Microsoft rewards when you click on news or whatever. I don't remember exactly but I tried edge and saw it and was immediately turned off.

I find it's browser competitive with Chromium. Use it every day. No revival needed: just more users.

So please: just install and use FF already! :)

Tried that, eated up my entire RAM.

And Chrome/Chromium didn't?

Ah the myth. I currently have 100+ tabs open on my old android phone, which has less RAM than any computer sold in the last decade.

How's that the myth? I literally tried it, it always end up eating more RAM than Chromium dunno why.

What is the meassurable difference?

How much RAM do you use? My wife’s 8gb and my 16gb Macs have never seen Firefox get especially RAM hungry

Could be one of the extensions you installed?

A reasonable web browsing experience is no longer possible (on any browser) on machines with 8 GB of RAM or less. Horrific, but true. Either get more RAM, use something like Total Suspender to suspend inactive tabs to disk, or limit yourself to 10-15 tabs open at once (and fewer than that if you're using modern, heavy JS web applications).

Dunno man, I'm actually using it right now and with 4 tabs open it's using 1.3 gb of RAM. These websites aren't specially heavy either, none of them it's Facebook or another social network.

My understanding is that the RAM per tab metric drops as you have more tabs. Firefox is more willing to cache stuff when you have only 4 tabs open, so that's not a great metric. Plus you have to consider the base RAM use of the browser itself. 1.3 GB isn't all that much on a modern system with 8 GB available, for example; the problem is more that Firefox doesn't handle 20+ tabs very well especially when you've got Twitter, Google Docs, Slack, etc open.

I never have any problems with Firefox having 80+ tabs open spread across 5 window.

How much RAM do you have? How much RAM does Firefox use, e.g. after you've had it open for several days?

My recent experience of keeping 1000 tabs around and auto unloaded (managed by Sidebery, a vertical tab bar plugin), is that it usually occupies 3~5 GBs.

I turn off my computer every day. RAM consumption after some time of usage isn't bad at all...

While I second this (I use Firefox as my main browser more or less uninterrupted since 15 years) some of what I perceive within the org worries me.

Mozilla does a lot of cool stuff aside of the browser, but what annoys me about ads in the address bar, shamelessly pushing pocket (a icon which for some reason I have to remove over and over again from the GUI) and similar things is not that they try to monetize their browser. What annoys me is that they don't have the trust in their own product that people would be willing to support them if they just asked. What annoys me is that they try those borderline dark-patterns and still try to sell it as a great feature for the user.

Just be honest to your users and if they understand your reasons they will support you, if they trust your decisions. Firefox was once a browser whos users bought T-shirts on it after all.

Agreed. I tried to find a compiled list of the proper about:config settings to disable all ads and integrations but it was constantly a guess and check. I still haven't figured out how to remove ALL of the default search/suggestion providers without manually removing them.

I recommend arkenfox's user.js[0] which uses (mostly) sane defaults oriented toward privacy and security. If nothing else, their user.js file is annotated so a quick Ctrl+F can help you find the exact settings you want to change.

[0] https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js

It's a company, it's a bit weird if they have to ask all the time for support, so they try to monetize in ways that finally are not really invasive. (At least that's my opinion)

They try, they fail, they try again, they fail again. It's hard to monetize from such a product, that's unfortunately the truth.

I use it as my daily driver on Linux (Gnome 3), and on Android.

I prefer it to Chromium due to its more native feel, the quality of the multi-device password and history sync, and the ability to zap tabs to and from my laptop.

adblock also works wonderfully.

I don't trust Google to implement these features or honour my privacy.

Same. After a brief flirt with Vivaldi, I came back to FF. Been a user for more than a decade.

It's fast and have good extensions. But they should divert their resources from pointless UI redesigns (proton) to better memory and power management.

I use FF almost exclusively on a desktop but can't afford luxury of running it on a laptop.

No idea why you can't afford to run it on a laptop. I use it in every single laptop I have, from 8gb RAM to 32gb of RAM, to my own smartphone, multiple tabs, multiple windows, etc etc and have no issue at all.

I admit that power mgmt and memory was a big issue before, but it improved, and it's still improving.

I mean, it consistently gives me highest energy score on a macbook.

And Chromium does not?

Safari does not.

Good old KHTML :)

I find that the video codecs used by sites are often the determining factors in that. If the site is playing videos using a codec that is handled well by the browser then the energy use is low. Otherwise it can jump up dramatically.

I don’t think the memory management part has gotten anywhere at all. Open 10 tabs on Firefox and I lose 2-3GB of my RAM just like that. Chrome and Edge never cross 700MB.

Firefox is a colossal RAM guzzler.

I have the opposite problem. I regularly open lots of tabs, and Chrome just expands its real estate pushing things into swap. Firefox just chugs on like a champion.

Definitely the opposite of what I see, as well.

The RAM think really depends on the websites and what resources they are allocating. The browser is really just accommodate that. Sites that do continuous scroll are the worst as they often don’t release resources as they go.

I've used Chrome and Firefox and I don't notice a significant difference between them. Why should I switch if there's no benefit to me?

Because mono cultures are not good. Because all platform controlled by one tech giant is not good. Because otherwise all sites will "build for IE6", ohh sorry, "build for Chrome".

Because Mozilla is a non-profit and is more interested in protecting your privacy than Google who monetizes your lack of privacy.

Not sharing your entire browsing history with some random company would be the reason.

The decline in usage tells another story: for whatever reason most people find not so competitive with Chromium.

User's actual opinion may not matter here, at all. Popularity may be self-serving.

With multi containers extension, it’s actually a better browser than Chrome for me. It’s perfect for my needs.

I'm starting to see more and more sites employing faulty JS that happens to work in Chromium...

The only thing that's keeping me on Firefox is the lack of persistent pinned tabs In Chromium.

Vivaldi supports it, but it's too slow.

No http, no ftp, sends browsing data to google by default (safe browsing), DoH trown down the throat. I'm tired. Pale moon is better.

Pale Moon is good, but its slow JavaScript engine means it gets bogged down to a halt on the modern web -- and this problem will only get worse.

The Safe browsing implementation is designed with the intention that Google can't infer the URLs of sites you visit from any queries sent to them: https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/how-safe-browsing-works-...

Obviously you have to trust the FF Devs, but you're already doing that by running FF in the first place.

Yup, for me chrome is getting buggier while FF is pretty stable.

Here's my prediction for the future of the web:

I think one of two possible scenarios will occur

1. Firefox fades into obscurity/irrelevance, Chromium becomes the platform of the web, and thus Google dictates its future.

2. Firefox fades into obscurity/irrelevance, and Chromium still becomes the platform of the web, but anti-trust action is taken against Google with a result being that Chrome is spun off into its own entity independent of Google, and so while there's still a browser monoculture, that browser is developed by a relatively unbiased company.

Of course in all of this there's always the foothold that Safari has that must be taken into consideration, particularly on iOS where users quite literally don't have the choice to use another browser (as iOS Chrome and friends still use WebKit under the hood).

> that browser is developed by a relatively unbiased company.

This imaginary company will have bills to pay. What search business will cover that company's costs? :)

I think there's a third option:

3. Firefox fades into obscurity/irrelevance, Chromium becomes the platform of the web, people realize this and forks abound, and eventually someone makes it into an ECMA standard and Google de facto loses control of it.

Oh also, another one:

4. The Linux Foundation or some other entity steps in and just builds a new GPL'd browser, which can mimic the success story of the Linux kernel (where the copyleft license will ensure that the vast number of open-source hackers prefer to contribute to it over something like the BSD-licensed Chromium).

> steps in and just builds a new GPL'd browser

I am not sure that can realistically be done anymore. Take a look at this for some estimates:

https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope....

This is the ideal situation. Google already lacks control over all the Chromium forks, like Brave, Opera, Edge and ungoogled-chromium. They accept upstream patches voluntarily, and they can and do reject anything they disagree with. The shadier Google gets the more forks will reject upstream and instead share patches among themselves.

As long as Chromium is open source I don't see what there is to worry about. We literally have the code.

There's a lot to be gained by standardizing on Chromium as well. New features, improvements and optimizations only have to be implemented once instead of thrice, and developers only have to deal with bugs in one implementation instead of the union of bugs in all three.

This is fine; but still it hurts me to think that an open protocol of HTTP[S] and friends is effectively accessed by a single client at core. Yeah it's wrapped with different toppings by different vendors, but deep inside it's one client.

We're going from a world where we had IE, Google, Firefox and Safari as independent projects, we're going towards one with just one.

> The Linux Foundation or some other entity steps in and just builds a new GPL'd browser

The Linux Foundation was already given Servo (in late 2019 if memory is not failing me), the promising rendering engine Mozilla was working on. Which meant anyone who was working full time on it, is not right now.

So there's even a new base to work with from the ground up if we wanted to.

Servo was built and run more as a useful browser technique sandbox than a future standalone product.

Unfortunately, I think license matters here, and Servo is MPL.

A copyleft license like GPL attracts developers with more collectivist ideals, and developers who only want to contribute as a challenge or to make a name for themselves. BSD/MIT/MPL attract developers who want to make their own fork with proprietary additions.

Also the viral nature of the GPL causes people to put up a wall of separation around the project, and agree on where the boundary lies. Just look at the BSD projects, each is a blurry mess where kernel and userspace are intermixed. They're jumbled in one big repo. With Linux, the threat of license contamination has caused the modularity we see (my theory, anyway).

So the logical choice is LGPL then?

I like a variant of your third option:

3b. Chromium becomes the platform of the web and a fork becomes dominating through some unforeseen hype (without ECMA involvement)

Microsoft couldn't build a viable browser that wasn't based on Chromium, so I don't have any faith that open-source can.

"If Microsoft can't do it, nobody can" is not an argument that holds a lot of water for me, especially if we're talking about web browsers. Microsoft has a track record of braindead decision making when it comes to their browsers. Couple that with their stubborn refusal to deprecate anything if it's a BC break and you've got an environment where not much can get done.

Case in point: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/internet-explorer/ie11-depl...

That article about IE 11 mentions about an IE 5 compatibility mode that can be activated. IE11 is essentially the sum of IE5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11. So yeah: Microsoft couldn't maintain 7 browsers bundled into one, but who could? Moreover, who would? That's a terrible decision made completely from a place of fear ("what if that one customer that depends on IE5 compatibility mode gets really, really mad and drops their windows support contract!??!?!").

It'd be an absolutely massive undertaking, but it's not impossible. In fact, I'd go further and say that it's necessary.

I was referring more to their failure with Edge 1.0, where they did mostly jetison the legacy cruft and start a greenfield project to match Chrome and Safari. They threw a lot of effort into a mediocre product that almost no one used.

tbh, I forgot about that, but it wasn't exactly a green field project, right? They started with a fork of Trident. It'd be hard to know without an engineer from Microsoft chiming in, but it's entirely possible that the first bit of EdgeHTML was just Trident with all of the compatibility modes turned off. Maybe they removed them entirely, but just removing those piles of code doesn't fundamentally change the thing they hooked into, right? All the plumbing to support old cruft could still be there, which would make working on EdgeHTML almost as hard as working on Trident.

Mozilla incubated Servo with a team of five (as of ~2014). It's not a complete browser on its own by any means, but surely that points at some degree of possibility.

it was shown this week MS couldn't even ship an up-to-date version of curl with Windows

a browser is... more complicated

They could but I was probably a lot of duplicate effort when they could fork Chrome and brew in their own telemetry as opposed to Google's.

Are there any good browsers with fast native UIs available for Windows based on WebKit proper (rather than Blink)?

From the list here[1] it seems there is no browser on Windows using Webkit.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers#WebKit-ba...

3. The Web becomes less relevant as Apps take over and become the primary way people use the Internet. Both Firefox and Chrome fade into obscurity. Everything is propriety and behind walled gardens.

4. The Zuckaverse becomes the primary way people interact with the Internet. Both Firefox and Chrome fade into obscurity. Everything is propriety and behind walled gardens.

Rooting for (3) but it doesn't seem to be happening. Quite the opposite - more and more apps just wrap the browsers.

I think this is because of how much effort it takes to make a truly native app on multiple platforms (iOS, Android, UWP) and then you probably have to make a web version anyway.

There are a lot of tools for doing this these days (i.e. React Native, Flutter) but I get the impression that none of them _truly_ solve the problem and you can tell they're not REALLY native apps.

I'm baffled that despite years of asking, Mozilla doesn't have voluntary subscription option for the FireFox browser. I'm not interested in paying for VPN or any other related product but I definitely would be interested in directly supporting FireFox browser development. As a Web developer, paying for my tools is not an issue for me, conversely, I'd be happy to do it.

It’s probably because they don’t think it would bring in enough revenue to be worth the effort. I don’t think it would either.

https://donate.mozilla.org/

Those go to the Mozilla Foundation, which is mostly an activist organization, not to the Foundation's for profitn subsidiary Mozilla Corporation, which actually develops Firefox. As far as I know, transferring money from the Foundation to MozCorp is hard. If you want to throw money at Firefox development, one of the Corp's paid products is the way.

The foundation exists mostly for tax purposes. They fully own the Mozilla Corporation.

Attempting to fund Firefox while hating the Foundation is entirely counter-productive.

The decline started with the ousting of Brendan Eich and the power grab of Baker. The interface got worse, menus were rearranged for no reason.

Classic story of a clique milking an existing code base under the guise of social justice.

I think this about lots of products or programs. I doubt anyone complained about the tabbed interface of Firefox rather than other things but yet a considerable amount of time and resource was spent on changing the UI.

Ditto for GMail, Microsoft Office, Windows etc.

I know your designers tell you that we need to look "fresh" but you can do that with minimal tweaks, most people would rather a stable codebase that just works and doesn't cause surprises or bugs imho.

I'm surprised that none of the business who are in direct competition with Google (or in fear thereof) start to contribute & make use of Gecko. It's really mind-boggling how many companies and how much money depends on the implementation of the web platform. Why would you use the one that is always acting in Google's interest? For mobile apps, GeckoView should be an interesting replacement of other webviews.

I don't think there's all that much that Google can force on Webkit or Chromium that benefits them. What are some examples you can think of?

Forget commercial, even just looking at FOSS projects, are there any cross platform browsers based on Gecko other than Firefox?

Not directly, but there are a few notable forks:

* Palemoon * Waterfox

Both of those are Gecko based, not Webkit based.

I second this observation. Last month I was looking for "webview" alternatives on Linux (with bindings in Rust, Go or Python); I wanted to create a simple chrome-less browser that allows me to override / takeover HTTP requests.

However to my astonishment, these isn't even one Gecko-based alternative. I've found a few based on WebKit (I've ended up using Qt5 in Python), a few based on Chromium (including Electron / nwjs), but zero for Gecko...

If perhaps Gecko would be easily embedable (and perhaps used less resources than Chromium), it could start appearing in other applications, and thus at least get some market-share in that segment.

Or perhaps if Servo is. It's the newer upgraded replacement to Gecko.

Servo is not at a level that it can compete with Gecko. It may work for many use cases, but it's not an 'upgrade' or 'replacement' for Gecko.

I have long wondered why Mozilla hasn't worked on a embeddable Gecko engine as an alternative to Electron.

A long time ago, Mozilla did have the option to embed Gecko into apps. It was badly-documented and difficult to use.

A modern embeddable Gecko engine could be promoted as a modular, cross-platform alternative to Electron. The Gecko advantages: stripped-down, faster and less memory hungry than Electron (assuming these features can be achieved).

The traction that Electron has gained as a cross-platform option for building apps is huge and is only set to get bigger (whether for better or worse). And yet, Mozilla is completely absent from this space dominated by Chromium/Electron.

Imagine if thousands of developers place their trust in Mozilla because they have built their cross-platform apps using Gecko. They want to see Mozilla grow and succeed because they have a stake in seeing Gecko development succeed too. (And that could include large corporates sponsoring Mozilla to sustain development of Gecko.) Unfortunately, it is probably too late (or too unrealistic) for this to happen.

Would any of the above revive Firefox? Possibly not. However, an embeddable Gecko engine may give Mozilla new opportunities.

This existed for a long time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XUL https://www-archive.mozilla.org/why/framework.html https://www-archive.mozilla.org/projects/xul/joy-of-xul

Unfortunately Mozilla seems having problems with managing larger products or changes. I was following recent (last year iirc) transition of Thunderbird from xul based extensions to webextensions - no updated roadmap, the new extension model was pushed to production while being only part ready. Examples provided by Mozilla team were outdated and some used features that were no longer available. Other features were not implemented, some worked for pop3 and not for imap accounts. This thing was and probably still is a mess. So while the product you described seems to have some potential, i can't imagine it being run by Mozilla and attracting developers.

There was a project to do this, Positron.

https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/

Revolving door management that has no clue what initiatives the previous management started and wants to start all their own initiatives really hurt Mozilla in the last 5 years.

Gecko is riddled with technical debt. People may have an emotional attachment to it, but technically it's a dead end. Sorry but that is the truth.

Engineers are actively rewriting the debts and throwing the old stuff away. The old graphics layering system was just removed upon completely moving to WebRender, for example.

> none of the business who are in direct competition with Google

You mean Facebook? No thanx.

They'll have to pry Firefox from my cold hands, even after the focus towards... let's say questionable priorities and the firing of many of the engineering team.

Despite the managements, it's the best alternative among the big browsers for my needs.

Good overall standards support (a few things missing) and addon suite, even after the XUL deprecation.

And performance wise, Linux ATL, it's fine. Is it better/worse than chrome in a benchmark? Idk, but I'm fine with the perf.

<3 Firefox.

hear hear!

To quote: "Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers."

I personally think Chrome gained so much market share, in large part, because it simply had the best developer tools.

Firefox had FireBug, which was great, and revolutionary for its time!

However! Having FireBug meant that Mozilla's built in tools never got much attention. So their dev tools were severely lacking, and stagnant. They remained that way until a few years back.

Meanwhile Chrome's dev tools just kept advancing. So in the end, FireBug (unintentionally) helped FireFox lose major marketshare

I would say most browser users do not care about developer tools. They are normal people, they do not debug stuff.

But the people who build their apps do… and they’re no doubt testing it more in the browser they use to debug it.

Agree 100%, but the people that do care about developer tools are often the ones installing software for their family, and giving recommendations to their friends.

"Please install chrome for the best experience" is a direct result of chrome being the standard for development with just enough idiosyncrasies to tank experience on other browsers.

Another angle on that: Wasn't it the case that Chrome was easily deployable and manageable by IT, while Mozilla refused to make mass deployment and management of Firefox easy?

Mozilla should fire their C team and convert to a democratically controlled worker-owned enterprise. They should not be paying a $3 million plus salary to a CEO.

> Mozilla should fire their C team

They did invent Rust to replace it :)

Well, it is not our choice for them to do so, only the Mozilla workers' collective will would make this happen. But if it were ever achieved I would gladly support them via financial means.

Are the market share counters correct? Like, a bigger percentage of Fx users are more likely to have blockers and privacy settings enabled, compared to users of other browsers.

Last time I checked our company's visitor distribution, GA showed far less Fx usage than server logs, for instance. Not a huge number for Fx in the latter case, but better than 3% at least.

I also feel the constant focus on a single person's salary to be a red herring. I mean, it's not ideal, but if their salary were to be axed, it wouldn't really make Fx more competitive or better in the slightest. I don't think anyone chooses not to use Fx based on one person's salary, and there are other reasons why Fx is at the lower end of usage worth focusing more on.

So not trying to excuse anything, just would like the focus to be redirected. Everyone always touts Pocket and the salary as these big things here on HN. But the masses don't care. It's not where the problem is.

The argument is that by paying too much for one exec, you are taking away money that could be invested into the product either directly or via more staff with different skills.

Her salary could be used to hire 30 other people. I doubt she contributes as much as 30 people would.

The company still needs a CEO, so it’s not a matter of “fire her and spend the money on 30 developers.” (At what, 100K per year including benefits and overhead? Good luck with that.)

Instead, it’s a matter of “fire her and hire a replacement” at $Xmm per year. So what is her replacement cost? I vaguely remember her raise being tied to increasing her compensation to be more in line with other CEOs, so it may be the case that there is no meaningful savings to be made there, or even that a competent replacement would cost more.

And, as the other commenter said, this is not the root cause of Firefox’s struggles. I don’t know what is, but I do observe that people on this site seem to hold Mozilla to a much higher standard than Google, quite unfairly in my opinion.

For reference, it looks like Wikipedia's CEO is paid ~$400k. 3m is a really unreasonable salary, and the attitude she has for why she deserves it is even worse, and seems antithetical to Mozilla's brand/image/beliefs.

https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salar...

The company needs a CEO, but it doesn't need a $2.7M CEO.

So why is the board paying her that much? Are they incompetent? What evidence do you have?

Mozilla fired developers while paying a lot to its CEO.

In many discussion of this kind it is a red herring indeed, but not in this one. First, her salary could be used to pay for several developers. Second, her salary does not correspond to the results. You pay execs for the result, not for their title. If she can't do her job well, she shouldn't be paid millions, that's all.

On my app Firefox usage (based on nginx logs) is 15% (~200,000 users, mostly desktop, half in the us). My guess is that mobile market share is much lower though

Or, is the market share including mobile where Chrome and Safari are king. If we just look at desktop market share is Firefox higher?

So, basically you want better management for firefox, and hope funding to magically appear out of thin air?

Are you sure that the loss of market share is due to mismanagement? Could it not be due to a competitor with unfair advantage? I mean the fact that even MS stopped their own development would suggest that to me.

So the concrete point you have against management: it is expensive. Does that explain the current situation? What if the CEO had a 300k salary, would that fundamentally change anything?

Edit: as a metter of fact, I also believe that a change is required, but I would look at the funding side, to diversify it. I would look into government funding (multiple governments), license merchandise, ask for individual donations, partner with more companies to sell rebranded versions of their products/services like with Mozilla VPN, etc.

>So, basically you want better management for Firefox, and hope funding to magically appear out of thin air?

No, I quit trusting Mozilla. I don't want another management. I want Firefox to be taken care of by another company/ NGO / consortium of companies. I want it to have a good development team and concentrate on technical excellence and user needs.

>So the concrete point you have against management: it is expensive. I'm more concerned with the fact that developers are fired while CEO is getting some fat checks while usage is declining and users are becoming more unhappy with Firefox.

> So, basically you want better management for firefox, and hope funding to magically appear out of thin air? > What if the CEO had a 300k salary, would that fundamentally change anything?

Yes it would; it would make 2.7 million dollars of funding magically appear.

I also think her attitude of entitlement to such an unreasonable salary is contradictory with Mozilla's beliefs. It seems like an awful match. And 3m is really high for a non profit. Wikimedia's CEO gets ~$400k a year. https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salar...

The downfall of Firefox is very convenient for many big players. Google obviously, as they have paid Firefox billions. In the bigger picture, an open, standards-based internet which Mozilla/Firefox stood for, competes with app-stores, data-silos, walled gardens and proprietary solutions of all sorts. Follow the money?

It took a lot of effort by the slashdot intelligentsia to preach the virtues of open source and internet freedom and to riot against violations of those principles. These times are long gone, and today's tech scene would rather like to build one of those closed solutions themselves than keep the old faith alive.

> took a lot of effort by the slashdot intelligentsia to preach the virtues of open source and internet freedom and to riot against violations of those principles.

We need a new generation of rioters. Closed systems and walled gardens are bad. If we go this route we will end up paying monthly fees for companies to allow us to do some computing or access information (which will be pruned with care).

It's a great question, and I don't know the answer. A browser is a very complex application which requires many FTEs and millions of dollars to develop and maintain. Donation models don't work well for open source, there's no way individual users will be contributing (in aggregate) millions of USD for a browser. There are various forks of Firefox and Chrome but I am reluctant to use those because they may be out of date or its developers might have financial or other incentives to install telemetry or backdoors. Previously, an ideological, established and proud institution like Mozilla could be trusted to an extent to refrain from such things. A subscription based model might work but it's hard to say if there's a market fit, as the qualms that HN users have over Google's monopoly are not shared by the population at large, who just don't care or even know about these things. A strategy I have been pondering is to take a browser and drastically simplify it (just the rendering and networking, no JavaScript/WASM, audio/video and APIs) and iterate until it's finished and secure; this ought to be manageable by a modestly funded small team of developers. Then use that to browse the web where I can, and use Chrome for websites that require the full browser stack like Youtube. It's a step backwards but this is where we are.

At this point I think the feedback loop is unstoppable: The lower Firefox's marketshare gets the fewer developers test their pages on it, the more pages don't work on Firefox, pushing more people to Chrome.

I use FF at home and work and have done for probably 3 or 4 years. I think I can count on 1 hand the number of pages that have not worked and needed to be loaded on another browser.

Mostly, it was horrible old sites that were designed for IE.

Of course ymmv

I use Firefox exclusively and I can't remember the last time I've had to switch to Chrome because the page wasn't working in Firefox.

In fact just yesterday I was submitting feedback to a retailer about it's website's poor user experience, and they've said "it works best with Chrome". :)

And this is not an isolated case... Each time I've had to submit a complaint about issues encountered while using a webapp / website (including for payment systems, utility companies, local government, etc.) I often get the same response: "try it with Chrome" or "we support only Chrome".

I still remember the "works best with Internet Explorer", which then changed to "works best with Firefox", and now it seems "works best with Chrome"... :)

Follow web standards, not browsers.

What doesn't work in Firefox?

For my day to day use everything works fine. I don't remember anything that didn't except the vscode.dev thing that appeared in the front page yesterday. Apparently the local file access is not supported/enabled in Firefox yet.

And when I was messing with CSS a few months ago there was... background-blur? Or something like that, not supported in Firefox. But pretty minor things.

Don't remember anything else where I had to switch to chromium lately.

There are plenty of paper cuts due to the differences of funding between Firefox and the other browsers. IndexedDB and ContentEditable are both a bit more weird and buggy in Firefox than in Chromium. Often when I release a new feature, we find out it’s buggy in some old version of Firefox on a specific Linux distribution that’s doing something a little odd to Firefox’s source code or build process.

Slack calls and Microsoft teams calls (you can attend meetings, but cant share your audio/video) don’t work in firefox.

Zoom on Firefox only has the speaker view, if you want to have the grid view to see everyone you'll have to use Chrome/Edge.

I also have to use Figma on a daily basis and the there are some odd things happening in Firefox that don't appear in Chrome/Edge.

Zooming in web browser is using the computer wrongly (TM). Just as using terminal or VDI client in web browser. It's wrong because security sucks, and bloat gets even bigger. These activities should be done through separate and well restricted dedicated applications.

Using the Zoom client is also using it wrongly, because you have to install some blob from an untrustworthy company that has historically been riddled with security bugs.

I hope so, browser monoculture is really scary, imagine everyone with the same browser with the same security bugs and no way to use something else.

We lived it in the early 2000s until Firefox broke the monopoly and it was a dark time to work in web.

Browsers, sure, but I honestly wouldn't mind to only have one major browser engine, or batch of forks stemmed from one like blink/webkit. After all, we only has one web standard.

Having been using Firefox and Chrome side by side for 10+ years, I don't think the difference (or preference) between the two worth the effort putting into making two (mostly) duplicate implementations of the same thing for such complex thing. And my experience in observing the development of Firefox is that they are already too short-handed to keep up.

Wouldn't having one implementation controlled by Google give them the final say in the standard though, and effectively all or most of the power over the standard? Seems like a dangerous road that we're heading down.

Google is already controlling the web now, with the existence of gecko. They control it because Blink/Chromium is much more popular than other choices, not because there is only one choice.

Keep in mind Blink engine is forked from WebKit (an Apple product) and Chromium is created from thin air. Yet it doesn't stop Google to have the dominant position they have today.

My point is, Google controlling everything is bad, but having only one engine (be it chromium or something else) isn't what causes it.

That's not my experience in W3C. Having an implementation gives us a strong voice.

So we all should also drive the same car and eat the same food?

You can have dramatically different cars with the same engine. To most of users, even the power users, their choice of the browser isn't caused by the difference in engines.

Also, I don't say "should", I say I don't mind.

We have a Unix kernel monoculture, and things are just fine.

*Linux kernel monolithism. It's not a commercial company and anyone is free to fork it for their specific architecture and usecases. You still have different types of kernels which you can use and also different linux kernel flavors which you can try.

And you wish for an OS monoculture, too?

As someone who is in the process of moving all of my machines from Linux to BSD, I'm very happy that this isn't actually true.

Why the move? What is it that BSD gives that Linux can't?

PF and jails come to mind, as someone who uses FreeBSD for the "important" home infra

BSD definitely makes sense in certain use cases (routers, web, mail, DB servers,...) , but moving everything indicates at some kind of rebellious act or just pure experimentalism. I have no issue with both, since I've personally done the same multiple times....

It's neither -- it's just that I want all of my machines to run the same OS, and I've determined that BSD fits my overall needs better than Linux. It's not about making some kind of statement or experimenting.

Linux has taken an overall development direction that I dislike (systemd is an example of that, although not the only one). BSD is now a better fit with my requirements.

Uh, what? At the very least there's linux, macOS (mach), bsd, and now windows subsystem for linux.

Don't forget Windows itself (the NT Kernel), which amounts to most of the desktop share.

Right, that's why I mentioned Windows Subsystem for Linux. It's a unix that runs on top of the nt kernel.

This is iOS, right now, and that's a fairly substantial number of users. It's not ideal but we also aren't hearing regular reports of iOS users being compromised en masse despite their browser monoculture.

I have been using Firefox as my main browser for years (on a mac). Firefox is fine. For my taste, it is better than Chrome.

My suspicion is that the majority of people in this sort of thread will never use anything other than Chrome, because it is not Chrome. Maybe the web will survive until a more idealistic generation takes over.

I use Firefox as my primary browser and has done so for years. I do not feel like I am missing out on something. But I will be interested to read the comments and suggestions from this thread.

I have a naive question. If chromium is open-source, why not strip it from telemetry and other “badness” and use it as a base to build a browser, which is essentially just UI around the rendering engine? I simply don’t understand how a $3M CEO and >>250 employees is required for a program to exist, which shows tabs, address bar, list of downloads, settings form and a couple of sites for extensions and installation. Today people are writing entire 3d high-tech games on unity/unreal by a team of two, but to render some text and images we suddenly need all that enterprise monstrosity.

Un-googled chromium exists...

Yes, but what's the market share of that?

If they did that all the USP that exists in Firefox would be gone and their market share would fall to 0.001% instead of 3%.

People might praise Microsoft for moving Edge to Chromium but ultimately it's because Microsoft couldn't compete on web standards and security and didn't want to invest further resources in to something not earning them money.

The idea is to have more than one rendering engine so no one can push their own agendas through dictating the web standards.

But if google pushes its agenda through chrome, it stays in chrome, non-issue. If it does that through chromium, isn’t it easier to remove it from there and not spend a fortune? Or if with time it will pull code from chromium to chrome (thus crippling the former), isn’t it easier to work on existing codebase until it really does that?

> If chromium is open-source, why not strip it from telemetry and other “badness” and use it as a base to build a browser

That's exactly how qt-webengine is packaged. And qutebrowser (based on qt-webengine) is fantastic for a volunteer effort, but memory leaks and other issues, too much stuff for one volunteer to realistically address, make it difficult to use as a daily driver. And that's just building a UI around an existing rendering engine!

The root of the issue is: W3C specifications are >100 million words, and growing at a rate of hundreds of new standards per year. So even if the Chromium code base were forked from its current state, a team of full-time developers would be required just to keep up with new W3C standards.

What I find tragic about the Mozilla mismanagement is, if one guy is willing to develop and maintain qutebrowser as a volunteer, then surely Mozilla can find developers who would be willing to work on Firefox at sub-FAANG-but-reasonable salaries without the waterfront San Francisco office.

I see. But did anyone try to fix that >100M words issue? Is there even a point to have a standard that only a couple of direct-profit bigcorps can implement in reality? Even MS could not and gave up, as I understand it.

The standards you need to implement a functioning web browser are far less than ">100M words". W3 has published a lot of stuff in the last 20+ years, but you don't need much of it.

Maybe one of Firefox's last chances was Microsoft, before they decided to cave to Chromium. They could have forked Firefox, now we're going to end up stuck with one web engine.

Sadly I agree they seem to have rotted.

I believe there will be more options but not sure where from…

I am not sure about that. They had their own engine but for some reason, they didn't want to continue with development.

Two engines. Don't forget WebKit. I know Blink came from WebKit but it was long enough ago that there is not much overlap anymore.

I like to read bad news about Firefox - at some point in time, they stopped listening to their core users and started pontificating moralistic values.

Wow, I hadn't known that Firefox's share was so low. The future of the web is very bleak. It's clear that it has became way too bloated and complicated.

Maybe we should all quit http and move to Gemini.

Http is {method, url, metadata, data} -> {status, metadata, data}. What’s wrong with that?

That's actually a problem. Too simple, too convenient, too easily portable.

Investors hate this.

I wouldn't be surprised to see Facebook's and Alphabet's stocks rise up the day they announce that they will stop allowing HTPP clients to reach their endpoints :)

I am a long time Firefox user (on Linux), however for about 5 years I had to switch to Chromium due to a small issue that seemed to never be fixed: proper support for user profiles, namely how to open a link in a new tab/window in a given profile (that was already running). Luckily it got fixed last year, so now I'm "back".

However, this is only one of the situations in which, from time to time, "something" pushes me away from Firefox to Chromium. For example for about two weeks now Google Meet is not working properly on Firefox (at least on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed).

Moreover, they just keep needlessly changing things: I use the, now obsolete, "compact" UI mode; for about a month I've started experimenting "tabless" (i.e. one tab per window) but found that there isn't any more this option (I had to use `userChrome.css` to hide the tabs); they keep dropping or breaking `about:config` options; when they add new "features" (like UI buttons) they shove them in my UI and I have to remove it from each and every profile; etc.

That being said, and getting to the initial point of the OP, for some time now I no longer see Firefox as an open source project, but as a "product", just another one in the browser line-up alongside Chrome / Chromium, Brave, Vivaldi, etc.

Just another product that happens to be open-source, just another product that happens to have a business-model where I get the short end of the stick (mainly the "advertising" incarnation of stick)...

If perhaps websites / webapps would be less demanding on the latest-and-greatest web-feature, we could use simpler browsers, like the ones based on WebKit, or why not even something lightweight as Netsurf...

They need to offer sane paid products to fund themselves properly. With their reach they don't really have to be too creative.

For example, they could sell more features on top of their password manager and compete with things like Bitwarden.

There are a dozens opportunities like this, the fact that they still go towards ads as a way to make money is what has me pessimistic about their management.

No. The organization is deeply compromised and cannot function anymore.

Run by a lawyer. Enough said. These types of projects should be run by engineer leaders.

The worst part is that Firefox is the only viable Chromium alternative in the market right now, and -as noted- they are rapidly going downhill.

The Chromium monopoly is terrible. Google dropped the `alert()` function from cross-origin iframes starting Chromium 92, which broke a lot of websites like codepen.io. I couldn't see anything in the spec that suggested this change.

I have a bad feeling that this will end up something like the Internet Explorer monopoly back in the mid-2000s.

> Is it possible that some company with deep pockets forks Firefox and hires what it's left from its development team to further develop Firefox and improve its market share?

I totally agree with this. We need some serious competition in the browser space.

It will have to be branded as something else. I don't run Firefox because it is the best browser, I don't run Firefox because it is the browser I have always been running.

I run Firefox because it is the best modern[0] browser from a perspective of privacy. Ublock Origin works best (or only) on Firefox, no other browser has support for containers.

Apple branded itself on privacy, firefox can brand itself on freedom and privacy.

[0]: I am not going to be browsing the internet with either e3 or with Links. Those days are gone for me, go a head and do what you want to do.

Firefox has 200M clients right now [0] so if 10% of users subscribed 10$ per year that's 200M $ yearly revenue. I do not know why open source companies don't try to push low $ subscription model.. I happily contribute around 20$ per month to a couple web serial novelists so <1$ per month for an independent browser would be a pittance.

[0] https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

I would pay for their vpn service and I would even pay for lockwise if they fixed the bugs.

But they don’t sell the vpn in my country and they give lockwise away for free but leave it broken on iOS.

So the CEO can get a raise? Nah, thanks.

CEO makes 3M per year, googling shows Mozilla revenue is ~900M, I haven't researched her and know nothing of her competence and effectiveness but I would have no issue with even a 5M salary for a person that would help build a strong enough open source browser.. the whole world would be better for it and I find it to be a small price to pay

CEO also laid off 200 people while keeping his salary. Not a good person.

Is the CEO's job to maximise payroll?

The CEO's job is to grow the company and have it improve or make products. Tanking Firefox and firing the developers (Servo team) is the opposite of that.

For all I care, a CEO can get whatever, if it's from the funds they raised, exclusively. Just not my donations or revenue directly from the product other people made. A "vision" or "leadership" isn't worth that much. Maybe connections are. Basically get payed for the stuff they exclusively enable.

Maybe that's even what's happening here. I agree, it's probably not the main issue at hand considering the overall financial situation.

> Is it possible that some company with deep pockets forks Firefox and hires what it's left from its development team to further develop Firefox and improve its market share?

Brave.

I am a FF user and I am typing this in FF. I very much dislike that the CEO is on millions per annum and the company asks for donations. Back to Chrome for me I think..

Right, because the CEO of Google doesn’t get paid as much, and instead of donations Google just helps itself to all your data? /s

I don't donate to Google though? I also know how their business model works.

Donations go to the Mozilla foundation which does "internet advocacy". Donations do not go towards Firefox development, not towards the CEO's salary or Firefox engineers' salary.

What does the foundation do? https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-do/

Whenever I leave tabs open in FF, it'll consume 3GB+ of memory and slow my computer to a crawl. I do the same in Chrome and it'll consume maybe 2GB RAM and it's fine. I want to use FF and support Mozilla. In fact, I lived with FF and this type of behavior for years hoping it'll get better in the next update, but it never did. FF is just not usable for me anymore. I reluctantly switched to Chrome and haven't had issues.

I don't understand how displaying some text and images eats gigabytes of memory anyway. Web browsers had that capability since Netscape and we barely had megabytes to spare. We have thousandfolds more memory now and have gained... what, exactly?

I wanted to support Firefox as well, and would still prefer to do nothing related to my job on a browser that may be sharing it all because some some click-through EULA gave it permission.

But I can't use it anymore, because it swaps.

My work laptop has only 8GB, soldered. One day I was shocked to find the NVME had only 50% useful life left. Digging further, FF memory demand was causing paging, on a drive that was so fast I wasn't really bothered by it. Who knows how long that had gone on....

Edge doesn't appear to do this.

> That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to.

I’m all for people being confident and ambitious, and getting paid what they deserve. But just say “I work hard and have a lot of value in my organization”. Don’t try to evoke sympathy for your family. Do a good job, get paid your worth, end of story.

Why can't we have something like Linux in the web browser world? A web browser built by the community that does not depend on a big bag of money for its continued operation.

Surely writing an open-source operating system that drives the world cannot be harder than writing a web browser? Or am I missing something?

That's what Mozilla was originally. However, like many things, maintaining the very fast moving world of web is easier when you have a paid team, which leads to the business, which leads to corporate politics and thinking that a good CEO is worth multiple millions.

But Linux has a lot of contributions from developers payed to do so by many companies. Linux isn't made solely by hobby developers in their spare time.

Only about 15% of Linux is made by community. Rest is done by huge companies.

The project you’re talking about - a massive open-source project written mostly by the employees of huge companies - is Chromium. Chromium is written by two large companies, plus some consultants and such payed by smaller companies. Or at least, Chromium is closer to the Linux model than Firefox.

Firefox cut back on a number of potentially useful products. There are still some I'm the hopper. I'm bullish on the sanitizer api

https://www.google.com/amp/s/portswigger.net/daily-swig/amp/...

However, if they don't find a way to grow revenue, I don't think they'll ever realize their potential. Let it be a lesson, someone has to want to buy what you are selling, or it's just a hobby.

> Is it possible that some company with deep pockets forks Firefox and hires what it's left from its development team to further develop Firefox and improve its market share? Can it be in some big company's interest to push for web competition?

It seems like Firefox is getting more and more into bed with Cloudflare. They of course have their own interests like everyone else, but their interests are not the same as Google's interests. It seems like a development that is better than the current state of things where FF relies on Google for almost all of its revenue.

Marketshare: On desktop, they seem pretty stable at 8%. Mobile is a lost cause thanks to the duopoly who pre-install their own browsers.

Deep Pockets: Microsoft gave up on making their own browser. I doubt anyone else will get into this game.

And regarding some comments: Both on mobile and Desktop, FF has almost exclusively improved in recent years, for me. Look and feel is amazing (not a fan of the "compact" removal, though), speed has been great ever since they finally finished Quantum (which many vocal people seem to see as a huge decline, for me the performance made it unusable before).

Mozilla may pivot to VPN and network privacy stuff. But that won't save Firefox. I would rather have independent party on Chromium source, to balance large corporations, than half baked alternative engine.

They're positioning themselves as social justice activists, so I left.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...

I don't think it's as simple as Chrome or Firefox. There's also Safari. There's Chrome-based alternatives too such as Vivaldi and Brave which utilize the Chrome engine but takes steps to ensure your privacy. If the market doesn't want Firefox then why force it to stay in existence? Maybe Firefox should address why the market is rejecting it.

Safari isn't even comparable to Firefox in term of correctness or feature. Let alone chrome. Powerful web pages never work on it. It is just a poor ancient browser like ie from a web developer's view. The only reason keep developer waste time on workaround it is it is the only browser on iPhone

I really don't have any qualms with Safari personally, since the websites that usually don't work on Safari are the websites that are incredibly bloated with JS and shouldn't really be opened in any other browser. The sites using the shiniest features are the ones that I usually avoid anyway.

Safari isn't only buggy in JS. It also bugs in CSS __almost everywhere__ . If there is a squid game that ask you write a page displays as spec on safari without preview, I guess everyone will die.

> The only reason keep developer waste time on workaround it is it is the only browser on iPhone

That's an interesting perspective. Here's my take: developers don't build web sites for self-enjoyment, they build web sites for users. A lot of those users, especially users having the propensity to spend money, are going to access your web site with an iPhone - an iPhone running Safari. My conclusion therefore is if you're interested in making money then you're interested in Safari. It's a simple calculus for a simple man like me.

Here's another way to think of it - if you want your application to run on Apple's phone then you have to pay the 15% Apple tax. That's the price you pay to get access to their market. If you want your web site to run on Apple's phone then you have to pay the "Safari tax." Again, that's the price you pay to get access to their market. Is the price worth it? That's a business decision, based off ROI. Lots of people complain about it but obviously the ROI shows it's worth it.

For personal project, I won't support it. It is simply waste of time for no return.

For company project, I was paid to do it. So I did.

But the low quality browser implementation is pain in the ass to debug. If it didn't exist at first place. My life will be far easier.

Brave, I know it's a pain in the arse, but can you port your browser to Gecko? I'm on the fence switching to your product, but I'll do so in a heartbeat if it was based on Firefox's source code.

Even better, make an optional paid version that has all profits reinvested in the product. I'm ready to pay for a good browser.

Who is going to maintain Gecko if Mozilla implodes?

Brave. That's what I'm asking for.

You and no one else. No one wants Bitcoin spam in their browser except people with a monetary interest in Bitcoin spam, which is less of the financial markets than Firefox represents in the web browser market.

Why would a for profit company make their product less appealing out of idealism? Chromium works better than Firefox and the rest of the browsers. Even Microsoft gave up competing against it.

Brave doesn't have the money to do it.

Firefox is good. Chrome is good. At the end it is all about money, people and focus. Chrome has Google that has money from other revenue streams. Firefox money comes mostly from where? Google. What other reasonable revenue stream they have? Donations? Pocket? VPN? None, AFAIK. It is sad, but still my main browser.

I would use firefox focus as my daily driver if it was available for desktop. I use mainly firefox but I'm not comfortable with the many addons I need to install to make it private. I would prefer privacy features baked in.

I wish I could use Firefox. I had it on my MacBook until one day it stopped loading websites. So I tried to uninstall and reinstall it. Didn’t work. It errors every time I try to reinstall. So now I use safari which I don’t love.

I will keep using Firefox until something else supports treetabs and Firefox gets too annoying to use.

I also expect to need to do that switch in the next few years for the reasons OP states.

But there is treetabs (as an extension) in opera and chrome.

The last time I checked, the best vertical tabs extension for Chrome was Tab Outliner, which is vastly inferior to the Tree Style Tab extension for Firefox. (I mean no disrespect to the developer of Tab Outliner. They seem to have done the best they could do given how much less extensible Chrome is compared to Firefox.)

Saying that Chrome supports vertical tabs is like saying that VS Code supports editing Org files. It's technically true, but the Org mode extension for VS Code has like 1% or 2% of the features of Org mode for Emacs.

I think it's sad that highly extensible software like Firefox and Emacs have been surpassed in popularity by software that is so much less extensible. And I suppose this trend will continue as more people grow up with phones and tablets as their only computers.

I can’t know your use cases, but treetabs from opera fully solves all my needs (namely, [re-]grouping tabs, all functions from tab menu, nice styling, configurable close/newtsb behaviors in a “tree sense”). What exactly tab outliner cannot do that you are using daily in ff?

I'd like instead to see a new experimental browser.

Chrome does most of what I need , I want a ultra focused single tab/window MIT licensed browser. Build in an ad blocker too.

Best bet would be to turn it into an Electron competitor. Make it so that it becomes a better choice for desktop apps.

There was some work done a few years ago, but was cancelled afaik.

For anyone who's sick of Mozilla but loves Firefox, try librewolf, it's a fork of Firefox without the bs. Been using it for a while and it's awesome!

I can't trust them until they've replaced their leadership structure from the tippy top (Mitchell) with reputable people with good track records.

I run multiple browsers, especially across multiple devices. I wonder how many FF users do the same and whether that changes the use stats we see.

Every time I give Firefox a try I regret it. It can’t even reliably save to PDF. A feature I use all the time.

Tree-style tabs is the primary reason I am sticking to Firefox and not moving to another browser

Firefox would benefit highly from exploring new ideas, for example the dappy project https://dappy.tech/ which drops the DNS, in favor of a blockchain-based co-resolution mechanism. They are free to resolve dappy names in addition to DNS.

No. They didn't promote someone who funded anti-gay marriage propaganda to CEO and the comment sections of the internet never forgave them so basically every time they come up someone gets histrionic about that. You can't survive that kind of sustained, targeted vitriol.

I guess we got gay marriage but they took our Firefox and our open, non-corporate web as revenge.

Most of Eich-related vitriol I see is towards Eich and Brave, not from Brave people against Mozilla.

Brave->Moz arguments are mostly about how they've objectively fucked up, Moz->Brave arguments are much more hateful in tone.

The comments sections don't matter, direction and management does. And Brave is growing, Firefox is in freefall. Brave focuses on privacy, Mozilla on politics. Not much else there to it. Build your product, users will come.

LibreWolf

PaleMoon

Waterfox

Waterfox Classic

SeaMonkey

Download them. Install them. Test your sites with them. Recommend them to others.

Maybe it can be rebooted. Call it…Phoenix!

Their mobile offerings have been laughably bad over the years. Other open source projects have done the things they should have done, meanwhile.

KDE or Arch community can.

I'd like to see Firefox, Thunderbird, and LibreOffice combined. Install one, get the entire package.

I like it.

I think it is clear that Mozilla lost their relentless focus on their core mission a few years ago. The social justice / political theater you’ve alluded to is an indication of cultural rot. I often view activism in the workplace as a precursor to the fall of a business, because it very literally is the act of placing personal employee agendas ahead of customers and products. In this case, looking at that absurd and undeserved compensation for Baker, I also wonder if the political theater is actually a shield that helps distract people from a failing leadership.

Is it really failing?

Mozilla is funded by Google.

As a puppet to show that they don’t have a monopoly.

I wouldn’t call it success.

And if Google wishes to impose a new web standard, Mozilla will be happy to oblige.

MS funded Apple like that back when Steve Jobs took over. It worked well for all parties concerned.

Looking at the development of its market share, yes, it is absolutely failing.

I am typing this on Firefox, but, ironically, this is caused by the fact that I am fairly conservative and I only abandon apps if they drive me absolutely crazy.

Regarding your comment about a cultural rot, I sometimes wonder if this is the case for governments, too.

It seems to me that as the count of various causes that some government adapts as its own rises, the overall quality of services tends to go down. Perhaps the total # of competing interests overwhelms the ability of the top level politicians to coordinate. Perhaps it goes down to just not having enough money and reliable people for everything.

Just a small observation. Austria-Hungary, a long defunct empire that ruled the place that I now live in, was considered fairly bureaucratic and ossified, and somewhat corrupt and inefficient. Comedians routinely satirized it as a clumsy state.

But it was able to keep the city streets cleaner than now and if you read up on various projects, they moved extremely fast compared to today's standards. Planning and building a tram track in several months was absolutely normal. Nowadays the planning and building takes several years.

Seriously, Mozilla has been sliding steadily downhill for the last 5 to 10 years. Mostly because of people (like Baker) who think that they're 1 level below being holy (if not actually holy). Get off your fucking high horse and smell the concrete. The only thing keeping Firefox a thing is people refusing to use Google shit (and I'm one of them).

What we need is a proper community effort to fork (and say fuck-you-and-fuck-off) to Mozilla people. Take your social justice and virtue signaling bullshit elsewhere. We need the Brave for Gecko basically.

And please for fuck's sake, DON'T MAKE IT ALL ABOUT FUCKING CRYPTO.

PS: Is it me or does it seem like NGOs that dabble in politics (or as a fellow commentator called it; political theater) are run extremely horribly and basically verging on a scam at this point?

Unfortunately “the community” will not provide $900M worth of full-time engineer development to a web browser fork. Even if you think mis-management wasted half of that - do you think the community has $450M with of “free effort” around and that’s enough to do a better job than current Mozilla employees working on Firefox?

There are plenty of aging Firefox forks like Pale Moon withering away with years old Firefox source and open security vulnerabilities.

The more we find out about Chrome’s tracking features in a cookie-less world, the more FF will gain adoption (again). Reviving FF requires exposing Chrome and Google.

The Mozilla Foundation needs to be a for the greater good political foundation, give up the Firefox tech and lobby for the Chromium rendering technology to become a standard and the Chromium team to become a global public utility under the W3 or similar. Every browser manufacturer then licences and customises the experience around that rendering technology.

Having a single rendering technology to support would be preferential but it's direction can't be controlled by just Google.

Of course this would then mean the end of the Foundation and Mitchell Baker's $3m per year so will never happen.

> Having a single rendering technology to support would be preferential

Really? I prefer there are a few, but mostly compatible techs in that space. This is the VM that runs almost all desktop (client) software these days. Having only one implementation would IMHO be a disaster.

Java has only single dominant JVM, but in several flavours. It is doing fine.

JVM has many competing implementations[1]. Also it is not used by clueless end users, but by tech workers. They will protest is JVM gets "phone home" "features" and other bloatware privacy-killing crap.

End users of browsers do not have this insight into their tools.

Yes, Oracle's JVM is dominant (but not on Android, which is a huge installed base). So is Chrome in browser land. Still good that Java has many, and FF exists.

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

Same with the Linux kernel and it's got a larger codebase than Chromium.

I hear this argument, and it makes sense...

But a lot of us still pucker up if you mention the word "IE6" and we never want to risk going down that path again. :)

There's a balance between diversity and monopoly that can be struck.

If there is just one implementation, is it really a standard anymore?

In my opinion if there is only chromium left it is the sign that http/html/css/js needs to be replace with something new that would allow healthy competition without being funded by a multi billion company

That's EXACTLY what GP is talking about, Chromium being transferred to the W3C and out of Google's hands. Or did I also misread it?

Yes you are correct - I did mean that Chromium rendering technology and team would be transferred to the W3 (or equivalent) and out of Google's hands.

> Having a single rendering technology to support would be preferential

I disagree. Monocultures never work out well for users.

IMHO the fact that we are moving towards one reliable engine is not a bad thing per se. I think it's a step in the right direction, as long as those contributing to chromium do have a saying in how it should move forward.

As a full stack developer I've battled so many times with weird implementations or unexpected behaviors across browsers that knowing that I can assume that the user will be on chromium is just piece of mind.

As a counter argument I don't think that monopolization of internet standards will be a risk. As long as chromium stays open source and anyone can fork it, I think that the risk of monopolization on internet is not on how web pages are rendered, but rather on how users reach content.

I think the latter is the real problem and I don't think that battling chromium is any good at that regard. Money would be much better spent on developing new ways to allow discoverability of content beyond Google, walled app stores and alikes.

Being able to fork is great in theory, until you realize how few players in the world can afford to not stay in sync with the mainline branch and bankroll their own ongoing development (even those who can afford it have thrown in the towel and fell in line, e.g. Microsoft's abandonment of Edge's old engine).

> As a full stack developer I've battled so many times with weird implementations or unexpected behaviors across browsers that knowing that I can assume that the user will be on chromium is just piece of mind.

If webkit/blink is the only game in town, web standards will become standards only in name. The weird implementations and unexpected behaviors you see on webkit/blink will become the de-facto standards.

Why would webkit/blink developers (or the companies who fund them) bother with the inconvenience of the process of standardization and involve multiple stakeholders and collect feedback from users when they can just ship new web features or break existing ones when it's in their best interest?

You can already see this playing out with webkit and Apple's neutering of web capabilities on iOS in the interest of keeping it from becoming a threat to its walled garden.

With all that said, we're already on the collision course to this world, given the prevailing sentiment in the web community is to build only for webkit/blink and leave other engines as an afterthought due to their low market share, resulting in a vicious self-reinforcing cycle. Like the OP I'm not sure if there's much that can be done about it at this point.

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