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Comment by finite_jest | Hacker News Reader

Well, we should remember that Mozilla is essentially funded by Google. [1] I think they are trying to remedy that a little bit by selling VPNs, but that's probably not gonna work.

Brave is probably a better option if you want to "drop out". Unlike Firefox, it is not a dying browser, and it's monthly active users are increasing: https://brave.com/36m-mau/. They do have a cryptocurrency for relatively privacy-respecting ads thing (Brave Rewards), but you can easily opt out of that. (Also, we should not be puritans about this, developers have to eat too)

It is still based on Chromium. But that's probably more of a plus for the typical user who cares more about websites working correctly than browser diversity.

[1]: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/041315/how-m...

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Your only criticism of Firefox is that they get money from selling the default search engine spot to Google, but then your alternative recommendation is a browser that's fundamentally dependent on Google?

The day Google stops open-sourcing Chromium or start delaying public releases, or when another privacy-busting oopsie slips in the open-source codebase and Brave devs miss it, Brave is done. They don't have the manpower or experience to develop an actual browser.

The day Google stops buying Firefox's ad space, Mozilla has hundreds of alternative options for generating revenue.

That is not my only criticism, but it was the most relevant one. Also, the issue is not that they get money from Google, it is that it is almost all of their revenue. I think Brave has a fair chance of surviving without Google, though your point of their lack of manpower stands.

I don't think Firefox will have many good options for generating revenue, given that they have lost 46 million users since 2018 [1] (while paying something like $2M to the chair [2]). And the only effort they made in that direction was is to become a VPN reseller [3].

[1]: https://www.techspot.com/news/90692-firefox-loses-46-million...

[2]: https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html

[3]: https://mullvad.net/en/help/partnerships-and-resellers/

Lost marketshare is the silliest criticism of them all I think. What to change that? Use it and tell your friends, that simple. It's like a meta-criticism, same as CEO salary. The quality of the product has only increased. Just in the last version they started rolling out Fission and added form filling for PDFs.

Lost marketshare isn't a criticism. It's an indication that every minute of the day, more current firefox are annoyed and leave than non-firefox users are attracted to install.

CEO pay also isn't a criticism of the browser, its an indication that the organization either rewards failure, or sees its current situation as success. Either way, it doesn't bode well for the future.

Lost marketshare is an observation. We can speculate all day.

Did Firefox lose marketshare because of:

Google intentionally making their sites worse in Firefox?

The lack of multiprocess for so long?

No support for Google Earth until 2020?

Google shipping a polyfill that made YouTube.com 3x slower in Firefox and Safari for years?

The move to WebExtensions happening too late, resulting in burnout and lost interest from the extension community because they had already ported their extensions to e10s?

Slack going out of their way to use a non-standard SDP format thats only supported in Chrome, resulting in no other browsing supporting video calls?

Microsoft Teams also does the same thing.

Mobile overtaking desktop, where Chrome reigns supreme as a platform default?

I don't think it's such a big contributor, but there are also regular and dedicated Brave shills in many tech communities which traditionally favored Firefox (not necessarily funded by Brave directly, they may be independently incentivized from holding the crypto token BAT).

Or they are just former Firefox users who went where the previous CEO from Firefox went, after he got kicked out from Mozilla for non-technical reasons in 2014.

Because it seems whatever technical “vision” Mozilla used to have back then have more or less vanished, while Brave seems to have quite a bit of it.

Edit: Back in the days I loved Firefox because it was made by the Mozilla foundation, which stood for things I found important, which I trusted and “loved”.

Today Firefox is still made by the Mozilla foundation, but that entity has little in common with the Mozilla of old besides the name.

In that regard holding on to Firefox “because Mozilla” is IMO largely holding on to a delusion or a lie.

I was myself in denial over this for a long period of time before I realized that my “love” for Firefox was no longer real. I was just using it out of a misplaced sense of obligation, not because it genuinely made me excited, like it used to back in the days.

Mozilla failed in its mission. Let’s hope someone else can find their place.

I do not appreciate you calling my criticism silly, it certainly is sign of comparative decline if people don't want to use their software anymore on that scale. (of-course there are other factors; e.g. other browsers being the OS default but that's hardly new) And that wasn't even my argument, I was saying that they won't have many options for revenue (or raising funds) with declining market share.

I haven't been really using Firefox recently, so there may have been some improvements I have missed. But they have made mistakes and missed opportunities. They probably should have made ad-blocking the default (same as Brave does), but can they do that if they are funded by Google? They probably should't have ended support for legacy add-ons. They probably shouldn't have freaked out their privacy-conscious part of their user-base by that Mr. Robot promo...

Cosmetic adblocking shouldn't be included in browsers, no. It doesn't scale and is easy to break. It just puts a gigantic target on your back.

Firefox already blocks a lot of ads by blocking tracking scripts. Including a cosmetic adblocker like Brave would lead to worse compat and broken experiences.

> They probably should't have ended support for legacy add-ons.

They should've actually. Firefox was a single-process mess for years with poor sandboxing, because Mozilla was scared of breaking everyones add-ons. The move to WebExtensions was the right one, if a bit late. If the whiners got their way, every extension would be breaking right now because of Fission. The old model also had no permission system.

Can we attribute some level of lost market share to a lack of cultural knowledge of the benefits of FireFox (for example my friends aren’t aware ublock origin, superior to adblockers available on chrome, is available in Firefox) and also that Google intentionally makes their products run shittier on Firefox in an anticompetitive measure?

To be fair uBlock Origin is also available for Chromium and Google products run like shit on Chrome too.

> The day Google stops buying Firefox's ad space, Mozilla has hundreds of alternative options for generating revenue.

Then it's really bizarre that they leave all of this money on the table, seeing as the money they get from google only requires setting a single variable. Maybe it's not actually true.

Google pay the most, but the are alternatives if that falls through, nothing being left on the table.

The compat story for Brave and Firefox is about the same. Tracking protections in Brave broke sites more often than Firefox when I used it for a few months, and there was a recent incident where iCloud was being blocked in Brave.

And despite what a lot of people say, engine interop is only getting better thanks to initiatives like Compat2021. More sites work well under Gecko than ever before. Anyone remember IE6 era where Firefox needed bug-for-bug compatibility? It's been worse folks.

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