Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
batsov.com
batsov.com
Two things that I think are worth calling out:
1. In many ways Apple's anti-competitive behaviour on iOS/iPadOS is a blessing. It's one of the few things that keep Chromium's dominance in check. Of course, it's not great that Apple are stifling innovation like this, but consider the alternative: Chromium dominance on all platforms.
2. Why it's worth caring about this at all? So what if Chromium is the only engine, it would make things easier for developers after all. To this I say, go read some of the discussions in standard bodies(for example about FLoC). Engineers from Apple and Mozilla are largely our bastion against Google's harmful proposals for the web. Pushback from Apple and Mozilla are only relevant as long as they have market share to speak of. The recent lawsuit against Google(summary[0]) by many US states should be extremely worrying to anyone that cares about the open web and it should make handing over any more control to Google a terrifying prospect.
Mozilla maintains a list[1] of their positions on various standard suggestions that is also a useful resource.
0: https://twitter.com/fasterthanlime/status/145205393819534131...
Mozilla existing (and shipping spyware, just like Chrome) doesn't really do anything to stop any of that.
> 1. In many ways Apple's anti-competitive behaviour on iOS/iPadOS is a blessing. It's one of the few things that keep Chromium's dominance in check. Of course, it's not great that Apple are stifling innovation like this, but consider the alternative: Chromium dominance on all platforms.
I wish all phone manufacturers actually understood that
/me glances at my Pixel 3XL with 3430 mAh batt
I switched to a used iPhone and was bummed my 8+ had a "small" ~2400mah battery compared to my Android phone, which was 3100. Then I actually started using it. Even though the Android phone had an OLED screen, it would absolutely melt the battery.
I have so little "battery charge anxiety" now it's not even funny. I don't even bother to charge it above 80-85% most of the time...and the battery life estimator says the battery is down to 82% capacity.
If apple actually went up on their battery sizing they could easily achieve Monday to Friday battery life on something like the iPhone SE.
Current phone has 12GB of RAM which is a bit extreme given I rarely seem to use more than 6GB. More Sub $250 phones are creeping up to 6GB which makes for a nicer experience for those on tight budgets.
Now if only we could solve the lack of updates most Android phones experience.
Why people think Android=Pixel is beyond me.
Whether they do have ulterior motives or not, the effect is that innovation is stifled.
Sounds like you're setting a double standard when Apple also runs ads on their devices[0] as well as selling their user's private data[1]
[0] https://stevestreza.com/2020/02/17/ios-adware/
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2021/11/26/apple-italy-fine-user-d...
Anyone who claims those are equivalent to what is going on on the web is being dishonest.
Neither of the articles even claims that Apple was “selling user data”, so that’s a straight up lie.
I can’t help you if you are going to post links that don’t say what you claim they are saying.
Why did Spotify and Pax Labs make PWAs again?
Spotify creates native apps for everything. "PWA" aka the web player is there for devices that don't have a native app yet, and for embedding.
Yes, I know the circumstances are different, but I do think it's ironic.
or it was just the typical double speak from Jobs until they were able to launch their walled garden. Anyone else remember when iPhone users were told they were holding the iPhone wrong during Antennagate? [0]
[0] https://www.engadget.com/2010-06-24-apple-responds-over-ipho...
>the effect is that innovation is stifled.
There's no such thing as PWA. There are several dozen of standards, and any combination of them is called PWAs by various people. And quite a few of those combinations work perfectly fine on Apple devices.
What's worse is that too many of those standards are extremely badly designed (service workers) or are pure Chrome-only "standards" rammed through standards bodies (Bluetooth, HID etc.).
They just don't get their cut from it, so, not a priority.
--- start quote ---
Talking about mobile phones and tablets, a Progressive Web App is installable with offline capabilities using the following browsers and app stores:
- iOS and iPadOS
Safari (since iOS 11.3), AppStore (since iOS/iPadOS 14, with some limitations), Mobile Configuration for enterprise distribution.
--- end quote ---
I disagree with this word gymnastics, it is Apple-ogism. It takes just a brief look at other decisions they've made to easily see that it is about user lock-in which fits in with their general philosophy. It is not great that they are stifling innovation at all, conflating it with browser dominance is a separate thing.
Remember that Apple doesn't allow other web browser engines in any application. Imagine if an Electron application on iOS just decided to ship with it's entire, own browser engine. We would have super-bloated apps like our desktops, and if a security flaw was found, good luck getting all those apps to update.
In a way, Apple knows that allowing other browser engines means:
1. Chromium-based browsers just increase their monopoly, Firefox continues stagnation by almost all odds
2. The Electron mess on our desktops will claim new territory on our phones and bring security problems with it
Not very appealing. Limiting competition? When your only realistic competition is Chrome with it's 80%+ dominance, I don't think a regulator would have a problem with that.
I'll admit, though, I'm in the "I really want native Mac apps" minority :)
People only really get active about bad divergence from expectations.
People do voice very positive opinions, but nobody really voices indifference.
Further, even extremely opinionated people are usually only opinionated about a few things. Most people are indifferent to most things.
Plus, security is somewhat less of a concern when the application only accesses a limited site and isn’t for general purpose browsing for untrusted sites.
But they can put those updates out whenever they want, so that doesn't go against the security argument at all.
Why would this be a believable excuse? you can install a Firefox skin of WebKit on iOS and this skin could maybe be terrible on battery usage. A good default browser like on laptops is good enough for battery, people who care about it will use Safari, the obvious reason Apple is doing this is to prevent competition, so if Apple fucks with WebGL then you can't have say a WebGL based mobile game that would go around the Apple Store.
Apple sets the rules for its own products. Why didn't "open" win? Why for whatever reason is Apple still #1 in the mobile space?
Perhaps users agree with Apple.
I can write a browser using WXWebView that wastes battery outside the rendering code, and Apple won't stop me. I can write a maps application that wastes battery, and Apple won't stop me. But if I write a web rendering engine that wastes battery, I have crossed a line? A line that is so important not to cross that Apple won't even let me try to write a rendering engine that uses less battery than WXWebView? I cannot believe that anybody would buy that argument without marketing distorting their thoughts.
Ah yes. Everything can be explained by marketing, and marketing alone. Poor, poor Google, and Samsung, and so on, who are struggling to find the money and the power to make people buy Android phones through the power of marketing.
Perhaps, just perhaps, I'm going on a limb here, Apple actually makes a phone that people want?
Apple has been a marketing-driven company for decades now and is better at it than any other tech company by a country mile. It's why they bought Beats, not for their technology, but for their marketing prowess. The other companies you listed pick features that are better on their devices to market. Apple's marketing department figured out long ago that no such restriction is necessary.
Right now, in this very thread I see no such discussion.
> They are also worse for privacy
> They are worse for security
Worse than what?
> The shoe fits.
It doesn't fit, not really. It's gross incompetence and ignorance to explain everything by marketing and people being stupid.
Because what you're saying, is that a good chunk of people on HN are stupid and are "duped by marketing". That I am stupid and am duped by marketing. However, I've seen and tried the alternatives, and I found them lacking.
Look at the first comment you replied to. It's about how Apple restricts how you can browse the web for user lock in but has convinced people it is for the sake of their battery.
> Worse than what?
Worse than Pixels, Android One devices, and ChromeOS devices currently. There are several open source focused devices in the pipeline that have better security design than iOS devices as well but are not yet ready.
> That I am stupid and am duped by marketing.
I did not say you are stupid. I said that people are duped by marketing, and I gave examples. I even pointed out that technologists can be duped, and they are smart in the field they were duped in. Apple's marketing department is smart, and Apple's other employees are smart for supporting their efforts, though when they get caught parroting marketing talking points that are clearly false, it can be embarrassing.
Ah yes. That comment is obviously wrong, and your comment is obviously correct because you are right, and the other person is wrong. Is that how this works?
> Worse than Pixels, ... and ChromeOS devices currently.
So. Pixels and ChromeOS are made by Google. You know,
- 80% of Google's money comes from online advertising. And this advertising relies on far-reaching privacy invasive tracking
- Google's own employees admitted that they have no idea how to turn the various methods of tracking off. Among others location tracking is so intertwined in Google's products that it's impossible to turn it off at all
Yup. These devices are surely worse for privacy than iPhones which go as far as limit tracking at the OS level.
Can't attest to the devices current security. Given Android's spotty track record of updates, I wouldn't hold my breath for AndroidOne. Oh. And Pixel 3 which was released in the ancient times of exactly three years ago will no longer receive any updates. So yeah.
Meanwhile the iOS 15 which was released this September is available on iPhone SE from 5 years ago.
> There are several open source focused devices in the pipeline that have better ... but are not yet ready.
I yes. Imaginary non-existent phones. In that case I have a phone that's better than any of those, and better than iPhone, and better than Pixel 6. Care to buy one?
> I said that people are duped by marketing, and I gave examples.
No, you didn't. What you did, was make overly broad statements that are either pure speculation, or can be easily refuted.
Read my comment in the context of what it was responding to. You seem to have grossly misunderstood it.
> Yup. These devices are surely worse for privacy than iPhones which go as far as limit tracking at the OS level.
iOS devices do not support end-to-end encryption of message backups, do not support allowing a user to run apps on the device without telling Apple, and do not support getting a user's location without telling Apple. Despite what you may infer about each company's motives, each company's actual actions show a very clear difference in privacy on their devices. Apple is motivated to make money by any means it has available. If it can make money by charging users more for devices and violating their privacy by marketing their devices as being better for privacy, it will do so, and we can see that this is happening right now.
> Meanwhile the iOS 15 which was released this September is available on iPhone SE from 5 years ago.
So you admit an iPhone from 6 years ago is insecure. The fact that only recent devices from either vendor are secure is the same for both, so a user who cares about security will only use a recent device. The difference is that recent devices from Google are far more secure than recent devices from Apple.
> Imaginary non-existent phones.
I was just illustrating that there will be more options in the future. Apple knows about the security features offered by current and future devices but despite that hasn't tried to match those security features and instead contents itself with merely marketing security.
> No, you didn't.
Read my first post. You still haven't refuted it.
I've read the comment an the context. It says "that person is wrong, only my opinion on what Apple does its right"
> Despite what you may infer about each company's motives, each company's actual actions show a very clear difference in privacy on their devices.
Indeed it does. And Google is many magnitudes more invasive than Apple. Including, but not limited to "applications which have location tracking disabled can use location tracking information from another Google application" https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...
> So you admit an iPhone from 6 years ago is insecure. The fact that only recent devices from either vendor are secure is the same for both
It's emphatically not the same for both:
- Apple: support phones for up to five years.
- Google: supports its own "flagship phones" only for three years.
HN poster: see, they are the same.
> I was just illustrating that there will be more options in the future.
Once again: I'm not interested in fantasies and comparisons against non-existent phones.
> Read my first post. You still haven't refuted it.
I mean, your approach to argument is "I'm right just because I say is right", so nothing will dissuade you.
This is pointless. So, adieu.
Where does it say that? I'll repeat the context right here:
"> Right now, in this very thread I see no such discussion."
The context is that I was pointing out that there is a discussion about what you claimed there was no discussion about. Nowhere did I say that I'm right and they're wrong (though it remains the case that none of my points have been refuted).
> applications which have location tracking disabled can use location tracking information from another Google application
Google does this on iOS as well. In respect to what information applications can share on the server, there is no difference between iOS and Android. The privacy differences that do exist between the platforms are the ones I listed, where iOS does a lot of data collection that cannot be disabled, while Android has no such problem.
> HN poster: see, they are the same.
A user who cares about security only cares about which device provides usable security. None of the Apple devices do. All the Pixels that are receiving security updates do. The choice for a user who cares about security isn't between some five year old iOS devices that provide limited security and other five year old Android devices that provide limited security (worse system updates but better application updates) but between any iOS device (including recent ones) that provide limited security and recent Pixel devices that provide superior security. How long they continue to receive system updates (or application updates) beyond replacement time is meaningless.
> I mean, your approach to argument is "I'm right just because I say is right",
I provided reasons why the battery excuse doesn't make sense. Why do you keep pretending I haven't given any reasons?
So I don't buy any of the Apple's excuses when they actively cause anti-competitive harm.
It started as a Konqueror fork mostly because Jobs wanted a browser on OS X and Ken was initially tasked with it (back then the mac had IE for mac). One person writing a browser from scratch even back then seemed an impossible challenge so he took a look to see if he could use most of Konqueror as an initial starting base.
[0]: The book has some interesting stories, but I find it hard to recommend because it's weirdly written for an extremely non-technical audience (using grandma like analogies to explain basic concepts, the analogies are so basic they do more to obscure than explain - e.g. the filesystem is like a 'cabinet for files'). It doesn't often get into the weeds of the interesting technical details - which is disappointing since 90% of readers are probably technical. The stories in it are still good though and Ken has a lot of insight into the iPhone development story since he was there.
for better or worse, Apple has been the single biggest driver towards privacy enhancement.
There's new headlines about this every few months.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/privacy-security/privacy-analysi...
https://www.howtogeek.com/756338/mozilla-says-chromes-latest...
There's also this:
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/04/latest-firefox-roll...
https://twitter.com/__jakub_g/status/1365400306767581185
And the top comment of the hacker news thread associated with that last link?
>My friend who works in an adtech company:
>"Protip: Use Firefox instead of Chrome. We get very little data from Firefox users"
Having your main competitor as your main customer is not a good position to be in for any company.
It's also fun to watch people complain about the Google situation and then, 10 seconds later, complain about "side projects" which are actual independent sources of revenue.
I don't envy the market dynamics of their situation. Selling FOSS is hard to begin with, and it's even harder in a market that is utterly commoditized by players 1000x larger than yourself, and it's even harder if your niche (privacy) rules out nearly every funding option apart from the search deals with Google.
10M Firefox users paying $50/year would yield same amount of revenue as 200M users monetized with a Google deal. Now, would 5% Firefox users convert to paid users is a different question. If not, then perhaps Firefox as a product (or as an idea) may not be as good. But I think they would, and even if the percentage is lower, it would at least set Firefox free. And that is a good position to be in for any company.
Opera was paid at one point, they lost the competition with free alternatives.
Paid browsers are a concept that has been and gone, and if Mozilla attempted to bring the idea back, it would probably be the stupidest decision Mozilla had ever made. They have made plenty of stupid decisions, but nothing so far has utterly destroyed their market share instantly, this would.
In the end, the funding model alone doesn't define how a company acts. It matters, and is certainly a threat to Mozilla's neutrality, but Mozilla tends to hire developers who care about thier mission, they tend towards openness in their processes. Both these things protect Mozilla from becoming a Google shill despite their funding process.
If Mozilla ever backed Google on the wrong decision, I trust that many Mozilla devs would push back - either internally or by going to the press, even if it cost their jobs. Being a particularly successful open source project tends to select for a certain kind of employee.
Apple devs don't have this advantage - Apple has a culture of secrecy (for prefectly understandable buisness reasons, they don't like leaks), this means Apple's decisions are much harder to monitor, and Apple devs are much less likely to fight internal decisions that hurt the web as a whole.
That said, Apple does have its own incentives to fight Google which are also legitimate - a more independent funding model, and an intense dislike within their internal culture of relying on external vendors for their software and apis. There's a reason Apple develop their own browser, their own compiler, their own dev environment, their own everything. There's a history to that, Apple have been bitten by externally controlled systems, so they are very unlikely to jump to Chrome, probably even moreso than Mozilla.
The point is, both Mozilla and Apple have good and bad elements to their continued position providing alternative browser engines, both are strong in their own ways, and we're vastly better off with the benefits of both than with just 1 of them, either would be a major loss.
The only way that works is if they abandoned the entire Firefox codebase and made another Chrome clone.
Even in their diminished state they still have 220 million monthly-active-users. With only 10 million, they'd have no leverage in the web standards groups, and no leverage with web developers. The Blink monoculture would be well and truly complete.
Plus I'd bet hard cash that even most HN readers wouldn't pay $50 a year for a web browser. Good luck finding 10 million.
I disagree. 50M people (including myself) already pay $12/mo ($144/year) for YouTube Premium [1], basically so they do not see the ads even though a completely free alternative is available. (this also tells us you need just one 'killer' feature)
And a browser, executed right, is arguably a much more valuable product. It is where we spend most of our day in. It is what we use to work and create value for companies we work at. So 10M people at $5/mo should not require such a stretch of imagination. The only question is is Firefox that good as a browser right now, and what would need to change?
Besides what is the alternative for Firefox? What good does its leverage in web standards group bring it? Even at the price of free, it is losing tens of millions of users every year and the death spiral of user attrition will drive its market share to the ground eventually. It clearly signals a need for a radical turn.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/2/22654318/youtube-50-millio...
This is a competitive market. There are reasonable alternatives. Cost to switch is low. Economics 101 (literally that class!) says that the price in that situation is going to be based on competition (for the companies/producers that survive), and the price of the competition is $0.
(It's actually not, you're paying with slightly less personal data for Firefox than the alternatives, and there are substantial externalities like the effects of monoculture, but none of that is going to change the big picture.)
Not only are you not going to get a critical mass of people willing to pay, but also those who are willing to pay will feel massively entitled, and will abandon your product when it changes in any way they don't like.
The only way to make it work would be to provide some value that cannot be replicated by competitors, in order to add switching costs and reduce the fidelity of alternatives. And for that to be relevant to Mozilla, it must also be compatible with the mission of an open web.
Good luck with that.
I believe I am arguing that we underestimate the willingness of people to part with their money when there is a right product.
> Cost to switch is low. Economics 101 (literally that class!) says that the price in that situation is going to be based on competition (for the companies/producers that survive), and the price of the competition is $0.
Not sure whether we live in different times, but isn't the same with YouTube? The cost to watch is $0, and you can even watch it ad-free for $0 with a free ad-blocker, yet 50 million people still choose to pay $12/mo for YouTube Premium.
>Not only are you not going to get a critical mass of people willing to pay,
I think you are speculating, so let me speculate as well. If Firefox does not make a radical turn, it will become irrelevant in 3-5 years.
> but also those who are willing to pay will feel massively entitled
With YT Premium, the one thing I request is that the one killer feature that I pay for (no ads) works reliably. So yes, I can agree that users will feel massively entitled to get what they paid for, but that is up to Firefox to define and control.
> The only way to make it work would be to provide some value that cannot be replicated by competitors
I agree! Firefox lost a lot of the product innovation and leadership mindset it had until roughly 2010-2011. Bringing that back would help (and the right business model could do it).
> And for that to be relevant to Mozilla, it must also be compatible with the mission of an open web.
How does making Google a default search engine in Firefox help that mission? Firefox should do it because it believes Google is the best default choice for their users and the open web, not because it gets paid to do it (if compatibility with its mission is what Firefox is striving for).
Isn't that more about information asymmetry than value proposition?
Blocking YouTube ads with the appropriate add-ons for free isn't necessarily that well known, except among the tech savvy.
While some tech savvy folks may choose to pay rather than use such add-ons is one thing, but the "great unwashed masses" don't have information about such add-ons, perhaps encouraging them to purchase something they wouldn't purchase if there was more perfect information availability in the market.
I'm not claiming that's the case, but it seems a reasonable supposition.
An excellent point. I mostly watch YouTube on a computer with ad blockers, and I also have a DNS-based ad blocker (Pi-hole). And the combination does block many ads, but other add-ons are required to block the video window ads as well.
I don't use YouTube enough on non-general purpose computer devices enough to care about that. As such, I didn't consider that as a reason to pay for Premium.
Thanks for expanding my view on this!
That said, apparently ~42% of global users[0] block some ads.
Given that there are ~4.6Bn users[1], of which ~1.9Bn sometimes use ad blockers, some 2.7Bn users don't use ad blockers at all.
50 million (although that includes YouTube Music subscribers as well as YouTube Premium) subscribers is a little more than 1% of total users and ~2% of users who don't use ad blockers.
I'd also point out that nations with higher per-capita incomes tend to use ad blockers less, which implies (again, I'm not claiming this to be true) that they may be less knowledgeable about ad blocking technologies.
It's not clear what the global distribution of YouTube Premium subscribers looks like, but it's reasonable to think that those with higher (and presumably more disposable) incomes would be more likely to pay for such a subscription.
I don't have any data to back up my hypothesis, as I can't find any published research into the tech savvy of those who pay for YouTube Premium vs. those who don't.
Even more, just because the absolute numbers (50,000,00 subscribers which includes 30,000,000 YouTube Music, and 2+ or 7+ billion in revenue, depending on if you count the 30,000,000 YouTube Music subscribers) are large, given the total population, they are a tiny group.
How many people use add-ons to block youtube ads? Who knows? Possibly Google/Alphabet, but they certainly aren't going to talk about that.
I want to be crystal clear that I'm not saying you're wrong, but the idea that there's a lack of information driving subscriptions to get ad-free youtube is certainly a reasonable one.
Perhaps that's a good topic for a master's thesis in psychology? Since I'm not a marketer or a grad student in Psychology, that wouldn't be something I'd do. Hopefully someone will.
[0] https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users
[1] https://www.oberlo.com/blog/internet-statistics
Edit: Added the missing link.
A reasonable point. And I don't necessarily disagree.
Although "Video of stuff I want to look at" may be more compelling than "some icon I click to view the intarwebz," when they see essentially the same thing unless they take specific steps to block ads/tracking.
And that goes double for Android phone users.
My hypothesis was orthogonal to your thesis, but I agree that the data I outlined certainly supports yours.
Yes, because de facto YouTube has no viable competitors, so I am not feeling that analogy.
If I want to watch YouTube videos specifically, I have to go to YouTube. People don't use YouTube because they necessarily like the experience of how YT does things, they use it because it has the content users want. Browsers aren't like that. Both Firefox and Chrome on a high level provide the exact same content.
Sidenote: adblockers and such are nice, but, as others have pointed out alread, non-tech savvy users won't bother. And the situation on mobile devices and smart TVs (which account for a growing percentage of YT consumption) have a pretty non-simple adblocker story (or non-existent, if we are talking about using native YT app on a mobile network).
They could build themselves to be the independent alternative to conglomerates.
They could be the alternative, offering services above and beyond the browser. I think their VPN service has been a modest success for them. I'd love for them to have moved into the same space as say, 1Password and other cloud based services of that nature. They are the independent 3rd party that works on all platforms. That is what I think their position could be. They're a trusted entity with known good track record of caring about privacy and their users, why wouldn't they move into markets where its a natural extension of this is a win?
The referral code thing was a bug that got fixed - the intended function was Firefox Suggest-esque sponsored links from a local directory when you typed a word but not a complete url, eg. "binance". The bug was that it gave you a suggestion for complete, legit urls too (eg. "binance.us") and put the suggestion at the top. The bug was fixed to make the feature work as intended, and the feature is turned off by default.
I don't totally understand how people think Brave is against ad-tech, when it is very much an ad-tech company making money primarily from ads, and secondly from its crypto ownership in BAT.
Brave does a lot of user tracking, but it says it anonymizes it, which hopefully it does, but it still tracks all your behavior.
It is still a cool model, but very much ad-tech and ad-based.
As far as web ads go, a lot of people's objection to them is not seeing ads (though the ads themselves can obviously be very invasive and bothersome), but to things like tracking and fingerprinting, which the company is adamantly against. The attempt is to have ads, but also have privacy, which IMO is the correct move. It's not like we can run everything on subscriptions.
> Brave replaces the ads from the website with its own ads.
This is not exactly true. They have separate functions for an adblocker, an ad delivery system that's entirely separate from the websites you visit, and a tipping system for sending BAT to creators.
I'm not terribly fond of crypto, so I use Brave as essentially a degoogled Chromium with a built-in adblocker that won't get fucked over by Manifest v3 (since it's not an extension) and is available on mobile, and who run an independent end to end encrypted sync service. It's pretty nice.
And what does the world look like if Brave "wins" (meaning becoming Google size)? Still ads everywhere, just Brave gets to pick them.
Worth noting is that people would run ad-blockers even if all ads in the world are privacy-respecting. Users simply do not want ads on the web pages and eating the bandwidth.
> if Brave "wins" […] Still ads everywhere, just Brave gets to pick them
No, Google’s business model is gathering humanity’s largest hoard of data and monetizing that through targeted advertizing. Brave doesn’t show any of their most traditional ads unless the user explicitly opts in, and then it doesn’t come with comparable tracking.
I have what looks like a promotion for Crypto.com, Binance, Gemini and FTX.us in Brave browser, on default settings even though I never turned them on. For few of these I never heard and I certainly do not have any interest in crypto. Not sure why these would even belong in a web browser on default settings unless there is some kind of a deal/partnership going on?
Both Google and Brave have the same business model. They make money when a user clicks on an ad.
The execution may differ and maybe only because Brave is still new and relatively small and did not feel the same kind of shareholder pressure Google withstood for the last 20 years. That is why I said, imagine a world in which Brave "won". It would not be the same company it is now (compare Google from 2000 to Google today).
Brave Talk and Brave News are ad-funded as well but I haven't tried them so it's hard to say.
An even better "funding model" would be a non-profit entity with no additional agenda beyond providing an anti-adtech browser to the world. I'm guessing that there are a lot of people who would donate their time and money to thwarting the overreach of adtech.
Mozilla has had five fold increases in CEO compensation over the last fifteen years, as Firefox market share has gone down six fold. Firefox had ~30% market share in the mid 2000's, and now it has less than five percent market share. Safari has twice the market share Firefox does, by some metrics.
Mozilla has literally paid its CEOs fantastical salaries for driving the company into the ground.
Mitchell Baker made $2.5M in 2018 and now in 2021 she's making over $3M.
Mozilla laid of nearly 300 employees post pandemic because of declining revenue.
Being a browser company and seeing declining revenue during a period when damn near every tech company was printing money because everyone hopped online...that's a real special kind of incompetence.
Then there's the fact that Mozilla insists on having multiple offices in probably the most expensive real estate markets in the world. San Fran, Paris, Toronto, Portland? Not just that, but look at where the offices are. I'm not suggesting Mozilla move out to the burbs, but...the offices are dead-center downtown.
If Mozilla moved those offices about a mile or two from the city centers (or shut most of them down - there's no reason to have THREE west-coast offices, especially post-pandemic), and adjusted C-suite salaries to be indexed to growth, I think that would be a great "funding model."
I'm not sure this would go quite the way you think. The quick numbers I could find are $104 million in revenue for 2009 [1], $828 million in revenue for 2019 [2]. Your market share percentages sound about right, though (and is more relevant to the success of the mission.)
> Being a browser company and seeing declining revenue during a period when damn near every tech company was printing money because everyone hopped online...that's a real special kind of incompetence.
I would agree, if I were to completely ignore the existence of competition and all other forms of external reality. I mean, look at the size of the computer market these days. What were Cray, SGI, DEC, Commodore, etc thinking? They must have all been unbelievably incompetent!
Sure, the results are not good. It is perhaps true that you personally could have done far better. Maybe you should give it a try, in some other market where a little company called Google decides to move in on your territory.
> Mitchell Baker made $2.5M in 2018 and now in 2021 she's making over $3M.
She's CEO of a company with a revenue of $800M USD. What should the CEO's compensation be? Is $3M too high or too low? Personally, I honestly don't know. My perception is that CEOs are generally paid large sums of money until they're fired. Perhaps that's not the way it should be in an ideal world.
> Mozilla laid of nearly 300 employees post pandemic because of declining revenue.
Yeah, that sucks. It really sucks. (I work at Mozilla.) Though for the record, we're not post pandemic.
Still, when your burn rate is too high for your income, you have to do something. In some markets, it might make sense to go for broke: borrow to fund scaling, and pray a lot. In the browser market, that would be incredibly stupid. You can't crush your competitors with a $0 product and a compatibility moat that it is your mission to minimize, especially when your main competitor is many times your size.
> ...office rant...
Thanks to COVID, the offices are indeed getting pruned down. But you seem to place a lot of faith in your ability to armchair quarterback. Those offices provided value (partly as a result of their locations), they incurred costs, and people did the math on them. You can assume rank incompetence, but why?
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2009/f... [2] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2019/
I may have been confused because I know some surprising things about how search ad revenue did at different points in the pandemic, so I overthought things. (I don't know if those numbers are public or not, so I won't be more specific.)
By definition, Firefox is not a $0 product - it is a $500M product, the product name is called primary search engine placement and it has exactly one customer, that also happens to be its main competitor and archrival.
The very fact that user != customer is where most of Firefox problems stem from (IMO). Turning users into customers is a correct (and only) way for Firefox to become independent and achieve a position from which it can really deliver on its mission.
2) Invest your saved Google bucks,
3) After a few years you can drop Google for a decade or two and coast entirely on savings + investment income while being beholden to no-one. Maybe indefinitely, depending on how well it goes and how lean you keep your spending.
The alternative would have been putting all that extra staff to work on paid products that didn't suck and were in demand. Firefox could have built an open-source Slack alternative with optional, slick, easy-onboarding paid hosting, for instance. Not that big a stretch. And that's on the boring-and-safe side of things they might have done. Truly, they might have done anything worthwhile with the time and huge amounts of money they had, to gain future independence. Instead, they did... the stuff they did.
But then there would be no money for Mozilla's social justice initiatives.
Also worth noting is that Firefox is not in the business of selling FOSS, it is (currently) in the business of selling primary search engine placement.
https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/components/t...
Or maybe it's because you can toss some money at Mozilla and they'll silently install a browser extension on behalf of an advertising company for a shitty TV show about a l33t haxx0r d00d?
By the way, the bugzilla report about that particular incident was locked, then made employee-only, then made public again...then restricted beyond employee-only...by a project manager...who used to work for advertising companies before she came over to Mozilla.
Or how about the fact that flipping on some of the anti-tracking features include munging the timezone, which means times in almost any website are wrong - which seems to be a poison pill to keep people from turning it on?
Edit with details regarding the extension controversy: https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robo...
It shouldn't have happened in the first place so no one gets any points for taking it down immediately. The fact it doesn't seem to have happened again also earns no points because again it should never have happened in the first place. At no point should your web browser silently install an addon/extension without your permission. That this same web browser wants to trot around afterwards and prattle on about how secure and open they are makes it even worse.
Please point out how to personally identify a telemetry user.
I am a Firefox engineer who uses telemetry data, and know of no way to personally identify any of my users. Well, one way -- you can voluntarily put your email or other info into a crash report, though I know there was some talk of stripping that text field out because it's so rarely useful and touching any potential PII is like touching hot lava.
about:telemetry shows you all that is collected and none of it is PII, a unique fingerprint maybe...
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/
I’m a huge proponent of platforms aiming to be stable and largely not messing with shit but it has to be feature complete first.
The difference between the resources Google and Apple contribute to their respective open source browser engines is night and day, and as any web developer will know - it shows.
In an ideal world two things would change at the same time: Apple is forced to allow other browsers, and webkit gets some genuine love and decent resources to make it a legitimate competitor again, instead of being used as a pawn in a game between Apple and Google.
Google pushes out yet another half-baked, poorly considered new feature in Chrome and overnight has mobs chanting about Safari purportedly holding everyone back because of some close to irrelevant fringe thing.
Safari might just be the fastest browser, and it supports a ridiculous, awe-inspiring array of features and standards.
And the greatest indictment of the ridiculous anti-Safari smear is that no platform uses the browser more than iOS users do. iOS users always are over-represented in web usage compared to marketshare.
Arguably it’s a result of having no competition on iOS.
From idb, webrtc, to scroll to viewheight, to performance issues Safari is the worst to deal with and this is reflected in all the developer surveys.
This is a bit like saying India has the smallest number of people in countries named China or India.
It's still an enormous number of features, and it is simply extraordinary what is capable in the browser.
"this is reflected in all the developer surveys"
Remember "Made for IE"? IE was dogshit, yet there were loads of devs who thought ActiveX was the bee's knees and having to deal with other browsers and platforms was just an annoyance in their lives.
Developer surveys on this are worthless, and if we listened to developers as a group it would be an entirely Windows world.
I don't think that's true.
There were loads of devs that thought that ActiveX was the quickest route to the best experiences for the largest market segment and having to deal with other browsers and platforms was something the people signing paychecks cared less about, if at all.
Many developers would prefer a single, universal browser. A single platform. A single input mechanism (a single development language, compiler, RDBMS, filesystem, cloud provider, backup system, etc). All for obvious, practical reasons, at least in the short term.
That would be devastating for the future, but if it makes projects easier today, many developers are entirely onboard.
That was very much a dominant position among developers in the IE days. Other browsers were a nuisance, and maybe they should just be cut out entirely.
If Safari weren't such an important part of the market, Firefox would have been cut out long ago and we'd be awash in "Made For Chrome (and skinned Chrome)" badges. It is only the economic necessity of supporting iOS users that keeps cross browser development alive.
I don't usually resort to personalised dissection of post, but to be frank, you've taken a giant shit all over this subthread so I think it deserves it... this notion of yours seems to be the underlying theme of most all of your comments - that everyone here criticising webkit or Apple must be against browser diversity, be Google proponents, or not value stability, performance and privacy... We are not this caricature... It might be worth your while to take a second to reflect on that assumption and binary view of reality.
Thanks
It breaks in every major version that’s been released. Simply talk to any developer who has to do a significant amount of work building apps in Safari and they will tell you the same thing.
The webkit team is talented and do great work but this is simply a result of a decade of underfunding and it’s just not possible for them to maintain a modern browser with their current resources.
"misguided impression that it’s a good browser"..."Simply talk to any developer"
Your experience as a developer, and you dealing with utterly trivial regressions or handicaps, has shockingly little bearing on whether it is a "good browser" or not.
Don't build "apps" in the browser. Period. It's shitty, underperforming, and breaks all user expectations, regardless of the browser it's running on.
I've yet to see a single app, PWA or not, that wasn't so. Unless it's just a re-skin of a simple website with text and images, and a few forms, but then it's just a website, and if you can't make it run on Safari, go find a different job.
It's not necessary to talk about chromiums bleeding edge non-standard features, webkit easily has the least support for unopinionated standards released over the last decade and adopted by the other two.
> no platform uses the browser more than iOS users do. iOS users always are over-represented in web usage compared to marketshare.
What point are you trying to make here? iOS users have no choice but to use Safari. If you install firefox or chrome or anything that is a "browser" on an iOS device, it's forced to use Safari webengine underneath, so it's essentially safari with different UI, and this is apparent in the useragent string so any decent stats will show that essentially every iOS user == Safari user.
"What point are you trying to make here? iOS users have no choice but to use Safari."
Android users use the browser on their device -- any browser -- less than iOS users use their browser(s).
Read the Google corporate propaganda repeated on here, and other platforms provide a web bliss of PWAs, freed from app subservience. Only, not at all.
I have not seen such a great community on the internet before, so if you have any recommendations of forums like HN, it would be great!
Can't harass users with notifications.
Safari can open a pdf up like a native webpage in a tab. Until one of the Android browsers can do this out of the box (without having to use a ridiculous fork of Firefox so I can install extensions Mozilla doesn't want me to and installing pdf.js extension to use their own project), it will always be the superior browser.
If webkit was liberated from Apple I think it would ultimately benefit chromium as well.
I also support the stance that certain features should remain focused where they belong e.g. natively installed apps. But who can decide what should be a web standard and what shouldn't... it's hard to say. I think having a healthy governance and enforcement body is a prerequisite before we look at technical specifics.
https://developer.apple.com/safari/technology-preview/releas...
The vocal minority is a very tiny percentage of web developers who believe that whatever Chrome spits out is the bees knees, the modern standard, and all browsers must immediately have that.
Apple's investment in safari/webkit goes up and down. They've actually made a lot of investments since 2019 or so. Probably less so for the previous 6 years before that. But again, webkit was very innovative in the early 2010s
"Let's support a company that abuses its customers, developers and refuses to implement web standards just so a company that makes a far superior product doesn't gain more market share..."
I think their tone makes it relatively clear that this is not a healthy state to be in!
The Black Plague was terrible; but it lead to increased social mobility in the aftermath. Likewise, Apple's "one browser" policy is bad, but ironically it's the main thing stopping the other browser, Chrome, from becoming the one browser that dominates everything. I'm still against the one browser policy, as I am against the Black Plague, but a reasonable person can make these distinctions.
Apple customers are generally pretty happy with their hardware and software.
It could happen, but even if it were to happen, there would be a split from Blink in a very short time period because Google’s values and mission do not align with Apple’s values and mission.
For WebKit that's the case.
[1] https://groups.google.com/g/mozilla.dev.embedding/c/c_NMcO-N...
That's what embedding a browser engine means.
> That doesn't mean Gecko can be used without all the extra parts in your app.
What extra parts?
A new one I found out is their supposedly open-source initiative called 'Cloud Information Model' [1]. Along with others such as Salesforce, Genesys and AWS (companies that I personally don't trust), they promise 'you can create seamless and tailored personal experiences across cloud-native applications'. It's all a bit vague and fancy and sufficiently "tech-y" to impress the marketing folks but colour me suspicious.
EDIT: forgot the link,
Brave also deserves a mention. As long as Brave exists in its current form, there will be a version of Chromium without Google’s “bad” stuff.
Ultimately they're inserting themselves in as the attention reseller - it's still an engagement/ad play dressed up a bit.
I really like what they've built, but I don't like how they're trying to monetize it. I think the ad/attention model is a corrupting influence on content quality generally, I can see what they're trying to do but I'd rather ad supported models just die. A browser completely focused on the user would just block ads and be done with it (imo).
Just let me pay for software that doesn't suck so our incentives are aligned. If you want a free ad-supported version for people unwilling to pay then fine.
It sure would, but here just as in many areas of tech, developer convenience is diametrically opposed to what's good for users.
So what to do? Go back to being the quirky, heavily configurable browser we all know and love? That would be great for me, but even assuming Mozilla can afford to do that now (greater configurability leads to greater code complexity and therefore greater maintenance costs), experience seems to suggest it won't be enough to allow Mozilla grow its market share to a sustainable level.
Finally, and this is a bit of a tangent, but I've never quite understood why Mozilla got such a hard time from users about telemetry. I understand that telemetry is in general something to be suspicious of, but we're not talking about handing your data over to Google so they can target you with ads; we're talking about sharing technical data with a non-profit organisation to help them maintain and improve the browser you rely on. Mozilla are removing a feature you use daily? Okay, did you enable the telemetry that lets them know you use it? Receiving and analysing user data is increasingly important to delivering a good user experience. If open-source projects can't access the same data as proprietary ones do, we can't expect them to be able to react to user demands in the same way, and so we can't expect them to be able to compete in today's market.
for example Mozilla VPN and Firefox Relay which added a premium version with unlimited aliases and your own @*.mozmail.com subdomain.
If they can find a way to promote themselves as a leader of Internet privacy with well-integrated servoces, and from which they can get a revenue from it then at least they'll gain some independence.
I started using Relay recently and it seems useful. I'll subscribe. I hope they can get a few hundred thousand paying users there...
I know Firefox has its own builtin password manager, but it's mostly barebone.
Yes, users can themselves explicitly communicate feedback regarding the product or its features, and no, most of them don't do that. That's why telemetry is useful.
Telemetry would fix this, but it's not our right to collect data from other people's machines. So our best bet would be to detect the condition we expect to cause problems, notify them in advance, and allow time for feedback before implementing a change.
Is it less pretty and a worse user experience than telemetry? Absolutely. But when you realize you have no right to data collection on someone else's machine, telemetry isn't a viable option, and we would betray people's trust by doing it.
Edit: typo.
You seem to be assuming that your users are always online and not sitting somewhere isolated, the ideal place for platforms old enough that you want to stop supporting them. Telemetry only tells you if something is there, it doesn't tell you if something isn't.
We've resorted to the "scream test". When there are features that are expensive to maintain that we suspect aren't being used (based on surveys, interviews, and usability tests) then we insert a notification when the feature is used announcing it's pending removal in some subsequent version. The notification includes contact information so if we get a higher-than-expected number of complaints then we may keep the feature.
Telemetry showed that users overwhelmingly approve of shitty option B!
The point of the comment is to show that telemetry is used to conclude things that aren't true, and it absolutely is, and only says the subset of things that someone wants to hear, or that even occurs to them to ask.
It's not even really a seperate issue, because even if you think you are only concerned with say how long a certain operation takes or how frequently it fails & retries, the more important issue may be why or whether that operation was even used at all in the first place.
This aspect of telemetry is simply a fact to be aware of and stands on it's own, and does not necessarily mean to say "therefor telemetry is an invalid tool that should not exist and should never be used" It just means it's incomplete at best and very susceptible to both deception and self deception.
I think it would be far less hostility if we as users got access to the information ourselves. E.g. I would think it would be very useful to see stats on which features I'm using in firefox, how often, which features I'm not using, how many tabs I have (compared to the average user) etc., and I would be much more happy to share that data with firefox if I can see it first.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/diagnostic-...
Go to about:telemetry
There are several pages detailing all of that information, and you can also get all of that data as the JSON payload if you want to munge and display it yourself.
[0] about:about
You could probably find more with searchfox, using a better query than https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/search?q=about%3A&path...
> This is a list of “about” pages for your convenience.
> Some of them might be confusing. Some are for diagnostic purposes only.
> And some are omitted because they require query strings.
Some are omitted. Like about:blank.
People don't want to be spied on. Yes, you can find positive uses for it, but you can find positive uses for many negative technologies. If anything some of the most pervasive negative technologies also have positive uses to sweeten the pill (or even give the impression that this is a sweet and not a pill you are swallowing).
> it seems that most of them have never worked on an user-facing product
If you have worked on user-facing products, then I think you do understand. I think you just don't like the answer.
Here it is in a nutshell: In the general case, how do you distinguish 'telemetry' from 'surveillance'?
And the answer is you can't, because the difference between 'telemetry' and 'surveillance' lies in the intent of the consumer of that data. Technically useful information collected in good faith today can become intrusive surveillance tomorrow with a court order, or business pivot, or just a bored insider & lack controls.
Now consider the fact that the author of every stupid new piece of code out there now seems to think it is so special it deserves to be allowed to send... who knows what back to some opaque collection endpoint as the cost of executing.
The only reactions in response to this mess that don't cost a huge amount of overhead are "block everything" and "have your way with me". Guess which a technically inclined user picks.
Granularity. Telemetry data can be privacy-respecting (e.g. anonymously aggregated) while still being useful.
E.g. "143 people flew from NYC to LA this month" vs. "John Smith flew from NYC to LA at 2:00 pm on Tuesday."
We promise it's anonymized.
You can do it with cameras and ID plate detection tools, which allows tracking where anyone is at any time.
You can also put magnetic loops into the roads, which just tells you how many drive over a certain area of the road, without any individualized tracking.
Good telemetry is like the magnetic loops. But nowadays very few implementations are that privacy respecting
For starters, consent. Telemetry generally supposes that the user opts into, either directly or by accepting the terms of using a service, and is free to walk away.
I find the increasing usage of the word surveillance completely silly and ideological. If the NSA vacuums data from some underwater cable that's surveillance, when I exchange information, aware of what's being handed over in exchange for some service, that's a trade.
Who has the time to read (let alone "become aware") of the full scope of that?
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/windows-11-... [2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/required-wi...
I'm all for informed consent, create laws to give users transparency and control over their data. But if users have that and they still decide that exchanging info for better services is worth it, calling it surveillance is I think not appropriate.
Case in point, Vscode. I'll gladly give them telemetry access for getting a better editor.
That's nice. I find downplaying the reality of surveillance to acclimate people to even more of it very dangerous and ideological.
By never sending PII to your telemetry system. Or if you must use PII (you don't need to) then you lock it away with proper access controls.
In case of mozilla specifically telemetry didn't help them to not destroy firefox's UI.
Leaving your veiled insult aside, I think it's pretty easy to see but you don't want to listen to it. Namely: telemetry and surveillance are literally the same thing and the only difference lies in the goodwill of the steward of the data.
I believe we've been witnesses, dozens of times, here on HN, about yet another "private data leak" because some company can't be bothered to hire an intern for $2000 a month to do proper data and security hygiene of some meager 3-4 disks that don't even total 10TB.
So why should I trust companies by default to take good care of my data AND to use them for good only, when all the historical evidence points at them being unable to do either? Shouldn't I take the matter in my own hands? I answered yes and so I did. My PiHole black-holes anything such I can think of and until that gets criminalized I'll be freely admitting it anytime when asked.
Once upon a time, Firefox probably had a normal ratio of privacy-conscious users to privacy-indifferent users.
But if the privacy-indifferent users are increasingly lost to Chrome, FF is probably left with an unusually privacy-conscious userbase.
I'd bet a graph of their privacy-focused:indifferent users over time would be U-shaped. Very high before, oh, I dunno, FF2.0 when the only reason non-nerds had it was because their nerdy friend/relative installed it for them. Lower when they were advertising all over the place and marketshare was growing ('08-'12? My memory's hazy). Higher now, as their userbase continues a years-long contraction and shifts toward being mostly nerds, again.
I'll leave it to others to argue why it's a privacy problem, but I'd like to push back on the "useful" and "feedback" arguments. It's appealing to say "X% of our users use this; we should prioritize it", but Mozilla has a charming history of saying "only Y% of users use this feature; we'll remove it", and for bonus points, "after we pushed this option into a really obscure sub-menu, nobody uses it, so now we can remove it while claiming that nobody cares". That is, telemetry isn't even useful for the thing that people claim it's good at, because it only provides raw data that gets used to justify things regardless of reality.
[0] Session-recording spyware "telemetry" products practically are this, and are widely used. Watching their session playback, or ability to monitor live users on "your" site (but actually, on their computer) is disturbing.
Part of the old tradeoff was that extension writers could do almost anything to make the web browser do almost anything. Nowadays, extensions are much less flexible. I think for good reason: being able to click a few buttons and get pwned isn't really a desirable feature. But the tradeoff has moved. I don't think that's really an argument against Firefox, but consider that powerusers are often very conservative, I'm not surprised that it caused some disagreement.
Firefox is extremely configurable. Settings being removed from the UI doesn't mean they are gone.
`about:config` has a crazy amount of toggles that allow customizing pretty much everything, including turning off all the Mozilla services (telemetriy, account sync, Pocket, VPN adds, ...). Compare that with the measly set of settings and undiscoverable CLI flags available in Chrome...
I personally feel removing settings from the standard UI is perfectly fine when almost no-one is using them, and power users can work just fine with settings.js or `about:config`.
Also if a setting is hidden behind about:config, it probably means dev will care less and less about it and eventually remove if it is becoming a hindrance
I was using it to enable TRR on Android.
No we are talking about a non-profit and a for-profit at the same time, where the distinction is often not clear. But it is clear, that they included ads and "studies" by default in their browser, that did send data to whoever, without any user consent.
So no, I do not really trust them anymore. Still more than google maybe, but not enough to voluntarily send them my data. And this is a shame, because I would have liked to keep trusting them.
The only thing I know of that's similar to that is how Mozilla has Google Analytics on some pages as part of the Firefox interface, but there they have a contract restricting how the data is used: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=697436#c14
(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
>So Mozilla tries to move in Chrome's direction, removing configuration options and "dumbing down" the UI, which frustrates its existing user base (including me) while apparently also failing to eat into Chrome's market share.
You can have sensible defaults for people who value simplicity and want it to just work and have customisation accessible from the settings page for the people who want customization.
Firefox or the (quite lost) Mozilla Corp ? They're not the same.
There's no particularly good reason to start your own renderer from scratch.
Start by fixing low-hanging frukt (the tab-strip api, make real customizability for the UI possible again) and build momentum from there.
I'm ready to pay a bit for what is one of my most important tools, and I think we all should think about it that way.
Just don't start growth hacking me or anything sleazy and I'm also your free billboard on HN and elsewhere.
That's the consequence of marketing themselves as "privacy first". Many people use Firefox because they don't want to be tracked, and therefore, any tiny bit of tracking/telemetry will be frowned upon. Google makes no such claim with Chrome, in fact, it makes it pretty clear that it tracks you.
Well, no surprise there. Technical people like us experiment. Mainstream users just use what they know, and what their techie friends recommend them. They're not suddenly going to use Firefox now that it's more like chrome. They'll just use the real chrome. And they don't like touching something that works.
Note that this approach didn't work for Microsoft either (and they went a lot more 'like chrome' than Mozilla!). They're having some success with Edge but it's mainly because they push it really hard to enterprise users with their O365 integration, so people are getting to know it at work and bringing it home.
> [...] If open-source projects can't access the same data as proprietary ones do, we can't expect them to be able to react to user demands in the same way, and so we can't expect them to be able to compete in today's market.
I don't want them to become like the proprietary browsers in this regard. Telemetry is not an all-seeing oracle, it's often used to confirm their own bias because it doesn't say why the users like something or what they'd prefer. What they should be doing is listening to users instead of blindly trusting telemetry. Google and Microsoft make the same mistake but they already have a monopoly on the browser and OS markets respectively so their mistakes are easily absorbed. It's not like their products have become a lot better since they started relying on telemetry so much.
But no, I won't allow telemetry and I block it for Microsoft and Google too in my DNS. The reason I use Firefox is because I don't want to "get with the program". If I have to change my ideology, I would be changed so much that the primary reason to use Firefox is no longer relevant.
Edge is also - aside from being a privacy disaster - a legitimately good product that does a lot of good UI innovation on top of stock Chrome.
Things like normie-friendly but powerful vertical tab implementations, turning menus into floating panels that can be turned into sidebars with a click, Collections etc. They're actually adding lots of customer-facing features that are really well designed.
This is simply not so. Google pays to be the default search engine on Firefox because it is beneficial for them. Had they not, this place would be bought out by Bing or whoever else, and in the end Google will lose more.
Perhaps they could care for the automation niche. There are thriving communities on macOS who are deeply into automation, and virtually no one uses Firefox. The ones who do stop because Firefox’s AppleScript support is non-existent, while Chromium’s (and thus every browser based on it) is top notch, even better than Safari’s.
I’m not talking developers, either. Non-coders frequently cobble up short AppleScript snippets do to what they want. When they visit the forums asking for help and how to do what they want in Firefox, they are directed to the open bug report which is old enough to drink.
I have seen plenty of users abandon Firefox on account of that gap. I tried to convey that to Firefox developers multiple times—both in person and online—and their response was to not care.
If they're relying on volunteers then they'd need a few folks with the right set of skills and a motivation to scratch that itch. I would personally love to see better AppleScript support in Firefox, but I won't judge anyone else for not stepping up if I don't have the inclination to either.
The automation communities (plural) create tools for themselves and for others. That’s the important bit. It’s common for non-coders to resort to those communities (which can be as simple as a subreddit) to achieve a simple recurring task. If they use Firefox, they get turned away from it because it’s the only major browser lacking AppleScript support. Not only do those developers abandon Firefox, so do all their users.
> Would you estimate they'd gain hundreds of users? Thousands? Tens-of-thousands?
I estimate they wouldn’t lose as many as they do. What good is it to gain market share if you can’t stop the bleed? If Firefox can’t even be interesting to large sections of developers and power users, what chance to they have with the general populace?
I lost count to how many people asked for my tools to be ported to Firefox, and I’m a single data point with a single need. Before I stopped caring, I checked every (front page) Firefox story on HN and without exception I collected a new macOS grievance by someone different. Tellingly, I noticed that no matter how polite or constructive the criticism, it was invariably met by defensiveness of the “I don’t care for that feature, so it’s not the problem” kind. That’s in line with what I felt in my interactions with the Firefox developers I spoke to, despite ostensibly most of them using macOS.
It’s fine for Firefox developers to ignore whatever communities they want; that’s their prerogative. But they then need to accept when those same people assert they can’t use Firefox as their daily driver.
> they'd need an expectation of a stronger ROI than their other efforts
Their latest efforts are constantly criticised on HN precisely because they are gimmicks not related to the browser. I’m not a marketing expert, but I expect making a browser people want to use is better ROI than Mr Robot marketing stunts or short-lived file sharing services with no innovative features.
Noted. The underlying question stands: what is the size of this (combined) community and is it large enough to make a meaningful impact on Firefox's market share? Some software can survive by finding a loyal niche, but a browser engine is probably not one of them as it requires a certain market share threshold to be a target for web developers.
> What good is it to gain market share if you can’t stop the bleed?
When the gain exceeds the loss from the bleed. (With the caveat that not all users are equally valuable -- users who are vocal, enthusiastic, and/or do not require niche functionality can be more valuable than others.)
> I noticed that no matter how polite or constructive the criticism, it was invariably met by defensiveness of the “I don’t care for that feature, so it’s not the problem” kind.
If it's any consolation, that is not my specific issue. I would love to have better automation on macOS and it frustrates me that I have to choose between an open web and end-user automation. I hear your frustration that you cannot help people use your tools with Firefox.
I also have no idea what Mozilla's expected return on their projects like file-sharing services were. (Marketing stunts are usually done to attract advertiser dollars, not users.) They don't seem to be making the tradeoffs and allocations I would personally make. Having said that, trying to halt or reverse a death spiral means making hard choices that invariably alienate some number of users.
Personally I am impressed that Mozilla has been able to outlast Microsoft and Opera in keeping up with Apple and Google for so long. But I would not be surprised if they too are forced to switch to Blink (or WebKit) eventually.
I don’t have data to make that claim definitively. Even if it’s large enough and they catered to it now, would people come back? I don’t know.
But that’s not my larger point:
> Before I stopped caring, I checked every (front page) Firefox story on HN and without exception I collected a new macOS grievance by someone different.
An example is music producers missing the Web MIDI API. I focused on automation because that’s what I know, but my point is they have multiple communities to cater to. This conversation started with a quote about Firefox niches.
> When the gain exceeds the loss from the bleed.
I wasn’t talking in the abstract. Firefox is unable to get new users at that rate.
> I hear your frustration that you cannot help people use your tools with Firefox.
I no longer care. I let them know why Firefox doesn’t work and point them to the bug report but tell them to not get their hopes up. My tools are open-source and free, so it’s not like this feature gap impacts by bottom line. I want to add Firefox support because I want it to succeed. But they’re not making it easy for automaters to help; quite the contrary, every useful tool we build which supports every major browser except Firefox is another nail in the coffin.
> Marketing stunts are usually done to attract advertiser dollars, not users.
Their stunts actively lose them users. No users, no one to advertise to.
I have all telemetry and Nightly studies enabled wherever I can (unfortunately the option is unavailable in custom builds, and I use custom builds on my main OS, since I contribute code to Firefox occasionally).
> removing configuration options and "dumbing down" the UI
I never understood the whole "dumbing down" thing either. It's fundamentally the same UI as it was in Firefox 2.0 back in the day, except the menus are more well-structured (there's now a convenient hamburger rather than everything being in a crowded "application menu" bar at the top).
> I'm not sure what they could do to make Firefox a thriving, independent, sustainable browser
I think it's still all these things. But to make growth possible, they need to somehow fight against Google persistently advertising Chrome right on the fucking google dot com main page (and YouTube and so on).
Telemetry includes personal information such as IP address and some people are (rightfully) concerned about it. Also we do not know for sure what is done with this data, as Firefox server side code (the one that processes the telemetry) is not open source (and even if it was it would not be a guarantee).
> Okay, did you enable the telemetry that lets them know you use it?
There would be no problem if Firefox shipped as a zero-telemetry browser, and all telemetry was opt-in. This would remove all doubt and if you want to send Firefox data you can choose to do so.
However that is not the case. Significant amount of telemetry is enabled by default. Choosing to go for opt-out vs opt-in is what is hurting Mozilla's credibility here.
What then happens (and I am speculating here) is that this behavior triggers most power users in a negative way (for various reasons, one of them being simply using your bandwidth and resources for telemetry and noone likes having a slower browser) so they do their best to disable it. This in turn leaves Mozilla with data that does not include most of its power user base, the one that actually has most impact on Firefox market share (because as 'techies' they install the browser for their family and friends). The crippled data leads to crippled product decisions, which in turn makes power users even angrier and thus we witness the death spiral of user attrition that Firefox is currently in.
Source? I don't see any IP address in about:telemetry window.
They could focus on building that browser, instead of getting sidetracked and wasting money on other things. Also reduce the friction of contributing to their projects from the outside, streamline the process, bring it into the 21st century while keeping top-down politics and egos out of it. I wouldn't be surprised if their rivals see more outside contributions (in total) simply because they are somewhat easier to work with.
However, overall the vast majority of contributions to Mozilla's projects is likely still coming from the outside.
Mozilla is afraid it will fail with Firefox if they don't diversify. But if Firefox fails, the world doesn't need Mozilla. If that happens they should just pack up and hand the custody of surviving technologies (Rust etc.) to someone else.
I would much rather lose a feature I use daily than send telemetry data.
The funny thing about this is that it's a narrative, but is it correct? Configuration options may be low, but Chrome has added things like tab groups and a reading list / bookmarks sidebar. They're in no way aiming to be as customizable as Vivaldi/presto!Opera/xulExtensions!Firefox, but even stock Chrome is actually adding useful features, while most news I've seen from Firefox have been them removing unique features I've used and loved, like being able to sync keyword searches via bookmarks.
The only significant feature I've seen them add - and it's a doozy, I admit - is Containers. But that's cold comfort when other features get removed at a steady rate.
> It seems that the market niche of tech-capable people who value privacy and customisation over a simplified UX is not capable of sustaining Firefox on its own.
This may be true, but it can really come down to quality of product: Firefox is losing ground, but Brave for example is growing, and doing it by a privacy sales pitch (with some dumbfucks who think they're going to get rich off BAT added in - it's a cut from Brave's ad revenue, ffs, and individual ad viewers aren't worth shit except en masse when the money pools up at creators' and ad agencies' wallets).
> Okay, did you enable the telemetry that lets them know you use it? Receiving and analysing user data is increasingly important to delivering a good user experience. If open-source projects can't access the same data as proprietary ones do, we can't expect them to be able to react to user demands in the same way, and so we can't expect them to be able to compete in today's market.
This is true, but making decisions purely off telemetry stats and setting up self-fulfilling prophecies of making features harder to find and then saying nobody uses them isn't exactly the way either. Telemetry is a good jumping off point, I think, but as a sole director it's shit precisely because privacy-conscious users are going to turn that shit off if they can out of habit.
> I've never quite understood why Mozilla got such a hard time from users about telemetry.
I think a lot of the Mozilla userbase is from an earlier age, before everything became cloud-based subscription services. They long for the days of locally installable software, buying new versions vs. subscribing to an app, etc. Some are the kind of obstinate FOSS purists who'd use gNewSense even if it meant they had to use their computer as a command line only device.
Think about Pocket, for example. I was one of the abovementioned people and hated its inclusion, and people still grumble about it in part due to the source code, in part just due to the old bad blood.
They'd essentially need a relaunch with a new take and attitude - look at Brave, whose pitch is pretty similar, and how people are a-ok with monetized services within the browser so long as they're opt-in. The product's newer, and so the attitude people come to it is newer. And it's growing.
Finally, there's an issue of focus: The organization increasingly feels like general activists first, custodians of a product second, which is not a vibe much of the competition gives off. Actors like Brave and Vivaldi have firm, in some sense political stances, but they're of a narrower sort of user control and privacy. I know people at both orgs who do/have shown their politics, but it doesn't show at the org/product level. The user? Does. I never, ever want to hear shit like "we need more than deplatforming" from an ostensibly privacy and user centered organization.
I've been building a browser full time the past year+ (synth.app) and FF core wasn't really even an option. They've done very little to make the engine usable outside of Firefox.
Now I'm sure there are a variety of savory and unsavory things that led here, but building that stuff out seems like a good way to grow the ecosystem. At least they would've had a chance at capturing the Brave/Opera/Edge/etc market and those seats at the committees.
This isn't to say that I'm not worried about these standards merging like this. I've spent many hours working out weird chromium only behaviors that websites rely on these days to do things (and egregiously so if they detect an agent remotely resembling chrome).
This sounds like the IE6 disaster all over again.
The gnarliness spans the whole stack. From weird java-applet like API escalation behavior if chrome is detected (e.g. Google properties feature gate a ton around this) to how there is not even a clear way to get a DRM license for a custom browser without waiting for Google indefinitely [1].
Here's a challenge: fire up a chromium fork and get it to run a relaxed DRM website like Netflix. If you get that far now try loading HBOMax with their fingerprinting/DRM protection on top. I'm not even sure it'd be possible in FF (at least without some DRM piggy backing if there isn't one).
[1] https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/google-widevine-blocked...
Not the most appealing idea, but an interesting one. Might help move more people to essentially using Firefox.
Say hello to https://servo.org/.
Enough features to distinguish on, enough political/managerial reasons for choosing an independent FLOSS engine over one controlled by Google.
Sure, Edge/MS won't move to this engine anywhere soon. Nor will Brave switch over tomorrow, or electron rebuild around their tooling. But the world is full or "HTML-2-PDF renderers, headless testing toolkits, (embedded) webview-libraries or electron-alike toolkits, which are now almost all exclusively Chromium based.
A lot of GUI based programs should think of implementing parts of it as a library others can use. I remember early Git implementations in IDEs where they just ran git commands in the background and parsed the command line output. Imagine if the same had been done with SQLite, would it still be as popular today?
I don't have much experience with creating desktop software, but it seems to me that separating the GUI from the "engine" would bring other benefits too.
I have often looked at OSS and wanted to use parts of it myself. An email client might have a really good mail parser that handles encoding, attachments etc. But decoupling it from the rest of the program would take too much time.
This reminds that Wine uses Mozilla code for their Internet Explorer replacement (wine-gecko). I wonder how far behind Firefox's rendering engine that code is, and how much effort is involved for the Wine maintainers.
Then I looked closer look at the history of Chromium and Blink.
The reality is that a lot of the other "Chromium-based" browsers actually only use the Blink renderer. They don't use many (if any) other Chromium components other than probably V8.
In ancient times, Blink itself was a fork of Webkit. So, does that mean Apple controls everything?? But Webkit actually came from KDE's KHTML, didn't it.. Linux wins...
The kicker for me is: Blink and V8 are open source, and anyone can fork them at any time. Because of this, Microsoft, Oracle, Brave - every "Chromium" based browser vendor is contributing code. So does Google really control us that much? Blink and V8 make a rock solid browser core and are being worked on by a lot of companies, not just Google. It's like the Linux kernel - kind of a marvel of open source. Not something we need to fight against so viciously, in my opinion.
(Edit: "rock solid" might sound extreme to some... The HTML and JS specs are absurdly complex to the point where there's basically no hope of anyone implementing them from 0. There's a lot of bloat in modern web, no doubt. But if you're really worried about crazy JS features cluttering your browsing experience, you can go clone the Chromium source and pull out the crap you don't like.)
The biggest difference is that the new MS is no longer selling you software but access to software.
Advertising in the Start Menu enters the room
Often enough, it feels as if there are two brains inside Microsoft - shiny new MS with Azure, WSL, VSCode on the one side, and old, schoolyard bully MS with advertising, telemetry, forcing cloud everywhere on the other side.
Yes. Contributing code to something doesn't mean that you suddenly control the direction of that thing. Google still makes the big decisions about what gets to enter the codebase: which web features to support, which ones to deprecate, how to interpret standards, and how to slowly align the web with their own financial incentives.
I think the idea of gp's point about others forking code means the forkers can also influence the code because they control the fork.
Otherwise, if we take your comment at face value, we'd conclude that Google's contributions to Webkit means it can't "suddenly control the direction" of Apple's Webkit. That's true, but also becomes irrelevant because Google controls its fork of "Blink".
In other words, does Apple's Webkit control us that much? No, because it seems like Google's Blink/Chromium is sufficiently independent. If we go back farther in the timeline, are we concerned that KHTML controls us? No, because it seems like Apple's fork of Webkit is independent and not beholden to KHTML decisions.
If Microsoft really wanted to, it seems like they have the resources to do what Apple did to KHTML and what Chrome did to Webkit.
If I understand correctly, Edge, Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, etc are all running on the later type of Blink "fork".
Does Google still contribute to Webkit? I was under the impression that stopped a long time ago after Blink and Webkit sufficiently diverged.
There was also a much wider array of browser engines at the time (MS had 2, Opera had 1, Firefox had much higher market share than it does today).
So KHTML/Webkit hardly had control over the web the way Chromium might because they never had the market share Chromium did, and further, they were never the dominant engine embedded in nearly every browser the way Chromium/Blink are now.
The usual answer I see is along the lines of "because Google is too big, has too much control". To reiterate the original argument in this thread: Chromium being open source makes this a hard sell.
Maybe there's another reason I've missed, though!
The end users don't care about who controls what. They care about having a simple, fast browser who just works.
> They care about having a simple, fast browser who just works.
In fact, what's often forgotten is that even before MS's illegal monopolization, IE dominated Netscape because it was genuinely better.
But a few short years later it was regular end users who were suffering due to IE and it's lack of competition, which led to MS sleeping on it and letting security issues (both technical and social) pile up.
On the other hand, much bigger problems in the world, so we go build something else instead of reinventing what Google has already built.
and almost all of Webkit has been rewritten from the time of the fork from khtml.
That's actually being done in the Serenity OS project! HTML renderer, JS interpreter, and Web Browser, from scratch:
https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMOpZvQB55beChggmvk-s...
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMOpZvQB55be0Nfytz9q2...
Let's say Firefox is the most advanced browser of the universe. How can you get people to install Firefox?
Chrome has the advantage here because it is preinstalled in every Android phone and Android has more than 90% market share.
The second advantage Chrome has is that it cannot be uninstalled from Android. The fact that Android phones have a limited storage space is a compelling reason to not install a second browser.
The third advantage Chrome has is the fact that more than 90% of people use Google has search engine and every time you access google.com with a browser other than Chrome you get a "Switch to Chrome" notification telling you that Chrome will help you "hide" annoying ads (without telling you that Google is responsible for the annoying ads) and you will be safe against malware. The regular user fears malwares and viruses more than ads or anything else because they think their bank account info will be stolen, so better security is a compelling reason to install Chrome.
Please, tell me, how do Firefox or any other browser can compete with the fact that Google is abusing their dominance of the search engine market and the mobile phone market to "force" people to use Chrome?
https://www.kaiostech.com/company/our-story/
They claim that they are on 160 million devices.
And based on this:
https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
Firefox has about 220 million users at the moment.
So, I wouldn't say that FirefoxOS failed, it just failed in their hand.
How many of those are active devices?
Both are better than Safari on iOS though, which does force you to use it.
Yes.
Together with Chrome, they ended up beating IE, at the time neither had a significant advantage in distribution, at least compared to IE.
So in theory, Chrome can be beaten, except that unlike IE, Chrome doesn't suck, in fact, about the only thing going for Firefox is that it is not Chrome.
Somehow even with Microsoft promoting IE on their platform, people still chose to install an alternative.
> For me Firefox is the only alternative to a complete Chrome hegemony in the sense that:
> it’s open-source in the real sense (a project that’s truly community-driven)
I missed when the community wanted to do away with tab groups, compact mode, or keyword searches synced via bookmarks. The project is handled by a corporation with a multimillion dollar advertising deal with one of the EvilCorps. Uhh, yeah.
> it has a great track record of fighting for its users and for a better Internet.
Last I checked, it's owned by a foundation that's very okay with advocating that others tell me what I should see on the 'net. "We need more than deplatforming" are not words I ever want to hear from a privacy organization's mouth. That and "fighting for its users" don't exactly go together, unless you believe the Foundation's purpose is to be its users' moral custodian in matters that are not tech-related.
The whole sales pitch of this thing is "you should use a browser that increasingly sucks, that's increasingly lacking in support, whose stewards get their money from EvilCorp and cheerfully advocate for Internet censorship, all because they use a different browser engine". When my option would be to use browsers that do not suck and actually improve release by release, have revenue streams not so beholden to EvilCorp and put their makers' personal politics aside for user control and privacy.
Choices, choices.
Any entity participating in a democratic society should be allowed to voice their support for keeping said society healthy. Antivaxxers and "the vote was stolen!!!" putsch supporters are a direct threat towards society itself.
There are things in a society where standing "impartially" aside is taking a stand in itself - a stand on the side of those who want to destroy society.
~ Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1945
What is your feeling towards the summer 2021 rioters? Are they a threat towards society?
Breaking and entering into the seat of government [1], building gallows in preparation for hangings [2] and calling for the murder of the Vice President [3] is not.
Please don't try to disingenuously draw a false equivalency here. Your whataboutism is supporting attempted murder and contributing to the destabilization of the country.
[1] https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/11/24/nation/newly-released...
[2] https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2021-01-1...
[3] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-video-shows-capi...
You asked "Did they attack the seat of government with the explicit goal of abducting, raping and killing elected officials". This is an "explicit" example of the mob attacking an elected US senator. Or it only counts when "right" people are attacked?
You also stated: "to interfere with a democratic process and establish autocratic rule". That's exactly what Seattle's “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” was - an attempt to interfere with a democratic process. Last I checked, no one has elected those people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Occupied_Protest
So if you are condemn capital riots, don't forget the summer riots as well.
These days, the US lets their ideological successors sit in Congress and no one bats an eye. What a disgrace. Not that I like violence, it should not be a tool that's used in political discourse, but nevertheless - people like him, MT Greene and Boebert should not even be remotely near the Congress to begin with!
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/31/americans-kill...
Ugh, I dislike the title of that post. I still claim that you're misinterpreting it, though. It should have been something like "We need better answers than deplatforming." Deplatforming is not the answer, and we need better ones.
Sometimes deplatforming is the right answer. Not when it's about a political agenda, but there are many many actually harmful uses out there, many of them illegal, and ignoring those on your platform is the same as facilitating them. But deplatforming is about as effective as sticking your finger in a dike for truly improving things.
In my opinion, Mozilla has done a decent job of being apolitical when possible. Yes, it does think you shouldn't see some things on the 'net, but those things are things like scams and malicious disinformation. It does not say that you should not see the latest blatherings of Trump or whoever, except perhaps when they're directly encouraging violence or sedition.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...
> Turn on by default the tools to [amplify factual voices](link points to below) over disinformation.
Their idea of "factual voices"?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/16/technology/facebook-rever...
> The change resulted in an increase in Facebook traffic for mainstream news publishers including CNN, NPR and The New York Times, while partisan sites like Breitbart and Occupy Democrats saw their numbers fall.
The entire post reeked of political tribalism in a way I don't like from people who make my tools. While seeing less Breitbart and Occupy Democrats might be welcome, Mozilla were completely fine with third parties boosting the visibility of openly partisan organizations who'll happily lie to my face. No, no thanks.
Hm? When were keyword searches or compact mode removed? I’m still using them in 94.0
Keyword removal totally dumbed down my browsing experience on mobile. I fear the moment the same will happen on the Desktop version.
>Google’s massive development resources and marketing machine. >Most people not thinking about the long-term ramifications of ending up in a market with a single vendor in it. >Firefox losing its status of a shiny new thing over the years. >Mozilla’s inability to capitalize on the popularity of Firefox in the past. I think almost all of their revenue came from a search deal with Google.
The true reasons Firefox lost market share are:
1. Firefox has become a mess
2. Mozilla is terribly mismanaged
To see Firefox thrive, we have to push towards management change while there's still something to be saved or by forking Firefox
I would say:
The true reasons Firefox lost market share is because we, developer & tech people started to install Chrome on family computers instead of Firefox because it was safer & faster (way way faster). And we never came back from it.
Performance is a feature.
What are you talking about? It's been working flawlessly for many years, without any maintenance for me and my non-technical relatives.
Chrome pretty much barely changes where things are and how things behave and it's a pretty fast browser. If you want to fix Firefox go complain with their management.
Despite being an open source project, Firefox management seems to be much less in touch with and responsive to their user's feedback compared to other browsers. As an example, both Safari and Firefox had the same bad idea at about the same time - converting tabs into floating buttons (although in the case of Safari the bad at least served a useful purpose: increasing vertical real estate for the browser). Both got negative feedback. The difference? Firefox management dug their heels deeper and told their users, "suck it up, this is the future of web browsing", whereas Apple listened to the feedback and killed the bad idea during the beta itself.
Yet another example: killing off single site browsing or progressive web apps.
I'm not sure whether Chrome is any worse on this front, but either way Firefox is terribly annoying. I think it's the most user-hostile open source software I know of.
And, no, I just checked. I don't have any auto-updates in Ubuntu either.
I'm using NixOS where every version of every dependency of every program I install will be saved until I cleanup the garbage (1 command) so I don't have your issue.
If this was Windows you wouldn't be able to update Firefox while it was running because Windows doesn't support overwriting open files (technically you can rename them and insert new ones with the same name, but that's not the point).
You're holding it wrong and blaming the project, close the software you update before you update and you might have more success.
Also, I like that you think that Firefox's default settings is "holding it wrong." That's rather the point, isn't it?
Reddit will have you back now.
Using the Mozilla build in /opt, the Snap [1] or Flatpack [2] versions will avoid the distro updating Firefox out from underneath it.
[1] https://snapcraft.io/firefox [2] https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.mozilla.firefox
The difference to Windows is that Linux allows you to delete (unlink) files that are in use. The inode actually owning the data continues to exist until the program is dead.
What does this mean?
Which comes down to the reasons I've already stated.
When Chrome came out, it was way better. Now I don't really see big difference in performance, they have similar extensions, frequent updates, sync, etc.
I prefer Firefox but I don't really need to install it on family computers because whatever browser they use is probably good enough.
Chromium is just much better built.
An old Ars Technica article comparing the two protocols (much has changed since then): https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/10/ars-e...
I'm not so certain those numbers compare with the 10s of millions of people(100s?) who's default browser was hijacked by nefarious bundles in every 3rd party installer under the sun back in the 2000s and early 2010s.. Those people knew no better and have been conditioned(or just don't care) to continue whatever gets them interneting.
Unfortunately I don't think this will help. If their market share is already low, creating multiple forks makes it even harder for devs to target.
Simply look at desktop software support on Linux for an example of why this doesn't work.
The marketing campaign for Chrome alone, if it is even possible to assign a dollar value to it, would have cost billions of dollars for anyone other than Google.
The tight relationship between rendering engine and browser has been broken by Chrome and its “children” (and in some way also by Apples enforced usage of their WebKit implementation in ios). Mozilla need to follow suit in order to survive, rip that rendering engine out, build a new browser and a “browser toolkit” to let other people build their own.
I don't think this is true at all. Anecdotally, a lot of Firefox users have been very receptive towards recent changes. Quantum was a huge success and I know very few people that miss the old Firefox with all of its jank.
> Mozilla need to follow suit in order to survive, rip that rendering engine out, build a new browser and a “browser toolkit” to let other people build their own
This is precisely what Servo is: https://servo.org/. Mozilla know what they're doing.
Also they moved way to slowly with Servo, starting it as a research project was correct. But they should have gone all in on it years ago.
I know they have taken parts of it and folded them into Firefox, but it should have been the the other way round. Take the bits of Firefox they could and combine them into something new with Servo.
That being said, Servo resulted in the creation of all sorts of technologies.
Great example - because Mozilla binned Servo!
It is a shame that Servo was shut down, because now there isn't a codebase focused on developing new technology; innovation has to happen in Gecko, alongside being a production system.
one vote for the old FF because tabKitv2 is unsurpassed
In fact, switching to Chrome is agonizing because I lose my adblocker.
Firefox in comparison feels like being in a grand old house that was built before plumbing and electricity. You can tell that it used to be beautiful and polished, but the luster has faded over time.
I think the core goal is influence: The ability to meaningfully change the web ecosystem or counteract changes that would be harmful.
Of course market share is necessary for influence, but I don't think it's sufficient: If Firefox gained a larger market share but at the cost permanently catching up to Chrome, I don't think a lot would be won.
How much of the users are actually technical?
The Firefox user share is frequently seen through the lens of technical features, however, I have the suspicion that the vast majority of the audience is regular users who have no idea of anything technical.
Mozilla brand has value in privacy, not browsers. It could start VPN, cloud services, remote backups, smart home, security cameras... Even Android phones with stamp from Mozilla would be great.
There are no money in browsers, it is basically a feed tube from big corporation to its drones. Mozilla should not sponsor large corporations.
Exactly. I would really like to use something google-free, but the interface of Qutebrowser is too good, and Qutebrowser can't use Mozilla's rendering engine, even though the developers would like to.
> Mozilla need to [...] build a new browser
>and a “browser toolkit” to let other people build their own
And it could have take succeeded before Electron arrived if Mozilla didn't decide to let the project die.
Most of the negative feedback from users comes from two paths, changes that break add-ons, changes that remove customization. Either of those two effectively reduce the value proposition, so I think negative feedback is granted.
The problem most 'core' users have is this UX ethos that some how we are not having more MAUs because we fail to "make changes to compete with Chrome". This has penetrated the Firefox team and has lead to a copy cat of UX features from Chrome and a 'dummyfication' of UX.
The reason Firefox is unable to compete with Chrome or Edge is not because of missing features or performance. Both Firefox and Edge have million dollar advertisement and OEM agreements. Talk to anybody on the street and everyone and their dog will know Chrome, Firefox not so much. The average users will use whatever is pre-installed. They will not go out of their way because of Chrome-like features.
This causality that somehow Firefox is missing market share because of features or UX is flawed. Firefox is playing a Goliath and David game, with billion dollar revenue companies. Accepting and embracing it's niche nature is a necessary first step.
I think it’s the second part that is more important than my initial (potentially unfair) generalisation.
In order to fund further development of gecko it needs to become a competitor to WebKit/blink and grab that market share in this new world of many browser front ends that are cropping up. Explore new business models, for example sign revenue share agreements with new browser developers in exchange for supporting (or even helping with initial funding) their development.
In my opinion the author missed a large one: Mozilla chose to chase after Chrome's market share instead of focusing on the reasons people liked Firefox. For years there were a ton of things that made Firefox objectively more powerful for a skilled user than Chrome. Mozilla has burned all of them to the ground.
They could have kept us, the ten percent. Instead they chased the 50% and they will end up with nothing at all. When they write the obituary for Firefox, it will begin with the day they decided if Chrome does something then they have to do it as well. Personally I'd peg the terminal diagnosis for June 21st 2011.
Mozilla should be comparing their user share to their user demographics. When Firefox had thirty percent of the market its users were talking about all the amazing things they could make Firefox do that other browsers couldn't. In 2021 Firefox users pretty much just talk about getting off on Google not knowing what they're up to. What's that get Mozilla? 3.29%. So why is Mozilla hell-bent on the same attitude and pattern of behavior that's been ruining them for a decade?
It still has some powerful features though, like E2E encrypted sync, multi-account containers etc. I'll keep using it. But they're aiming at the mainstream too much which has already given up on them. They need to win back the enthusiasts first instead of alienating us. Only then does it make sense to thing about mainstream adoption again.
Meaning X will be removed within ~three versions.
And it just looks so bulky with compact mode off. I tried to get used to it but no. I actually used it without compact mode before, but with the latest version the compact mode is using about the same vertical space as the old normal mode :)
Instructions: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/compact-mode-workaround...
Now I have some extra vertical pixels :)
I don't blame Mozilla for this though since they did not have a monopoly on a platform to capitalize on unlike the other players.
Sadly Safari seems to be the only other option.
For a long time Firefox has been dependent on Google for sponsorship. This is a toxic dependency that Firefox hasn't been able to rid itself of and is seeming increasingly less plausible as time goes by.
But FireFox on Android was perfect, at least it was until the latest UI update when suddenly they lost the notion of favorites (or, they were now hidden under "new tab" instead of available on touching the address bar) and you needed to open a new tab for just about anything. I'd still prefer it over Safari or Chrome though.
I actually do not enjoy using Chrome on my Android compared to the feel of the new Firefo client.
For most people the internet, Google and Chrome are one and the same.
I wish they would just charge for Firefox sync. The users that are left mostly use it for privacy reasons and they know that privacy costs money.
Safari is not an option for me, I use all platforms but I want the same browser on every platform which means no safari :)
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/find-and-install-add-on...
Considering how poorly pretty much every vendor who wasn't named "Apple" was fumbling around trying to layer negative value added customizations on top of Android in the early days (and continued doing so for years), there was a ripe opportunity to ship a "Mozilla mobile" consisting of a stock Android device + Firefox. Of course, the powers that be predictably blew it.
Sure, Edge can be configured by domain policies and that is easy too. For example disallowing https exceptions is a popular recent policy (that gets reverted pretty quickly).
Especially for any web shop... Firefox is even less relevant than Microsoft now and forcing it as a primary internal browser is a great way to alienate your company from end user experiences.
It already has, sadly.
> Can you centrally administrate Google accounts? Because employees certainly aren't allowed to use their privat ones.
Yes, definitely. For non Microsoft shops, Google is a very common option (eg academia).
I use chrome for important stuff for that reason.
From personal experience I know that Teams definitely has some Firefox-only bugs.
Outside of corps ideologically opposed to using Office, like IBM and Oracle, I've almost never seen anybody that didn't run on Outlook. At least since Notes became abandonware anyway.
(edit: to be clear, wasn't trying to be snarky. Genuinely surprised. Thought Microsoft intranets were a thing of legacy dinosaur companies, didn't know that modern enterprises still did that. But I don't work in enterprise, only in small biz, where nobody can afford dedicated sys admins and everything is in the cloud. From what I hear though, the UX of Outlook these days is better than Gmail and gcal (which isn't saying much, I know). Might be worth trying again someday...)
In the small dev world it's kinda the opposite. Linuxy servers beget Mac dev machines, so AD is mostly out, leaving Apple enterprise stuff (shitty) or Google (OK, but nowhere near as powerful as Microsoft).
GDocs becomes the lowest common denominator and many people don't have Word anymore. Data is either cloud native (json, csv) or else imported into Gsheets.
I suspect some of this is due to the modern educational pipeline too, with gsuite (or Google Workspace, or whatever it's called these days) producing a generation of young workers who grew up on that stuff. It's caused quite a generation gap at my current workplace, where the older workers use Microsoft and the younger ones use Google and stuff keeps getting converted back and forth. And once in a while someone sends a PDF and both sides go nooooo...
Also, I'd be willing to believe your average Google Workspace, preconfigured by Google, is more secure out of the box than your average Microsoft LAN administered by somebody who once took a certification course twenty years ago.
But when something breaks on self-hosted Microsoft stuff, at least you can hire someone to fix it. When something breaks on Google Workspace, hey, it's a free vacation day for the whole staff!
Sounds like they ported over all the best features from Skype! ;)
Lack of corp support is one of the things that harmed FF from what I saw. Until a few years ago it was not as easy to control FF via group policy¹ as it was Chrome, so FF didn't get a look in. Telling infrastructure managers “but you can do X instead and it is just as easy or easier” would fall on deaf ears because while as convenient in isolation it is still something different instead of integrating with what they did for everything else they permitted on their user machine builds.
¹ This has changed since, but too late.
* Performance feels better. Both in terms of being more lean in everyday use, and in not having random issues where CPU/Memory spikes for seemingly no reason.
* I'm sure there are websites that don't work with Firefox, but I haven't found any yet.
* I don't like that tabs in the tab bar are roundrects instead of "connecting" to the content, but it's no big deal I guess.
* Other than that I've basically not noticed that I'm using a different browser, which I mean in the best way possible.
I'm going to continue using it for as long as possible, because while I think Mozilla has made some bad decisions in the past I strongly believe in their mission overall.
There is a webapp I use that has a chat feature and causes high CPU consumption on Firefox. It's the only app I know. I'll switch to Chrome if I use it.
Web standards in 2021: Don't need interoperability if everyone is using Chrome, and thanks to the living standard if you want to compete you'll not only need to implement a spec that is changing daily, but you'll also need to implement all the bugs in Chrome as they'll eventually become part of the spec, and any unrelated specs that disagree with Chrome will end up having to be changed too!
Switching to FF is good, but the reality is that nothing can compete with the dominant players in this morass, so we'll never see new entrants. The Chrome team will determine the direction almost all software moves in probably for the next 2-3 decades at least barring some sort of legislative action by the worlds governments
* Firefox is fine, the sync works well, I don't see any of the drama around management or new-tab or search being an issue, and I get a pile of benefits like sandboxing and better ad-control.
* Chrome is faster, but it also has literal billions of investment.
There really isn't that much drama about this? Sure I wish Firefox had more market share, but it also runs on a fraction of Chrome's budget, so it's never going to be as good, and I can't judge people for not caring about helping Google.
I believe it was very visible, several times, that the execs are only concerned with taking home huge bonuses (there were several submissions here on HN about their balance sheets and budget). At the same time, amazing and strong research teams have been let go. And then Mozilla started doing a very classic corporation things like trying to diversify income while half-arsing almost every such effort (although I do think their VPN offering is a pleasant exception of this rule); an example coming to mind is of course Persona but it's not the only one. To this day I haven't forgiven them for putting Pocket in a right-click menu. It didn't belong there then, it doesn't belong there still to this day. Or has HN forgotten to awful privacy policy that Pocket had at the time? Apparently it has.
The way I see it, only Safari and Chrome(-ium) will remain in the next few years. Firefox is doomed when it's managed by Mozilla. And Mozilla hasn't been what they used to be, for a long time now.
It's time to consider stopping to try and save the standard web, and start looking at alternatives like Gemini for a non-corporate controlled alternative.
I insisted on Firefox for a while because Google hegemony but in the end I switched to brave.
1. Firefox often loses settings
2. Also it is really, really bad at saving your session. After losing important tabs I ignited that but...
3. After painstakingly preparing a bunch of docked tabs, it lost these too.
4. Frequent interface changes, often for the worse (to be honest my favourite interface was firefox 2.0)
5. It often breaks extensions too, this is felt heavily on Thunderbird where I have to often teach my family all over again how to do what they want or have to code more extensions myself because some critical extension does not work anymore.
I've had these problems before (on rare occasions) but ever since Firefox did its Quantum leap, these issues were pretty much resolved.
This drives me up the wall. At certain, irregular intervals Firefox loses my configured multi-account containers - except for those provided by an extension, e.g. Amazon Container.
The only thing that I have seen work is shipping a better, cheaper, and more useful product and focusing marketing on why a user would prefer to use it on its own merits. Everything else is preaching to the converted.
In the past I had trouble with client projects or dev tools only working in chrome, but I decided that the only way things get freer is to make myself fix those pain points when I come across them.
I see friends switching to Brave, but I dislike how they seem to be focusing their RnD into BAT/crypto features. Firefox also has the advantage of having addons on mobile.
It's a pipe dream, but I could see Google reverting to the don't be evil days with the rise of these Chromium forks and other ad agencies. Somehow change their business model away from ads, promote adblocking, and support addons on mobile. Checkmate Brave/Vivaldi/Edge/etc. Other than niche features or those apposed to Google will look elsewhere.
Brave is also the closest to the "Let me pay to see no ads" model.
Google could mirror Youtube Premium, and give us ad free 'Chrome Premium' for $x.xx per month.
Also market share varies by region. Chrome and Safari are a bit over represented in the US and under represented in e.g. Germany.
And if people want to use edge, chromium, brave, or get their Chrome experience straight from Google, also fine. IMHO you are dependent on Google either way because it's mostly them doing the heavy lifting on the internals and setting the agenda/roadmap for that. I hear good things about Safari too. Though, I mostly use it to figure out why stuff that works in Firefox and Chrome doesn't work there. That seems to be a recurring annoyance I have to deal with.
From my point of view, having three browser engines (Chrome, Safari, and Firefox) is better than just having Chrome and Safari. At worst, it keeps the other two a bit more honest. Especially Google seems to need to have their arm twisted a lot more to actually do the right things.
If people don't like their browsers, maybe go and fix them? If you can't, pick the one that best caters to your need and be grateful for what you get for free.
Best thing that could ever happen for the browser problem is for Mozilla to go under and FF be taken over by the community who actually care about the problem that FF is the solution for, not just some overpaid executives who think selling a VPN is a good use of their time between private jet flights.
I think it's fair to say that the experience with Firefox will depend a lot on the platform and how much its imperfections affect you.
For example, I use macOS. Until last year Firefox would cut my laptop's battery life in half compared to a Chromium browser. That alone would make it a bad browser for me. Some sites that rely a lot on JS are often noticeably slower than Safari or Chromium. Then you have Firefox's UI. One thing that annoys me... CTRL/CMD+Click means opening on a new tab, right? On Firefox, by default, links on pages works like that, but links on the bookmarks bar don't! Talking of the bookmarks bar, after many UI updates, it no longer has the correct margins and doesn't fit with the rest of the UI, not to mention that favicons are a pain in the rear to update. And then there are the little things... Firefox moved to a "settings in a tab" for some things, but stuff like downloads and the bookmarks manager still open on windows with sizes that don't fit the OS or even Firefox's design. This old code was also stopping context menus and other parts of the browser from using the OS dark theme until recently.
Is Firefox terrible? No, but it's a mix of old and new code, UIs, etc, and the macOS version has been neglected for years. It's usable. Firefox's problem on this platform is that Safari and Chromium are so much better platform. Even with the recent improvements, Firefox is still behind in many areas.
I use Firefox daily, but only as a secondary browser. I've tried... but I get annoyed after a week or two and end up going back to a Chromium-based browser.
An alternative isn't an alternative if no one uses it therefore no one tests or supports it.
I want Firefox, without Mozilla.
Noting, however, that I use Firefox and Thunderbird as my daily-driver applications, and Edge + Safari when I must.
Linus and the “gamers” will compare and try distros, point out tiny flaws, judge developer team strength but the one thing they will almost never, ever do is _pay money_. Even the nicest folks try their best, ask for support politely but they typically will not or cannot pay, and cannot contribute to a project beyond a solid bug report in most cases.
Linux OSS fanboys also are allergic to paying for software. God forbid someone charges a dollar for a useful application on a linux distro. Elementary OS is trying to inch towards payment with a “pay what you want” model because developers and teams actually charging for their labor would piss off 99% of the users. They may talk about the virtues of open source but what 95% of (non-technical) users love about open source is the fact that its FREE.
Kovid Goyal, creator of Calibre & Kitty gets ~$3000/month on Patreon for software used by millions that he’s built and supported for a decade now. How much does Amazon make on the Kindle instead? Tens or hundreds of millions? This isn’t a case of an evil corporate company not paying for OSS either, its just people who like to read.
We could end the Chrome hegemony tomorrow if Firefox was realistically able to charge for a browser, hire folks and not get completely dropped by their userbase. I hang out in the Firefox chats and fixed a bug once. Like most OSS, “community driven” basically means ~1000 people are actually willing and able to contribute to the project in some capacity. The rest is freeloaders, even if they happen to have good intentions. Google figured out an indirect way to get compensated for what they build because they too know users will not pay for a browser, or a search engine, or maps, or cloud storage, or photos, or news or everything else Google just gives us for free. As developers we could help solve this problem too - simply work for Mozilla negotiate a lower salary if you feel so strongly.
Open source software walks a hard line on freedom. Nothing is stopping you from charging a dollar for your Linux software, but nobody will pay for it unless you're offering some kind of actual utility. Similarly, if Google started charging a dollar for their browser, I imagine there would be a lot of disgruntled people looking for new browsers.
Money is not the solution here, it's the problem. Hiding away code and restricting access is the opposite of freedom, and while you're welcome to disagree with the principle it doesn't change the fact that there's thousands of open source projects floating around, many of them best-in-class. Do you think Hacker News would exist if every CSS component charged a dollar so you could support the developers, or every coreutil you used had a 50-cent tax after every invocation?
I see the same pattern in Firefox. Back when Chrome launched, and for years after, it was miles ahead of firefox and IE.
Anyways, if money is a problem then just work for free lol. Easy solve. Why do you care about Vulkan on Apple anyways? Seems like you were a Mac user.. if i had to guess you used Mac for many years and switched recently, now that Linux desktop has become viable. Why did you not use linux 10 years ago too? The money you paid to Apple only causes problems right? If money is the root of evil you should work for free contributing to the FOSS you believe in and find some other way to pay the rent. But I guess money is the root of evil only when you're paying, not when you're getting paid.
The Linux desktop was fine, arguably since GTK2 was popularized. The software selection was a little sparse, but I genuinely liked it more than the Aqua UI at the time. (as well as... whatever Windows 7 was doing. Aero?)
> Mac was as good in 2010, 10 years ago. I do believe that its at least partly because Apple had the money to hire and support excellent teams full of brilliant people.
Maybe so, but I seldom really saw it pay off. Things definitely looked prettier on MacOS, but I was often frustrated by things that should "just work" like Time Machine and Safari, so I really spent the majority of my time on MacOS looking for alternatives to Apple's own software. Whatever lead they had in 2010 has been greatly diminished though, especially since Big Sur's release. I just can't even fathom using their new UI...
> Anyways, if money is a problem then just work for free lol.
I suppose I do, if you count open source contributions.
>Why do you care about Vulkan on Apple anyways?
It's nice. DXVK is very powerful, and not being able to use it on my Macbook kinda makes it a no-go for regular use. You can argue that it "doesn't matter" and try to trivialize my desires as much as you want, but it's Apple's move. My Windows machines had it, my Linux devices have it, Apple is the only one left who doesn't.
> Seems like you were a Mac user.. if i had to guess you used Mac for many years and switched recently, now that Linux desktop has become viable.
I used to use Windows for gaming and my Mac for programming, but once Proton got good enough I figured it was time to retire them both. Windows and MacOS were starting to get too slow to daily-drive, and my Mac wouldn't even run Mojave without idling above 50c. Plus, Apple's software quality has taken a complete nosedive in recent years. Sierra was the first step in a pretty questionable direction, and everything running Catalina and beyond is completely foreign to me. Plus, the little things like package management and process handling started to get increasingly difficult, to the point that it was actively making it harder for me to do my job. Safari's endless popup notifications drove me up the wall while I was happily using Chrome, and having to blow hundreds of gigs just to use little utilities like Xcode finally pushed me over the edge. I couldn't buy a machine with upgradable memory or even accessible storage. Modern Macs are about as repairable as a cellphone, which I find abhorrent.
> Why did you not use linux 10 years ago too?
I did, I've had an x201 for about a decade that's happily served as a media server and a Nextcloud/Syncthing host for quite a while now. On desktop, it was mostly down to a lack of software: there was a period where you couldn't run everything you wanted unless you had both Windows and Mac, but nowadays the holdouts have mostly given up. I've got Slack, VS Code, Discord, Steam, Spotify, and pretty much anything from Windows that I really cared about like Ableton Live. Plus, I can plug in any GPU that I want and expect it to work fairly well on Linux, which is definitely not the case for MacOS. Really not ideal for the times that I'm playing with AI or CUDA acceleration. Running Linux virtualized was a pretty good solution for a while, but with QEMU I can run Windows and MacOS with baremetal performance.
This isn't intended to dunk on MacOS, as much as it might seem like it (and as much as people insist that I do). I still think Mojave is one of the best OSes you can use these days, especially if you're not an enthusiast. My demands outgrew MacOS though, and Apple's demands offended me. Switching to Linux made perfect sense for my workflow, and it went smoother than I expected on the desktop. My overall point is that money is nice, but it won't buy you software freedom. You could have all the money in the world, and Apple wouldn't let you audit their source code or plug in an Nvidia graphics card. Instead of fighting them at every corner, I've given up, and I'm happier than I've ever been.
I just think there genuinely IS a tension between open source/software freedom and great software. For an example, read about the recent case of Streamlabs. They stole the OBS code and rebranded it a little, copied the webpage down to the layout, but did not disclose any of that. They made tons of money and got acquired by Logitech. The people there successfully used the fact that OBS open sourced everything to steal their work and got rich off it. If Apple open sources their entire OS, why wouldn't the same thing happen? If that did happen, who pays for all the maintenance and new features on Mac? just recently I found a certain Mac OS app that sells pretty well. On decompiling it I found it was just an old open source command line utility, the dev literally threw in the binary and packaged it into an app. This was not disclosed anywhere of course. I've seen many, many examples of this across SaaS and other products - they take some free code, do nothing but repackage it and brand it, keep the profit and give nothing back to the creators.
I would love if MacOS was open source and I could fix any OS/software when i hit a use case it doesn't solve well for me. If there was in theory a way to open source code without letting cheaters use it that would be great. But if piracy is easy then people default to it. No one paid for WinRAR back in the day and if we just let that model continue, 80% of the IT industry today wouldn't exist. Like i just see the entire ecosystem and industry with all the amazing technology we have now compared to the 90s was born partly because we found ways to charge for stuff and cut out freeloaders. No one on HN asks for a lower salary and we get these salaries _because_ these models prevent theft. So closed source is a compromise to a tough problem - im okay with that. I think the huge leaps sometimes take a LOT of money to build - say Apple designing and researching and paying to manufacture touchscreens for a decade before ever selling the first iPhone, or Amazon buying a billion servers to build the cloud, and I don't know if they would exist if they never got paid for the stuff they built.
> If that did happen, who pays for all the maintenance and new features on Mac?
This is probably the last thing I'd worry about if MacOS was open source. As it stands today, Apple basically "maintains" the Mach kernel by strapping BSD patches onto the XNU kernel and praying nothing breaks, if the community maintained it we probably wouldn't need to wait months for new iterative versions to come out and fix relatively simple issues.
> I've seen many, many examples of this across SaaS and other products - they take some free code, do nothing but repackage it and brand it, keep the profit and give nothing back to the creators.
And that's fine. That free software is intended to support other people, and it's why there are distinctions between GPL and BSD licensing. When you write open-source software, imagining such a "worst case" scenario is the first things developers do, and they choose their license accordingly. In the Streamlabs example you brought up, the community rightfully called them out for being a ripoff of OBS, and encouraged people to go use the free version instead. Like I said earlier, "money is the problem, not the solution."
> No one paid for WinRAR back in the day and if we just let that model continue, 80% of the awesome software today wouldn't exist.
People didn't pay for WinRAR because
1. It didn't force you to.
2. There were several free alternatives, like 7ZIP.
As you've mentioned earlier, the majority of "awesome software today" is really just free software strapped together with twine and bubblegum. 80% of SaaSes these days are simply frontends to software that could absolutely run locally. Even SaaSes don't see the end-user as an important asset, since the "new hotness" is moving on to B2B sales and bootstrapping directly onto another successful company like a parasite. Whether or not you consider this to be the utopian world of proprietary software is up to you, but I certainly appreciate things better in the FOSS world.
I keep reading articles like that on tech-related websites and they all miss the point which is: if Chrome-based browsers one day manage to gain 100% market share, what will it change if it is open source? What stops anyone from just forking that browser if Google makes anything wrong with it? And what did Google do with browsers so far, that we hate it?
I use Chromium because it has both a safer and more reliable design and implementation. If web browsers were OS's, Firefox would be Mac OS 9. If Mozilla wants to understand why they're losing market share, they should try and understand why no one builds OS's like that anymore.
It's an inefficient use of computing resources, but necessary for security, mostly because of Spectre.
I hope Mozilla can find a more coherent use of their energy. I'm still rooting and using firefox but it's more of an ethical effort than the obvious pleasure it used to be.
Good luck
When I've tried out alternatives, I run into sites that don't work correctly. I don't particularly like Firefox, but it "just works" most of the time.
Also so many of the tutorials on JavaScript are done with chrome. People are learning how to use the chrome dev tools, and then not able to transition to using other browsers for web dev. It’s a mess.
> Don’t get me wrong, though - using Firefox is not painful at all. Quite the contrary!
... after noting an anecdote earlier in the post
> Last week I saw one site that directly didn’t support Firefox (it displayed a message I should switch to Chrome) and another where the sign in was broken on Firefox, but worked on Chrome-like browsers
These experiences make using Firefox painful for end-users, and if Chrome is 99% as good and doesn't have this friction, they'll use Chrome just to experience less online friction.
It's a vicious chicken-egg problem, because if Firefox's market-share is sub-5%, then it doesn't matter why that sign-in page doesn't work in FF... Nobody empowered to fix it will bother to look, because the workaround of "Just use a different browser" is very cheap from the site-owner's point of view (way cheaper than spinning up a debugging flow in a browser they're unfamiliar with).
Low market share drives increased likelihood of browser-site incompatibility drives users to switch to the larger-market-share browser drives low market share.
The assumption that Chromium (& Webkit) is controlled soley by Google, is outdated.
If you think Microsoft would have made a strategic shift like basing Edge on Chromium without ensuring they had a seat at the table, you would be very mistaken - and they did not.
Microsoft, Google, Brave, and Samsung all contribute to the core, Microsoft very significantly.
You're arguing "sole" control which is a Strawman and doesn't really address anyone's actual concerns. A better discussion is: Can Google make unilateral decisions on Chromium's direction/support/features in any circumstances?
What I'm about to say may upset people but if Chromium's governance model was good enough I could see Firefox joining it and turning Firefox into another Chromium based browser.
The problem with hegemony is governance and control, it isn't technological. Purely on a technical level hegemony is a good thing. But who controls the hegemony? If it is Google or any corp that is really, horrible.
I don't understand why those companies don't finance the development of alternative rendering engines and browsers. Right now Google is financing the only alternative left, Firefox. So they kind of control that, too.
I've seen that, but it was related to hardware keys. If Firefox cannot be bothered to support keys, why should anyone be bothered by using it?
More importantly though, it seems like the whole world is in this mess, because browser developers develop monoliths. If the browsers were split into small reusable parts, any developer could assemble one, and there could be lots of competing parts. The number of available browsers would explode to infinity. Why is everything lumped under a single massive code base known as "Browser engine" like gecko or blink or whatever? Why do they keep making monoliths? There could be parser engine, css layout engine, svg render engine, etc etc etc. But there isn't, there's one giant lump, browser engine.
If anyone made a focused attempt at a new browser ecosystem, it seems like it should attack the glue layer between these disparate parts.
The plugin relies on Google and Yandex for translations. Mozilla doesn't seem to have a problem with relying on or providing proprietary services (for better or worse) so that shouldn't be an obstacle, though I'd love to see an open source translation service replace them eventually -- maybe LibreTranslate https://github.com/FilipePS/Traduzir-paginas-web/issues/278
It seems the organisations forget why they're here - to write software, not to try and solve all of mankind's issues and injustices. The scope becomes too broad and unfocused.
The Mozilla Foundation pledges to support the Mozilla Manifesto in its activities. Specifically, we will:
- build and enable open-source technologies and communities that support the Manifesto's principles; build and deliver great consumer products that support the Manifesto's principles;
- use the Mozilla assets (intellectual property such as copyrights and trademarks, infrastructure, funds, and reputation) to keep the Internet an open platform;
- promote models for creating economic value for the public benefit; and
- promote the Mozilla Manifesto principles in public discourse and within the Internet industry
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20081218222911/http://www.mozill...
Perhaps the cart has now been put in front of the horse somewhat and they think that a great community (or being involved in issues entirely separate to software) will somehow magically create great software.
Yes, that would be because the whole story was basically lies.
Interesting, thanks.
Servo was never going to grow into a complete browser, and much of it was absorbed into Gecko (the Firefox codebase). But I agree, it would be great to have the Servo idea pushed further forward.
Right. Strange that. Who’d have thought that’s how a company would prioritize things.
You would have to rely on donations. Which gives me an idea that probably already exists: a kickstarter/patreon alternative for recurring donations. Recurring donations won't start until there are enough for continuous funding of the project.
Though, to be fair to the Chromium maintainers, they've done an excellent job of making it incredibly easy to develop against. Puppeteer is the gold standard for browser automation, Chromium Headless makes it easy to run pretty much any webdriver against it, then there's Embedded Framework, Electron, etc. Firefox could have/should have done more here.
Guess what, today using Firefox is the same, even if it's better than Chromium derivatives for you, too often will you need to switch to Chromium when faced with Google Hangouts / Google Meet / Zoom / the fad of the day, or some random websites.
And this time it does not worth it since it's the same US corporate product, so I jumped this ship more eagerly. I'm on Yandex (the web browser) now.
That's the thing with second-class citizen browsers - bleeding edge is often broken.
Is there a (sane) way to map Cmd+D to highlight the URL bar? I was trying to do this about a year ago but it proved insanely complicated. I managed to update omni.ja in v80 but then couldn't anymore in v80.0.2 (plus this would get annoying quick to do frequently).
In Chromium this is easy since the there's a menu entry for it ("Open Location...") so I can natively create custom mappings for it, but I refused to retrain my muscle memory for Cmd+L so I went back to using Brave. :|
If there were even half a dozen capable browser engines to choose from when making a new browser that were all accessible, then we wouldn't be in this mess.
I tried to switch from Chrome to Firefox, and 98% of my websites work fine, but you still need Chrome as a backup for those sites that don't. Without 100% compatibility it's a hard sell when most users have no reason to leave Chrome.
I can't recommend Firefox to friends with the caveat "Keep a copy of Chrome around for when stuff doesn't work" Hopefully Mozilla can keep making things better. I'm glad someone is competing in this space
This is probably the major blocker from people switching.
"But you can't actually do it unless you're a $1T company" crowd forgets (or wasn't around to see) how dominant IE was, and how huge a project Mozilla was even back in the day.
But i stopped using it now the Mozilla Foundation is having hard times surviving....
The big problem is the fact that Google has sooo much money... We need a Twitter, a Facebook, or another company with a big cash cow to seriously support a different browser engine.
This deliver a poor experience when implementing History API compare to Safari and Google on iOS that work as expected.
Although, autofill on Safari is objectively worse.
I guess the problem today is nobody can be bothered to maintain sites for different browsers. Today I see most websites work well only in chrome.
Is the problem that the standards keep evolving? Or are the standards just too difficult to perfectly support? What is going on?
AFAIK, Google Play offers a browser choice prompt on new Androids, at least in Europe
If Wikipedia can live on donations, why not Mozilla?
In the end I gave up on the feature I’d be hoping Firefox would implement (tab search), and went with I just need to use this for the future of the web.
It’s been a happy process, I love containers for privacy and in the process I’ve discovered many niceties of Firefox.
Don’t miss chrome as my daily driver since I detoxed.
there is no point crying over spilled milk, hoping that it can reconstitute into a jug. post-mortems might useful but they need to account for the tectonic continental plate drifts that tamed even extremely well funded actors like Microsoft
what the broader open source community should focus on is where the next choke point will materialize and ensure the same mistakes do not happen again
assuming there is a second chance
Google is also not known as the company as the company that just has the best for you in mind.
I guess that is why some companies are starting to get wary of the term open source.
> Chrome started with a great narrative when it was facing an uphill battle with Internet Explorer,
That is just not true, the uphill battle was hard won by Firefox and their supporters. People knew there were alternative browser. Developers were taking action in supporting Firefox. Chrome came in, with the help of Google Services steal the thunder. Although you could also blame Mozilla for failing to work on e10s, which was originally schedule for Firefox 3.5, pushed to Firefox 4 and later that is what we now call quantum.
>it’s home to the last major rendering engine, that’s not derived from WebKit
I dont think that is bad. Gecko isn't necessarily better than Webkit. You need to win on technical merit.
> Google were still the company that “does no evil”. It’s almost surreal how things have changed
"Surreal". I guess that is just life, when most were too young and naive to believe a new startup company could do evil. And Google was so righteous back then. When a few lonely conspiracy theorist were crying about Google, no one listened. Remember, that was before Steve Jobs declared Thermonuclear war. And before the Great Battle between Apple and Google started. But then even after the thermonuclear war, most people still believed in Google.
It wasn't until 2021 did anyone from ex-Mozilla stepped up and suggest what Google might have done.
And here is what I wrote about Mozilla [1] not long ago.
>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 its 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 Mozilla'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 often argue against pure natural language specifications in favor code based specs. I just don't think human language is nearly precise enough to write an adequate specification. Natural language words are incredibly polysemic and contextual. Look for example, at how many meanings the word "break" has: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/break
Kolmogrov has long ago suggested that fully specified information distills down to a computer program: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_description_length
The ideal language for a pure specification might be a mix of natural language and pseudo code with a pseudo test suit. However, if you are writing that, you might as well go one step further and write working testable code.
Other technical fields usually go beyond language for specifications, using blueprints and diagrams which are their version of code.
There is also an history of trying to tackle the inadequacy of natural language for technical specifications. A pioneer of this is Donald Knuth with his Literate Programming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming) and the descendant concepts of having code with extractable inline comments that you can use to auto generate documentation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentation_generator
I would argue that modern platforms with pull request based workflows that tie discussions to version controlled code changes are also the progression of this line of thought.
A cleaned up version of these might make sense for a specification.
And I get some of the concerns. While natural language under specifies, reference implementations over specify. This is more of a problem with low level languages however. Modern, high level languages are getting fairly close to a form of pseudo code. I fully agree that the reference implementations shouldn't contain or should hide, low level optimizations. I also understand that reference implementations can unduly tie specs to specific hardware, OSs and platforms.
But to me, over-specification is less of a problem than under-specification and it can be mitigated by labeling particular functions or blocks of code as implementation specific and not part of the spec.
Without spec written in code, the different implementations always have subtle incompatibilities. I see egregious versions of under-specification in government where horrendously vague specs are created in order to issue RFPs for getting software built. They usually end up with non working software at mind blowing cost.
People have this weird misconception that they are contracting out to build software. They are not. Building software is really easy. You press the build button or type the compile command. Building software has been fully automated for a while now. What is difficult is designing software and specifying what it must do. This is because there is a vast jungle of protocols, business flows, hardware and software platforms that need to be interacted in different ways for different needs. This is what needs to be specified and only computer code can do it adequately.
I wish that Mozilla adopted the chromium core. We really need a well funded non-profit managed release of the reference browser.
The problem here is twofold. The "reference implementation" is already beholden to Google's interests, and only getting more intertwined as time goes on. The other problem is Mozilla, who I wouldn't trust to manage taking a dump, let alone a web browser.
Chromium is a fine platform. I'd love to see a community implementation of that which isn't directed by corporate interests or utter incompetents.
In fact I now celebrate their shrinking market share.
Although I have heard Nike earned billions with the Kaepernick campaigns, so maybe sometimes it does pay off. But for Mozilla? Do they get government funding?
It is a 180° turn on what they seemed to stand for in the past, an open web.
...OK?
> What is their differentiating factor to Google now?
Mozilla doesn't gather your data to show you ads
So they say, but they have teamed up with Google and Pocket before. And how do they plan to fight "hate speech" and promote fake news, without analyzing my data? What if they don't like what I write or look at?
It may not be literal religion, in the sense of believing "God says this is the right thing to do," but it is the same underlying instinct - "This is Right, and I must do all in my power to serve it."
Humans pick other people who agree with them for their teams, so after a while corporate cultures are almost guaranteed to become homogeneous.
Once they are, groupthink and lack of dissenting opinions means the company starts to explicitly support whatever causes fit its corporate culture.
That's what it looks like to me, anyway.
I guess Safari is still their own. KDE Konqueror still their own. Sad that opera became chrome. Guess I'll be staying Brave for awhile.
Firefox's huge decline also makes sense to me. Firefox stopped building their browser ~5 years ago? It's not that Chromium is inherently just better, it's that Mozilla moved off of firefox. When you lose focus on firefox, you lag behind.
https://blog.mozilla.org/careers/mozilla-diversity-inclusion...
They are far more concerned with hiring women. They hired themselves a 'Culture Manager' and 'people managers' and 'diversity managers'. Note how these are not Rust Software developer manager, protocol developer manager.
https://blog.mozilla.org/careers/mozilla-introduces-gender-t...
Imagine how good firefox could be if they weren't so concerned with their staffing diversity and instead worked on their browser.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/
They are concerned about political activism, calling for people to be deplatformed, etc.
For that reason, firefox isn't even an alternative.
I would not agree that is what I said. I'm not opposed to inclusion. I'm not even saying their decision is wrong. Maybe they are exactly what we need on the internet. I fully support their choice to do what they have done.
I have made a judgement against firefox. It has very clearly been neglected. There are a myriad of problems that have been unsolved for years and this is recent experience. I suspect nobody can refute this very real experience. I remember a time in history when firefox was a top contender with tons of market share.
So did I say that they are mutually exclusive? Certainly not, but in Mozilla's case their priorities are clear and the consequence of a bad browser is reality. they lost focus on their browser and it lagged behind.
I'm interested in why you asserted I said more than I did. Do you believe inclusion and good engineering are mutually exclusive? It certainly looks bad for Mozilla.
For example, the recent move to switch from master branches to main branches provides near zero benefits, mass gnashing of teeth, and hours upon hours of wasted time. It is time spent increasing adherence to a cause and beating down dissent to the cause, and time spent away from things like producing code or, on the activists' part, doing things like teaching people if you're of the opinion that their cause is a good one.
I've seen far more environments turn for the worse after their entry, than become better for it (though a small handful have done so)
I believe that is highly unlikely. At root the Blink engine is actively supported by several big tech heavyweights. Microsoft Edge is based on it. A rarely mentioned but important derivative browser is Silk (Fire tablets etc.) that Amazon develops. Then there are a bunch of smaller fish with Brave leading that pack.
I think the engine would survive just fine without Google. There was a time when you're view held, but that time has past.