Mozilla Foundation places two-page advocacy ad in The New York Times (2004)
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
They need to get themselves back to this place mentally, get the community rooting for them again. And spend some money on a passion based marketing campaign.
Edit:
Just to add, back then Firefox had an army of advocates installing Firefox on their family’s and friends computers, basically making them use it. Google co-opted the same army just four years later with similar marketing to get everyone installing Chrome on their family’s and friends computers.
They need to find a way to get that to happen again. I don’t have the answers but suspect privacy and security may be the angle to take.
I suspect the thing holding them back is the danger that attacking Google on privacy grounds in order to push themselves as better could damage the lucrative revenue that they receive from Google.
They are close to being best here.
Fix extensions is on top of my personal list.
But so far you get moderated (edit: for advocacy even, what an irony given the title of this post!) if you try to remind them about the parts they broke a few years ago, see all the hidden comments at the bottom of this bug for an example: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1332447
Personally I am moving to LibreWolf these days (Firefox with minor fixes). LibreWolf can halfway expect to see donations this spring. If they also fix the extension API it will become a "must have" product for me.
> They need to find a way to get that to happen again. I don’t have the answers but suspect privacy and security may be the angle to take.
This worked because, at the time, Firefox was genuinely, and more importantly, visibly better. You can't honestly say that about Firefox nowadays, and after Mozilla's management laid off tons of their engineering talent, there's been no plausible path for them to get there.
On privacy, I tentatively agree (but Mozilla's actions with Pocket etc. casts doubt), but Firefox is significantly behind Chrome when it comes to safety. Firefox's sandbox is substantially weaker (e.g. it's basically worthless on linux, because you can reach the X server from inside the "sandbox").
Not sure about Android, as I can’t remember how Chrome performs, but I regularly test things in Chrome on Desktop (or when sites are so third-party heavy, I can’t figure out a sensible way to enable sites), and on Windows the performance for both is indistinguishable, and that’s despite tons of extensions for FF and none for Chrome.
Firefox works really well on Wayland though, which addresses X's problems (and a few other regarding input and clipboard).
Edit: found out the issue you mentioned: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1129492
That's not great indeed. I guess that the only workaround for now is Wayland
Fast forward to last week and I'm considering switching back. It's not because of any sites that Firefox hasn't supported. It's because I recently needed to start using a webapp to access to email from $WORK. They locked up email and now my local Mail.app client won't connect to $WORK.
My preferred way of handling this is to wrap the webapp as a desktop shortcut, so the entire site is wrapped in it's own window, etc. I also have a couple of other work webapps that I like to treat as applications. Chrome makes this easy/possible. Firefox does not.
This used to be something I did with Firefox, but now, it's not possible (or at least easily, on a Mac). Firefox was something you could embed. And now, I have no idea.
Small little features like this are where Firefox starts to lose users. Right now I have both running, but I can't see that lasting long.
That's the big problem. Looking at this only from an average user perspective, it's absolutely right, and "oh yeah well that doesn't work as well as in Chrome because Google pushed an overly complicated unnecessary feature into the standards that requires a company the size of Google to actually maintain and develop it", will only get you blank stares.
I hope I'm wrong, but can't help feeling this war is lost. I can't see how you compete when the rules are being written out by your adversary.
For what it's worth though, Firefox for _me_ is better than the other options in every way; container tabs, easy privacy options, clean interface, etc. I love it.
Did you mean Firefox there?
It's not even close to a fair game.
Not saying Mozilla doesn't have some faults, but Google is just playing a different game.
At this point in time, people wholeheartedly trust Google. Chrome works well enough for the majority of people.
Would Firefox improvements make such a difference in comparison to Chrome? With the current processing power we have on our hands and laptops, I doubt people would care.
As a marketer, the only way to go about this would be "the path of privacy", and maybe try to get traction in the EU market where privacy is being valued to the point of having proper legislation in place.
If Firefox became the standard for privacy, I can see large public organizations start to make the shift, even if it was for compliance reasons. Then maybe people who use those browsers at work will start to use them at home.
Of course I'm pulling this out of my ass, but it's A path I can see as an hypothesis.
Firefox was a superior browser in almost every way to Chrome, the only selling point to Chrome was that you could crash a tab without crashing the entire browser. Firefox conquered massive engineering challenges and aggressively fought its own users for its current position as an also-ran/historical footnote.
edit: and an indication that Firefox doesn't care is that so many Firefox remoaners feel like they can't switch because they rely on Tree-Style Tabs, and Firefox not only doesn't hire the developer and pull the project in-house, they actively sabotage the project through UI intrusions and inflexibility about those intrusions that require the kind of technical confidence to fix that average people don't have (or want.) And they periodically break even that.
I think Tree-Style Tabs will be as seamless as they were on Firefox 5 years ago on Chrome before they will be so on Firefox again.
They don't have to, because there's a whole market beyond Firefox users, that's where I'm getting.
Edge is the default browser for Windows, but when you visit google, you're asked if you want to download Google browser. Google is a known brand, at this point, after years of people talking about chrome, unless you don't know much about the internet you'll default to chrome.
Other instance: Android, default browser is Chrome for the majority of phones.
Google has years of hammering Chrome into people. Even if Firefox because up to your standards, the struggle would be the same.
I have personally set up Internet users who I started out on Firefox, and that I later found out were using Chrome as their primary browser because in their words, "[X Webapp] told them to install it", and then it got set as their default.
In what ways was Firefox clearly so much better?
I know it once had more UI customization (XUL era) but much of that was dropped because of maintenance costs and security concerns (line of death and add-ons conflicting). Today I still use TST and the biggest lingering difference I see is it now has a name block which isn't easily hidden. (Though with userChroms.css it may be possible to do so.)
I regret that I have but one upvote to give. I still use Firefox, but from switching from a secure password-sync system to driving out Brendan Eich to the Mr. Robot fiasco to deprecating the powerful old extensions to almost completely eliminating extensions on Android to constantly changing and damaging the UI (at least on Debian the packagers eliminate a lot of the nonsense), it increasingly feels like either they don't want me to use it — or they simply lack adult supervision.
Not saying Moz's management isn't crap, but IMO we shouldn't jump to conclusions into either direction here. From what juicy details we have, it might very well be the case that Moz's Rust advocacy (Servo project) turned out to be a cesspool of dictatorship, lack of accountability, and nepotism, and overall just not delivering much value to the endeavor of developing a web browser relative to an increasingly untenable situation and/or risk of PR catastrophe waiting to happen.
With Manifest V3 in Chrome stopping the use of uBlock and friends, Firefox could be a real alternative that provides users with a visibly better experience. Firefox will soon become one of only a few browsers capable of blocking the CPU unfriendly visual pollution that pervades every webpage nowadays.
Users are going to leave Chrome and I would prefer they don't flee to Brave. If Mozilla fails to position themselves to capture these users (uBlock and AdBlock each have more than 10 million users), they wont be getting another opportunity like this for a very long time.
Coincidentally a similar issue is why a number of people I know shifted away from FF to Chrome: breaking changes in the add-ons system which meant a lot of old ones stopped working completely and some major ones were slower to update then you'd expect. Moving onto better maintained extensions is a good thing in the end in terms of security and stability, but the hassle of needing to find/choose new options meant one of the sources of friction stopping people move to Chrome then existing even if they stayed with FF.
> If Mozilla fails to position themselves to capture these users
Hopefully they'll remember the other side of the coin and organise to make sure those users are aware their option is viable. I don't currently use FF much (though I've experienced some irritations in Chrome in recent months so maybe it is time for my bi-/tri-annual switch of primary browser) but the existence of a significant browser that isn't essentially a reskin of Chromium and isn't locked to one platform is important to avoid the monoculture issues we experienced in IE6's 90+% market share days.
Not only CPU-unfriendly, but network bandwidth stealing adverts like auto-play full-motion video ads (in a world where every one of the major "mini-monopoly" ISPs impose bandwidth usage caps with insane overage penalty billing), not to mention the security and privacy risks of some advertising "services"…
If they position themselves as THE privacy-first/ad-free browser they could get people back. It would truly be a better experience (specially the ad-free part) which is the only way to get the non-IT crowd interested.
Other features like memory, speed, etc are a commodity now, both browsers are good enough for non power users, but Chrome is stuck with ads because of Google. Firefox is free from this and can use it to disrupt the market.
This kind of comes down to what your tolerance is for the occasional ad slipping through -- if you need the best Ublock Origin support right now, use Firefox right now. If you only care at the point where it becomes really noticeable, then maybe that won't matter until after Manifest V3 becomes a requirement.
Anecdotally I run into people who say that Safari's adblocking is fine, and if those people feel that way about Safari, they aren't going to view the loss in effectiveness on Chrome as being a dealbreaker post Manifest V3. So I also kind of wonder how many people are actually going to switch just because they lose Ublock Origin.
Firefox advocates are reduced to trying to defend using Firefox based on either trivialities or philosophical concerns. And the philosophical concerns seem weak to me since, like Chrome, Mozilla seems to ultimately draw funding from Google.
I'm not against the idea of people keeping up the effort to maintain an independent engine, but it really is hard to justify why given Google's permissive licencing. I am overcome with the irony that the most interesting challenger browser I'm aware of - Brave, run by ex-Mozilla people - is itself using the Blink engine. A pretty sad statement of the strength of the Gecko engine as a renderer.
They needed that groundswell support of lots of extension developers and they torpedoed it. I hope the price was worth it.
:'[
The serious answer is hopefully nothing.
I used to hop between browsers often, and for a few years Firefox felt significantly slower. Does that really matter that much? I don't think so.
I often think that Firefox never really got bad, the difference between FF and Chrome was never massive. It's a bit unfair that FF lost so much market share for that small difference.
If one browser is 2% faster than the other, and the cost to choose one or the other is near zero, then expect huge switching.
... And that's before we factor in the far more dominant network effects, like "What comes pre-installed" and "which integrates with my accounts and syncs my aggregated data and preferences history onto a new machine transparently."
If nobody else is using that memory, they might as well.
1/ yes its depreciated on paper, but it still works
I don't think most people advocating Firefox did it for the extensions. My non-technical family and friends don't care about that.
Firefox used to be just better, obviously better, than what people were using before. Chrome changed that, but still Firefox was the one you could trust not to syphoon your data without your knowledge. It was about having the web not be mediated by a for-profit company that only wants you for your data.
Having competition in the browser-engine space is important, but outside of the HN crowd I don't think most FF advocates did it for that reason. If you didn't suffer IE, it doesn't seem that important.
FF lost because a) it stopped being perceived as better than the competition, b) Chrome took a lot of it's ground through attractive design and marketing, c) Chrome was perceived as better (and I'd argue it was in many respects, at least for a while), and d) Mozilla ended losing a lot of the trust of its previous advocates (with the pocket thing, the Mr Robot marketing stint...).
> Mozilla seems to ultimately draw funding from Google.
I never felt that bad about this point, but may be I was deluding myself. I trusted Mozilla to take Google money without compromising on making FF private and secure.
> t the most interesting challenger browser I'm aware of - Brave, run by ex-Mozilla people - is itself using the Blink engine
Here I agree. There can be lots of innovation in the browser space; may be not the engine, but I'm not sure we totally need it as long as the engine is OSS and there are other companies using it.
Brave does some interesting stuff, but I still would love to see more innovation in how we experience the web. The UX/UI of a browser hasn't changed in a long time.
Instead the points raised here are
a) Perceptions
b) Design & marketing
c) Perception
d) Trust
Just saying, there used to be real technical ammo to bring to the table. Might have helped shore up the userbase if there were great reasons to use Firefox. Maybe users don't use software for its capabilities, but it isn't like Firefox is bringing much else to the table now.
You're right, but those are 2 different discussions. On the one hand, why did Firefox stop being a relevant web browser in the general consumer base. On the other, why did it stop being so great for advanced users. There is some connection between both, of course, but...
Not even all technical users who were promoting Firefox originally actually did use that many advanced extensions. Even if you or I may think FF went to shit, for most even FF advocates, it didn't change that much. That's not why they stopped promoting it.
For me, personally, it was losing Pentadactyl. I'm using Vimium now but it's not even close. I'm still mad about losing that.
Through various decisions over the years, but especially the extensions, Mozilla totally nuked the power user case - they decided they wanted to make a browser for the average grandma, not power users. So their core group of supporters lost enthusiasm as they removed feature after feature, and grandma isn't going out and downloading her own web browser, unless...
...it's pushed by a multibillion dollar megacorporation that pushed it relentlessly on all the biggest web properties (Google and YouTube), TV commercials, and had it packaged in installers for other software. That's why Firefox lost: there was no possible way it could complete with Google's marketing of Chrome, while at the same time it alienated its core of supporters with very poor leadership decisions that fundamentally failed to recognize who its constituency was.
I never noticed Chrome itself being noticeably better than Firefox - I'm sure it was in some ways, but it was definitely never the kind of difference we had between IE6 and Firefox.
I remember this NYT ad very well. It was an incredible moment of positive energy. It's really sad Mozilla blew it, and to this day their leadership doesn't seem to recognize what went wrong.
I remember how much I freaked out when I found that that extension was installed. I had not installed it myself, the title and the description were pretty weird, there were no hits on Google (yet), etc. I thought that I had been hacked and that my browser data, including passwords, had been exfiltrated somewhere else. And all in the name of advertising for a telly show! This broke my trust with Mozilla forever and I haven't used Firefox ever since.
Somewhat fortunately for me in the long run I am such a wasted brat when it comes to software that I had to forgive them - I can't stand working in Chrome or Vivaldi, and not only because I don't like Google because I did back then, but for my use cases it is so clumsy (the way tabs work, how it can't handle a few hundred tabs, how it still doesn't support vertical tabs etc).
[1]: the other time being when I had been married a couple of years and found a letter in the paper bin saying that one of my mortgages had defaulted - long story short it went well but I was shivering at the time).
Chrome was eating their lunch without those deep extensions because they were slowing Firefox down, both in performance and in development.
Whereas I agree Firefox used to be way better than IE when I first used it, I can't really perceive any notable difference on performance for those 3 browsers.
There are some minor diffs (edge has veritcal tabs and allows login in with your AD account), but that's it.
Firefox will let you do this, too, if you tell it to trust the host in about:config:
network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris
network.negotiate-auth.trusted-uris
More important in this day and age is since Firefox 91 there is a checkbox in privacy and security to automagically SSO using the account on the Windows 10/11 Account Settings page that Edge uses.
I guess I need to start advocating for this more, because people genuinely don't seem to know: Firefox is, today, straight-up better than Chrome on privacy in user-visible ways; albeit maybe not immediately obvious ways.
Just off the top of my head, Ublock Origin on Chrome doesn't reliably start up when the browser starts up. If you have a page set as your homepage on Chrome, it might get loaded with ads on it even if you have Ublock Origin installed, because Chrome doesn't supply a mechanism for them to defer requests until after extensions load.
I've seen people argue that they'll switch back to Firefox after Manifest V3 is required, but Ublock Origin already works better in Firefox than Chrome (https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...).
I don't know if that counts as visible though, because I see people who argue that even Safari's adblocking is "good enough". Maybe stuff like blocking ads just isn't obvious enough? Certainly all of the privacy improvements in Firefox (and I'll make the same claim, Firefox is just straight-up better than Chrome on a technical level where privacy is concerned) -- but those privacy features are not visible to even technical users, even people on HN don't notice those features.
I would think that being one of the only big browsers on mobile that has good adblocking would be enough of a selling point that almost everyone on HN with an Android phone would be running Firefox on that at least, to me that's a user-visible feature. But I know a lot of technical people who still use Chrome on Android, and I've run into people who straight-up don't know that Firefox supports adblocking on Android.
Informal poll, how many people here with an Android device are currently running Chrome on it, even though Chrome doesn't block ads on Android? If that number is high among technical users, then either adblocking doesn't count as user-visible, or people just don't know? I'm not sure what to make of that.
But I want to push back against this narrative a little bit that Firefox just doesn't have anything going for it anymore. Firefox is indisputably the best mainstream browser available available today outside of Tor for privacy, adblocking, and (even with the decline of functionality) extension support. I'm just not sure that stuff matters for market share; or maybe the gap isn't wide enough that people care.
The thing is, while things like privacy and adblocking are important, they are passive defensive features made necessary by others; they aren't things that make you feel good, they just make you feel less bad about certain things. When an extension could customize your browser exactly the way you wanted, that was exciting; when TreeStyleTabs felt integrated into the browser, instead of taking several seconds to load and feeling bolted on, it felt like an amazing part of _Firefox_; when mouse gestures worked reliably on every page, including new tab pages and plaintext-mime pages (really, sort this out Mozilla! No reason other than bad coding for extensions to not work on text/plain pages), it felt like a part of the browser, like Firefox was super-charged.
These are the things people can get excited about, and so gets people to show them off to others and recommend it. It's hard to talk about how this nuanced privacy feature is better for X complex reason, in casual conversation; much easier to demonstrate how you're able make the browser fit you like a glove with customizations A, B, and C (and it's more psychologically natural to want to show off positive additive features, too).
> and (even with the decline of functionality) extension support
Extension support, yes, but in terms of actual extensions, it's a yes-and-no situation. The thing about this and other customization that Mozilla doesn't seem to understand is, it's not enough to have "better" extension support, it needs to be "better enough" to overcome the difference in popularity between Firefox and Chrome, and hence the difference in availability/motivation of addon developers.
I still use Firefox as my main browser, but the extension support is not "better enough" for me anymore (see issues mentioned in the first para above), and so for the first in time actual decades, after switching from IE6 to Firefox back in the day, I'm considering switching or partially switching to another browser for my daily use (and have been doing so little by little, with Brave and qutebrowser).
Yeah. I did that. Probably closing to a thousand, from pushing inside Enterprise to libraries and Uni Campus. And I watched first hand how they all slowly migrate themselves to Chrome. Because it was faster. I still have vivid memory of it happening.
>I don’t have the answers but suspect privacy and security may be the angle to take.
I did that too. Against Google. Heck That was before anyone on the internet even suspect Google was a privacy nightmare. Every single one believed their Do No Evil BS. ( Even Mozilla ). I was the contrarian then. And that didn't work either.
I was there in 2004 NY Times Ad. Or even pre Firefox era. Firefox was a better browser than IE6. And even then fighting against IE6 was hard. Very hard. The lesson I learned was that most people dont care much about ideology. ( As long as it doesn't hurt their interest ) They just want a browser that worked. And would only switch if it was better. I dont think Firefox is a bad browser in 2022, but I also dont think it is faster or better than Chrome either.
At the end of the day people can only do so much to help push Firefox. It ultimately falls back on Mozilla. It is Mozilla that needs to change or up the game. Unfortunately 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. The exec keeps getting paid.
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 to push people to abandon it.
Unless they are threatened, they wont compete.
To take the role of devil's advocate, what should Mozilla's goal be here? They're a self-sustaining nonprofit competing against titans of the modern business landscape. Should they aim for 100% market share? 2%? Why?
Maybe, counter-intuitively, instead their focus should be on fair, reasonable standard-setting that allows 50 2% market share flavors, rather than themselves achieving 100%? The scuttlebutt on these boards is Chrome achieves it's advantage by unfairly or aggressively pushing standards or proprietary features that become a de-facto standard, so maybe Mozilla's derivative mission should be lobbying for sector-specific binding rules on common standards and interoperability for dominant technologies? That's a public policy problem not unique to browsers or a single dominant vendor, and one Mozilla is well positioned to address, maybe even politely enough not to disrupt its primary income stream
Right now it is 10% "Desktop" only ( I should have been clear ), Firefox get practically zero on Mobile. ( You can ignore Statscunter's Global All Platform numbers which somehow points to ~5% for Firefox. I never had time to dig up how they arrive at the number as it doesn't make any sense ). A combined market share including tablet would be 2-3% if not less.
It wont ever be a 100% because Mozilla dont own any platform. They try to have their own platform with Firefox OS. Which was at the time painful to watch.
And of course, may be Mozilla dont have to change. Some people only wants to break their reliance on Google. You could always have another competing browser with chromium.
That mission is even more relevant now than it was 18 (!) years ago, and yet Firefox is trying to be just another pushy lifestyle brand. They're friendly like a used car salesman.
Firefox should show people (show, not “tell loudly”) that software can be a useful tool that isn't trying to trick them. A lot of people expect computers and phones to be hostile, because that's all they've ever known.
Spin up a virtual machine and compare Firefox's first-run experience with GNOME Web's first-run experience. Which feels more like a tool you're in control of?
Make it lighter and faster than Chrome and with more privacy. That’s all that matters.
I do use Safari, but as a secondary browser, mostly as temporary private windows.
If I had to choose between the two without the ideological side, I honestly don't know which one I would choose. Probably Firefox for tabs containerization.
I use Firefox 99% of the time though. I think it is something about the tabs that I like better but it is a minor difference and purely based on personal taste.
Firefox is a great handle but nobody wants or needs their blades.
Firefox brings in hundreds of millions of dollars.
https://www.androidheadlines.com/2020/08/mozilla-firefox-goo...
Given that Google is their only source of income, (excluding one-time payments) it is indeed very unstable and they are ultimately at the mercy of Google, despite 14 years ago promising [1] to move away from being completely dependent on their income. At this point, Mozilla is on life support.
Privacy (which is their main selling point) to Mozilla is also a joke to them. If Google wasn't bad enough, why not work with Meta on 'ads' too? Not exactly 'privacy first' - they might as well drop that claim.
[0] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3600206/mozilla-report...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...
Are those expenses for developing the browser, or burning money on other things that nobody cares about?
For example have you seen their YouTube recently? Why are they spending money on making these bizarre rants about their competitors?
Making a web browser in the hopes of getting people to subscribe to your VPN or relay systems seems an absurd engineering and management cost, surely if you just want to sell VPN subs there are easier ways than taking on one of the most complex engineering tasks in tech.
Of course, I don't think Mozilla should be selling VPN subs at all but their exec team certainly think it's a major priority.
Low vision, low ambition, riding on past success till they sink. Confident I'll see the headline "Mozilla switches Firefox engine to Blink" within the next 10 years.
Also, you know the whole firing of dev teams thing.
I don't think the burden of making the VPN client forced them to fire the developers.
What would be acceptable to you as a monetization model for Mozilla? Google makes money from Chrome because Chrome fits into their larger advertising goals. Apple makes money from Safari because it fits into their larger goals about platform control, particularly on iOS. Brave makes money because they inject ads into the browsing experience.
What should Mozilla make money on? They apparently shouldn't take money from Google because that makes them dependent on a competitor. They also apparently shouldn't focus on platforms like Pocket or Email because those are independent of the browser. And they also apparently shouldn't sell VPN subs that are directly integrated into the browser because those are bad. Should they charge directly for the browser itself? That's a good way of crashing your browser market share.
Off the top of my head, I wish Mozilla took direct donations for Firefox, but I also don't think that would be enough. I wish Mozilla would do more donation campaigns for specific features, that would be really cool, but also not a solution on its own. I wish we saw more sponsorship of the browser, but people seem to be angry about sponsorship, particularly when it comes from large tech companies. Outside of those partial solutions, I really like that Mozilla is doing subscription features around the browser. I don't personally feel like the subscription features they're currently offering are particularly strong, I wish they would make some more compelling stuff that's easier for me to recommend to people. But it's not the core idea of subscriptions that upsets me.
> I think this is what the Mozilla execs believe and also why Firefox likely wont exist at all in 15 years.
Nobody in the current market monetizes browsers directly with the exception of Brave, and Brave's monetization model is toxic and should be rejected. Everybody else is using browsers to further other interests that they have. Vivaldi is partner deals and secondary services. Safari is iOS. Chrome is Google dominance and other services. Edge is Bing/Windows. Who is selling browsers successfully as its core product?
Also, personally I would prefer them to focus on privacy and security and avoid anything more partisan; I haven't counted up but it feels like the majority of their campaign emails are about battling 'unsafe' content online, and I have no reason to trust them to be the judges of what qualifies as unsafe. So it puts me off donating any money for the things I do care about, because I can't trust they won't use it for something I completely oppose. I also would expect that a company that starts getting into the business of content moderation is going to find it conflicts with any privacy and security work they're doing, sooner or later.
I have advocated for my family to use three different browsers of the last 20 years. First Firefox, then Chrome, now I push them all to just use Safari. They have all slowly migrated to Apple completely, fist with iPhones then to Macs.
Over the last 5 years I have pushed them to all use Safari, as it has better battery usage on all Apple devices, a “just works” sync across devices, and better default privacy situation than Chrome.
For me to advocate for Firefox (and move to it myself) it would need to be better at at least two of those three things than Safari.
I've been thinking too and really I feel the only way to save Firefox at this point is to destroy it. Mozilla is too bloated and the executives have zero interest in working on a browser and extremely wasteful spending, firing engineering teams.
The best thing that could ever happen to Firefox at this point is Mozilla running out of funds and disbanding and something new made from the ashes and the codebase.
If you think I'm wrong, remember Firefox was originally called Phoenix for a reason.
I still try Firefox every few years, and then go right back to Chrome because the FF renderer doesn't feel as fast as Chrome's. Goosing performance would go a hell of a way towards piquing my interest again.
Shortly after they had two extension competitions with large prizes.
Some fantastic extensions was created and bootstraped the extension ecosystem.
At its peak even what later became the ubiquitous developer tools across all modern browsers was just an extension to Firefox (Firebug).
However I don't think it was smart to kill the raw power of the old extension API. I would have loved for them to add scary warnings to the store, and ruthlessly break backwards compatibility. However they went so far to make it impossible for the average user to run these extensions. You need different versions of Firefox and you can't load them on the store.
It is a lesser evil when Mozilla is not changing my browser's default search engine to Google and when Mozilla isn't forcing my browser to open "We value your privacy" sites infected with Analytics or Tag Manager after updating.
They could get popular fast by blocking ads by default, but of course, they'd have no income then.
Nevertheless, there's a bunch of other stuff they could do to help their popularity that they aren't currently doing, I'm sure. I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
I mean the alternative to free and ad-driven is a paid service; what could a browser offer to make people (companies, consumers) pay for a browser? Ideally a subscription fee. I can think of a few things.
The big one: Highly efficient, network-level ad blocking by default, as well as other nuisance blockers (newsletter sign-ups, cookie opt-in, etc). This one would be very popular since it removes 80% of the bulk and annoyances of the modern internet, but it would likely become problematic as they would get blocked by websites everywhere.
Built-in VPN / TOR. Difficult because those get blocked a lot. I wouldn't want my computer to be used as a TOR exit node either if I paid a monthly subscription for my browser, putting me at risk for investigations by local law enforcement.
Access to other services like e.g. youtube premium, again in the name of an ad free experience. That would require Google being on board with it though, and since their income is mainly ads they would be quite antagonistic.
Web is getting increasingly integrated in real life so bridges and apps may take the spotlight (just a guess).
If it's not broken why do so many devs refuse to support it because things they code in Chrome don't work in it.
Not that I condone that, but it's what I experience working with dev teams the past few years they all just complain that features are missing from Chrome so it will be too much work to test/support FF.
You'll surely meet a lot of people doing what you mention. I would bet most of them are young enough to not have gone through the so-called "browser wars" [1], at least what they now call the first one, the one that ultimately led to the creation of Firefox.
Their attitude does not mean at all that there's something actually broken in Firefox, just that it is so much easier -and lazier- supporting a single browser's quirks and ignoring the rest. Even if that means discarding standards and compatibility. Specially if it means that, because you will take advantage of those particularities.
I was under the impression that most things were stable or that most major browsers implemented things at a similar pace.
This mentality is exactly why Internet Explorer was dominant for so long. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. There are many differences between 2000s Microsoft and 2020s Google but there are also quite a few similarities, even down to funding their opposition to avoid the appearance of a monopoly.
It still is :)
Fuck mozilla.
Firefox is a glorified Google referral system first, a slow, bloated browser second.
Mozilla has been ruined by highly paid executives draining the organization and the Google search referral income stream.
How long will they be able to coast off of their organization's reputation?
Well if Brave is the spiritual successor to firefox I'm done with the web.
This is not a jab on you or Brave. I'm simply completely disenfranchised by the whole browser / web thing. Firefox keeps alienating me, Brave is not the answer as it never passed the smell test with all their crypto bullshit. The web itself is run by corporations trying to mine and sell our attention.
More and more I feel like gemini is the only answer to these issues. I will keep the general web as a gateaway to email and bank accounts and forget that it exist.
How about selling a premium version of Firefox, with polished versions of uMatrix and uBlock included? I might pay a small renewing subscription for that and for other things like that.
Firefox apparently has less than 200 million users left. 0.1% of those taking part of such a thing (say $5/mo) would mean a monthly revenue of 10 million. That would make some sort of a dent in their finances and if they communicated this clearly, it would be harmonious with their mission.
To: Mozilla
Subject: The Popularity of Firefox
Dear Mozilla:
Just saw the headline,
"Mozilla Foundation places two-page advocacy ad in The New York Times (2004)"
Okay, I will respond with some feedback intended to be helpful. I'm a long time Firefox user. Until recently Firefox was my "default" Web browser.
I'm trying to remain a good and happy Firefox user, trying REALLY hard, but Mozilla is trying even harder to have me quit using Firefox. Mozilla has already in the last few weeks finally gotten me to tell Windows that my default browser is Chrome and no longer Firefox. I WANT Firefox back as my default Web browser, but for that Mozilla has to stop working so incredibly hard to have me quit using Firefox.
"Mozilla, NO, greater than 99 44/100% of the time I do NOT want a proctology exam, an unanesthetized root canal procedure, a piercing for a nose ring, a tattoo, a Firefox update, a popup window, a popup window announcing another Firefox update, or the Firefox update that enabled those 10s of thousands of popup windows I have gotten in the last few months.
A Firefox popup window is where Mozilla believes that it has some information for my eyes, attention, and work more important to me than the Web page the popup window is covering and that I was trying to read, and that belief is nearly always badly WRONG.
A popup window is where Firefox stops and refuses to continue until I stop what I'm doing, pay attention to why my computer has stopped, move my hand, and click on NO once more of the tens of thousands of times recently. I can be patient, but somewhere on the way to > 20,000 times, I can become infuriated.
I HATE, to be more clear, deeply, profoundly, bitterly HATE and despise, am outraged and infuriated by, unwanted updates and popups.
In the last few months I have declined Firefox updates announced in popup windows literally, conservatively > 20,000 times.
To be fully clear, did I mention, I HATE nearly all updates and popups."
Here is some feedback on some of the current disaster:
From some Firefox update, that I did not, NOT,
N.O.T.
approve, my current version of Firefox is badly broken. Why: When I try to have Firefox display a Web page, from a URL on the Internet, a tree name on Windows, or the Web site that has my email, I get a popup that says that Firefox is not my default Web browser, which was false, or a popup saying that Firefox is starting in "safe mode", which from all I could tell was inappropriate. Then I get another popup window announcing that a Firefox update is available.
My suggestions:
(1) Cut WAY back on the popup windows. If there is a really serious computer security problem, then announce that via a popup window. Announce it no more than three times. On average, there should be less than one such serious problem a year.
(2) Restore the option that permits a user to decline updates and also decline announcements of updates.
(3) Document your work. There is a lot to usage of Firefox -- DOCUMENT that work in TEXT in high quality technical writing.
(4) For options, be willing to write the option values to a text file with a simple syntax, a file that a user can edit with a standard text editor and then specify to Firefox as the options to be used.
(5) Instead of icons, use text.