Comment by ikurei | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ikurei | Hacker News Reader

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> Mozilla systematically shut down all the reasons to advocate for them back around 2015-2016 when they assassinated their extensions

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.

Extensions were a major selling point, even though as you say, most regular people didn't use them. But the advocates were almost all power users. Mozilla co-opted power users by making a browser that power users wanted and convincing them to evangelize it to regular people.

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.

These sort of "which-browser?" discussions come up regularly. In 2014 I would have been laying down 10-15 interesting extensions that gave Firefox capabilities that Chrome didn't have.

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.

> Just saying, there used to be real technical ammo to bring to the table

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.

Use Tridactyl?

>the Mr Robot marketing stint

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.

That's one of a couple of times[1] in my life where I felt what I think people describe as my blood freezing. I knew I hadn't installed that thing and I had no clue how it had gotten there and I too thought I had gotten some malware that even I had neither managed to evade nor caught immediately (I can think of two cases of the latter from the top of my head, one drive by on a completely innocent blog and one where a previously nice program suddenly bundled ad or malware).

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).

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