Why Firefox Deserves Its Sad Decline | Hacker News Reader

Why Firefox Deserves Its Sad Decline

fadingeek.medium.com

24 pointsComodoHacker40 comments

These days FF is just as fast and lighter than most Chromium browsers. With a better curated add-on store (my god google store sucks), a clean UI (which they'll hopefully stop messing around with), and more importantly, it just works for day to day use, and is customizable enough for most people's needs.

While Mozilla have themselves to blame for a lot of the decline. A big part of it is Google's dominance over the web and android, pushing Chrome on everyone's face for years. Bundling Chrome with software, annoying pop-ups on android telling you to use Chrome, pre-installed on android, pushing it on their main page... There's so much of it. Of course there's also Apple's walled garden preventing it from going there, as well as years of MS doing what Google does now.

Still waiting for the apis to reimplement xul addons, which were promised at least half a decade ago...

To me the best part of Firefox was its unique ability for add-ons to customize the user interface and add significant new functionality. The architectural change in 2017 (version 57) was necessary but the failure to prioritize the re-implementation of the lost API functionality is dooming the browser.

Firefox's incredibly vibrant add-on ecosystem was a huge differentiator and competitive advantage over other browsers. I still use FF as my daily driver but I have to apply UX customization with CSS just to make it livable. Fortunately, there is an active community at www.reddit.com/r/firefoxCSS which eases the burden.

You mean APIs to reach into browser internals and escape sandboxing?

yes

Yes, which is why the EU’s recent legislation is a terrible, terrible thing. The People’s cry for other rendering engines on iOS is a sham (the free market chose iOS among other, more permissive and equally viable platforms). Real people don’t care, and real people won’t notice because they do not care what rendering engine is powering their browser. They only care that websites work and that browsers provide the features they expect. But thanks to the EU, the death of non-Chromium browsers just accelerated to the benefit of no real person. Mozilla will of course continue to make nice browser features, but the day will come when a blog post details their reasons for ditching Gecko. Real people won’t notice and the industry will have further reduced (read: eliminated) engine diversity - the very thing EU was trying to avoid.

Amen. I was a complainer about Apple's insistence on WebKit, but when I thought it through I realized that it's the only bulkhead against a total Chrome takeover.

I admire a lot of Europe's consumer protections, but this EU legislation is a huge overreach, written by politicians pandering to hype that they are too ignorant to assess.

KHTML from the KDE project was Apple's surprise choice for the Safari browser, in preference to Gecko. Everyone expected Apple to choose Gecko for their rendering engine.

Chrome and Safari both ran WebKit for many years until Google forked to the Blink engine.

Blink (as a descendent) is far closer to Webkit than either are to Gecko.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML

Thanks for the info.

Apple's ban on third-party browsers on iOS has caused enormous damage to the web ecosystem.

We explain this in great detail including browser diversity arguments here: https://open-web-advocacy.org/files/OWA%20-%20Bringing%20Com...

Any article about Firefox and it's relevance that doesn't strongly highlight the "David v. Goliath" nature of what it's up against -- and implies that it gets developed in roughly the same way and for the same purposes as its competitors -- is dumb at best and dangerously misleading at worst.

Mozilla was getting $50m from search to develop a browser that gained market share. How is that different from the goals of Google or Microsoft?

$50M is tiny compared to how much Google invested in Chrome. That barely pays 100 engineers.

Then maybe Mozilla should move to Europe where they can pay 5x engineers with that money :)

I don't know what's worse about this response, the backwards causation logic or the bad math.

I can't tell if I'm having a brain fart Sunday morning or this is just generally a very poorly written article. Can someone give a summary? I read half of it and I still don't see a single "point" being made. The closest it got making a point is:

> It seemed to be this software that tried to keep up with the pace of Google Chrome more than a software that actually had its own ideas.

That sentence answers itself. Obviously the issue is that it had to try to keep up with a huge corporation pouring orders of magnitude more money and time.

The article is just filled with memes but doesn't really say much at all.

It's not you. It's piss-poor "writing."

It is poorly written. Not only it's void of insightful content, it tries to use an informal spoken style but fails to engage, completely. The images add nothing (how many memes on FF logo and Twitter-Giphy-like macros can you fit). Also random stats don't make a point, in itself.

It's written in a quasi stream of consciousness style. I enjoyed it

And not altogether accurate:

> It all started with an app called Netscape Navigator ... believed to be the very first web browser ever

Netscape Navigator was at least the 3rd web browser.

The first web browser was Nexus by Tim Berners-Lee, renamed from the WorldWideWeb which was too easily confused with the distributed hypertext system known as the World Wide Web. [1]

The second web browser was Mosaic (originally xmosaic) by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, which some of us are old enough to remember using. [2]

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)

I knew this article was going to be “quality” when I saw the line about Netscape being the first browser.

I don't understand the ideas in this article. Or the writing itself, which is horrible.

> Firefox was a legend. It’s of course, still underused by millions and millions of people, but not the way it was before. It was without a doubt one of the most dominant software before.

What the fuck does that even mean? Is it underused but not as underused as before? Was it the dominant software before? Before what, exactly?

> For example, the mobile version of chrome integrates well with Android and is the default browser in android because both Android and Chrome was owned by Google.

> Since google chrome just started giving good competition, and also making itself and default for Android, the marketing and popularity of Chrome flew through the sky.

Is competition given? Do browsers give competition? Also, is this good competition, really? I remember a certain software giant who got into some legal trouble over similar mechanics. But I'm happy that the popularity of Chrome didn't flew through the dirt or through water. Flying through water is not as good as it was 'before'

Around 2007 Google was paying $1 per install/click through to Firefox back when IE was the dominant browser. It seemed like Google threw a ton of money at disrupting the browser market with FF then followed up by launching Chrome.

The article mentions that FF hit %34 in 2010 and acts like that was due to the features, I don't think it was.

For the average browser user we're talking about here talking about bloat and features are irrelevant. FF's market share is just a number bouncing around in the waves between two giant forces, Microsoft which owned the OS for much of this timeline and Google which owns the pages everyone is going to where it is suggesting they install Chrome.

> This led to the present where the only place where Firefox is dominant is on Linux, where it seems like the community is trying hard to give another chance to them...

Yup, this is me. It helps it's installed by default on Linux.

Firefox got so slow and bloated from 2010-2015 I stopped using it at some point. In 2017, a work colleague told me when Firefox "Quantum" was released so I tried it out for nostalgia, and found Firefox was as good as it used to be. Just from inertia, I continued to use Chrome until last year when I realized how great container tabs and the JSON viewer are. However, it seems everyone I know has moved on to Chrome and I don't blame them.

If anyone from Mozilla is reading this, I hope you have found a way to codify the learnings from the bloat years into your product development. My hope is if you can keep Firefox lean and innovative some lucky external development will eventually push users away from Chrome and Firefox will be the best browser to switch to.

Let me TL;DR it: Spends ages telling us a revisionist history we mostly know. Then says it deserves this because the chairperson of Mozilla has a ridiculous salary (agreed). That's nonsense though.

Firefox did a lot of stupid things (FF OS etc.) and took too long to deliver things like quantum, security, etc. But they got there eventually and they're still a non-profit. So while I don't support the salary of the chairperson, I do support it. It's also a better product than Chrome at this point in time (for my usage). Still has ways to go.

It seems that OP is just looking for attention by being an a-hole. Pretty lame behavior IMHO.

Not to mention the juvenile and lazy writing, often lacking in specifics or even purpose.

This is missing the (very effective) anti-competitive tactics used to grow Chrome market share. In addition to things most folks are aware of, they also used dark patterns and bundleware installers in products like Adobe Flash, Avast, etc to trick users into installing Chrome and making it their default browser:

https://imgur.com/Uldw6X3

https://imgur.com/hNZLbmL

> 'Mozilla Firefox was the very first web browser to popularize the idea of “tabs”'.

Except that it was Opera that did that.

> It also started implementing other ideas like popup blocking(now ad blocking),

Opera...

Stop reverting my config settings. If I want browser.launcherProcess.enabled set to True after updating Firefox, I'll do it myself.

It's a matter of basic respect for your users. Those who want their settings ignored or reverted can get that behavior from any number of other browsers.

Pretty extensive but leaves out Phoenix and the meteoric adoption of the lightweight browser and then the co-opting, injection of XUL, and return to bloatware.

People left Mozilla products because they didn't have enough RAM to run them.

Phoenix was the first time I started looking at Mozilla again.

"Extensive?" This isn't exactly fact-filled:

"It all started with an app called Netscape Navigator, developed by a group of people, which was then bought..."

This reads like a poorly-researched junior-high report.

Agree to some extent, this feels very sketchily, or maybe hastily, written, with seemingly anecdotal or incorrect historical paragraphs, and just a little supporting data. It's nowhere near the deep dive the opening promises. I'm getting confused.

> The main reason this utterly failed, is because there is literally no reason for people to use this, considering that most Phones came with Android pre-installed and nobody was mad enough to install FirefoxOS instead which came with no software support and had no unique selling point.

Firefox OS was never really supposed to be installed by random people on their random phones (which, in fact, is one of the reasons I wasn't very interested in it back in the day). This "main reason it utterly failed" is a very misguided opinion presented as a fact, so I guess the rest of the article isn't much better.

Like manybi feel the reimaged reality in this article is as flawed as rhe conclusions presented.

The truth is that Firefox and any other browser that can achieve relevance is a critical bulwark against the advancing Google domination of web standards.

Under Googles dominance the web has become a less private and less free version of what we took for granted. People often worry, rightly, about what governments will do while also ignoring the impacts of companies like Google on their lives and liberty.

At this point it is clear that Mozilla is not really an engineering driven organization. They are mainly a political organization with a browser attached.

In addition, as some have mentioned, they really don’t have the resources of the big players (Apple/Google)

Given that the web browser is basically ground zero for malware and exploits, I think it is safer to go with the browsers with more resources behind them.

Why is that clear?

Why should we support larger organization that historically use their resources to manipulate web standards in their favor while repeatedly leaving known security issues unpatched in favor of superficial changes?

This has been the track they've been on since Brandon Eich was booted for wrongthink. It's a joy to watch, really. Meanwhile Brave is nice.

I can't get copy and past working without hanging/ crashing on manjaro ... tried all hints i could find (x11, wayland, about:config flags, ...) only thing that makes it kind or work is `WAYLAND_DEBUG=1 MOZ_LOG="WidgetClipboard:5, Widget:5" firefox > /dev/null 2>&1` is it just me ... is it just me ?

Why is Firefox's slow decline a bad thing? Firefox seems to be leveling out at 5% of users. Perhaps serving those 5% of users is more important than selling out and becoming another Chromium-based browser? Sometimes I think open-source advocates have an obsession with "winning" and think that increasing market share is the only goal. (You can also see this in the way that this article throws Brave and Vivaldi under the bus... lol)

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