Comment by andy_xor_andrew | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andy_xor_andrew | Hacker News Reader

andy_xor_andrew

Does Firefox have a future?

I'm writing this from Firefox, having used it ever since the days when Firefox releases used to have launch parties, and tabs was the revolutionary killer feature.

Let me rephrase the question: does Gecko/Spidermonkey have a future?

I think it's clear the Firefox branding will live on, since it is Mozilla's crown jewel.

But in today's landscape, you can target WebKit (Apple) and V8/Blink (Chrome) and you've surely covered 98% of all use cases.

Surely these competing engines have far, far more resources pouring into them than Mozilla can afford.

Since the balance of power has shifted towards the owners of these huge players, how can Mozilla keep its browser engine competitive, given that all these new features (such as wasm) surely require massive investment?

I know these questions have been asked already a million times, but it keeps me wondering. Will Firefox eventually need to become a fork of Chromium like everyone else, just to keep pace? Can Mozilla keep its entire browser stack afloat in these shifting currents? (pardon the gross metaphor)

Supporting Firefox continues to be way easier than Safari for web developers. Chrome and Firefox are very compatible with each other. It's essentially almost no effort.

Mozilla seems to do fine keeping up. Wasm and Rust originated in Mozilla even and they are still very active on that front as well.

I seriously doubt Mozilla will kill their company by switching to Chrome. It would be suicidal for them. Users would revolt and fork the code base probably. Mozilla developers especially and without their developers Mozilla is nothing. Just look at what happened to Opera after they switched to Chrome. They technically still exist. But they are a footnote in web server statistics at this point. A rounding error basically. I've not seen anyone using it in many years now.

So, I doubt a move to Chrome would end well for Mozilla if they ever were to float such an idea. The history of Mozilla is that they bootstrapped out of AOL's Netscape division which was being mismanaged by AOL. Once the code base was OSS, people just left and created mozilla.org to cut loose from the failed corporate entity. AOL ended up with nothing. That can and will happen again if it needs to.

In short, users and developers would abandon a Chrome based Firefox in a hurry and it wouldn't take long for them to get organized with a new foundation. Wikimedia manages fine based on donations. Millions of Firefox users would be able to keep the project going pretty much indefinitely. Mozilla would lose control over most of its key people, users, and assets. Which is why they will never do this. It would be corporate suicide.

Maybe it's just the contrarian streak in me, but Firefox being on Gecko is why I haven't left. There must be more than just one browser engine to rule them all! We got rid of our trident just to get blinkered.

Firefox moving to Blink means I'm just hopping over to whoever has the slickest Chromium clone right now.

It seems all but inevitable. Regardless of the technical feasibility of keeping your own browser engine going, much of the missions of the foundation and overall company do not really depend on having a truly separate browser at all.

If anything, it is an albatross around the necks of the groups and management that care more about the 'mission' of an open web and the advocacy and other programs that are largely unrelated to the Firefox browser, and certainly don't require the browser to be its own thing rather than a chromium fork.

For the short and medium term goals, a browser is just another tool and vehicle for pushing their vision for the future of the web... But it's an extremely expensive and difficult tool with comparatively little short and medium term importance. So why keep it? You don't need a 'real' browser to put up surveys or blog posts, or to attend or run conferences, or to join web working groups or participate in RFCs. Not having to pay for almost any engineers or teams for something the rest of the foundation could categorize as a pyrrhic project? That would be simply wonderful, I'm sure.

Vasselization simply makes more sense in the foreseeable future.

I'm not an expert on the web tech. so apologies in advance but wouldn't it be great if Mozilla spent all that money Google gives them on something more revolutionary like a new runtime for ephemeral apps and the corresponding UI engine that's not bound to the legacy JS and HTML and has near native performance and access to hardware sensors? Add to that the support for multi device setups where you can move an app session easily from your phone to your desktop. There're so many cool things to do there.

Instead we're dealing with the "diversity" of the web (HTML,CSS,JS) engines and endless arguments around Manifest v3, etc. So many precious man hours are going to waste.

HTML/CSS/JS are the most superior UI engine that exists right now, especially when used through something like React/Vue/Svelte. So creating an even better one is quite a tall order.

A non-profit with lots of talented devs like Mozilla is in a good position to do just that. I do understand it'd be at least a 5 year long effort by a talented team of 200 engineers but it's still better and more fun than iterating on Firefox.

>"I think it's clear the Firefox branding will live on, since it is Mozilla's crown jewel."

I'm not following your question. How does Firefox branding live on without Gecko/Spidermonkey?

For example, if the engine is switched out (or made an option) so that Firefox 150 uses WebKit or Blink instead.

Many Firefox users would not notice the difference, as long as the things they care about keep working.

I wonder when Mozilla will make Gecko/Spidermonkey useful for other browsers, like WebKit seems to be.

Gecko was used in other small browsers in the past but it was always hostile to it, SpiderMonkey is used by some external projects but they clearly aren't interested in it (no releases, api stability, documentation, etc).

>Does Firefox have a future?

Well, mobile is the future of computing. Does Firefox have a future on mobile? I think the answer is clearly no.

Firefox will be relevant only until the Desktop PC paradigm fades into obscurity.

Eventually Chrome and Safari will join Firefox in obscurity, as more content moves behind apps and walled gardens, and as the desktop paradigm falls into disuse.

Give it 10 years.

Their soul will live on as Web widgets.

Firefox on android is an objectively superior experience.

I would say "it was". After that major update a while ago, I lost hope on Firefox mobile.

It has a future if their search partners say it does.

Some of whom they are naming in these allegations.

I personally think they should think about maintaining a chromium fork.

It will relieve a lot of resources to be spent on other things like user experience, and they will benefit from all the development resources devoted to chromium, while being able to remove anything they don't like, like MV3 limitations on adblockers.

I really like what brave is doing, I switched because I lost hope Mozilla is going to do anything, they are funded by google, and therefore afraid to do anything impactful.

While brave has privacy by default, has an independent search engine, an independent ad network(that is privacy friendly and isn't enabled by default), and they aren't afraid to do anything against big tech, like banning AMP, removing social trackers and other things.

Brave is almost what Mozilla should've been.

> while being able to remove anything they don't like, like MV3 limitations on adblockers.

… which might actually not be as easy as it sounds. Sure, as long as Chrome/Blink internally retains MV2 compatibility behind a configuration setting for enterprise customers you job is easy – just hard-code that setting back to enabled for everybody instead of just enterprise users and you're done.

However once Google starts ripping out the MV2-related code from the Chrome/Blink code base, all that code suddenly becomes your responsibility to maintain – and from that point on there's always the risk that Google suddenly decides do to some large scale refactoring or internal architectural change that radically conflicts with your attempts to maintain those old features alive.

Once you reach that point, you've then got the choice to either spend ever increasing amounts of effort on maintaining those features on top of the current code base, doing a hard fork and therefore having to suddenly maintain the whole shebang, which would be an even larger effort, or instead giving up and dropping those features after all.

not to mention that google still controls the chrome extension marketplace, and will stop accepting mv2 extensions by the end of the year. So not only do you have to maintain the mv2 related code, and keep reintegrating it whenever google moves a bunch of code around (which from what I hear they do quite aggressively) or hard fork, you also need to maintain your own repository of browser extensions, and get developers to actually develop them for your browser specifically, rather than just for chrome, too.

Would maintaining such a feature be harder than maintaining a complete browser engine?

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