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Comment by preinheimer | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla: Please please please just concentrate on making an awesome browser people want to use. Then market it.

> concentrate on making an awesome browser

Is it not? I honestly can't think of anything I'd want it to do more than it already does. I'll be honest, it is difficult to distinguish between browsers these days. But we have holy wars like vim vs emacs, when really the differences are quite small and rather dumb.

The reason I use Firefox is literally three things: 1) I don't want Chrome to have a monopoly, 2) I get ad blocking on my phone, 3) if I'm going to install an ad blocker on my browser, I also want my browser to not be tracking me. I'll be honest, these are the only truly unique features (that I use). Otherwise it is near indistinguishable from Chrome.

I'm happy with FF and while that's still true I don't mind Mozilla branching out. If I wasn't happy, then yeah, there's a priority issue. But honestly, what's so important that's missing? I don't get this holy war. It just seems like war for the sake of war, and no one benefits from that except those on top.

I spent my last evening, and this one, on working around the fact that firefox still doesn't support modules in WebWorkers.

And yes, I have a valid reason to use webworker: I'm making writing an online compiler playground.

More than half the time, the firefox debugger plainly crash when opening my app, and I have to open a new tab and retry.

For some reason I can't put a breakpoint on the statement after an if on the same line.

And these are my issue only on the last hour ! I'm using firefox everyday but yes, there is room for improvement.

I expected them to add Time Travel Debugging: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/firefox-is-te...

It was working on mac, then they fired a lot of staff, including the one who were developing it, and now they made their own company out of it: https://www.replay.io/

And to the one who says "you can contribute", yeah no, I tried, the official docs (back then) gave you the non-optimal ste^s (full clone of the repo (multiples hours due to upstream servers being slow), full local compilation).

The worst of it is, the doc tell you to compile firefox, so multiples minutes of wait to test a change, a change made to the devtools, which is entierely written in JS.

Oh and of course, you can't plug a debugger on the devtools, so you are stuck with console.logs.

Edit: minutes after writing this comments, my just tab crashed: https://i.imgur.com/s1y1JsO.png

I'm pretty sure I have opened the devtools for the devtools on Firefox before, maybe try using the whole-browser devtools? (I don't remember how to enable it but once it's enabled press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+I to open it)

Brave has it all, really.

Eich's back at it again :D.

> Is it not? I honestly can't think of anything I'd want it to do more than it already does.

Give me 4x less battery draw and I'll try Firefox again, I want to use and like Firefox but every time I give it a go power usage remains a massive issue. I get at least 4x less power draw in the same activities on chromium based browsers and safari.

The android version is still... not great. It only supports about a dozen hand picked extensions for instance.

How many does mobile Chrome and Safari support? Last I checked it was zero. This is an example of what I'm trying to say: there are things to critique, but a perspective matters.

This is exactly the problem with the current Firefox direction: It's tries to mimic Chrome with a few differences here and there. Chrome should not be the baseline. Slightly better than chrome does not mean good.

I see that as more convergent behavior rather than explicit intention. What do you specifically want to be different?

Real, meaningful extension support? Like was mentioned upthread?

Safari for MacOS and mobile does have an extension library. Sure, it’s not as good as Chrome or Firefox on the desktop, but there are several extensions available that I use regularly.

Can I setup ublock origin on Safari mobile? (Is it event supported on Safari desktop?)

Thats my main use case for Firefox extensions

No, that’s a level of control that is unfortunately by design not available on Safari. AdGuard is a decent alternative.

It feels like you intentionally missed my point. uBlock is the number one add-on that most people care about (at least in my circles).

Kiwi Is built on chromium and supports pretty much every extension I've tried

I had been a Firefox user since 2009 but over the last few years general sites like news and blogs slowly started breaking layouts and events, with JavaScript heavy sites sometimes crashing, esp on m1 air. I found toggling JavaScript and installing extensions is too tedious, esp on iOS devices so I had to move to safari as my primary with brave as a backup.

I still have Firefox on all my devices and seriously hope they focus on engineering instead of playing ideology when their revenue stream is shaky at best. I’d honestly pay for tab continuity and other UX improvements as a feature if they improve their css and js engines. I know that chromium has now become what IE was at one point but if Firefox can’t render properly and provide consistent js performance I find it harder and harder to recommend to non technical users.

This is from someone who evangelized FF in the 2010s and got many friends on board.

Javascript off by default makes websites better more often than it breaks websites. I find that whitelisting sites that need first party javascript doesn't take much time and covers 99% of cases; very rarely does a website actually require 3rd party javascript to be whitelisted.

So, where in your plan do they make money?

Apache had $3M in revenue and $1.5M in expenses in 2021 [0] with about $1M in donations.

Mozilla spent $262M in 2020 [1]. They manage money poorly.

[0] https://www.apache.org/foundation/docs/FY2021AnnualReport.pd...

[1] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2020/mozilla-fdn-202...

I think those are comparing very different organizations with different aims. There's a big difference between employing a bunch of people to actually build a complex product that you expect normal people to actually use, vs supporting the governance of OSS projects that are built by other people, largely employed by companies using or offering services around those projects.

They are very different. But my point is that Apache is very successful and produces lots of great software.

You don’t have to pay $100M in developer salaries to produce great software. Mozilla is not that great despite having lots and lots of employees.

Perhaps rethinking their approach would be useful. But if their revenue goes away, it doesn’t mean Mozilla the browser goes away.

Maybe Mozilla should just be a governance process rather than a software developer. The browser would probably have similar quality.

The Apache Foundation doesn't produce the software, people paid by various companies do. This is quite similar to the Mozilla Foundation and Corporation relationship.

Who would employ people to work on Firefox if the corp side shuts down eg. because they lose their revenue?

It's hit or miss. Many Apache projects are basically open source abandonware. It's great that there's an organization to manage the rights to these projects but Apache doesn't have much power to keep them going.

That’s a good point and I agree. But it’s not like they detract from the other products. I think for open source foundations it’s not about average product value but overall value of the portfolio.

If these were business lines then of course it’s bad to have stinkers or abandoned products. But with Apache products it doesn’t cost them anything (or almost nothing) to keep them around and have amazing products (httpd, spark, lucene, etc) ad well.

I think the issue with Mozilla is that their browser has really floundered despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars on development. That’s the problem they need to fix. It would be curious to see what Google’s spend is on Chromium and Chrome. I’d be surprised if they have 100 developers working on it.

Glad that you identified not fostering a community of outside condtributors as one of Mozilla's failings.

Same way anyone with a platform product makes money: premium tiers or paid extensions.

And yet the market leader by a wide margin doesn't do any of that. They are bankrolled by a near monopoly on ads in various markets.

They're a non-profit.

They still have bills to pay. Being a non-profit doesn't mean they don't need revenue.

For starters they can fire the CEO that's seen their market share decrease by an order of magnitude while seeing her pay increase by an order of magnitude.

After that go down the org chart and fire everyone not coding for the browser.

Then you can live off donations until the end of time.

This strategy won't work if no one is organizing the work ahead. They can't be coding full time and administrating a project as complex as a modern browser. Especially not when competing against a complex beast like Chrome. (Though I do agree there may be too much money going into admin.)

Well it isn't working now so not much will change.

You can’t live off donations unless you make it look like a subscription

Mozilla Corp (the company that does most of the dev work) isn't a non-profit, although given their relationship with Mozilla Foundation (which is a non profit) maybe it's not a big distinction.

They have failed at that, so now they're just figuring out ways to spend the free money they have.

They didn't fail they were sabatoged by an incompetent CEO.

which one?

Perhaps the one that has multiplied her own salary while the browser gets less and less relevant.

https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html

Mozilla Foundation (non profit org doing this 'venture fund') != Mozilla Corporation (folks who build firefox)

So what? Corp is owned by Foundation and pays Foundation millions every year. They even pay for the Foundation's legal services. Mozilla Foundation is Mozilla Corporation's albatross.

That the foundation doesn't seem to have any interest in the browser seems to be one of the big issues of the Mozilla setup to me. Then again the Corp and Foundation share leadership.

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