Some announcements are 'nice', but almost all seem to point to 'too little too late' for the original dream.
I say this as someone who uses chrome/ff/safari daily, and threw a 'Mozilla release party' (with a Mozilla cake!) back when Mozilla hit 1.0, and donated early on to FF/mozilla.
They seemingly squandered years becoming less and less relevant to day to day usage, and it bugs some folks. On top of that, we get treated to press releases and social media tidbits now and then of "we're laying off dozens/hundreds of people, and our CEO makes millions of dollars". Depressing to see what it's become vs what people expected years ago...
Idk this position just seems a little narrow minded and negative nancying.
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90539632/mozilla-vows-mdn-isnt-g...
[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/MDN/MDN_Product_Adv...
I know they're in financial trouble. But how they spend what's left doesn't make it look like they're interested in surviving that much, only management salaries.
If one of the major chromium skins supported tree style tabs I'd long be gone.
i'm not intentionally coming into the threads and badmouthing firefox, but i get why people want to - it feels like they've very deliberatly set the perception of their brand as being "the good guys" in comparison to chrome/google, and they haven't really been living up to that. they're essentially just another corporate browser development firm, same as chrome, edge, opera, brave, etc, but they try to project the vibe of being the saviours of the internet. and at one point it seemed like they might be, but now we all understand that they're not.
of late, it feels like they've come to the conclusion that their browser can't actually compete on merit, so they're leaning into the reputation of mozilla of old. but they're not the mozilla of old, they're just another company doing corporate things and collecting that fat paycheque from google for search engine placement.
It used to be a bunch of people writing a piece of software for whatever damn reason they had, and that was enough to produce something notable and worthwhile.
You'll have a hard time convincing me that anything so fundamental has changed that this cannot still be enough. The moment anyone does, I'll leave the net for good, because then all truly is lost.
Choice quote:
>Mozilla exists so the internet can help the world collectively meet the range of challenges a moment like this presents. Firefox is a part of this. *But we know we also need to go beyond the browser to give people new products and technologies that both excite them and represent their interests.* (emphasis mine)
What other products? The entire organizational focus should be centered on Firefox so that it can meaningfully compete with Chrome, as Firefox is the only truly open alternative to Safari/Chrome.
A little below that, they list their new 5 areas to focus on and ... no mention of Firefox there.
[1]https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/changing-world-changing-...
In its 2020 financial results, the most recent available, Mozilla
listed its total revenue as $496 million, with royalties from search
deals equaling $441 million
In my opinion, if Firefox was owned by a company that liked and wanted to focus on Firefox, it would not be in a death spiral right now. But instead it's owned by a company that wants to use the browser as a cash cow while its market share collapses. And when it finally dies they'll just point at Chrome and say "there's nothing we could have done, Google is too big." Never mind the fact that Firefox beath IE which was also funded by a megacorporation.
Obviously, they didn’t take that option.
(Mozilla's non-Firefox products didn't actually make any impact thus far).
That is absolutely nothing like the environment that Firefox operates in, today. IE was irrelevant to Microsoft's business and revenue. Chrome was (and still is) a core aspect to Google owning search, which underwrites everything else it does.
Even with limitless resources, there is nothing Mozilla could do to make Firefox so much better that it would regain market share against Chrome. And Firefox's primary competitor's enterprise is highly dependent on being in the driver seat, so that isn't going to change.
Firefox is a great browser, and some people may independently decide to use it. But at this point, if you aren't using Chrome or Edge, it's probably because you have been on Firefox since 2005 and see no point in switching, or because you are making an ideological statement against Google (for privacy, or against web engine monopoly).
The best thing in the long run for firefox in my opinion would be to not renew the contract with Google when it comes up again. It's pretty drastic and it might kill the Mozilla foundation, but firefox itself can be forked and continue on. I'd love to see a group of developers (or more than one group) do a hard fork of the project and move in the direction of "performance, bug-fixes, standards compliance, and a healthy add-on infrastructure" as their main goals. A firefox-focused dev team wouldn't be adding things like Pocket into the mix or bothering the user so much.
Put another way, there’s absolutely nothing stopping this hard fork from happening today. It’s just that maintaining a browser engine is a Herculean amount of work, and having full-time devs is a huge asset.
Firefox is controlled by a not-for-profit which is dedicating to making the internet a better place. People who would also like to make the internet a better place tend to get quite worked up when they feel Mozilla is not doing what they'd do.
(Disclaimer: I mostly happily use Firefox)
And worse, they weren't (and aren't) even attracting others, so their antagonism towards their long-term users was even less justified.
Literally the only thing I and probably most people care about. 99.9% of the time I spend using a browser is browsing, so speed is pretty much the only thing I care about..
I tried FF once on a work MacBook. It installed, but wouldn't launch. Uninstalled and haven't looked back since.
I could probably make it work for me again, and it might be alright. Chrome just works, though, and my workflows all just work. I literally have no reason to switch... Until January.
Once manifest v3 rolls out, i will be very interested to see just how badly hampered ublock becomes.
When Chrome came out, the other big argument in its favor[1] was stability and security due to how it isolated tabs (and plugins) into separate OS processes.
Firefox supports something similar now, but it definitely didn't at the time.
---
[1] see the Chrome comic: https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/
Even to this day Chromium is superior wrt security, but I am sure the gap has narrowed quite a bit.
At least that is my interpretation. Mozilla is not addressing the same audience any longer, a lot of which is technically-minded folk on HN, Reddit, /g/, etc.
Firefox feature announcements are like when your alcoholic husband who won't take his heart pills or get his turn signal fixed throws a catered party to show everyone his new five-iron.
I badly miss smiling at that little Firefox icon my taskbar and I'm tired of being re-invited to watch the decline.
The announcement reads: "more than 1 billion people around the world who live with disabilities."
And with the new ocr image feature they will all become Firefox users, just watch the usage statistics in the next few months.
That's why.
Thought it is a pretty great feature, to be fair.
this a press release about an accessiablity features allowing firefox to support images to text when using a screen readers, and screen reader performance improvements
the press release was written by someone who is blind and worked on the feature
Anyways, maybe Ladybird will have a dragon lance.
If there is no other way against reckless/gargantuan companies, then use patents to prevent Chrome/Safari to copy newly added features. Demonizing patents is partly because they don't want the small guy/small company to arm themselves and fuck up the big ones up the wahzoo.
When I see Firefox roll out features that don't really change anything, all the while steadily losing market share, I'm disappointed.
But I also can't think of anything Mozilla could do to fight the dominance of Chrome and Safari, so I guess it's not that disappointing.
Like, containers are nice feature.... and I ran out of things to praise them for.
Quantum finally caught on speed but broke stuff I used, and limited plugins so now I can't have vertical tab bar normally, existing tab bar addons have to shove themselves into sidebar.
...which means every time I Ctrl-H it gets replaced with History! and disappears completely when I enable it again! Wasn't a problem before but someone decided "plugin replacing everything you see on site is fine, but modyfing browser window? BIG NONO". I even had to dig in some files to hide the actual tabs because of course plugin can't be possibly allowed to do that.
They had also few PR blunders like auto-installing some addon for promotion some time ago, or the fact they bundled pocket with it. I mean it's a nice service that I used before anyway but people complained Mozilla decided to essentially force-install a plugin in it.
While before they were leader, now they are catching up, all while getting involved in some random stuff instead of making better browser. And the fact marketshare is low also means some sites just subtly break from time to time.
I feel Mozilla has lost its way.
'delightful' in the title feels manipulative.
People don't have that kind of personal history with Chrome. There are still criticism when Chrome does updated, but that is usually related to the relation between google and chrome with things like preventing ad-blocking.
Firefox used to be an awesome standards focused alternative to the bloatware that was Internet Explorer.
But that's not really what Firefox is anymore, under the current direction of Mozilla Corp.
Lately, the goals seem to be about copying Chrome (things like killing XUL in favor of webext, jumping on similar UI themes, Forcing bloatware into the browser by integrating things like pocket, laying off most of the dev team for servo, etc).
Basically - the current vision of Mozilla just really doesn't line up with what got me interested in Firefox as a younger dev.
Am I glad Firefox is still around? Fuck yes.
But I'm glad in the same sense that I'm glad Safari is still here - alternatives to chromium are healthy. But it's lost a lot of the luster it had.
The focus just isn't on making a great browser that empowers users (not to discredit the folks working on it). The focus shifted to a multi-project revenue based model exactly like all the other for-profit companies (of which Mozilla Corporation definitely is).
And not only is that not great for me as a user of the product - they aren't even doing it all that well, which is like watching the project sell its soul for pennies on the dollar.
So really - it's absolutely the history. I expect better from Firefox than I do from Chrome, and I'm not really a fan of Mozilla Corp at all. Too much talk, too many buzzwords, too much money spent like a typical corp.
Because in 2020: https://itdm.com/mozilla-firefox-usage-down-85-but-why-are-e...
Because in 2022: http://techrights.org/2022/02/17/mozilla-salaries/
All the while slashing the headcount of actual engineers, canning the very promising Servo, canning Android extensions, slowing down the development on Firefox (how long has been the new Android Firefox in beta now?), and spending most of their lavish resources on half-assed, badly sustained random initiatives there an there (Pocket, VPN, Monitor, ...).
Frankly, IMHO, the Mozilla foundation is the current scam of the century when it comes down to the Open Source world.
Although in this specific case, I think what they're doing is great personally.
The worst thing they did was firing the servo team for me.
It's like Sun microsystems before Oracle ruined them, seeing a great org get ruined.
I don't get it but the phenomena is not unique to mozilla. Signal is another example, they start doing great but then they need to find value outside of doing what is useful to customers and taking care of their core product. Valuing short term gains when you're big but nowhere big enough to take risks like they're taking.
I feel like with the right prioritization firefox can totally decimate Chrome in just one year.
For ex look at the top 30 firefox threads in the past year: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...
> "I've started using Firefox and can never go back to Chrome"
> "Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox" and a lot of threads highlighting new features for FF
Compare that to the top 30 chrome threads: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...
> "Chrome users beware: Manifest v3 is deceitful and threatening"
> "PSA: uBlock/AdBlocks on Chrome to lose function thanks to Manifestv3"
> "Google has added ads on both its search page and Chrome://newtab"
> "Chrome allows websites to write to the clipboard without the user’s permission" etc
Chrome is the new IE and Google is the new Microsoft. They make up their own standards on a whim, which thanks to market dominance everyone is forced to follow. They collect user data without permission. They waste computer resources. They push people towards other Google products in an anti competitive way.
Mozilla has made some dumb mistakes here and there but it pales in comparison to the very serious threat that Chrome, and Chromium in general has to the free web and to users.
It's worth noting that the complaints below have nothing to do with the article, which shows a pretty promising tech, and are just bagging out FF because just as you said, that's what happens on HN.
The company that owns Chrome is nearly the sole financial support of Firefox.
Google can't allow Firefox to die because it would raise questions about Google's own funding of Chrome.
The vitriol comes from people who want Firefox to return to being "just a browser", and to be honest more often than not are the Linux crowd. It's seemingly got nothing to do with rivalry (all the browser vendors are actually fairly chummy with each other) and frontend devs are more likely to just ignore Firefox than to complain about it (IME).
HN has also just become far more vitriol-filled as of late. That's devolving into meta commentary and outside the purposes of this thread, though - just can't leave it uncommented on here.
the opposite is true. a certain group of emotionally invested people will come out of the woods to defend any dumb or authoritarian decision Mozilla makes.
>Mozilla has made some dumb mistakes here and there but it pales in comparison to the very serious threat that Chrome, and Chromium in general has to the free web and to users.
that doesn't give Mozilla a pass. pox on both their houses
It is because the threat of a Chrome monopoly is so great, that it's so important to point out Mozilla's many failures, so that they can be corrected before it's too late.