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Comment by SamoyedFurFluff | Hacker News Reader

Frankly Mozilla already lost that and people demanding Mozilla stay firefox focused are telling the company to death spiral. Firefox has no path, literally none, in getting a significant marketing share. And even if they did the company has no real way to monetize. In fact it almost never had a chance, especially in the current environment where anticompetitive moves are no longer really pushed back on by the govt. I say this as a person where Firefox has always been my daily driver.

I would rather Mozilla keep trying things that keeps it afloat.

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> Firefox has no path, literally none, in getting a significant marketing share.

I'd argue it has a trivial path and that focusing elsewhere (ie: not on the one fucking asset they have ever had/ profited from) is insane.

1. Build a better browser. People browse a lot.

2. Do what Chrome does. Build integrations with services. Chrome is mandated at many companies because of its GSuite integration/ Context Aware Access. The Browser is an identity platform these days and Mozilla has done fuck all about it.

I could seriously go on and on about what they could do.

Mozilla's failures are painful because the path to success is so obvious. Their CEO is a massive failure and should have been fired ages ago.

What Chrome does is that it markets “Download Google Chrome” on every Google property, and comes reinstalled on Android phones.

It is not realistic advise to expect Firefox to do what Chrome does.

I said what Chrome does. It has integrations. I have to use Chrome to log in at work, that's been the case at 3 companies I've worked at now. It is insane that Firefox doesn't see that as an obvious threat and build similar integrations.

Building similar integrations will require, in your words, "focusing elsewhere." You can't have both.

Yes - but that would be as a extension/integration with their browser asset - not a random unrelated project.

You can say this, but every time Mozilla does an integration with their browser asset - like Mozilla VPN or Pocket - people scream at them for adding "pointless bloat" to the browser.

I fail to see how your proposal would end differently.

Plus it was suggested that Mozilla do things to compete with Google's "Gsuite integration" - how do you see that working to begin with? Should Mozilla try to push a competitive office suite, or try to compete at an inherent disadvantage to Google, who already nerfs features of Google search on their mobile browser?

All they have to do is implement the Endpoint Verification plugin. It's open source and any attempt from Google to prevent that would be obviously anti-competitive.

I'm advocating for code that would be implemented entirely in the browser or via an extension...

It's interesting how tribal the corporate IT universe can get - I am forbidden from installing Chrome, even if I wanted to.

Do you use ActiveDirectory for identity? In my experience, most corporates are either AD + Windows , or Google Workspace + Chrome

Yep, AD + Windows here.

Do you know that Ubuntu's number one issue in their bug tracker is "Microsoft has a monopoly on the desktop market"?

Plenty of people have to use Windows at work, it doesn't mean that MacOS (or Ubuntu) is a failure, or that they lack focus, or that this would change if alternatives just went to implement what you need.

The truth is that Google has built a formidable moat around their browser, and even if Mozilla put it as their one mission to catch up, they wouldn't be able to. Also, the first second that Firefox became a credible threat to Google would be the time that Google would drop all the money that they put into Mozilla.

>Do you know that Ubuntu's number one issue in their bug tracker is "Microsoft has a monopoly on the desktop market"? Plenty of people have to use Windows at work

Funny, I had to use Ubuntu 22.04 at my previous backend job and hated every minute of it thanks to snap, gnome, apt, wayland, hibernate, touchpad, and other issues that made me pull my hair out and loose several work hours in tinkering just to attempt to fix them so I can be productive at work. Maybe I was also horribly unlucky, who knows, but IMHO Ubuntu has went from the go-to to being the worst possible Linux distro. I was daily driving Ubuntu 10.XX in college and it wasn't this bad.

I get Canonical wants Ubuntu as the competitor for Windows, and they can can cry "wagh! Microsoft monopoly! wagh!" as much as they want, but Ubuntu aint it chief. Linux Mint and others could do it better if they had Canonical's pockets.

Similar for Firefox. Basic stuff that's standard in Chrome and Edge, like translation (I live in an EU country who's language I don't fully master) or spell-check, need to be downloaded as extensions/plugins in Firefox, and separate for each language, and the end quality of the Firefox spellcheck still sucks majorly compared to what Chrome has out of the box.

I get it, we should support Ubuntu and Firefox because freedom and all that, but I can't when the quality of the products and consumer experience is abysmal compared to the paid competition.

I was an (X)ubuntu user since at least 2009, I also stopped using it and went for Debian/Nix about three years ago.

> I get it, we should support (...) because freedom and all that, but I can't when the quality (...) is abysmal compared to the paid competition.

Why not? Supporting open alternatives does not mean you exclusively need to use them.

MS's pockets are big enough for Ubuntu, Mint, and a dozen more.

Do you know how Ubuntu has managed to increase its share? Focusing on enterprise and server use cases. Exactly what I'm suggesting Mozilla does.

You missed one key detail: Canonical never depended on Microsoft's money to operate. Mozilla does depend on Google's money for everything, including the R&D resources that would be required for them to develop the use cases that you are suggesting.

They just spent 30M dollars on this AI thing lol it wouldn't cost 20% of that to do what I'm saying

First, speaking from experience of someone who worked in a (failed) project that wanted to build a "Enterprise version of ChromeOS", based on Firefox and Linux: I love this naive confidence to predict how much it would cost to bring a whole new lot of features to a product (Firefox/Gecko) that is known for being extremely difficult to refactor.

Second, You really don't get it, do you? They will not spend money on anything that might actually threaten Google's dominance. They get 30M to play with AI is because they don't get to spend anything on making Firefox a strong alternative for Chrome. If they did, Google will take all their money away and then it's game over for them.

If you think it costs 30 million dollars to write a blessed extension that implements the Endpoint Verification logic... lol

> If they did, Google will take all their money away and then it's game over for them.

Because of the position they put themselves in. Also you underestimate how much cash they have.

In terms of ROI: How much do you think they would get in market share if they implemented it?

That’s categorically false, their revenue is tied to their userbase, if they were more popular Google would cut them a larger check like they do for Safari.

According to a contract, which can be renegotiated or simply not renewed.

Google does not pay Apple for "access to the user base". Google pays Apple so that Apple does not try to get into the search engine space and compete with Google.

They also pay Mozilla as a way to keep controlled opposition and a (relatively) inexpensive way of avoid threats of lawsuits like the one that MS had in the past. But they don't need to. If Mozilla for any reason decided to stop conforming to this game and went on to actually fight against Google, Google would drop them in a heartbeat. And who would Mozilla go for, Bing? DDG?

I'd really like you to expand in the forced to use Chrome at work. How does that work?

I'm also at corporate and they are really integrated with Edge. But it doesn't mean I can't do my work in Firefox (Which I currently use)

What do you mean by forced? What happens if you don't log in? What happens if you try to log in in firefox?

Edit: Ah I missed this from your original comment:

> Chrome is mandated at many companies because of its GSuite integration/ Context Aware Access.

You might be right, I'm too lazy to try this in Firefox.

One of two scenarios.

1. The Endpoint Verification extension is used to ensure that the browser/ system is compliant before connecting to certain services such as any SSO.

2. Internal tools were tested with Chrome and to ensure that users were using an up to date tool they were gated on the user agent.

Chrome offers a host of endpoint management integrations that make it a far better choice for Enterprise than Mozilla. Mozilla could very easily build a management portal for Firefox or, even better, build an integration with various SSO providers.

Whereas Chrome really only integrates with GSuite Firefox could support Okta, O365, GSuite, and more, making it the de-facto corporate browser.

This isn't even complicated, this is one of many ideas I have that are easily within their ability, are taken straight from the Chrome playbook, leverages their singular asset, and their major competitive advantage (that they are "open").

Mozilla's CEO has to be fired. The incompetence and mismanagement is obscene.

> What do you mean by forced? What happens if you don't log in? What happens if you try to log in in firefox?

Companies with application allow-lists simply don't allow non-Chrome browsers for use on their endpoints. That's the easiest way.

Companies without allow-lists may still block Firefox in other ways, though none quite as effective as above. Still, the block is usually on the endpoint, occasionally the proxy.

BeyondCorp only working on Chrome. Every single tool and vendor integrated with BeyondCorp. Access to internal systems (including SSH) checked against BeyondCorp.

Using Firefox for anything was literally painful.

I have never encountered this. Everything I've had to use for work works with Firefox just fine.

Chrome gets put on corporate machines because the IT people use Chrome. None of these people seem to regard ad blocking as an internal security feature yet.

If your personal Google account is cancelled, do you become unemployable?

Wouldn't they have a corporate suite account used to log in?

And if they catch you using it they might ban the company you work for by association.

Yes, that should be obvious. I can't imagine what the parent was thinking.

Can you have more than one Google account per phone? Can you have a Cloud Identity Account without a Personal Account?

Yes and yes

That was the song people sang when Internet Explorer had 95% market share in 2003.

Of course, then Microsoft faced a major lawsuit related to their browser monopoly. That seems highly unlikely in today's regulatory environment.

Whatever happened with Microsoft buying Activision?

In general I agree with you though, my above example likely only exists because there's another huge corporation involved.

For new businesses trying to edge a way in the market, yeah good luck unless you've got something novel.

More that controlling a platform is no longer seen as a monopoly position. If Apple can get away with effectively driving Tumblr out of business and taking a cut of everything transacted on its platform, it seems unlikely that regulators will pick out a web browser as the hill to die on.

I agree with this for the most part but "just build a better browser" is naive. For starters, everyone has a different of what "better" is. I'm actually pretty happy with Firefox for the most part and I think being the company that sells safety is a good fit for Mozilla to move into.

> For starters, everyone has a different of what "better" is.

We can all agree on some things though. I'm talking about core metrics. Performance, stability, safety. Beyond that there are some more "controversial" things like privacy, and then you have purely subjective things like UX.

When I say "build a better browser" I mean that they should take those core capabilities and invest heavily in them. Instead, one of their most promising projects, Servo, was canned "because covid" while their CEO took their largest 8 figure payment ever.

Mozilla's greatest failure with Firefox is one of marketing.

It's a performant, stable, safe, and private browser.

(It lags Chrome in some potted performance tests, but it is more than adequately performant. Firefox is much better than Chrome at memory management. It never crashes. It does not steal your data. It allows you the greatest degree of privacy in any major browser. Side tabs are possible.)

But no one can compete with Google's marketing, or Apple's iOS advantage. Not even Microsoft. Certainly not Mozilla.

Mozilla has failed us in so so many ways. You mention one egregious example.

But we've failed Mozilla too. Anyone who recommends Chrome over Firefox is making a mistake detrimental to the well-being of the internet.

Not that Chrome is a bad browser. It's great. Almost as good as Firefox! Chrome has terrible tab management and chews RAM, but it's performant and secure and lovely.

But Chrome is a bad path forward for the internet, and this is important.

Firefox is bad at browsing the web, because complex websites don't test for Firefox compatible.

This doesn't match my experience. I use Firefox as my "daily driver" browser on my personal machine and the number of browser compatibility issues I run into over a given period of time approximates 0. It's vanishingly rare for me to encounter something that's Firefox specific.

Curious to hear which sites you experience issues on.

I use a lot of SaaS admin panels, of widely varying quality. In every case I can think of, the same bugs are present in Firefox, Chrome, and Safari.

On the one hand, it would be nice for Mozilla to focus on firefox, but on the other hand, Mozilla screwing around has produced things like Rust, so maybe they have earned some credit to screw around if that's what the donors actually want.

Their 'donor' is Google, their users are us. Without us they have no donor. Rust at least makes some kind of sense because it is a tool they used to build parts of Firefox.

Aside from being the new hotness, what exactly about AI makes sense for Mozilla/Firefox to jump into and have anything to offer? The one obvious thing they could do would be to integrate AI capabilities into the browser for the users benefit (i.e. the most valuable thing they could do to contribute to 'trustworthy AI'. Note that this would not require a new foundation/company... just integrating the capability into the product they already have) But of course Mozilla most likely won't do this... they're going to keep taking moonshots they can't afford. I can't say I'll miss them when they're gone.

> Without us they have no donor.

Former Mozilla fellow here. I wish I could agree with this sentiment, but it's untrue. Mozilla is a corrupt nonprofit which exists solely to advance the interests of elites. The users don't matter. Within Mozilla there is disdain for the concerns of regular people.

I consider Rust and Servo to be exactly the kind of things that they should be working on in order to strengthen their core product.

Mozilla may have one path, albeit a long shot. If Apple were to decide that it’s cheaper to give money to Mozilla and have FF be the default iOS browser, that would be their best shot for success. Or maybe Apple could buy out Mozilla entirely. This scenario isn’t likely but I don’t think it’s completely out of the question.

When Apple decided to build Safari, they hired one of the creators of Firefox and still chose the relatively obscure KHTML as their base over the at-the-time major market share Gecko. If they didn’t pick Gecko then, they certainly aren’t going to throw everything on WebKit away to do it now. It’s also a terrible move to buy a competitor when they are under legal scrutiny for having a controlling interest in web browsers.

Alternately if the EU or some other government were concerned about privacy (both in the "don't collect dossiers" and the "don't harass people with popups and unwanted features" meanings) and competition it could fully fund Mozilla or a fork of Mozilla that is free of Pocket and similar distractions.

"Build integrations with services" is the silliest possible advice for Mozilla to be getting on Hacker News. Any time people talk about Mozilla on this website, you see comments about Pocket or VPN or any of the other integrations Mozilla did, and most of the comments (if not all) are negative. Persona is the closest thing I can think of and that was a failure, nobody wanted it.

As a former member of both the Firefox and Chrome teams I think you're also deeply misunderstanding the difference in scope and scale of the teams and the products. The thing you're suggesting Mozilla should Just Do Somehow is not feasible.

> Any time people talk about Mozilla on this website, you see comments about Pocket or VPN or any of the other integrations Mozilla did, and most of the comments (if not all) are negative

a) Pocket is by far the one that gets criticized, not the VPN. Besides, the VPN is primarily criticized because VPN companies tend to be really scummy. The VPN is fine I guess it's just not interesting and I don't see how it's going to drive user engagement.

b) HN criticisms aren't representative of anything too meaningful. People constantly post about their pet bugs that they think matter to everyone but they don't.

The integrations I'm talking about are ones that Chrome already has and that would be a huge boon to Enterprise users. Users who have to use a browser at work are going to end up using it at home to avoid the UX friction of using both, other than a subset of "power users" who won't be convinced anyways. Getting Enterprise users is huge and it's a big part of why Chrome is winning - their integrations with identity management is massive and it's part of their overall strategy as an IDP.

> The thing you're suggesting Mozilla should Just Do Somehow is not feasible.

That's nonsense. There are already third party extensions for some endpoint verification for Firefox. We're talking about a 1st party plugin built by a company that just spend 30 Million dollars on this "safe AI" project. There are startups building entire IDPs with a 10th of that funding.

And what does Firefox integrate with? Your Mozilla account? All of these companies have both an identity service (Google accounts/live.com) and a shit load of services (office365/gsuite). What does Firefox offer? Automatic login to more Google properties so companies can continue mandating Chrome, because Google will regularly fuck over Mozilla?

All the big browser players have more than just a browser. It's a gateway to _their_ services. Firefox users on this site shriek at fucking _Pocket_ and all seem to think that all you need to do is to build a better browser.

If that was true, IE6 would never have been in the dominant position it was. If that was true, Chrome would no longer be in the dominant position it is. The only thing that matters is how much you blast users with ads and force them in your ecosystem. Mozilla has none of that.

Integrate with those other services obviously. Partner with Okta and O365, implement the Endpoint Verification plugin for GSuite, etc.

> 1. Build a better browser. People browse a lot.

We're at the point of marginal returns on nearly all of our "traditional" tech (browsers, cell phones, gaming, etc, etc).

There just isn't room for enough improvement in the browsing experience to be "that much better" for people to switch.

Disagree. Safety is still really bad in browsers. Companies have to spend a lot of money ensuring that patches are rolled out aggressively because attacks against browsers are increasingly common in the wild. Investing into a memory safe browser would have been a huge boon, especially since security teams are often the ones who decide on a company's browser choice.

That's just one example.

> Build a better browser.

The Linux version has definitely become worse over the last year. It keeps stalling for no good reason.

>1. Build a better browser. People browse a lot.

Don't think there is anything with it (now). Chrome just captured all the mindshare by being a lot faster & leaner for a while

Hard to fix a mindshare problem with a technical solution given that they're now about on par (roughly)

> I would rather Mozilla keep trying things that keeps it afloat.

I don't care if Mozilla is afloat if that means they'll abandon Firefox to oblivion. I would rather have a truly open browser that doesn't do things like hamstring UBO.

They're burning through (literally) millions on these moonshot projects nobody asked for, meanwhile people are building a browser & engine from scratch on a shoestring budget (Ladybird).

I haven’t perceived Firefox abandonment. I get regular updates and there was a very noticeable major update in performance pretty recently. I don’t think I’ve heard of anything Chrome has done besides trying to push an anti-Adblock.

Yes, they're pretty active, especially in removing features. They removed RSS, removed compact mode, removed bookmark descriptions, removed old extensions, etc.

And at the same time they don't offer any options to donate directly to Firefox, you have to donate to Mozilla and hope they'll spend the resources on the right project (which they clearly don't). It feels like Firefox has been a walking corpse for a while, so of course they'll try anything.

>removed old extensions

Lots of new features were impossible with the old extension model, which was barely an extension model so much as complete access to the browser internals.

> Lots of new features were impossible with the old extension model

Can you name some?

Overall I see extensions as part of the problem, not part of the solution. (the one extension I install is uBlock)

Back in 1999 my relatives were mostly running Internet Explorer on computers with 640x480 screens over dialup. It was fashionable then for companies like Yahoo! and Hotmail and Amazon to add toolbars to your web browser and I'd go visit my uncle and find that more than half of the vertical space was taken up by various toolbars they'd downloaded so they really had about 300 pixels to view the web through.

None of them seemed to thing there was a problem there.

Similarly today if you install too many plugins into a GUI application and it gets "pluginitis" and gets slow and unreliable. I am all for extensions that really speed things up by eliminating junk but if you're not part of the solution in this way you are part of the problem.

I'm not sure I understand your point. Yes, extensions can do bad things. Thats why you don't install those. There are also tons of extensions that do very useful things, but are not applicable to a wider audience. It would be silly to include that functionality in the base browser. Extensions are an absolute necessity in a modern web browser.

The problem is that people who like extensions don't stop at just one.

Unfortunately with IDEs for instance, many people have never had the experience of using an IDE that "just works", they expect it to be f-ed up all the time so when they load another 15 plugins into Eclipse and it is crashing and hanging up all the time they figure "that's life" and don't even realize that somebody else has a stable IDE because they use a stable set of plugins and don't have pluginitis.

Reliability and speed are features too and they are global properties of the system. I'd say non-GUI programs accept extensions well but GUI programs have a rendering thread that can be blocked, an internal change notification system that can be corrupted or used incorrectly, etc.

Generally speaking, their entire multiprocess work (you know, the thing that allows your browser to not fully crash when some website decides to load 250MB of JS) would have been impossible with the old model. You're peeking and prodding at the entire core of the browser in ways the browser... Knows nothing about. E10s could not have worked with old extensions.

IIRC that's not true. Multiprocessing was switched half a year before WebExtensions, and most popular XUL-Extensions were refactored to work with multiprocessing at the time and worked fine with it. Back then it was even a big shitstorm that they had invest so much work, just to be killed some months later.

Exactly. In the past, I looked for a way to donate to of give businesses to Firefox, but I have no intention of supporting Mozilla given their lack of focus.

I think we should hard fork firefox. Set up a board of respected people, and a non-profit. Fork firefox. Set up a 5 year dev timeline, with specific larger goals and intent.

Fundraise, and then hire away some core, mozilla key devs who will leave. Build on that.

I wonder, this would be a "feel good" place for some IPO enriched persons to put money. And it has real value, in that keeping a second browser engine is a laudable and important goal.

Real good to be done.

Hmm.

And you know, Firefox was paid for by donations, and OSS devs donating time. If anything is reasonable to non-profit, this is it.

> And at the same time they don't offer any options to donate directly to Firefox, you have to donate to Mozilla and hope they'll spend the resources on the right project

Such hope is fruitless. You can donate to Mozilla Foundation but not Mozilla Corporation. Mozilla Corporation does Firefox development and actually pays Mozilla Foundation for the privilege. Mozilla Foundation owns the trademarks/etc and Mozilla Corporation pays Foundation for the rights to those and for administrative services.

Q: Why bother? You can’t make a new browser engine without billions of dollars and hundreds of staff.

Sure you can. Don’t listen to armchair defeatists who never worked on a browser.

(I love this)

I respect Andreas Kling, but Ladybird is not a real alternative.

To the sibling who commented. Sorry you got downvoted to oblivion.

> Of course it's not, yet. But those people are doing good work and it's not unthinkable it could gain contributors at an accelerated rate.

Agreed. It's an impressive feat of tech as it is, and I wish it best. That said it's still far from being usable.

> Well, when you're a leftie HN peasant I guess anything more complicated than your CRUD codebase

That's not fair. Web (browsers) is (are) hideously complex. What Andreas did is impressive, like launching a rocket with terrestrial satellite. What browsers are launch a manned mission to Mars.

Sibling was downvoted because of the gratuitous and off-target insults and strawman-ing (in multiple comments), not their point about feasibility of Ladybird, etc.

Shouldn't then their individual posts be downvoted?

Pretty sure they all were :-)

> Firefox has no path, literally none, in getting a significant marketing share.

We used to have these discussions in the Linux world. Some would argue that the goal is to take market share away from Microsoft, even if you have to add closed software to the distribution. Others, including me, felt the goal was to provide an open alternative. That is where I stand on Firefox as well.

> And even if they did the company has no real way to monetize.

You don't need to be real creative to come up with ways to monetize their brand. They're the nonprofit that makes open tools that protect your privacy. Partner with someone to provide cloud storage, email, a notes app, calendar service, and anything else that requires security and privacy.

Edit: To be clear, I support Mozilla.ai if it gives us a private option. I'd like them to integrate it with Firefox.

I agree - if Mozilla is pushing out a useful product and they have the money to keep that product in development as needs change what's it matter if not that many people are using it? Selfishly, I don't care what other people use - just what I want to use.

Personally, I do not need Firefox to have some grand vision to compete with Chrome. I just need it to exist and be there in features that Google does not like (Ad blocking, privacy), so Chrome does not determine the web.

IMHO Mozilla needs to focus on Firefox.

Firefox already does this and continues to be supported. Not sure what you’re talking about. I’m only pointing out there’s no way the company Mozilla can survive off just their browser, because no company currently has a monetized browser product. They immediately lose here. I’m happy with the privacy I get from Firefox and I wished more people enjoyed it, but I understand they’re up against anticompetitive companies on the regular, so I can’t expect them to keep acting as if Firefox is all Mozilla is hanging their hat on.

> Firefox already does this and continues to be supported. Not sure what you’re talking about.

And I enjoy it everyday. Happy to clarify. I am talking about your claims

> Frankly Mozilla already lost that and people demanding Mozilla stay firefox focused are telling the company to death spiral.

> Firefox has no path, literally none, in getting a significant marketing share. And even if they did the company has no real way to monetize.

This is hyperbole. Firefox could push for the privacy angle, or the no-ads angle, or have the best developer tools, or a lot of other potential paths, and it could resonate with a lot of people, and win market share.

Firefox already has a way to monetize the default search engine, and they were doing fine with that before the started following all kinds of non-core initiatives and behaving like a big respected corporation.

If Mozilla focused on their core product this revenue could be enough to be profitable. This is not due to market share, or some defeatist prediction, but to mismanagement IMO as an outsider.

I think focus on the core product is exactly what they need. That is how they started.

P.S. Unrelated, but the whole topic reminds me of Unity $4.4B acquisition of ironSource (an Ad company), instead of focusing on providing a better Game engine (their core product).

Firefox started out in the position it is in today, back when Internet Explorer had Chrome's current market share. They carved out a market share because they sucked less than IE.

But now we're back to square one, with a big corporate entity running dominant browser, and a host of lazy developers that only develop for that one browser.

We really need Firefox to step up to the challenge again to keep chrome honest. Sadly Mozilla flounders at every step, and somehow manage to make their browser even more user-hostile than Chrome.

The situation differs. IE lost because it stagnated, as Microsoft didn't care about the Web.

Google cares about the Web, and they not only keep developing Chrome, they also keep developing Web standards, meaning that any competitor has a lot of keeping up to do just to stay in one place.

Not just that but Firefox has become stagnant when it comes to a lot of interesting Web standards. WebUSB, WebSerial etc... are the ones where people are really pushing the web and Mozilla refuses to implement them.

https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#webusb

You make it sound like Mozilla is pushing back for no reason. They have pretty valid security and privacy concerns.

For some of them, they do. But they could have implemented some of them behind a feature flag/cli flag or so? They did this for things that were bigger security headaches. That way they'd collect all the real world issues and iterate on their solutions for their privacy concerns. Right now, it is just one more reason why Chrome taking over their market share.

It is not like the use cases for connecting devices and use them via. the Web Platform will suddenly disappear if they don't support it.

Their reasons to push against WebUSB are, imo, valid. There are legitimate concerns and a high level of complexity to allow such low level USB access in the web browser.

Their reasons to push against WebSerial are not as valid and that would still cover most use cases without the downsides and complexity of the full WebUSB.

Another difference. Because Google is on the Ads business, they won't incentivize anti-ad/privacy behaviour. Firefox has that edge, at the very minimum.

Today's market share situation is mostly about the growth of mobile.

> Frankly Mozilla already lost that and people demanding Mozilla stay firefox focused are telling the company to death spiral.

Firefox is literally the only thing Mozilla has that's worth a damn. A Mozilla that doesn't focus on Firefox is already dead.

> Firefox has no path, literally none, in getting a significant marketing share.

They have a path, and it's "called not focusing on aping Chrome and mindlessly cutting features 'because telemetry.'"

> I would rather Mozilla keep trying things that keeps it afloat.

I don't care about Mozilla-the-organization, I care about Firefox. It does no one any good if they burn up all their resources aimlessly chasing trends as an also-ran.

In a way...I kinda wonder how much Mozilla needs to stay a purely private company.

Giving the current climate relative to Google, Microsoft and Apple's presence on the web, having Mozilla become a nationally funded project at a dedicated org. doesn't look like wild dreams.

To jest if it becomes Germany's official administration's technology provider, investing a significant amount in the ongoing maintenance of firefox would be a given. Make that a multi-country deal and enough money would float around.

There would be still issues on the governance and keeping it a competitive and innovative product, but it isn't unheard of.

I use Firefox more than any other application.

I don’t care about anything else Mozilla has built in the past decade, unless you count Rust.

As they continue devoting resources towards more and more things that aren’t Firefox, they only hasten the day when I’ll give up and move to Brave.

Mozilla are not a startup or a public corporation. If an organization does not have a path to pursue their core objective, they should just fold.

Mozilla exists for Firefox, not for itself.

> In fact it almost never had a chance, especially in the current environment where anticompetitive moves are no longer really pushed back on by the govt.

They used to have a great market share of 100%, but then Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with Windows, which was much easier to install than Netscape Navigator. Netscape then became the basis for the open source Mozilla Firefox project.

As a side-note, the name Mozilla was derived from Mosaic Killer. Mosaic is the browser that was created by Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This Mosaic browser was then bought by Microsoft and then the basis for Internet Explorer, which killed Netscape.

> In fact it almost never had a chance, especially in the current environment where anticompetitive moves are no longer really pushed back on by the govt.

I disagree with the statement that anticompetitive moves are no longer really pushed back on by the govt. Anticompetitive legislation was introduced in response to Standard Oil. On the day that the legislation split up Standard Oil in the many subsidiaries such as Chevron, BP, and Texaco, Rockefeller advised people to BUY shares of Standard Oil since the company was getting too big to run efficiently anyway. The legislation didn't have much effect as you can see from the fact that aforementioned subsidiaries still thrive today.

I've learned these things from the Acquired podcast by the way. Can highly recommend.

They have no mobile presence, their Desktop usage is very low (even using the Cloudflare stats which doesn't require client-side tracking) and Devs aren't even bothering to test on FF anymore. It's lost.

Yes, my biggest complaint in firefox is a lack of dev supporting the browser. Sometimes websites break and I know it’s because their dev didn’t bother to check if it worked in Firefox. But that’s not something Mozilla can control. So I can see them trying to find something else, and I’d prefer they do that than keeping on something that will likely never work.

Throwaway for obvious reasons. I recently interviewed for a Mozilla R&D E.M. job. The first and primary questions asked of me were not technical but about diversity. I didn't even feel like I had a chance to showcase my technical skills. They wanted to know how important diversity was to me and how it would impact my management. H.R. was on through the entire call continually injecting these kinds of questions and it was not a technical interview even though it was supposed to be. (third interview)

> Frankly Mozilla already lost that and people demanding Mozilla stay firefox focused are telling the company to death spiral. Firefox has no path, literally none, in getting a significant marketing share.

The company is in a death spiral regardless of what 20-50 HN commenters tell Mozilla to do. Please don't have any illusions in that regard.

We can still debate as to why they have been in a death spiral for the last 10 years, and part of it was that they did pretty much everything to avoid making a better browser that could have actually been a competitor to Chrome. On top of showing a giant middle finger to all the power users who developed add-ons.

> I would rather Mozilla keep trying things that keeps it afloat.

Isn't the only thing keeping them afloat concessions from Google in some sums of money? In that sense they could be doing anything and it wouldn't make any difference. It's extremely clear that their leadership is Google-captive and will never be allowed to make anything that directly competes with the tech giants.

> We can still debate as to why they have been in a death spiral for the last 10 years, and part of it was that they did pretty much everything to avoid making a better browser that could have actually been a competitor to Chrome.

You clearly haven't been paying attention at all. Quantum 57 shipped in 2017 and was a huge investment.

I clearly have. Quantum was the giant middle finger I described in my post.

You're fixating on very necessary changes to the addon ecosystem and selectively ignoring the huge underlying changes to Gecko that were made possible by doing so.

Mozilla Fluent internationalization (https://github.com/projectfluent) is superior to other offerings. Firefox is almost entirely transitioned to Fluent (https://www.arewefluentyet.com/). This puts Firefox in a position to potentially perform well in providing good quality browsing experiences to a global audience using many languages.

If Firefox is already dead then Mozilla may as well be dead. What's the point of keeping Mozilla around if they're giving up on Firefox? Why should I care about the continuation of their org, if not for Firefox? In fact, if Firefox is dead then I want Mozilla dead too. Clear the playing field for somebody new who might succeed where Mozilla failed. If Firefox is dead then Mozilla continuing nevertheless is contrary to my interests.

> And even if they did the company has no real way to monetize.

Isn't firefox the only thing making them money? In a very straight forward way: Selling the default search engine configuration. 500M in 2020 according to Wikipedia. Seems even a tiny market share is worth a lot?

what would be the point of keeping them afloat if they no longer focus on firefox?

The only reason why Mozilla exists in the first place in Firefox. If they can't make a good web browser, there is no reason for them to exist in the first place.

> I would rather Mozilla keep trying things that keeps it afloat.

A Mozilla that doesn't create Firefox is a failed Mozilla.

Everything else others can do. There are working charities for every single thing Mozilla does - except creating a good browser.

Eh, this still seems at least plausibly smart strategy purely in terms of "not getting left behind." I'm reminded of the choice to enable Netflix DRM?

It is at least possible (if not likely) that "AI" becomes central to the browsing experience, so Mozilla should probably do something here.

(We detached this generic subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35260301)

> Firefox has no path, literally none, in getting a significant marketing share.

Wait until Chrome bans Manifest V2 extensions (like ublock origin). That will be a good time for Firefox to shine.

Doesn't Brave support Manifest V2 just like Firefox?

Brave is based on Chromium. Google has a significant hand in Chromium developments. If Manifest V2 is deprecated on Chrome, other Chromium forks have to work harder and harder to maintain it as time goes on. Firefox is slightly less vulnerable since it's a different engine.

Crazy idea: make a browser which adds features with new versions instead of how they are currently removing them.

I don’t know of any features that would improve Firefox’s market share to any significant effect. Tbh I haven’t even noticed any feature removals, but that’s just my day to day use cases: I bookmark things, I have multiple windows with tabs open, I install privacy add one and ad blockers, I sometimes open the console and mess around with websites. I don’t think the vast majority of the market even does a portion of what I do, much less any more obscure features. So I’m not inclined to believe that any removals changes Firefox’s market share to any significant effect. They just have no realistic way to monetize a browser. I doubt safari or chrome are money makers either, but they have anticompetitive conglomerates using those browsers as customer lock in and not a core product. Completely different needs there.

No single removal changed Firefox's market share to any significant effect, but it's death of a thousand cuts. Eventually, they're going to have to start doing things again that gain them users rather than lose them.

(Happy Waterfox user; my "one feature" was multirow tabs, and the general betrayal of the Quantum rewrite. "We will add these features back as extensions" my unsupported ass. Bring back UI modding. PS: Same goes for Firefox Android, which I've thankfully found an old APK for.)

You can still mod Firefox's UI pretty easily, its all defined by CSS files and not too difficult to customize. I for instance actually did the opposite of what you wanted and completely got rid of the tab bar cause I use Sidebery for tab management: https://i.imgur.com/cHz1clI.png Theres a whole subreddit for it even: https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/

This repo (and that subreddit) has all the info on setting stuff up in Firefox: https://github.com/aris-t2/customcssforfx and even has a CSS example for doing multi-tab lines: https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx/blob/master/curren...

Sure, but every time I try this it has terrible UX compared to TMP, particularly around scrolling and dragging.

(Also Firefox breaks it once a year or so.)

Not sure how much this is lack of developer effort vs lack of support from Firefox.

>Same goes for Firefox Android, which I've thankfully found an old APK for.

Not sure how much this will help you, I don't know which features you're keeping the older version of Firefox Android around for. But have you looked into Iceraven browser?

https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser

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