https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
Call me a pessimist but I don't think Mozilla is managed well enough to actually compete against Chrome. We'd need the Linux Foundation or some other large neutral standards body to fork Chromium at this point and create a vendor-neutral platform that everyone can rally behind.
Not to mention, google pulls its own underhanded tactics.
I don't know how many Chrome users use add-ons that would become less useful after the change, so it'll definitely be interesting to see whether Firefox's numbers will show a sudden uptick at some point.
This seems like surprisingly low percentage. I wonder whether these stats count people who disable telemetry or install add-ons from their distro's repository.
For people using Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, Arc, etc it won't impact them. Their adblockers are all native and not using the extension API.
*Which isn't actually true; "cosmetic" blocking (altering the DOM), the original type and the one most users actually care about, will still work just fine. It's only privacy tracking which is going to be totally broken, and frankly, outside of the unreality bubble of HN, most users care much less about "privacy" than you'd think.
So these limitations of manifest V3 don't exist?:
>One of the main issues with Manifest V3 is its limitation to filter lists: an extension can only include up to 50 static lists, and only 10 of them can be active at the same time.
>There are also limitations to the number of filter rules inside these lists: installed extensions cannot collectively exceed 300,000 static filters and it is no longer possible to update
Also, even that part isn't as catastrophic as you'd think; ad blocking, like most things on the internet, roughly follows the 90-10 rule: 90% of the ads are blocked by 10% of the rules. So even with a tenfold reduction, you should still see the vast majority of the ads blocked by even the intentionally-gimped declarativeNetRequest API.
Yes, it's going to make ad blockers slightly less effective and make your page loads slightly slower. But that doesn't get as many clicks as "Chrome is banning adblockers!!1". And it's important to note the difference because when v3 rolls around, all those users that were lied to are going to see that their ad blockers still mostly work, and lose even more trust in whistle blowing.
You forgot the part where Google postponed the original timetable for the deprecation of manifest v2. Without that postponement, developers would not have had enough time to change the extension so that there would have been a time when adblockers were banned. The outcry prevented that.
explaining this distinction is actually enough to drive me to switch thanks
It's a tactic.
I use Chrome on desktop because websites work properly in Chrome, and Firefox on Android for the adblocker, except when a site is unusable.
What is FF marketshare on Android?
I really wish the timing of FxOS was better as well as the marketing. I’d certainly choose it over Android, but we’re now sort of locked into the duopoly with terrible decisions from apps like Signal requiring you have a Android or iOS primary device or no service for you.
Can we stop pretending that this is mozilla's fault that the GIANT corp sitting in front of the internet, being the homepage of 90% of computers, that nags users to install chrome "for a better experience" on every single web site it can, is able to get onto more systems than firefox?
How many average users even KNOW about firefox anymore?
Faster on sunspider. In practice, on real web pages, as someone who occasionally browses the web using a low end tablet PC (Surface Go 2 with linux. The CPU is downright anemic but good enough for treating it like a reading device/video stream platform), I experienced many more stutters on Firefox that I did not on Chrome and it has become one of the reasons I stopped using it (the syncing is also way worse and often breaks. "Read latest tab from other device" is almost useless if you don't manually trigger a sync because it sure won't do it by itself in any reasonable time frame).
The performance difference is much less visible on my main computer though. But yall really need to try firefox on low end devices before you make generic statements about its performance. Or the android version.. lord, firefox on android is just unpleasant.
Android variant is actually shit, but it’s getting only better. It’s much faster now than 5 years ago. Hopefully they will improve it further.
And while I never use Firefox on Android without uBlock Origin, I don't get how it can be described as unpleasant after the rewrite a few years ago. The combo makes browsing bearable compared to Chrome.
The sync tabs thing used to be flaky, I agree, but now sending tabs to and from Linux and Android always works for me.
But general performance-wise, Firefox is so easily better than Chromium in my experience, it's not even a competition. Firefox with hundreds of tabs open performs better than Chromium with 10-20 tabs. It's more responsive to interactions, uses less memory, and is much less likely to freeze up. With Chromium, I have to constantly keep a watch over open tabs, and close them mercilessly, or suffer from overall system slowdown and a browser that's almost a slideshow.
Killing the servo project.
Running metaverse projects instead.
Yes, mozilla could do better.
"Power users" aren't most of anyone's user base. The vast majority of people use chrome because google told them to, because google IS the internet
Google Chrome was recommended by power user, and that how they took the market lead, not because they are the internet, but because power users told regular users to use chrome.
Those are the types of websites that have issues with firefox, because mozilla maintains it's own root trust store held to various standards/compliances, and many..less savory web addresses use not HTTPS content on their HTTPS pages.
This is a feature/value added bonus, but because it "breaks" sites for people....back to chrome.
Powerusers don't shift the market.
The problem is that "not pushing hostile web standards" and "more flexible ad blocking" clearly isn't stopping the insane bleeding of the userbase. These are people actively migrating away from Firefox in droves.
Perhaps not, but if you're writing your desktop app in Electron, you'll be benchmarking your performance optimizations against the Chrome engine. If that same code is used for your web app, you're optimizing your website for Chrome.
Mozilla can pour resources into making Firefox more performance, but the real-world ecosystem will change behavior to improve Chrome's performance on their webapp with little concern as to whether it hurts Firefox's performance.
(I assume people use largely the same code between Electron and their webapps, and that optimizations for Electron translate reasonably well to optimizations for Chrome.)
2. Most people aren't actively choosing their web browser. For example, my wife uses the Samsung web browser on her phone because that is the default.
3. Most people think Google is the internet, can't distinguish between the browser and the google webpage, etc.
4. A dwindling marketshare percentage does not directly imply old userspe are moving from Firefox to another browser, it could imply that new users don't know/use firefox
You're right that it could theoretically mean that, but unfortunately monthly active users have actually fallen by ~20% since 2019 according to Mozilla:
Google is _forcing_ Chrome, onto everyone. Gecko is fully embeddable on Android, through GeckoView. Nobody uses it, because the default WebView is chrome. androidx.browser is Chrome. And if you want to delegate to the browser while still staying in an app context, the feature is called Chrome Custom Tabs. Everything is made to make people forget about Firefox's existence. Google actively harms Firefox performance on their websites, while happily displaying a "it's better on Chrome" everywhere you browser. They force the WHATWG's hand on 90% of features. There's articles every month on new-obscure-feature-that-is-only-implemented-by-chrome-and-requires-an-army-to-implement, pushed and paid for by Google, which dumbass webshits are going to go and implement because obviously their VC backed startup _really_ needs WebUSB and WebMIDI, as well as Google's shitty, unfinished implementation of WebGPU.
Google is a cancer that grows everywhere, killing everything it touches. Firefox smoking a cigarette from time to time is not responsible for that.
This makes no sense. The parent argument is that Chrome wins due to aggressive bundling and free ads on Google. Neither of those are self-inflicted wounds. The claim is that Mozilla doesn't actually have self-inflicted wounds.
Not in the comment I was responding to; you would have to be arguing that "Firefox smoking a cigarette from time to time" doesn't describe a type of self-inflicted wound—and for you to be right—for that to be true. (Whether you genuinely think that or not is one thing, but you definitely wouldn't be right about it, in any case.)
The entire comment I responded to belongs to the flavor of apologia that takes the form, "it doesn't matter if X is bad, because Y is worse".
In the case of Mozilla and Google, yes. Mozilla's leadership fucking sucks, and I've written at length about how the entire Foundation board is a bunch of useless MBA clowns that are here to suck from the golden teat.
But it doesn't matter, when the alternative is Google having absolute and total control of the web. Mozilla, for what they're still worth today, still have a weight. Write an article titled "Mozilla opposes API proposal X from Google for privacy reasons" and people will at the very least give it a listen. RFCs from them are listened to. The WHATWG has to at least pretend to hear them out.
Go on. Let Mozilla die. See what the web looks like when Google can push every API they want, unopposed. WEI would look like a walk in the park. Apple could say nuh uh we don't want to, and Google would do the exact same thing they did with Firefox: snuff it out. Microsoft wouldn't even need to be pressured to work with them, pissing off Apple sounds like a lovely distraction for them. Little by little, websites would stop working on Safari (not that they work quite well currently, most Safari users are doing it because of a complete lack of technical knowledge and it's the default browser, with three nerds on HN saying it's because it's better for their battery life), APIs unsupported because Apple isn't interested in the open web.
At best, you end up with an Apple Web, and a Google Web, both of them sucking ass in their own right. At worst, Apple becomes irrelevant because of their focus on native apps. Most of which are already Chromium wrappers anyways.
So yes. Pinch your nose and go in. Mozilla is worth the support, no matter what. Their leadership already sucks, what's the worst that could happen ? They keep sucking, but take back marketshare ? Good. For once, give them support instead of being the worst user in the world, the one the just shits on them for not being good enough, while flocking to Google anyways.
Now, of course, Google's financial relationship with Mozilla is no exception. The stated reason is that they give money to Mozilla in exchange for having Google as the default search engine, but its actual purpose is to mitigate claims about Google having a monopoly on the browser market and thereby avoid anti-trust laws.
If Firefox were to gain the majority of the marketshare Google would no longer have an incentive to give them money. Mozilla wouldn't be happy about that because they'd lose their biggest source of income. And Google wouldn't be happy either because they make money through web ads and harvesting data to sell it to ad companies, and there's no better way to go about doing that than creating their own web browser and a whole ecosystem surrounding it, and then making sure it's the most popular one.
Clearly it is Mozilla fault: the world is not fair, if they are where they are they should crunch their resources and win. Google haven't started being the home of most computers. It is the nature of competition. Is it hard? Sure.
How the fuck is mozilla supposed to compete with a GIANT that is nearly everyone's homepage? Even if they had comparable budgets (Which they don't) mozilla still wouldn't get the free advertising that google gives chrome
If your argument would be 100% true there will be no innovation or market dynamics. Business history has proven that one day you are at the top and another you aren't anymore.
This is wild exaggeration that I never hear about except from people defending the mismanagement of Firefox. I've used Firefox since forever, and I don't have much trouble anywhere that I can remember. The browser works. This is an article showing that it's outperforming Chrome on some metrics. It's Firefox's business and design decisions that wreck their browser. It went from being awesome to being janky Chrome that calls you abusive when you complain that they put an ad for a tv show in your browser.
Chrome won partly because of the marketing and being preinstalled, sure, but also by being a good product. If nagging people to install Chrome was all it took to win, then why is Edge in such a precarious position on Windows with all the nagging Windows 10 and 11 brought? Microsoft failed to succeed time and time again.
People on HN have weird preconceptions about how suggestion and marketing works.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1311229/whatsapp-usage-m...
Edit: A quick search said this from the same source:
>Using WhatsApp less often than once a month was the most common usage frequency among Danes in 2019, according to 23 percent of the service users. 15 percent used the app weekly and 13 percent used it several times a day.
RCS is a non-starter if you need to do group chats with iPhone users or send them pictures without a massive loss in quality, as iPhones do not support RCS. As long as Apple refuses to support it, it will continue being a terrible choice in any country with significant Apple user base. An Android user with WhatsApp shares an identical experience with an iPhone user with WhatsApp. RCS on the other hand will drop you back to what cell phone messaging was many decades ago.
Which is why none of our companies use microsoft teams, right? Or wait, maybe when it comes to products that aren't that different, what comes with the package matters.
Mozilla mismanaged it to hell. They don't even really care about the browser anymore.
Safari is a huge simply due to iOS but it’s a shame that Apple stopped maintaining the windows port.
Edit: I wish Mozilla would just fork Chromium and add/delete whatever privacy things they want, like Brave. There's no reason to maintain Gecko anymore.
This wasn't due to my computer's IP, the problem went away the moment I browsed the same website with Chrome, and this time I wasn't even asked to click the checkbox to prove that I'm human.
Hah! Let's see you try to use vertical tabs in Chrome. If you ever have more than 8 tabs open at once, Horizontal tabs are clearly inferior.
I never have more than 4 or 5 tabs open at a time, closing them as I'm done with them. If I need to recover them later they're always in the history.
I'm sure Firefox and other browsers offer some power user features that's good for some folks. I just don't care enough.
As a user I just want to see the information I need without tinkering with settings, and Chrome does that well. As a web dev I'd much rather focus on UX than cross browser compatibility, and the Blink/Webkit duopoly makes that possible in a way that standards never did (and still don't). So there's just no need for Firefox in my personal or work life. YMMV of course.
Hah! Let's see you try to use vertical tabs in Chrome. If you ever have more than 8 tabs open at once, Horizontal tabs are clearly inferior.
Brave and Edge can do vertical tabs natively, but chrome doesn't. The extensions I have tried in Chrome are as unusable as Safari's native vertical tabs implementation.
That's it, though. If Firefox breaks that again, like they intentionally broke it before, that 3% usage will drop down to 2%.
What's wrong with you guys? Could google stab you in the face and you still swear up and down that firefox is negligibly slower than chrome? What will it take? Google is pushing a "feature" to completely lock down the internet, take away all meaning from "user-agent", and make blocking ads functionally impossible! When will you stop aiding and abetting this behavior because you feel mozilla is "not perfect"
A lot of the tech echo chamber bandwagons and freaks out about things like this, but I bet in a few years it'll turn out either a non issue or else alternate browsers will naturally rise to popularity. No point fussing about it beforehand. In the meantime Chrome just works, Google is whatever, Firefox is annoying, and Mozilla just feels irrelevant.
Shrug. I feel way more annoyed by Firefox than anything Google's ever done. Whatever their ideology, their product just isn't great.
much better privacy
practically the same experience while surfing
keeps competition going
ublock origin actually works as it was meant to
mozilla didn't forget what "do no evil" and "open internet" means
Because they do have a great browser, but have a horrible strategy and have wasted money in any number of ways, and made themselves wholly dependent on Google for handouts.
>How many average users even KNOW about firefox anymore?
A hard lesson I learned at my last company was that it's not enough to have the better product. Better marketing and better relationships will, more often than not, trump a better fitting solution to a problem. It sucks, but it's real.
Can you imagine the fucking fit HN would throw if mozilla dared to buy a super bowl ad?
This is still the small minority of sites but I keep safari and chrome around as it still happens often enough.
Firefox ALWAYS seems to have random leaks after weeks that other browsers don't have, once I saw Firefox taking 24GBs of RAM, while Edge and Brave on the same or more tabs and time were taking only ~2-3gb of RAM.
This has been going on since at least 2019-2020 or so, when I started dropping Firefox because of this behavior. It is just random websites that seem to cause leaks but this has never happened with Edge or Brave and no website should really be breaking a browser like this, the system becomes unusable after a while.
They are seemingly unable to fix the issue or pretend it doesn't exist even when its reported so I basically had to stop using FF as my main browser.
> I don't think Mozilla is managed well enough to actually compete against Chrome. We'd need the Linux Foundation or some other large neutral standards body to fork Chromium
Ah, yes, Linux, the OS used on something like 3% of desktop machines! I'm sorry but I don't see the logic at work here at all. Chrome dominates because Google pushes it and they have the means to reach basically every internet user out there. Switching out Mozilla for the Linux Foundation would do absolutely zero to counter that. Case in point: by most measures ChromeOS has a higher desktop market share than vanilla Linux already.
82% of the smartphone market
90% of public cloud workloads
62% of the embedded market
99% of the super-computer market
The first figure alone makes it more relevant to the general population than windows or any other OS.
Let's see, 55% of all web traffic is mobile devices so that means roughly 45% of all web traffic comes from linux-based smartphones.
And that isn't counting things like Chrome OS, or linux desktop browsing, which account for another 2-4%
So roughly 49% of all web traffic is literal user-facing linux devices, and 90% of the websites they are browsing are served by linux servers...
So yeah, if anything linux is probably the most important OS in existence right now. Definitely not obscure..
ASP.net had it's day, and everyone wanted to instead run their .NET apps on linux rather than deal with windows licensing and security issues, which is why mono was so popular
Other things had their chance too, like MacOS-based hosting, and it never really took off, again because people don't want to manage closed-source production systems that they can't simply patch themselves.
The domination of linux in the hosting / server world predates the existence of public clouds. I was there, I remember.
At the turn of the millennium for a very very brief time there were a lot of windows servers running ASP.NET. That was it. Nothing has come close to linux since then, and it has absolutely nothing to do with what AWS/GCP offers. What they offer is entirely beholding to what developers like.
No disagreement there.
> We'd need the Linux Foundation
Who spends a whooping’ 3% of their total spending on actual Linux? [1]
Call me a pessimist, but I might look for a better candidate.
[1] https://lunduke.substack.com/p/linux-foundation-spends-just-...
I use Firefox because I am privacy-conscious, as a result I have telemetry turned off. Do people like me show up in those stats?
Why is the answer always more chromium?
And for a userbase nominally so positively biased towards open source it is weird to see how google gets a pass on pretty much everything, while mozilla/firefox has this incredibly carefully curated list of offenses that is maintained and spread by the community, doing most of the work at ensuring that firefox never goes anywhere. There's a lot of Linux proponents here who are doing all the heavy work of carrying water for Google when it comes to chrome dominance.
Yeah, so every time you actually restart firefox after it updates you probably get an ad for mozilla VPN. Okay compare that to Google literally being the central advertising and spyware hub of the entire internet. "I'll just have to use the worst option possible, because the alternative isn't 100% ideologically pure".
But I agree, that third browser engine kept things interesting even if I didn't use it. Selfishly I hope Apple continues using its iron grip on iOS to prevent anything other than Safari's engine there. I don't use Apple products personally but benefit from the diversity of ecosystem it provides.
The only reason IE retained any marketshare was because it was required for legacy enterprise and government applications. For security this was bad all around and Microsoft was right to kill it off even to their own detriment.
- People were trained to automatically install a new browser on their computers when they got it.
- Edge is a never ending nagfest and that became another prompt to go and download Chrome.
Less is more was probably the better strategy to take with Edge.
You hit the nail right on the money. Every time I accidentally open Edge through the Windows search, it never ceases to shut up about itself. There is fanfare, there are notifications for details I don't care about, popups showing me all the features that are standard in any web browser.
You know what would make me use your browser Microsoft? Getting the hell out of my way. I do not care that it's Edge, I don't care that it's new, I don't care that it has 7 ways to input and take pictures and who knows what else. Just show me the search result.
Contrast this to how Safari behaves when it pops up to show you something. It just gives you the web page. That's it.
Making a reliable engine that supports all of the modern web is a monstrous undertaking. Not just "support", it needs to be reliable. Microsoft missed the boat when they allowed IE to rot and it was too late to catch up now. Every year spent without a reliable browser preinstalled on your OS is detrimental.
It had been on the decline for years. Statscounter shows 26% in January 2013, 17% January 2014, 13% in January 2015, then Edge was introduced in July of that year.
If anything Edge was a recognition of that reality: the investment in maintaining their own browser engine wasn't worth it when compared to the resulting market share. IMO the failure of Windows Phone was the death knell of Trident (the IE engine): desktop share overall is smaller and they have no footprint in the mobile OS space.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwid...
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwid...
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwid...
IE market share was declining before Edge was introduced, and it continued to decline after Edge was introduced. Since the browser engine switch their market share has actually increased a small amount! So all in all I don't think there's any evidence that Edge was a blunder.
Despite people having a better opinion about Edge Chromium it didn't seem to stem the decline.
Nitpick, but the Edge name signaled the switch to the ground up rewrite Spartan engine. Trident is still sort of alive in its zombie corporate state in the Windows backwards compatibility swamp. Trident was still maintained for backward compatibility (and still exists in IE Mode in Chromium Edge), but Edge was always Spartan and it is Spartan that is dead (RIP).
It's so weird these days seeing people literally cheering for the success of a proprietary product on a completely closed platform over an open source engine. Firefox, sure. I can get behind that even if my professional life technically argues against it. I see the draw there and won't argue about benefits.
But Safari? Seriously? Even discounting the existence of Firefox, the "monoculture" argument falls down in the face of products like Edge and Opera (and countless others -- Linux distros ship Chromium, Teslas all have a build installed, etc...), which are *successful forks* of Chromium. If Google goes evil and turns into a bad steward, we know already that Microsoft et. al. won't be impacted and can continue to ship their unadulterated products. Because that's what they're doing today.
Really? Safari?
I suspect that's not OP's fear. Google is powerful enough that they can do whatever they want with Chrome. They could even close source the thing and implement a load of proprietary APIs if they wanted and the bulk of users would continue to use it.
One of the things holding them back from doing so is the fact that Chromium can't run on the most popular mobile platform in the US. I'm no defender of Safari but I can see the logic at work.
Right, but that capability is exactly what the upthread comment is cheering for Apple having. Apple goes even farther and straight up denies competitors access to its platform entirely.
It's the asymmetry I don't understand: why is proprietary control good for one side but not for the other? Is the goal here preserving open systems and interoperability or is it just to Beat Google?
It isn’t for either, this is a “least worst” scenario. Both sides have the capability to push proprietary APIs but largely fail at doing so because they don’t have a monopoly over the market. They are forced to compromise on a middle ground (supporting the open web), which is better than one side being able to entirely dominate the market and do whatever they want.
> Is the goal here preserving open systems and interoperability or is it just to Beat Google?
In this specific scenario they are one and the same but the aim is the former. Google controls the desktop browser market already, one of the only reasons they haven’t done the same on mobile is because Apple won’t allow it. The argument is not that Apple should control everything, it’s that stalemate is the best we’ve got.
Yeah, I think this is wrong, but I'm going to bail on this discussion since it's too close to my employment.
But my opinions haven't really changed anyway: from my perspective both sides have "control" over a market, but one side has been a good steward, allowing forks and experimentation and open implementation, and the other side has been an inarguably bad steward by disallowing competition entirely. And it's shocking (and frankly a little Orwellian) to see people trying to argue the opposite.
From my perspective I agree that Google has been a better steward of the web than many others would be or have been. But I have spent too much of my professional life dealing with things like AMP pages and shitty, browser-crashing ads provided via Google ad networks to say they are a total objective good (to say nothing of the Web Environment Integrity proposal and other stuff that never succeeded, remember when they wanted to put Dart in Chrome?).
Even if you think they are objectively good, remember that they've been a good steward within the current context where they don't hold overall power. Microsoft is a good steward of the web these days but I've been around long enough to remember the IE6 days. If given total control over the future of the web I have every expectation that Google would behave like MS did back then. It's nothing personal against any company, I think it's inherent in the nature of any private company in total control of a market to bend it to their will. Expecting them to do anything else is foolish.
I fear the native future Apple wants but can't achieve because of the open web. I fear the dominated web future Google wants but can't achieve because of Apple. I'm equal opportunity scared of all these bastards.
It seems like you agree with me then. I remind you that you stepped in to a subthread arguing in favor ("seeing the logic" in your words) of Safari as an alternative to Chrome as a way to preserve open access to web content. And as you yourself point out, that's ridiculous: iOS/Safari is much more locked down than any WEI-compliant browser ever could be.
I repeat again that I'm happy if you want to boost Firefox or Chromium or (if you must) Opera or Edge instead, as those platforms represent open choices in a reasonably free market. But telling people to use Safari on iOS in this particular argument is a very weird up-is-down/gaslighting/Orwellian take. It's just wrong. Your stated goals upthread don't match your recommendations, at all.
WEI alone is enough for me to disagree with you on who is the bad steward.
But... again, WEI is just duplicating features that have been there from day zero on iOS (and mobile apps more generally).
I understand that you dislike WEI. I understand why you might argue against its implementors and push platforms like Firefox that don't do that. I get that part.
What I don't get is your celebration of a platform that is even more locked down, in every reasonable interpretation. Your ability as an arbitrary client to connect to the service of your choosing using the software of your choosing (which is all WEI is about) is objectively much weaker with iOS than any other significant client platform. So maybe you should revisit your thinking here?
We need more engines, not browsers. If every other engine dies, Google gets to dictate what the web is even more than they do right now.
[1] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
One of them is called TabFern, get it? It's like TabTree but it doesn't have branches.
For other Chromium-based browser users, Tabs Outliner is great, more powerful (but with a steeper learning curve) solution.
After not liking Firefox, I tried four more browsers: Orion, Arch, Brave, and Vivaldi. I finally landed on using Brave.
After you turn off everything related to crypto, it becomes a great and user-friendly browser with adversarial interoperability with Chrome. It's the only browser with an actual chance of beating Chrome by convincing its users to migrate.
I'm hoping they can continue maintaining the Chromium fork (it's an actual fork, by the way), as it'll get harder and harder as it diverges more and more.
0: https://twitter.com/brave/status/1574822799700541446
1: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1534893414579249152
I don't get it.. that was the day that open source won the web. There are now no major closed source browser engines remaining. It was a massive indication that in the end, open source software will always win in any market. We just needed Google to dump in billions of dollars to help accelerate the process, but they did that, and now we're all better off for it.
Now we just need Windows, OSX, and iOS to die out, and the whole world will be running on open source software.
Microsoft announcing an open source "Edge Core" (cf .NET Core, ChakraCore) would have satisfied the same criterion.
Google dominates web search, controls mobile as part of a duopoly, pays the other mobile provider to feature their search, dominates mobile advertising, ranks websites based on ads and chrome performance, increasingly takes over functionality from the websites they index, etc.
They use their money and power to transform the web into a platform they own and control with AMP, Manifest v2, WEI, WHATWG, and repeated attempts to kill the URL bar.
Chrome is a key instrument of their monopolization. Their business units need to be carved up, and Chrome needs to go its separate way, kept apart from search and ads.
I hope they gain in browser market share alongside Firefox and all the other non-Chrome, non-Safari browsers.
> If a competitor has a superior product, then why not just leave it up to the consumers to decide if it lives or dies.
The trouble comes when the entity in the dominant position squashes competition unfairly. In the IE case, Microsoft included a browser with every copy of the OS, so consumers had to overcome hurdles to even try a competitor's browser. Additionally, as I mentioned above, Microsoft provided secret hooks into the OS that were unavailable to other browsers, so it was impossible for a competitor to create a superior product. Those actions limited fair competition in the browser space, which usually results in worse outcomes for consumers or the market as a whole, hence the laws forbidding monopoly abuse.
Hope that helps give some idea of what happened there. Of course, you can read much more detail about the case & anti-trust law in general elsewhere.
In case of Microsoft and IE, even if you don't read up on the history and details of it, it's obvious that they were just trying to do what Google is doing now - gatekeep the web and get some of that toll money. I don't think many would have issues with Microsoft just including a simple web browsing tool and leaving it at that. Instead, they were actively working to kill the competition, took over the majority of market share and then just killed off innovation basically completely, and held back the web for years and years afterwards.
I guess with WebDRM this point is moot though.
Better than nothing, and just incredible what they’ve achieved so far!
About FxOS being mismanaged, well... you have to understand that if you follow a model where you rely on others for distribution (carriers and open market OEMs), you are bound to their constraints. In that case, it was a chicken and egg situation where selling devices without a WhatsApp app was very difficult, but WA didn't want to develop an app for a new OS until it grew to tens of millions of users.
Then Moz top management lost some key proponents of the project, and the FirefoxOS haters got their wish. I still don't understand why Mitchel Baker didn't agree to support a community based project (like Thunderbird) or try a strong privacy based spin.
Disclosure: I worked at WA during the FirefoxOS time period as well as when the KaiOS client was developed and launched.
I honestly don't remember the internal sentiment on FirefoxOS, and I don't know if Mozilla ever approached WA to ask for a client. But the public interfaces for apps were insufficient for a WhatsApp client, so that's a bigger issue. The KaiOS client (which afaik, Jio approached FB/WA to ask for) was difficult to build in part because the OS was missing important features for apps, and that takes time and collaboration to get added to the OS and then pushed out to users.
From memory, the major missing interfaces were around access to TCP sockets and ability to run code that accesses the network in response to a (silent) push message that optionally submits a notification for the user. If FirefoxOS didn't have push messaging (I can't remember), then ability to keep a socket open always and post notifications at will would suffice. Arbitrary tcp sockets are needed because the chat protocol is not http based; running code on pushes is required for e2e, so sender names can be populated from the device's address book, and to avoid notification horrors. Horrors include getting a notification about a message you can't read because the client hasn't fetched it yet and getting a notification about messages you've already read; WhatsApps model is the client is the source of truth, and so there's no reason to accept notification horrors that are common with server source of truth systems. e2e was under development for quite some time, so even if the public timelines don't match up, it would be a requirement for supporting new OSes.
For calling, access to UDP sockets would also be needed as well as ability to run native code as the voice codec and data marshalling is in C; although Firefox OS came out before WhatsApp calling. Calling didn't make it to all platforms, and would have been an acceptable thing to defer, IMHO.
- 3rd party clients. That worked initially, but WA was quite aggressive in breaking them, and once e2ee was added they stopped working.
- we wrote a j2me VM in Javascript (https://github.com/mozilla/pluotsorbet) to run the S40 version :) Perf was not good enough when dealing with java threads.
- we collaborated with a company (OpenMobile) to run the Android app in a container, rendering in a DOM element. That was a pain in term of OS integration, and OpenMobile finally didn't get the distribution agreement from WA.
I implemented the KaiOS additional APIs, basically exposing a subset of libsignal. You're right that there are missing pieces in the web stack for these apps - it's very frustrating that you can't rely on WebCrypto for all the e2ee. Let's hope WebAssembly will fix that!
Yeah, that happened. :/ I was mostly in favor of a light touch, but e2ee would have been a hard cutoff anyway, and we didn't have the desire to make a compliance program for 3rd party clients, so they just got the boot whenever they caused inconvenience. There would usually be a flurry of activity around individual changes, but afaik, third parties saw the writing on the wall when e2ee started showing up.
> - we wrote a j2me VM in Javascript (https://github.com/mozilla/pluotsorbet) to run the S40 version :) Perf was not good enough when dealing with java threads.
Wow, that's impressive! (and kind of terrible!) Were you able to leverage this for other things, I hope?
> - we collaborated with a company (OpenMobile) to run the Android app in a container, rendering in a DOM element. That was a pain in term of OS integration, and OpenMobile finally didn't get the distribution agreement from WA.
I was unaware of this. That's interesting to hear about. I think you're right from your earlier post, that user count would have pushed WA the other way, and that lack of WA support made it harder to get user count. Samsung (Tizen) and Jio (KaiOS) got WA to make clients by subsidizing handsets and leveraging user counts / other business relations; s40 got a client because Nokia was clearly going to sell at least a few million of them (s40 predates WA, of course, but the earlier ones never ran WA); same with WP7, although no client until 7.5, because the platform was missing pieces.
WebOS didn't get a client because the platform was missing pieces and didn't survive long enough to add them (lack of WA support wasn't really an issue, given the timing). MeeGo didn't get a client because Nokia cancelled the N9 before they launched it, and limited the release.
It absorbed resources and focus, which resulted in the browser stalling development, which resulted in shrinking marketshare, which resulted in less money from the search deals, which resulted in the ongoing job losses.
> you have to understand that [hard realities of the mobile market that everyone knows already]
I don't disagree, but: none of that was new or unexpected when going in. That's why a lot of people thought FFOS was hopeless: because breaking the mobile duopoly is so hard, by then it had already claimed a giant (Nokia) and seriously humbled another (Microsoft). The play for the "developing market" and low-end devices was hopeless and misguided. We had just seen Nokia dying while trying to hang on that same market... There was a lot of wishful thinking in all the strategic moves, and unsurprisingly they didn't pan out.
That's history revision. The browser development didn't stall because of FirefoxOS, it was slow for other reasons (look at the leadership team changes when the Quantum started).
Please remember that FxOS started in 2011. At the time WindowsPhone was quite new (first release in 2010), Samsung was pushing Tizen and Android was not nearly as dominant. Context matter. Mozilla already knew that Firefox would not be the default browser on Android (Google waited for Chrome to be ready to replace the crappy default one that was subpar compared to Firefox) so owning a platform was a logical step. It would still be better these days.
I don't think that's right. The developing and low-end devices are probably the only plausible route into the phone market. Especially during the time period that FirefoxOS was active, there was a tremendous opportunity for a phone that cost very little and was widely available. I don't know that FirefoxOS could have really addressed that market, given their software stack, but the market was there. Wikipedia claims 23 million KaiOS devices were produced in Q1 2018; given that KaiOS is a fork of FirefoxOS, I think that's a demonstration that the targeting was fine. 23 million devices is a small chunk of the mobile market, but it's still a lot of devices.
Microsoft was making significant gains in market share with WP7 and WP8 by having devices that were low cost and worked much better than similar cost Androids. In the US, you could go out and get a $60 wp7 device or a $100 wp8 device when they were new and have a much more usable phone than a $150 Android. and an iPhone was like $400-$500 at the time. Microsoft had some high end wp7 and wp8 devices too, but not many people bought them, because high end iPhones and Androids worked well, and at that price point you're looking for different things. WM10 had promise and interesting features (Continuum might have been pretty cool, especially if Intel hadn't dropped development of x86 phones days before the Continuum public demo), but WM10 didn't run well on low end phones, so there were no low end WM10 phones, and user growth evaporated. (It doesn't help that WM10 included at least the 3rd new framework for windows phones in 3 generations, and called this one 'universal', which meant it only ran on the OS which had the least number of phones for its whole lifetime....)
And that's the problem: the phone market is fundamentally aspirational, phones are status-symbols, it's the high-end that directs the market. Yes, you can have a number of bottom-feeders at the cheap end, but they are fundamentally irrelevant: (almost) nobody buys a KaiOS device because of KaiOS, they buy a cheap phone that will run whatever OS ships with it. And the same was happening for Microsoft: people bought MS phones because they were cheap, and then chucked them away as soon as they could afford a flagship Android or iPhone.
If you cannot produce a flagship phone that people actually want to buy for the OS, for the experience, rather than for the price, you're having no impact whatsoever on the direction of the market, regardless of numbers. Nokia was still shipping hundreds of millions on cheap featurephones when it died on its ass.
I don't use iOS devices, but I understand the experience is generally considered to be pleasant. The Android is really not that great; there's definitely room for someone to build something with UI that's not made of molasses; but it's going to be a real uphill slog to get it into the marketplace, and it's going to have to be driven by market share on the low end that goes upmarket over time.
That's where you need the commercial talent to go out and make deals, build relationships, get mindshare before you even go to market. To do that, you need sexy software, a sexy experience that makes a difference, and a lot of money. A clunky OS targeting the low end will never be sexy, and you'll never convince developers to work on it "for the good of the web" or some other non-financial reason.
> The Android is really not that great; there's definitely room for someone to build something with UI that's not made of molasses
But the thing is, there really isn't. Android is actually pretty good, on flagship phones it works as well as iOS. There just isn't a massive quality gap to exploit. One needs a value proposition that changes the game, because you're not going anywhere with progressive enhancements.
> it's going to have to be driven by market share on the low end that goes upmarket over time.
Nobody has ever done that in post-2007 mobile. Nobody. Every player that saw the low-end as strategic, went there to die. As Microsoft demonstrated, it's a road to nowhere. You need to make a splash at the top end, make headlines, make people want it, or you'll never move the needle.
I think I agree with most of this. But on the other hand, Jio was able to make KaiOS "sexy-ish" by promising to gather millions of new to smartphone users, only possible because of the low cost. And they delivered, and apps showed up, at least a little. That's not because the phones were sexy, or people were excited to buy them, or because they're not clunky, or because of some open web BS; it's because the phones were cheap and capable enough and the numbers were there. Mozilla clearly wasn't able to build the relationships to get there as we know from history, but it was able to be done with Firefox OS because Jio did it with the fork.
> Nobody has ever done that in post-2007 mobile. Nobody. Every player that saw the low-end as strategic, went there to die. As Microsoft demonstrated, it's a road to nowhere. You need to make a splash at the top end, make headlines, make people want it, or you'll never move the needle.
If anything, Microsoft's WM10 flop proved it. WP7 and WP8 were doing ok, WM10 didn't address the low end and the sales disappeared[1]. Is 2.5 - 3% market share great? No, but they had a reasonable bump after WP8 (q4 2012) and WP8.1 (q2 2014), and a proper release of WM10 (q4 2015) likely would have been another bump instead of a rather quick demise. It didn't help that there were signs that the WM10 release was not a quality release and that Microsoft had plans to abandon the platform; I was interested in a phone at the time, and could see that a) there was nothing worth buying for WP8.1, b) nothing worth waiting for on WM10, c) Microsoft didn't care, so I should start making my way towards the door.
Like I said, it's an uphill slog. You've got to make consistent releases that don't suck, which isn't easy.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/236034/global-smartphone...
I'm still very bullish on the dWeb pieces: content based addressing, UCANs (https://ucan.xyz/) for distributed auth, new web app models (https://hackmd.io/@robin-berjon/tiles) to create an ecosystem that is not locked by centralized app stores.
There's a lot to do, all contributions are welcome (frontend, device ports, platform apis...). We have a Matrix channel (https://matrix.to/#/#capyloon:matrix.org) and you can try desktop builds easily following the steps at https://github.com/capyloon/nutria#quick-start
That's an interesting way to say that the people who foresaw its imminent failure were correct—but (conveniently) does so in a way that not only downplays[1] the correctness of their prediction, but also maligns them by ever-so-subtly suggesting the reader consider whether blame for the resulting failure shouldn't perhaps be shifted onto those who made the prediction [1 again, unfortunately]...
1. <https://web.archive.org/web/20201022224913/https://www.colby...>
It was a Hail Mary for sure but really their only way to be competitive on mobile. iOS and Android are both owned by direct competitors in the browser space, Mozilla is never going to be given a fair shot there. FirefoxOS would have their way to rectify that and I think we would have all benefitted from greater competition in the mobile market. But alas, it was never to be.
In terms of being the right idea, the idea of firefox OS was great and really needed in the face of chromebooks popping up and iOS dominance. I can’t imagine building a browser and not also planning a response to mobile lock-in and cloud based devices.
I still love Firefox. Not seeing ads anywhere is worth whatever warts I hit
Or, oh no, the CEO of the foundation makes more than they do as an engineer at google, that must be corruption! Meanwhile Firefox is faster, less buggy, has never stopped being a very good browser and the only one made by a group that can't subsidize it, and doesn't get to shove it's advertising down your throat on every single website that Google owns.