Mozilla's midlife crisis has taken it from pioneer to Google's weird neighbor
theregister.com
theregister.com
I expect even that will become untenable soon: when other engines finally appear on iOS in the next few years we'll start seeing websites blocking any non-chrome browsers (and probably some of the reskins too) and then Mozilla won't even be useful as a fig leaf.
Its an awful state of affairs, and I don't see any way out of it for them.
By every available statistic, Chrome has more than 80 percent of the "free market" --- i.e. the market outside of Apple's walled garden where it has only recently become a realistic option.
[1] https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#all-sit...
Personally, I run it everywhere: on my phone, on my Windows desktop, on my Linux desktop, on my Linux netbook. Not even because of any particularly strongly held stances - it's just a nice browser that I like and it runs pretty well everywhere (plus the devtools are the most usable for me).
That said, I'm fairly sure that the majority of Linux desktop users are also using Firefox, because it's typically the default browser in most distros.
used to run it as default on my android phone -- but ahh mozill doesn't care about it enough. pretty unstable
There's already a Chrome-branded Safari wrapper on iOS; but my guess is that the majority of iOS users use "regular" Safari and will continue to because it's the default.
That said, the most important extension usecase is adblocking, and with Manifest v4 and FLoC/Topics and SafetyNet/remote attestation, well...
You can track this uBlock Origin Lite issue: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/issues/52
Safari is unfortunately the last bulwark against a Chrome monoculture where Google will decide the future of the web - which they will of course design to assist and enhance their ad selling.
Tbh I can't recall if at the time Google Chrome was also preinstalled or just "Google" app. But I can say that it wasn't very clear which browser is the default one in which situation. For example when you open a link inside some third party app sometimes it would hook Samsung browser and sometimes Google Chrome. Sometimes Android pop-up would ask me, use Samsung browser/Google Chrome "Just once" or "Always" and if you pick "Always", how do you change it afterwards? Easy solution would be if you prefer one browser over another just uninstall the one you don't like but if it was preinstalled or whatever, it kept coming back.
https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#desktop...
- two wrongs don't make a right
- can't put out fire with more fire
etc. sorry for the lazy response, but too many exactly fitting idioms to resist.
Also, “the enemy of my enemy, is my friend”
That one basically never leads to anything good.
But can you put out a fire with Firefox?
Personal information extraction for ad targeting purposes will be on by default and eventually be made very hard to turn off.
New features that’s good for the web but Google doesn’t like because it threatens their ad business or they just don’t like it because of “not invented here” will die in the crib - see JPEGXL; Apple is trying to push for it but if Chrome displaces Safari that hope will be completely extinguished.
Now we at least have a choice …
but three rights make a left!
In 2020, she got paid $3MM.
In 2021, after an incredible year which saw Firefox's market share fall even further, she of course got a raise to $5MM for her brave decision to lay off 250 people in Aug 2020.
I hope she gets a massive bonus for 2023, given that her leadership has allowed Microsoft Edge to flip Firefox most days according to the stats, and she still has a quarter to let Safari consistently flip Firefox too!
It is obscene. She wants to be paid according to what she alleges her market value is, but she does not have the accountability of a publicly traded company's CEO.
Firefox needs a radical culture change and it needs to happen 8 years ago. I have no hope it will happen, as it exists to siphon money from suckers who pay donations that barely pay Mitchell's salary (total annual donations barely cover this expense![1]) and the board does not give a shit about what Firefox's core audience cares about.
The grift will continue until Mitchell and co decide enough is enough and flee the sinking ship. Whoever inherits it and the massively bloated outgoing expenses will probably be fucked, regardless of who they are or how good their intentions are. Firefox is massively behind, web devs are not incentivised to accommodate for the single-digit percent of Firefox users, and things are only going to continue to get worse.
[1] Yes Mitchell is paid by the corporation as opposed to the non-profit and donations go to the non-profit, but ultimately money that could have gone to the non-profit went to Mitchell's bank account
Stats from https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#desktop...
I was really amazed with this post I found here the other day:
https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...
maybe they should think better where they put their money!!!
If servo ever gets into a decent independent browser I will let go of Firefox the second its released!!!
I do not support a donation-based tech company spending money in other places not related to tech!
FWIW I think a few of these likely have perfectly reasonable innocent explanations like consultants having a company they don't bother branding rather taking payments personally (hence hard to find specifics on them - they brand themselves rather than their company) and I find it hard to believe that Lunduke didn't consider this possibility, but he asks nothing that doesn't deserve an answer.
What's specifically wrong with this post besides the author?
He bags on "Mozilla" for claiming that they relied on donations to function on a Foundation donation page, using the total revenue from both orgs as proof that wasn't true, but didn't bother to drill down into the Foundation's income specifically to see if the statement was true in the actual context that it was being made.
Which is a common theme in a lot of his work. If he has an axe to grind (and he clearly does if you're familiar with his comments about Mozilla going back like 5+ years), his journalistic integrity takes a nosedive. Remember when he claimed that Mozilla funded terrorists because they donated to a privacy focused email service, and some antifa group he disliked used that email service? I do.
Mostly, knowing how completely insane he has been on this and similar topics in the past makes me assume that he's probably as least being misleading now.
Charitably I'd assume the quoted reason in the article is the reason:
> In fact, the “not-for-profit” and “for-profit” aspects of Mozilla are so tightly intertwined that the auditors report makes a point of calling the collective group of three organizations simply “Mozilla”… and reports on their finances as a single entity.
After their alarming treatment of security researchers documented here [0], I've been doubting whether to continue using Firefox at all. For what it's worth I still do, because I think not using Chrome is a fight worth fighting and that alarming behaviour was just from the VPN team, but if any similar behaviour happens with the Firefox team I'm just going to drop it altogether.
I want Mozilla and Firefox to succeed. I want diversity in browser engines. I want to see the culture change happen. It still can! But the debt created with each passing year and each percentage point of market share lost makes it harder and harder.
[0]: https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2023/08/03/1
I remember these old-days of Linux with other browsers pre-installed. Like Konqueror (I see it's still in development), or others even more niche ones. Cannot even remember their names.
I don't use any Google products/services except when I need to at work. Firefox is perfectly fine for now; I agree that Mozilla's future is concerning but there is absolutely no downside to sticking with Firefox for now.
It's too bad that Mozilla doesn't push for more adoption; the vast majority of users would never know the difference between Firefox and Chrome once they're browsing. It's not like it's an inferior product.
There are a few government website where I live that block Firefox, although those are just checking the user-agent so easy to work around.
And yes I complain all the time about it.
The underlying WebKit engine is the interesting part and is portable, with multiple other browsers using it.
- The only non-Chrome browser available across 3 operating systems I use.
- The only mobile browser that supports extensions.
These two alone make it an objectively a better solution for me than Chrome or Safari, regardless of how I feel about any of them. If I was on iOS and didn't run Linux on my personal computer, then Safari might've been a worthy alternative. Since I'm not, Firefox is really the only one that satisfies both of those criteria, no "ideological" reasons necessary.
It's not a great state of affairs. This is speaking as someone who's used Firefox as primary browser for many, many years.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/search/?promoted=re...
Open a website in Firefox, click on three dots, click on "install", and you have an ad-free version of the app you'd otherwise find in the Play Store.
Just that one extension alone makes Firefox objectively better than Chrome or any of its Android forks. It is a slam dunk. Having all extensions available is a nice cherry on top, but no other desktop extension is as important as uBO.
I tend to use Firefox elsewhere too, primarily because of my disdain/distrust for/of Google and Microsoft. I know the WebKit/Konqueror relationship soured after a few years of Apple giving them massive, untenable patch sets, but haven’t kept up with their development. In the early 2000s it was really impressive what they were doing compared to the Mozilla bohemoth of the day.
I also find it sad that Opera and other implementations are out of the running. I’m sure one day some Blink challenger will arrive, just like some Gecko challenger arrived, just like some IE challenger arrived, but table stakes are so much higher than they were 15 years ago.
Safari in WSL
Edge Linux :P
I just run Degoogled Chromium forks (Cromite/Thorium) these days. Maybe its still Chrome underneath, but if I'm blocking Google Ads and their native browser tracking, at least its still a middle finger to Google's business model.
How? There is no Safari for Linux and never has been, AFAIK.
There was Safari for Windows until 5.x and it was good -- I liked it and used a Windows XP VM just to run it on Linux. Dead and gone now.
You can run Epiphany on WSL and get a Webkit browser that way, but that is not at all what you said.
1. It's irrelevant, as I pointed out.
2. It's a false premise. We talk about bad CEOs all the time, especially egregiously bad ones. I saw only just the other day comments on the Yahoo CEO.
I would like to see a source on that.
Even if it were actually worse of from a technical standpoint, do you not see the huge value of an independent implementation of the most crucial platform of humanity? Should it really be controlled by a single giga-corp?
The performance on Android is garbage though :(.
The feature set is worse in some parts, better in others. Better UI customization, container tabs is cool, and some extended APIs for extensions. Meanwhile, Chrome has support for more exotic web APIs (e.g. WebUSB, filesystem access). So it's your choice.
I don't know a thing about Mozilla's current CEO, and I don't give a shit about them either.
I still use Firefox and haven't used Chrome in many years.
I've known quite a lot of CEOs, of small and big for-profits and charities too, and anecdotally they've all been some of the hardest working people I know. There's many complaints to make against many CEOs (including some of the ones I've known), often including taking obscene salaries while under-paying workers, or other problematic management decisions, but in my experience laziness just doesn't seem common - in exec levels generally as well as chief ones.
If you want to be lazy and paid well, there are easier jobs with less constant security than being a CEO!
If she's getting that salary she must be able to defend it as reasonable based on comparable salaries in the industry, the income she's able to secure for the company, etc. So if her pay seems like a lot, it's probably because the tech sector overall is paid too much in your opinion.
tech CEOs ≠ the tech sector...
It’s niche.
Microsoft dropped IExplorer because they were far behind in their implementation and by embracing Chromium they short-circuited the development needed to produce a credible alternative. They had nothing to gain from Firefox and everything to lose, actually.
On the other hand what is Mozilla offering? A (now) obscure web browser that has run an Google charity for decades. It's painfully obvious that Mozilla isn't playing in the same category.
Mozilla makes and manages many other software titles besides Firefox. Rust, NSS, etc. Just think about all the current software built on Rust. That alone is a huge contribution to the tech industry and to society, more indirectly.
How long do you imagine someone in such a position at a FAANG company would last if they were getting Baker's market share numbers?
I'm absolutely disgusted every time i'm reminded of just how obscene the yearly pay for that class of people, and how often they are just straight up psychopaths.
They rely on nepotistic networks of power, scamming, and straight up financial crime.
Unless you yourself built the company, or pulled some rare actually great scheme to elevate it, everything above 1MM a year is stealing from other peoples wages, especially in orgs like this.
I wonder why people haven't pulled a french revolution when there's countless examples of this type of siphoning everywhere these days.
These people don't give a fuck, they are twofaced, they lie all day long while they take your money and use it to buy wine cellars, yachts and propaganda to keep everyone down - all disguised by buzzwords like "open", "green", "patriotic" or whatever while they tank the great work done non psychopaths.
This instance shows a few _general_ problems:
1. Compensation is a function of power, not merit.
Merit is a secondary, indirect factor that _can_ have an effect on power, but it's not a necessary condition.
Power often comes from social currency, negotiation, manipulation, wealth and ownership.
2. Power and responsibility are at best loosely correlated.
Often those in power try excuse their obscene privileges by pointing to responsibility. According to this idea, their decisions are force multipliers and they carry a huge risk.
But reality shows time and time again, that this isn't true outside of the most extreme cases. They accumulate power and wealth to an irresponsible degree and make irresponsible decisions all the time without being held accountable. In fact, many get _rewarded_ instead.
---
I want a Mozilla that is the steward of the fastest, most advanced, secure and user respecting browser. I want the best in class dev tools.
I would gladly pay good money for that and I 100% bet that there would be enough people who would too.
Find some existing pain point that people don't like about Firefox, fix it, make sure people know the better version is available. People switch to it, you get more search revenue and donations, you hire more developers. It's the same way Mozilla operates, but this time you hire competent management so your market share goes up instead of down.
I feel like you could have said the same thing about IE 4.0. It's more like, the incumbents don't care outside of what they need for their own purposes and Mozilla is the one supposed to be doing it but they're not.
Except for the crowded market, but that's not even true now. We've got Firefox and the KHTML lineage and that's about it.
> Unlikely you'll gain traction among regular users who are bagged to use their OS or search vendor's own.
Chrome has 64% market share on desktop despite the proprietors of Edge and Safari having a combined ~90% desktop market share. Firefox itself had 32% market share in 2010. You can get people to switch from the default if they have a reason.
> Perhaps one could gain Mozilla users, though hard to compete against millions of dollars of development (regardless of whether CEO is taking a chunk or not).
The problem is more than the CEO taking too much. They're not actually spending most of the money on making Firefox better.
They should also be spending more of it on marketing, because their funding is directly tied to how many users they have, which keeps going down.
1) it costs money, so those doing ot for philosophical reasons may find it daunting
2) Those who'd do it to make money (less ideologically aligned with Mozilla) would rather fork Chromium instead as it has momentum
I've suspected that their mix of people includes (but not limited to):
* many very capable true-believers in their ostensible mission, like we'd expect of Mozilla (though they can't all have perfect morale right now);
* some people who've gone through, or are going through, a rough time, and are trying to use Mozilla to solve problems that they see elsewhere in the world (even if off-mission, but other people are sympathetic and want to help, so it's complicated);
* maybe some true-believers who have to make hard compromises to keep Mozilla alive, somewhat quietly (and maybe it's hard to know which compromises to make, and to not lose the way at some point); and
* people who'd actually much rather have their counterpart roles at a FAANG or other prestitious tech company (and so aren't true-believers in the mission, and will tend to think and act with their true thinking, with impact to vision and decisions, and to leadership of the true-believers).
Maybe some key people span multiple categories.
This isn't a satisfying grand unified theory of all of Mozilla's behavior, and I'm sure there's insiders with better insights.
That spot has been filled by safari on the iPhone a long time ago.
Firefox is my favorite desktop browser, but the desktop market is not the big deal when it comes to browsers.
Even edge has higher usage than Firefox across devices.
Thankfully, browser extensions can quite easily make firefox pretend to be whatever browser you want.
Then Firefox would be guaranteed to be strictly better than Chrome, since the baseline is the same and they can put in all the features that Google doesn't want because they would reduce their ad income, such as great ad-blocking support.
This might result in losing Google's search engine deal, but they can probably make a similar deal with an LLM-based search engine and even if the money might be less they don't need that much if they are only maintaining a fork and not the whole engine.
Then folks not using Chrome find more friction until they eventually give up and switch.
I’ve sat in a couple of Ecmascript events where maintainers complain about Google implementing features before approval. Sometimes Chrome ships stage 2 features because (apparently) Google engineers don’t want to respect due process.
It’s known, we just put up with it. I also blame developers working on non-standardized features. You should work with the ES that is official and current, not the one Google is forcing on other vendors.
Apologies for not listing all the times this happened, but I think too many.
DTCC apps such as Omgeo support Chrome and Edge only.
One example is a tool for flashing code to a embedded device. It's aimed at beginners, so not requiring an install is valuable. It means even kids with locked down Chromebooks can try it out.
But the Firefox teams doesn't like the vibes of a web USB API, so it'll be cheome-only indefinitely.
- Snyk
- Fastly's support site
- background blur on Meet and Zoom
Really dumb aside that shouldn't have made it past the editor (not least of all because of the insane rendering of "GoLang").
> Mozilla also backs the development of the leading cross-platform messaging client, Thunderbird.
This overstates Mozilla's involvement in Thunderbird. The relationship is basically ceremonial at this point.
> in 1998, owner AOL promised to open source it[...]. Four years later, the open source version shipped.
The way this is written makes it sound like there was a delay to fulfill the promise. In reality, it only took 2 months for Netscape to publish source code. It took another four years for them to decide to scrap the old code and undertake a rewrite that culminated in the release a 1.0 of a different product line which the author refers to here.
While I maybe self-servingly agree that mozilla could stand to focus more on the power-user market segment, this article feels more like a low-effort ramble than any kind of real investigation into what the modern org's actual focus is vs what it should/could be.
For what it's worth, Firefox is also developed by a fully owned subsidiary of the Mozilla foundation. Do you also think the relationship between Firefox and Mozilla is "basically ceremonial"?
One in which the latter's involvement with the former (including influence on and influence from) amounts to substantially more than letting one use the other's name. The relationship between Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Foundation, for example, is not merely ceremonial.
> For what it's worth, Firefox is also developed by a fully owned subsidiary of the Mozilla foundation. Do you also think the relationship between Firefox and Mozilla is "basically ceremonial"?
No.
So, have you taken the temperature of a representative set of Thunderbird contributors?
> Really dumb aside that shouldn't have made it past the editor
Why? It was 100% intentional and the reason I included it is that I have often seen this raised as an alleged reason for Mozilla not more aggressively competing with Google, notably here on HN.
I don't believe it for a minute. That is specifically why I said "surely not".
> (not least of all because of the insane rendering of "GoLang").
"golang" is one of its official names and that is because the bare word "go" is open to misinterpretation and is hard to Google. The caps were merely for emphasis, and also, interCaps help screen-reader users.
> This overstates Mozilla's involvement in Thunderbird. The relationship is basically ceremonial at this point.
[Citation needed]
> The way this is written makes it sound like there was a delay to fulfill the promise.
There was.
> In reality, it only took 2 months for Netscape to publish source code. It took another four years for them to decide to scrap the old code and undertake a rewrite that culminated in the release a 1.0 of a different product line which the author refers to here.
Arguably true but, I submit, tangential to the actual point. The decision to O/S it being the same time as the Netscape 5 rewrite was a deeply stupid idea, but also understandable.
However, it was some 25 years ago now, so I didn't and don't think it merits more than a single-line passing mention and was not -- and is not -- worth this level of hair-splitting.
> Arguably true but
There's nothing arguable about it. It's simply "true".
I mean this is ancient history and I really don't know why you are so bothered about it, but as I recall, Netscape was unwilling and unable to open the source code for 3.x or 4.x and so rather than spend all the time and effort to clean it up for publication, it chose to rewrite it.
So, as I said: the reasoning was unfortunate but understandable.
Drop the ad hominem if you want to have a serious discussion. (In the future, that is. We won't be having a discussion here, for the reasons stated. You can email me if you want, but I'm going to impose a mandatory 1-month delay for reflection and require a simple affirmation that the purpose will be a genuine attempt to develop the facts rather than "winning" the conversation. Changing the subject, diverting attention with weak attempts at petty retorts, etc. are going to be strictly off-limits.)
My article had plenty of references and citations for the points I wanted to make. If you wish to falsify it, then you need to reply with your own citations. You have yet to do so, and what you claim are significant issues are, AFAICS, trivial cavils.
Now their tech sucks and market share is sinking.
I don’t think it’s the only reason, but firing Eich didn’t help. Also, Brave has been a pretty nice browser with lots of small quality of life innovations. It’s a shock to me that Firefox didn’t capitalize on its unique position to be privacy focused.
When Brendan Eich was still there they seemed to have a clear purpose and identity. A lot of interesting stuff was happening: the birth of what would become Rust, PDF.js which is now ubiquitous back when downloading PDFs was the norm, Firefox OS, which somehow found success after they abandoned it, asm.js, the predecessor of web assembly which killed the alternative that Google was championing called NaCl (very few remember it now).
Then they just seemed to lose their way I can't tell how
1) Mozilla does have alternate sources of revenue, like Pocket and Mozilla VPN.
2) Mozilla had a partnership with Scroll, which was precisely that (a way of funding websites without advertising and taking a slice of that) before it got acquired by Twitter and subsequently dismantled.
You're right that they perhaps don't want to be reliable on Google themselves, although they are and all other ventures have failed, but that's different from wanting a web that is not driven by advertising.
But that's exactly what it was...
https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/02/25/exploring...
If you want to argue that they should have done it themselves rather than in partnership, or bought out Scroll, then sure, I agree. Especially given how it turned out after Twitter bought Scroll.
Not really though. All alternate sources are usually less then 5%. [1] As of 2021, they made 73% of total revenue from Google. [2] Mozilla VPN? You mean the one that refuses to fix CVEs? [3] Yikes. No thanks.
1:https://frankhecker.com/2020/08/15/how-mozilla-makes-money-a...
2:https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37376466 (Sept 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37372118 (Sept 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37367785 (Sept 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37357369 (Sept 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37345115 (Aug 2023)
Those comments broke the site guidelines so badly that I need to let you know that we ban accounts that post like that, and ask you not to do it again—no matter how badly someone else's comments are or you feel they are. We're really trying to avoid having this site burn itself to a crisp, which is what unchecked flamewar leads to.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Couldn't have emailed me though?
I agree, I can get snarky. Although I don't quite agree with the strictness of the rules, this site is one of the most unique I have found, so something must be going right.
I'll respect the rules.
It depends on how you look at it. https://www.w3counter.com/trends
Really can you give some links ?
Mozilla is not a "weird neighbor" but a controlled opposition and its CEO's salary would suffer from breaking this unhealthy relationship or stepping on Google's toes. I'm fairly certain that a lot of Mozilla's developers and users don't have pro-Google viewpoints but it's cash that matters here, not viewpoints.
Recently, my Firefox updated and now I can't run bookmarklets anymore right after starting the browser.
Say I have a bookmarklet like
javascript:alert(123)
But not right after the browser started with what is called "blank page" in the settings.
This is a bit cumbersome, because I often use a bookmarklet as the first step of my browsing session. A bookmarklet, which goes like "If TekMol is not on page B and not on page C, then send him to page A". So I start with page A, then click the bookmarklet again, get to page B, click it again and get to page C.
But that workflow is broken now. Must be some regression in the latest version of Firefox.
A button, which I click to get to the next task. It makes some checks if I accomplished the last task etc and then brings me to my next task.
For instance, I have one setup that after activation, allows me to highlight text on a page, which is then automaticaaly dated, annotated with metadata and copied to my clipboard, saving a lot of keystrokes and touch movements. Another parses the .bib metadata found in Google Scholar results, and prettyfies it to a markdown suitable format.
I would dread losing these simple scripts that can be run across all my devices.
Wonderful! Thank you!
data:text/html,%3Cscript%3Ealert(123)%3C%2Fscript%3EBut every 10 or so versions of Firefox breaks this and I have to seek out a fix.
I don’t understand this assertion, and definitely not the comparison between Rust and GoLang, which exist for entirely different purposes (systems programming versus cloud servers)
So their suggestion this was why Servo was dropped seems extremely bizarre.
You might as well ask Mark Zuckerberg about tabs vs spaces.
Unless you're working on some kind of hard real time system, I can't see why you would discard Go.
The whole cloud bonanza came later. A lot of Go programmers I know also don't really like it (myself included).
[1]: https://opensource.googleblog.com/2009/11/hey-ho-lets-go.htm...
Running programs with Java and C# (OpenJDK and Mono at least) is nothing like running a Go (or Rust) programs. You can't distinguish between a Go or Rust binary at a glance, but you can spot a Java or C# program easily.
In many ways Go is significantly more similar to C than Rust is, and in other ways Rust is more similar.
C# and Java modern ahead of time compilation, tree shaking and linking should make it similar to Go at that sense (as in single file, no runtime, etc). There is still a lot to do but they are reaching that playing field. Not motivated by the servers but by apps and cloud startup times I guess.
Related from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37701769
To run the built binaries, whether to require the runtime (by not including it in the executable) or not is a choice.
Tl;Dr of MSFT docs is:
JIT (w/ Runtime): dotnet publish -c release -p:PublishSingleFile=true -p:PublishTrimmed=true
JIT (w/o Runtime): dotnet publish -c release -p:PublishSingleFile=true --self-contained false
AOT: dotnet publish -c release -p:PublishAot=true
In general, dotnet CLI commands are similar cargo (it had some of the features earlier, some later): dotnet new, build, add, publish, etc.
I've saved your comment here to look at if I go back to this in the future; thanks!
It will not surprise you that I think you're dead wrong.
Notably you have failed to register that what I am doing in that paragraph is attempting (possibly badly) to rebut this surprisingly widespread allegation.
Baker is a great operator and Mozilla is still bringing in a solid income, but I think they sorely need/needed some sort of outgoing, proactive tech visionary type to give Mozilla a fresh/enhanced meaning to evolve into rather than continuing to live off the fat of the land. To be fair to Baker, she has blogged about how she thinks about Mozilla's ongoing mission – https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2023/03/31/a-quarter-century... – but I can't help feel a more proactive and public approach might be needed to evolve and grow their market share.
We should be fair to everyone. But there's no contradiction - you can be fair to someone, and still judge them very harshly.
Disclaimer: I'm not a native speaker, feel free to correct me if I'm misinterpreting something.
An illustrative example where the use of the phrase "to be fair" would be justified:
Person A: "Brian has been very rude to me lately!"
Person B: "To be fair, he's been in a lot of pain since the surgery."
However, in this case originally, GP's request for fairness read to me as a pre-emptive dismissal of concerns regarding the ceo's performance, given that the examples did not address any criticism.
When I say I have no interest in being fair to the ceo of Mozilla, it's not to say that I believe they should be treated unjustly. Rather, it's that I believe their behaviour to be inexcusable given the context. Admittedly, this does veer a little from the dictionary definition.
I stayed on Firefox for years so that I could use Pentadactyl[1], an extension that made the Firefox UI minimal and vim-like. I think I had to run LTS Firefox to keep it working through 2016 or so and then moved on. I miss it!
Maybe it's just because I'm based in NYC but a lot of folks I know have moved to Arc this year - I'm excited to see where it goes and whether it can push things forward!
I had forgotten about the UI! Kinda remembering now how they pushed the tabs up into the window chrome next to the close/minimize buttons which let them really shrink down the size of the top bar back when browsers typically spent a ton of vertical space on ~stuff. I bet having a single bar instead of separate URL / search bars was nifty too.
I guess Chrome's launch is also from a different era where sentiment around Google was much closer to uniformly positive which I'm sure helped.
at that time, (when browsers like firefox 3 and ie8 were around), browsers were still having bars on top of bars on top of bars: window bar, on top of a file menu, on top of address bar (with a split search bar), and they'd throw in a bookmarks bar in too by default (which chrome had turned off by default), and that's beside toolbars which were still a thing (and were not a thing at all in chrome). all that would come up at a total of 3 to 5 bars, which was a lot.
particularly the combining of window title bar and tabs bar into one (along with putting tabs up top, and forgoing window title and file menu along the way), was a big thing. which seems to have influenced all the other browsers later on. (see firefox 4, opera 10, ie9 which all did kind of a spin on that, with ie9 surprisingly going even further and putting both address bar and tabs bar on a single bar)
it kinda changed everything, with its approach to simplicity. i'd argue that even now chrome remains one of simpler browsers among those popular ones out today (compare to firefox, opera, vivaldi, edge, etc. which all seem to have features piling up and just popping out at you). but it is also getting crowded as well, in that button zone around main menu. if I could hide those (given that they're also redunant, cause most of those things are in main menu anyway), i wouldn't miss them at all.
Tab Groups and/or Tree-style tabs are pretty much required for working with hundreds of tabs, though.
Many of us don't have enough horizontal space on all their machines to comfortably waste a bunch of it on a tree style tabs sidebar.
I performed a test again. This is on a 1920x1080p screen, which is pretty standard. Firefox progressively shrinks tabs, until there are 21 or so. Then, you can scroll the tab bar left and right with the scrollwheel.
Chrome continues shrinking tabs, until there are 90 or so. Then you can switch tabs with the scrollwheel or with the drop-down arrow on the right. However, it will fail to display some of the most recently opened tabs in the tab bar.
My workflow usually consists in opening a new tab for a new activity, for instance search the web for a product category. Then open multiple tabs from here, and multiple other tabs from each, while searching more and more precise information (like spec sheets, or digging into some documentation). I progressively walk back, closing the tabs as I am done researching a topic. This process is very analogous to a mind map (and it's a representation I wish was available in browsers, together with annotations, a bit like pearltrees). Tree-style tabs come close enough, as you can collapse a group or close it at once.
The reason why Firefox's approach work is analogous to the principle of locality[1]: data that needs to be frequently accessed tends to be close together (in time and space). By opening new tabs close to the current one (middle-click a link or the new tab button), they stay close to each other, and scrolling the tab bar allows to shift your context window. It works quite well.
Now, Firefox has one big advantage compared to Chrome: its address bar is very effective for jumping to an open tab far away (or some matching browser history/bookmarks). Chrome probably has a conflict of interest here where they want you to search the web first. If you want to jump back to a topic 40 tabs to the left, you don't have to scroll, just type in some keywords in the address bar.
Lastly, and that works with both browsers (still thanks to this locality principle), you can shift-select multiple tabs to move them to a new window to form a "tab group" substitute. Though in practice, I just tend to use private windows.
> Many of us don't have enough horizontal space on all their machines to comfortably waste a bunch of it on a tree style tabs sidebar.
Now, I find this argument to be weak. The only screen I have trouble using it is my vertical 1360x768p screen (so 768 horizontal pixels). Most screens will otherwise fit this quite comfortably, and have more horizontal than vertical real estate. The Tree Style Tab extension, by default, is toggled with F1, so I just hide it on that screen, and bring it up when needed. Thinking about this, some auto-hiding panel could work very well here.
I am conceding the fact that my initial reply was exaggerated. After testing this again, Chromium's usability threshold is more around 30 tabs. And given the RAM chromium requires for maintaining numerous tabs, I am wondering if it isn't by design.
To summarize, well, it probably depends on what you are used to... You wouldn't catch me dead on either hill though.
I can't really compare this with Firefox's native solution though, because I use Sidebery (and I used tree-style tabs before that).
I can't recall so much from the early days but modern Chromium releases are packed with "shiny new toys" that the web-dev crews love. I deeeeeeeeeply appreciate that saying such a thing further entrenches the "Chromium is eating the world" perspective, but I'm just pointing out that web-devs love shiny toys and Chromium seems to ship them on the regular
So, too, do they ship an unholy number of C++ footguns, but omelet-breaking-eggs-etc-etc :-/
With all that said I think somewhere around 2015 or 2016 I switched back to Firefox because Chrome had become a CPU and memory hog while Firefox had stepped up its game and was a lot faster and more lightweight than Chrome.
It was superior in almost every way. All other browsers had to play the catch-up for a while - especially the performance.
It got some initial launch attention but then usage fell a lot (I was at Google at the time), and plateaued for a long time whilst the team fixed bugs, ported to other platforms and caught up on the feature set. It took a lot of belief by Google to continue funding it during these quiet years when relatively few people used it. One of the biggest struggles the Chrome marketing team faced turned out to be that nobody even knew what a browser was let alone why they'd consider switching to a different one.
Still, the team didn't give up. They just plugged away at it, year after year. They caught up on features, added a thoughtful/controllable extensions API and were careful to stop power users doing things that would accidentally trash performance, like opening billions of tabs or installing extensions that trashed the browser internals (a particular problem for Firefox).
Every single person I set up with Firefox (parents, non tech savvy fiends) ended up replacing it with chrome. When I asked they said it was because “google said it was better.”
This spot has never been available for any non google product, BTW.
It took a handful of years for tech folks to see Google (and Chrome) the way they do now.
Here is the most voted HN post from the time of Chrome's release: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=291946
This feels largely correct to me and I was in the same camp at the time re: Google sentiment. “Google kills products” has been a meme for so long that I had kinda forgotten.
None of the little things are absolute must-haves, but the little things do add up.
Obviously Firefox becoming much slower and heavier over time, whilst introducing anti-features didn’t help either.
I despise Google now, so I don’t use Chrome anymore. But I’m not going back to Firefox either. The trust battery towards Mozilla never got back from zero.
What better and better extensions were Chrome only before Chrome overtook Firefox?
A quick example that comes to mind is The Great Suspender (the tracking-free community edition). Firefox’s alternatives were really not very good. (I’m not sure how it is now.)
What was really not very good about Firefox's alternatives to The Great Suspender? I read some opinions now. All but 1 recommended alternatives even in Chrome because The Great Suspender could lose tabs if the browser crashed. And tabs suspended with it couldn't be restored without it. The other preferred The Great Suspender because it let them activate a tab without loading it.
But the question was why Chrome beat out Firefox the way that it did. I think Chrome overtook Firefox before Chrome extensions overtook Firefox extensions.
That said, I do feel that Firefox fell in the "X is more popular, X does Y, therefore, we need to do Y" trap, forgetting that you have your current userbase exactly because you're NOT doing Y but Z. But that's an entirely different matter.
Removing XPCOM, switching to multiprocess, and switching to asynchronous Web Extensions was absolutely vital technologically. Perf is good now.
I wrote the article. I did not state that. I did not even hint it or imply it, and my eyebrows went so far up when I read this comment that my hat lifted.
I've never even heard this idea before.
Please can you point out where I said that the removal of XUL was in order to ape Chrome?
> Mozilla, please stop aping Chrome. Copying is rarely the way to win big. The Australis Chrome-like theme in Firefox 29 annoyed users and was a driving force behind Pale Moon. Firefox Quantum killed XUL addons, and drove The Reg FOSS desk to Waterfox Classic.
"A drove people to B. It didn't drive me to it, but C drove me to D."
Expanding that:
1. Stop copying Chrome.
2. Australis copied Chrome and that drove a whole fork because so many people hated it.
[Full stop.]
3. Also, comparably, for the author, Quantum killed XUL and that is why the author switched away from Firefox.
However, I note that the marketing claim from Mozilla was that Quantum used the same type of extensions that Chrome used ("webextensions") and that this would be good for the Firefox add-on ecosystem. This is demonstrably false, as I laid out in the Waterfox article which this story links to, but it was what Mozilla claimed at the time.
That's a tangible benefit you can tell your friends about.
Safari and Chrome V3 blocker are much more privacy friendly since the extension does not need to access the entire DOM.
One can argue that if you don't want ads, and you don't want to pay for a subscription, then maybe you shouldn't use that website.
Because continued use is just like software piracy. It's imoral because you're getting subsidized by those playing fair, but also because alternatives can't thrive unless you choose to vote with your wallet or eyeballs. It's the same reason piracy was imoral, as it kept people using the incumbents, instead of using alternatives that were open-source.
I have considered that actually but it would mean I have to give them my credit card thereby tying my real identity to the Google/YouTube account. I might consider it if they sold those gift cards that you can buy with cash at a convenience store.
Personally, I trust my local authorities, since I'm an EU citizen and the GDPR applies. I know this may be naive, but Google has implemented many changes in response to the GDPR already, and for me it's the only alternative short of avoiding them completely.
Speaking of Chromium, forks still exist, like Vivaldi or Brave, and they ship with ads blockers that are not subject to the limitations of Manifest v3.
Again, the solution is simple, sell YouTube gift cards. Steam can do it. I think iTunes does it. It should be trivial for a company of Google’s size.
"There are plugins that get it talking to Slack, WhatsApp, Telegram, RocketChat, Signal, Mattermost, you name it. Adopt it, update it, add it to Chat Core."
This is terrible advice. They've spent years paring back and compartmentalising to get Firefox into the lean, secure browser it is today. Make a fork if you want but don't turn it into an slow, ugly everything app.
The first line you quote refers to Firefox.
The second line you quote refers to Thunderbird.
I am at a bit of a loss how you can conflate these 2 separate comments about 2 separate products with different functionality.
Mozilla Corporation paid Mozilla Foundation $20 million in 2021. 3.5% of revenue approximately. And received trademark licenses and IT services. I am skeptical changing IT vendors and rebranding would be beneficial.
1. Integrate IPFS as a first class citizen. This alone would be a huge step forward for the new web.
2. Provide a competitor to Electron with better features and installation experience.
3. Create a Steam-like cross platform marketplace for lightly vetted apps from #2. An experience that should ideally seamlessly blend the UX of signing into Slack in the browser vs having it installed. This has been a holy grain of web apps for three decades and now finally there are ways forward.
4. Marry browser identities with website authentication. Kill passwords with a logical successor to Persona while also providing credentials sync across all your devices and OSes.
5. If #3 and #4 are successful, then their own OS finally has a place in the world. Native FOSS OS a la ChromeOS but works both on desktop and mobile thanks to #2.
Mozilla knows how to siphon money, they play double face non-profit and for-profit at the same time with the same name
I wrote the article but I didn't write the headline and I have zero influence over the selection of the pictures.
Interesting point, though.
https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope....
When you're the leader, you can further widen your lead by bolting on additional functions & features that require at least X amount of effort to implement. Any new contender will have to put in SUM(X effort for each feature) to match feature parity with the existing leader, and existing competitors will have to put in at least X effort to catch up. Existing OSS work can help bridge the gap, but only for what's already been done.
For those calling Firefox irrelevant: note that its market share of web users is about the same as desktop Linux's market share. 3% of surfers is a lot of people and not an irrelevance or a rounding error.
Sadly the ones that run the org are not interested in that. All they want is fat salaries sponsored by Google.
The programming teams mostly make greenfield projects not related to firefox at all. Thos projects usually end up half baked and cancelled (no need for painful maintenance or having to make the code work!) that can be used to advance ones career further.
Meanwhile users jump to Chrome.
On one hand you have chrome based which gives Google more control or you use Firefox.
They depend on Google.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-go...
I'm well aware that the majority of Mozilla's income is from Google.
Google wants Google to be the default search engine of Mozilla's browser Firefox, Google in order to incentivize them to do it, offers them $450 million and Mozilla accepts it because otherwise they would be on the verge of bankruptcy since 80% of their revenue comes from Google. OK, they are not directly enslaved by Google but they are existentially dependent on Google in the monopolistic abuse of power situation.