I see FF users dwindling down, and I'm worried. What could we do to prevent FF from going out of business?
There are so many ways that Mozilla the organization could do more to promote not just a browser, but the open web writ large.
1: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-990...
Statcounter said Firefox's market share increased in 2021 surprisingly.
Do they just not see them and float above the real world in some bubble where a web browser is some abstract thing that has no intersection with reality? Do they know they exist but pretend they don't? Do they scoff and say "they just don't understand, bless them"? Do they scoff and say "those idiots still think we care"?
How is possible to command generational wealth for the platform: millions upon millions in funding, and the goodwill of nearly all open source enthusiasts, over decades, have the entire community basically unanimous in saying "this is going downhill", see all the metrics agree and still plough onwards and downwards?
For a friend, how can I get a job like that?
I would have spotted a literal bubble when I was an intern in the SF office, but they definitely didn't mix with us.
I interned in ~2013. I had a boss who took everyone but me out to lunch, forever aggreived I'd gotten an offer prior to Eich being forced out. Despite designing my own research project on short notice that got a lot of good feedback, I was neither hired on nor pointed somewhere in the valley to work...
Meanwhile, I got the impression that my advice to the engineers to abandon "VR" (which danah boyd had pointed out can't even be used by everyone) and the weird firefox os crap to focus on getting ram usage down and browsershare up to build up a war chest, to partner with other search engines than google and to ban said googlers from our events since they kept poaching people...
But I was not heeded, and Firefox instead introduced pocket and did a bunch of other stupid stuff...
Nevertheless, I keep using it, because I love the extension system and the community around it but that summer broke the heart of the abused pre-teen who discovered the web and themselves via it.
The old Firefox, a lean extensible open source browser... is alive if you throw some switches and are selective in your extensions... but they messed up very badly that summer after Snowden and never recovered.
I really liked Firefox OS, was an early adopter using one of the ZTE Phones, tried my best to acquire an Fx0 while I was in Japan but they wouldn't sell me one without a phone contract, I also crowdfunded the matchstick that never came to be.
I'm not sure what KaiOS is doing with it now, they're not very transparent.
one issue with open source phones is the divergence of talent means more unpatched vulns, imho.
i don't have the money to experiment like i used to, so i don't like to comment on these matters -- i suspect kai, like many other projects, may struggle financially and go dark in ways that make ppl more paranoid than they should be rather than anything truly nefarious.
if they'd done proper user research they'd have found lots of people wanna just do navigation and calls on the phone then hotspot to a laptop... but instead the os got bloated (imho)
There's hope for revitalization, but only if it's caught early-on. I feel Mozilla doesn't have much time.
A cliche that may apply here is "follow the money". If your primary financiers are entities that prefer you to avoid competing with what that financier is producing, you're not looking at the interests of the userbase anymore.
Maybe on the way back from their latest cocktail party, their secretary can give them a little summary of what's going on on the message boards.
Ask around inside Alphabet, Inc.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37801542
Bottom line from that thread: The organization supporting Firefox does not have the trust or gravitas left to gain enough competent followers to create the conditions needed to sustain Firefox as a leader
You might as well say that a forum on XDA Developers is proof that Apple products suck and nobody buys them. Mozilla is trying to convince people who have never been to this forum to use their browser, not a vocal minority of idealists who hate the idea of Mozilla daring to try and expand their revenue streams ("pointless endeavors" as user "sirwhinesalot" calls it).
Seems to me, they've been very daring and motivated at expanding the executive compensation of a single board member, chair Mitchell Baker, who earns 3x the rest of the executive leadership combined.
I think that Mozilla VPN is pretty nice. It's based on Mullvad VPN, so they seem to know their audience (given that Mullvad has a pretty okay reputation among many tech savvy or privacy conscious folks, a lot of which probably use something like Firefox as well): https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/products/vpn/
I guess there's also Firefox Relay, for those who might benefit from something like that: https://relay.firefox.com/
Not many other products to give them money for come to mind, though.
Pocket. Mozilla VPN. Is MDN Plus meaningful? Probably the Mr. Robot ad would have led to paid ads without the backlash.
Don't let Firefox threads turn into a litany of unreported hearsay bugs. Get them reported and fixed.
The average user probably wouldn't wanna bother with the process of reporting (and I sure don't either):
1. find the place to report it (so googling "report bug Firefox", going to a Mozilla help page that goes to Bugzilla)
2. make an account
2.1 enter an email
2.2 verify the email
2.3 come up with a password that fits the requirements
3. read the bug writing guidelines
4. actually reporting the bug
4.1 selecting Firefox
4.2 describing the bug
4.3 find out if its already reported or not
4.4 selecting version, writing a summary, steps to reproduce, actual results, expected results.
4.5 potentially needing to provide additional information that might not be easy for a user to get (e.g. stack trace, output of about:memory, profiling)
versus just... not using Firefox, it's just not easy enough in my opinion, I know on crashes, you get a popup where you can just write a short summary and it'll automatically send some of the information to Mozilla though.
I can’t remember which one it was, but years back I found a bug in some open-source project. Made a bug report with all the information, steps to reproduce (full workflow, with expected and actual results), screenshots, the works. Essentially the GOLDEN STANDARD for a bug report. Everything they could possibly be needed to investigate it.
My report was closed with the comment, “did not provide the location in the code where the bug occurred”.
Like, WTF?? That’s not a part of a bug report, THAT’S YOUR JOB!!
I ended up just uninstalling the software, as that bug interfered with what I was doing and there were other options out there.
But maybe this is also just my impression. Why not start with a website listing reasons and strengths of the different browsers, and research the selling points of browsers and Firefox specifically. Maybe this could be used to figure out which features could be used for advertising, and which features Firefox is missing to compete with others.
Mozilla seems broken. I love Firefox and its mission, but I have no idea what Mozilla’s mission is. And they seem too beholden to Google to really make a browser good enough to threaten them.
I think we need another “true” open source group of devs who just love browsers and love writing browsers who would like to fork and work on.
I would support such a group, but I don’t think it exists and don’t know how to effectively encourage it.
But I feel like donating money to Mozilla is actually counterproducti
What would a browser good enough to threaten Google look like? Has anyone else produced one?
I think the decline of Firefox market share has a lot more to do with forces outside of its control than the quality of the product.
If you're using Chrome on mobile, and the differences between the desktop versions are negligible, why would you not just stick to Chrome on desktop as well?
I think this is actually a good example of where Firefox could really make a difference on desktop. Introduce a very powerful extension framework, allowing things like what Chrome is removing in manifest v3. Killer extensions will be built and people will switch for that. For the users who would inevitably install malware extensions, there will always be Chrome. Firefox doesn't need 100% market share, just one big enough that it can't be ignored.
Can you point out what you feel is the single most noticeable difference? I use Firefox as my daily driver but I also use Chrome, and I never noticed any difference.
Chrome on the other side has good integration into Googles ecosystem, has better support from Webapps (yes, this sometimes is a relevant topic), is depending on the platform significant faster, and seems to have some better side-features here and there. So its whole identity is to be THE Google-Browser, well polished for the modern World Wide Web.
Similar stuff is with Opera, Vivaldi, they all have their own special identity which they support with accompanying features. Like Vivaldi being an app-suite which offers more than just web browsing, or Opera with their Gaming-Browser catering to give gamers a good selling point. Not sure that Brave is doing today, but they were once strongly focused on AdBlock and earning Money?
Firefox on the other side has nothing of this. It once was the everything-browser, which could be anything through extensions. A mail-client, ftp-client, web-archiver, note-app, office suite, and much much more, all depending on the Users preferences. But that is lost, and now it can't even restore lost basic features. At this point it's just a window to render Web-stuff, with a better Adblocker and customization than Chrome. And even this is not advertised well. I mean the last ads I saw from Mozilla were not even about anything specific, just random pictures...
I find Firefox to be noticeably slower than the various Blink-based browsers and Safari (when available) when running on the same systems. I'm referring to the overall responsiveness of the UI and the application itself, as well as the rendering of sites, and the subsequent interaction with them. I find this to be the case for a fresh installation with no extensions, all the way through to an installation with common ad blocker extensions installed. Firefox is just plain slower, from what I can tell.
Firefox's extension signing nonsense is another pain point. As part of my work, there's a fully-trusted custom extension developed in-house that I need to install. It's trivial to install in the various Blink-based browsers. On the stable releases of Firefox, though, I have to jump through numerous hoop to get it installed and usable, and this has to be done each time the browser restarts, which is often in my case.
That is exactly what they are saying.
What is there to fix? I use Firefox as my daily driver, and I think it's already flawless.
To me all major browsers look and feel the same. There are subtle visual queues to remind us of which app we're using, but browsers are pretty much interchangeable nowadays.
What exactly do you believe Firefox does wrong that Chrome of even Edge or Safari do right?
It's behind even Edge on features, let alone Vivaldi or something.
• No integrated option for vertical tabs
• No integrated ad-block (I know there are reasons but still)
• They broke the old extensions system, and its replacement is inferior
• Bundled development tools 99.9% of users don't want or need
• Built in Win98 era profile handling when this is the OS' job
• Can't sync toolbar settings or search engines
(as per discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38048385 )
• Needs custom stylesheets to even hide the immovable built in tab bar
• Needs `about:config` tweaks to enable custom stylesheets
In re the last 2: FFS this is meant to be the customisable FOSS tool here!
Complaining that Firefox provides development tools when all major browsers also ship with those it's simply absurd.
So is complaining about lack of an integrated adblock when Firefox was the one who created that feature and allowed any third party to roll their own.
Whining about vague complains about profile handling when Firefox made it trivial to run multiple profiles perfectly independently as separate processes, and even to pick and choose which profile to run at app start.
And the peak of absurdity is complaining that Firefox is customizable and allows you to do stuff no one in the world cares about.
There are plenty of reasons why feature requests are triaged, and your post is a poster child of absurd feature requests.
No it is not, and here is why.
1. How many developers work on Firefox? Chrome & Chrome or Webkit-based browsers are already some 95% of the market.
Citation: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
It is borderline irresponsible to work on Firefox now. Test on it, yes. Develop on it, no.
2. There is already a developer edition: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/
I am just arguing that more functionality needs to be moved to that from the ordinary mass-market edition.
> So is complaining about lack of an integrated adblock when Firefox was the one who created that feature and allowed any third party to roll their own.
No it isn't. It's a feature of competing products. I am arguing Firefox should be the power users' tool. So replicate the key functions the competition have.
> Whining about vague complains about profile handling
Dude, if you don't understand it that doesn't mean it's vague.
When the Mozilla suite was developed, the main Windows OS was Windows 95, which did not come with a browser. IE was not only an add-on it was a paid-for extra.
Now the OS provides profiles and functional separation. Lean on it, make the default edition as small and as fast as possible. Less is more.
> And the peak of absurdity is complaining that Firefox is customizable
Again, ISTM you don't understand me. I am saying it's still more customisable than Chrome and they should lean in to this. Don't make it necessary to frig `about:config` and add a config file to move a freakin' toolbar. This is not a hard point.
> and allows you to do stuff no one in the world cares about.
So you don't know how to customise your browser. I do. I care. I did my research.
E.g. citing the Classic Addons Archive:
« 19,450 Firefox add-ons created by 14,274 developers »
https://github.com/JustOff/ca-archive
A lot of people care a lot. 15,000 developers falsifies your ludicrous "no one in the world cares about.
Like many others, you are mixing up "I don't care" with "nobody cares", and you are wrong.
Why does HN always assume everyone is a power user
Chrome, Edge and Safari are doing: a) being the default and b) being the default.
My impression of Mozilla as a company over the last decade is that they are in the business of burning money under the pretext of doing good. And while doing that, they ignore the product which enables them to earn the money.
> I use Firefox as my daily driver, and I think it's already flawless.
It's not bad, but far less than what it once was and could be.
> To me all major browsers look and feel the same.
The differences are deeper than just visual gimmicks. But true, on the core-abilities there is not much more than this. And this is a big problem too, it seems people today don't even know what's possible in this space. It's all the same, because to few people know it better.
> What exactly do you believe Firefox does wrong that Chrome of even Edge or Safari do right?
It's wrong to be the same as the leader. Be different.
Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, they are all different, and they sell well enough with being different. Firefox has nothing like that, it's just building on a history they mostly buried.
There are more than 18K open bugs in Bugzilla for Firefox. That's far from flawless for everyone.
You aren't donating to firefox the browser, you are donating to Mitchell Baker.
Firefox is Mozilla’s flagship product, the organization wouldn’t exist in its current form without it. It’s understandable if people are frustrated it doesn’t appear to be getting the org wide funding it proportionally deserves.
1. Google's fee for default search (the vast majority of their revenue)
2. Paid Firefox services (Mozilla VPN, MDN Plus, etc)
Remember that there are things we don't have any control over in life. You have no control over the success or failure of Firefox because its financial means of survival are controlled by people who are not you (unless you feel like signing up for a VPN).
My understanding is that the Mozilla Corporation is doing just fine for itself. They even have some financial information published [PDF]: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202...
You just pointed out why everyone don't appreciate it.
If "everyone can appreciate it", why isn't it a native/default part of the browser? This way, you wouldn't have to install and maintain it for your friends and family.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-go...
2. People need a reason to use it that isn’t privacy. I don’t care about privacy personally and certainly am not changing browsers over it. Could be a killer extension or some new browsing system.
Too bad Firefox OS did not became a real thing.
Actually the company that is preventing a tech monoculture on Chrome is Apple with the mandatory Safari on iOS.
A company can afford to ignore Firefox, but they can’t afford to ignore iOS.
Beyond that there’s nothing you can do. Firefox is paid for by Mozilla Corporation, whose major revenue source is Google’s search partnership. Initiatives like Mozilla VPN and MDN Premium are minuscule in comparison. These are also not available everywhere and Mozilla Corporation doesn’t seem aggressive enough to create more paid or subscription products that people are willing to pay for.
Don’t donate on mozilla.org assuming it will help Firefox directly. That goes to Mozilla Foundation to promote the open web. Not a penny from that can go to Firefox development or marketing.
Certainly, almost every suggestion I've read in threads like this over the years is indistinguishable from concern trolling, so it would seem the hive mind doesn't have any good ideas either.
Is this a thing Rust could do? Or would one need to code this wrapper in C because we'd have to link/embed so many other C projects.
I'm sure it's very difficult -- but is it impossible?
2. Test your website(s) on it. Maybe you don't officially support Firefox, and maybe you're not a QA, but if you are a web developer you should use your site in Firefox and fix any bugs you find. Don't give your users a reason to abandon Firefox.
3. Join the discussion when you disagree with Mozilla's leadership. It may or may not change anything, but large vocal online communities have impacted the direction of large open-source projects before.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/29/mozilla_asleep_at_whe...
They spent 88% of income in 2020. 56% in 2021 through a combination of more income and less expenses. Mozilla Foundation expenses were 7% of of all expenses in 2021. What did you read? Where did you read it?
1. Preventing Firefox going out of business -> as noted by others, Mozilla is actually doing decently well financially, and continues to dedicate a large part of its resources to Firefox -> however given some of its revenue sources, maintaining a certain share of users is important to maintain that state of affairs
2. Driving more adoption of Firefox -> Most users have pretty simple browsing needs, and a non-negligible share still don't know what a browser is (we all know a few I wager) while still using one daily, -> Competing browsers have semi-exclusive or exclusive distribution channels for their products which help drive their adoption (Google.com, some Android flavours, ChromeOS / Mac and iOS / Windows, Bing, Outlook & Office) -> Thus as with any product, driving adoption could be done by: --A. offering a killer feature many (actual) people care enough about to download the browser for - for most people, this would need to be significant speed or friction reduction (Adblock, etc) which Firefox already does well but perhaps not significantly well enough --B. get users early, i.e. partner with websites, apps and influencers that reach younger users to promote/recommend Firefox and its features, notably on the privacy and personalisation side (themes, meta filter, Adblock, password and history sync, etc) - think some viral Tiktoks on the benefits or simple product placement --C. get a series of not-just-tech ambassadors to promote the browser along with the work of the Foundation, which may be done cheaply as they do have commendable initiatives --D. Partner with like-minded organisations to recommend each other's solutions where possible, e.g. Automattic or such -- etc etc
Firefox has been my daily driver on all devices for 20+ years. I personally feel it's never been as good as it is now: it's fast, the memory woes are gone, the sync works like a charm, password suggestion and management is seamless, the Android version is great (love the bottom navbar option).
Probably not perfect - what is - but I just wanted to share a more upbeat comment here, and perhaps one more geared towards the majority of users, who will be less technical and choose their browser's (or better said default to their browser's) for vary different reasons.
I think Firefox enforces some security constraints more strictly than Chrome. One error I've seen often has been blocked resources due to Cross-Origin Resource Sharing without the proper permissions, such as via Access-Control-Allow-Origin headers.
For security related errors, I emphasize that this is a potential security issue and I use FireFox for its security.
*We* don't have any control over the situation.
What Mozilla *could* do but won't is take a strong stand on privacy by default --- something more than lip service. But their sugar daddy wouldn't approve so they can't.
In any case, it's probably too late now --- credibility and integrity have been lost.
Brave is what Firefox could and should have become. Brendan Eich (boo, hiss) grabbed the opportunity that Mozilla intentionally chose to ignore.
That, and user base. Their position now is way worse than it used to be, and the viable options open to them are closing off.
Firefox should have pushed more privacy and user-convenience features by default. Those were a big part of what got them adoption to begin with.
Pushing open-protocol social networking built into the browser would have been a good idea, most likely. Amazing differentiator, in line with the browser's perceived values.
Half a dozen other good ideas that might give their browser an edge and deliver things people actually want.
But they needed to start this stuff more than a decade ago.
Privacy, speed, stability, compatibility, availability.
At least there is no crypto/ad model there.
I'm not a crypto fan so I don't use it. It is easily ignored and has no effect unless you choose to enable it.
Seems to me like FF is still better option here.
Seems to me FF is beholden to and needs to appease Google. This is why they talk privacy but don't offer it by default.
Brave doesn't suffer from these "political" contradictions and complications that run counter to user interests.
See below.
A little known Chromium fork?
Brave has some privacy advantages by default. Firefox has some privacy advantages with configuration. Both are useful.
Vivaldi seems to have been more successful as a power user's browser than Brave has had with 1 eye on cryptocurrency and 1 eye on privacy.
https://www.spacebar.news/p/stop-using-brave-browser
He's right.
As I see it, the choice is between my privacy and your politics.
No offense but my privacy is the bigger concern to me. Brave is one of the most privacy focused browsers available on every every major platform. Privacy by default --- no fiddling with add-ons or updates or configurations, just install and go.
I love Firefox, but as long as Safari continues to be the default on iOS and Chrome continues to be the de facto default everywhere else, I don't see much hope for Firefox long term.
I don't think Mozilla is dead like it seemed a year ago though, obviously nowadays it's as influential (close to zero) as some companies like Atlassian.
It should support hardware APIs like Web Serial API (their stance that a browser is not an app platform is ridiculous)
Chromium's huge and underappreciated weakness is that their font rendering on Windows is horrible (at standard 96 DPI anyway), FF could've capitalized on things like that.
Beyond that, FF should be alive as long as there are paid developers to keep it up to date in terms of W3C web standards and security. Mozilla is a non-profit whose revenue is mostly unrelated to the number of FF users.
Their existence is actively harmful to the web. Firefox deserves better.
unless you can bring better leadership to the project, Firefox is a dead end. you’re talking about monocultures: how many different webkitgtk or qtwebengine (chromium)-based browsers are there? how many gecko browsers are there? which one’s the real monoculture?
"We care about your privacy" but they also send your memory dumps to Mozilla when Firefox crashes. "Might contain private data" ... yeah ok. Just one of infinite examples, really.
I bet in a couple of years after we would see the development and rise of an actual non-corporate browser that serves the user. No telemetry, build-in ad blocking, no extension signing, no pushing services, no build-in ads or search engines, more powerful extensions, etc.
Let it die. Let Google be sued and forced to break Chrome away. Let every engine be based on the same engine. Less bugs. Easier for developers. Less user problems.
Replacing it will be a gargantuan effort, but until it's truly dead every attempt to do so won't even be given a chance due to appeals to "just use firefox" or to stop diluting the efforts of the firefox team.
Firefox as it stands is a zombie sucking the efforts of good talented developers away from hypothetical new hopeful things.
As others have said, it's also a backstop for Google against antitrust suits. Firefox surviving without any hope of ever thriving is the ideal scenario for Google.
Keep in mind that this was posted two days after the coup attempt, and emotions were running high throughout the country.
Mozilla, from my understanding, has always been big on privacy first and data protection. This most definitely goes against their ethos, which is understandable, given how they've been hijacked over the years. I'm glad these advocates of "free and open software" show their true colors, it makes it really easy to not use their software. I'm not alone on this either.
Mozilla runs a content suggestion platform (Pocket), not just an agnostic software tool. It is sensible for them to have a stance on this particular issue.
It’s also not “against their ethos” just because you don’t agree with it.