Hacker News Reader

Comment by lupusreal | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla doesn't need any Mastadon instance. They need to stop pretending to be a social media company and focus all their resources on browser development.

Their only reason for being involved in social media in the first place is because it gives them a plaything for their forays into censorship and narrative engineering. This is one aspect of the cancer Mitchell Baker has been cultivating in Mozilla

View on HN

Firefox engineering is in a pretty good spot. What they need now is clout and market share to bring in income and brand awareness. I'm not sure how else to achieve that? They need people to associate them with being the good stewards. Best way to do that is to be a good steward.

https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?timerange=3...

> They need people to associate them with being the good stewards

nobody cares about good web stewardship.

Actual people care about performance, ease of use, integration, and capability. And chrome is already good enough now-a-days, which means it takes a huge improvement to firefox for people to switch (not to mention an advertising drive when those improvements come about).

There's a reason why Dvorak keyboard isn't more popular than qwerty, even tho Dvorak is slightly better.

Switching from chrome to Firefox isn't the same as switching from qwerty to Dvorak.

Agreed; it's more like turning caps lock into ctrl; not zero friction, but pretty close and much nicer.

>nobody cares about good web stewardship.

The EU has passed many digital protection laws. Some US states have down the same. Trust in these big tech companies has cratered.

>Firefox engineering is in a pretty good spot

It is strange that a moron surrounded by morons taking Firefox solely in non-good directions could accomplish that.

Firefox would be better off if it was technically a worse browser but more relevant. The function (and central marketing claim) of Mozilla and Firefox is that it is an alternative to big tech controlling the entire internet. It has completely failed at that mission. At one point, it was failing because engineering. 10 years later they've finally corrected that, about 8 years to late, and at the cost of tying themselves to Google and losing all their relevance. Again, this is a zero sum game. Firefox only has value as an alternative to big tech if it has enough relevance to prevent Google and Microsoft from abandoning standards. And it has failed spectacularly in that arena. It spent all its relevance, has failed to recoup it, and is now reliant on Google to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars solely to pay the bills. Mitchell has been at the helm for nothing short of an unmitigated disaster.

I don't understand this oft-regurgitated opinion that Mozilla needs to "focus all their resources on browser development." Mozilla does focus a large portion of their resources on browser development. Firefox is fast enough and has an interface that's largely similar to its main competitors. It works pretty well. This is a browser we're talking about. What special features do you think Mozilla could build that'll magically allow Firefox to claw back huge chunks of market share? And why do you think that Mozilla isn't building those features due to lack of focus - surely they build browser features and do other things simultaneously? In my opinion, building a killer non-browser thing might be one of the only ways to save Firefox - after all, the history of browsers shows us that successful ones typically piggyback off of successful non-browser things (Windows, Google, iPhone, etc.)

They removed XUL without providing an API to replace it, even for some very popular use cases (TabMixPlus comes to mind). I lost a few (to me) important extensions and had a hard time finding replacements. For me, extensions were the major thing that differentiated Firefox from other browsers, as I could customize it exactly as I liked.

I certainly respect your take. I just don't think that XUL is a killer feature that vast numbers of people are clamoring for.

Firefox as a browser is doomed no matter what Mozilla does. People installed Firefox because the default browser sucked. Now the default browser doesn’t suck.

Chrome still isn't the default on any major desktop OS (ChromeOS is far from major) and only on one of the two mobile platforms.

Yet people go out of their way to install it even over edge on windows which is kinda the same thing. Sorry this argument doesn't fly. Firefox really lost mainstream appeal.

I would have liked them to double down on that mobile OS they were working on a few years ago.

It still exists actually in the form of KaiOS. Used on a lot of feature phones now.

Other projects like the VR browser are also still alive under the name Wolvic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com