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Comment by gkoberger | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla was originally the Netscape browser, which was a paid browser. All browsers were paid at the time, until IE came along and was bundled for free with Windows. Firefox broke that chokehold, and make an open web possible.

Mitchell was a lawyer at Netscape, and used those two things to (with others) spin Firefox off into a non-profit (controlling a for-profit). No, she didn't write any code, but she is directly responsible for forming a company that enabled Firefox to be free and open source.

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I never paid for Netscape and I used every single version of it.

From the Wikipedia page [1]

> The first few releases of the product were made available in "commercial" and "evaluation" versions; for example, version "1.0" and version "1.0N". The "N" evaluation versions were identical to the commercial versions; the letter was intended as a reminder to people to pay for the browser once they felt they had tried it long enough and were satisfied with it. This distinction was formally dropped within a year of the initial release, and the full version of the browser continued to be made available for free online [...]

Maybe the misunderstanding is because (from the same page) the original plan was to have a free version only for academic and non-profit organizations and make everybody else pay. That wouldn't have had a chance even ~30 years ago especially because building a browser was much easier than now. The features were so much more limited in 1995. No JavaScript, no CSS, the only one that mattered was loading and displaying text and images on the page without blocking until everything was downloaded. The Mosaic browser was blocking. Minutes staring at a white page waiting for something to appear...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator

> I never paid for Netscape and I used every single version of it.

Businesses paid for it. It was free for non-commercial purposes.

My internet connected computers were owned by a business. They were desktops inside my company's building.

However I dug more and I found this at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape

> Netscape Navigator was not free to the general public until January 1998

so either I don't remember well (maybe my company had actually bought some licenses) or nobody was paying no matter what. I remember everybody else and I downloaded Navigator from Netscape's site without having to go through any authorization process.

I always used Navigator/Communicator for free personally but a lot of companies (especially big companies) bought licences. I'm sure many companies did not pay for a license but there was more than enough that did to make Netscape a viable and growing business.

There was a brief time where Netscape Communicator filled the role that Outlook fills now.

That's right, I won't link here but one of jwz's earliest blog posts describes putting Mozilla 0.9 on an FTP server in '94 and hundreds of thousands of people were downloading it. I assume this violated some commercial license and I know my employer (UC) did buy their server product but I don't recall anybody even remotely considering licensing Netscape Navigator itself.

Netscape was never open source during that phase though, I think that's the point. Moving to firefox was a huge improvement for the internet community.

I paid for Netscape. I bought it as a boxed product at Fry's in Palo Alto, CA.

"Firefox to be free and open source. "

And die.

And spending >$6.000.000.000 to do it.

As a 30 years user, it's just so sad to see Firefox going down down down. No innovation, no progress since the introduction of tabs. At least the sell-customer-data-for-marketing-experiments phase is done. And at least it's not unusable slow like it was for some years, so the bare minimum works. And it somehow survived the XUL/extension debacle. But it's 2024 and I'm through my 10th vertical tab extension (Tab Center Reborn for now) since using FF. How is FF supposed to work with >20 tabs open? The only reason to use it for me is it's open source and not owned by M$ or Google. Would there be another open source browser with traction, I'd be gone in a second.

Firefox keeps getting better?

Are there any major features or reason that chrome is better these days?

"Firefox keeps getting better?"

In which way?

Its “appeal has become more selective”

Firefox definitely gets better, as much as it frustrates me sometimes. It's not hard to come up with examples, I've yet to see any other browser use persistent or temporary containers per tab and per site - just to name the most obvious.

It becomes better after it became worse. It's not that hard to make it better after you burned all the bridges who lifted your product into the sky. Though, at this point, there isn't much left anymore outside the core-abilities.

Firefox has been always the best browser as it is the only open and free (as free from adversarial incentives).

Unfortunately many people (especially here) have advertised Chrome instead, naively believing Chrome to have these important properties.

Chrome has always been the controlled frontend for Google business and Google is readily willing to hurt the browser to aid its business and keep its dominance.

Blink is also open and free enough. The wide usage of it, and the manifold companies pushing successfully against Google, is proof enough. Firefox on the other side is not free from hostile behavior itself. The manifold bullshit that Mozilla did over the years telling.

And in general, your requirement is not matching the demand of the majority of users. I don't give a f** if something is open or liberated, I'm a user, I care firstly whether it's doing what I need, and being open&free are just tools to balance the powerplay of the creators.

But if not enough people are using the browser, they have no power anyway. And if there is only one developer, then we as the users have not way to balance our power against them. Mozilla has shown over the last decade that the user has no power in their game, which shows that free and open software in itself has little meaning.

The multiple blink-browsers are showing better how this is supposed to work, then the one project who always claims this as one of their main goals.

Majority of the Blink browser users are Chrome users, followed by Edge users and then somewhere come Opera users, what depending on the polls is on par with Firefox users or far behind it.

But none of this matters as I was talking about browsers, not browser engines, that are not the same thing and none of the Blink browsers listed above are open source browsers.

Majority of the users are using the browser they are told to use. If everyone is telling them to use Chrome, they use it. And there practically has not been much resistance to Chrome. How many IT people have told over the years to not user Chrome, and use Firefox instead? There was huge resistance to IE, but not to Chrome, and it pays now its dividends.

Is Chrome now doing what the users want? How many people are upset about the latest moves by Google. For me it was obvious result for long time, I was actually surprised that it didn't happen earlier. Now based on the reactions, many users didn't expect it.

Firefox has yet to top Firefox 57.

Bring back multi-row tabs.

Actually, while we're at it, bring back XUL. And apologize to all the addon developers and users they straight up lied to.

> Bring back multi-row tabs.

I can't live without multi-row tabs but it's totally doable in current Firefox. It's now possible with just CSS. It still breaks every so often when they make big UI changes but it's manageable.

It's the reason that Firefox is my main browser.

If that's your main reason have you tried vivaldi?

Vivaldi is great on paper (if you don't care about it being F/OSS), but it's wildly unstable compared to all other major browsers including Firefox. Every time I try to use it as a primary, I end up running into something blocking within a week, reporting it, and switching back to whatever.

Which is a shame, because, stability aside, it really is the best option among Blink-based browsers, at least for the power user. No containers, sadly, but the problem there is Blink itself.

I played that game for a while, it gets old. Also the UX is not nearly as good as TMP when it comes to moving tabs around.

dropping anything goes xul was a large improvement in security. Extensions still have a lot of power.

Why not drop the browser entirely and get maximum security? Firefox without TMP is not worth using for me.

I've been led to believe that xul played a large part in the memory leaks, security issues, and poor performance Firefox was known for.

Are we only allowed to compare to chrome?

I miss session manager, tab mix plus, a few others.

I really miss having a gesture extension that runs at the GUI level, so it doesn't stop working while pages are loading and lag all the time and not work in certain places. And that one isn't even about XUL, they simply refuse to implement the mouse callback in the new system.

Yes.

For a long time, chrome has had significantly better memory use. I really tried firefox again 2 or 3 years ago. If you have to keep jira open all day for work, it was unusable.

Regardless, your comment illustrates why Baker should have been fired for cause. Browsers are not really evaluated on technical merits past a minimal quality threshold. Rather, browser marketshare is built on distribution -- like any business.

And firefox was incompetent at that. Google has effectively used search; Microsoft effectively uses their OS; Apple effectively uses their OS, etc. And all products work this way: this is the reason Slack sold to Salesforce, ie Microsoft was using Office's distribution to effectively clobber Slack with Teams. The same reason that Google pays billions of dollars to Mozilla and Apple to be the default search engine.

What could have been done here? I dunno, but focusing on technical measures is not the right lens. BD is and was the necessary component, and that could have started with companies that don't want to see Chrome be the sole browser in the world. What could you have done to get eg Facebook or other companies with large web properties to ask their users to use Firefox? What partnership could have been forged with Microsoft when they were broadly uninterested in browsers? What could you have done to make Firefox a better browser for technical users specifically? etc.

Firefox could have build a niche, e.g. be clearly the best browser for developers - like native autoreload API support. Or the most secure one. Or be the best browser for power users. Or or or. But you need a vision for that.

Apple started their comeback with developers who liked the combination of a slick UI, commercial software and a unix shell (Got a G4 Cube around 2002 or so, then a Macbook). Dominating that niche made them hip and then everyone wanted one. The rest is history.

Everyone uses Linux, even if MS did everything to push MS on servers. And don't forget Apple spend millions (billions?) on pushing OSX to the server two (I had some XServe and XSans). But Linux dominated, and not because of Red Hat.

Many people and perhaps in the future everyone uses Postgres, even if MS and Oracle spend millions (billions?) to prevent this.

Are there other browsers that have successfully built a niche? And how does one use that to bring in enough money to sustain a reasonable sized organization? To me it neither seems easy, nor any guarantee of success.

Well Mozilla got >$6.000.000.000 - so I do thing this is enough money. Do you think they would have needed more money?

Brave currently tries to grow from the secure niche. I think Chrome started from the developer niche, with developer tools, being embeddable, open sourcing a rendering engine etc.

I am not sure clawing back a significant amount of marketshare can be done with any amount of money. As long as there is no access to a distribution channel that is similar in size and low friction to what the other browsers have, it will at least be extremely tough. Far from "easy".

Vivaldi has been around for 9 years now, and they manage to get by without regular donations from Google.

7 years later Firefox still hasn't caught up to 2017 Firefox in functionality. Using ancient versions of Firefox isn't an option, so I switched to Vivaldi.

I can only think of @scope in css

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/:scope

I have no problem with Firefox staying as it is. But do not push new products via it. Focusing on the things other companies cannot copy (privacy, extensibility for the user) is definitely the angle for Firefox IMHO.

A personal gripe is FF's refusal to implement WebSerial or any form of screencast functionality.

Just use a screencast tool. It's a browser, not an OS.

I'd rather not use something that's less convenient, less consistent, and generally worse.

Chrome is better for websites that are specifically tweak to run well only on Chrome. Surprisingly, such websites are not trivial in amount and traffic.

Every thread about Firefox there's a comment like this and I truly don't know if we're using the same browsers. Firefox keeps getting better and faster, while chrome is getting more bloated and aggravating.

"better"

What does better mean? What is better in the last 10 years? And I'm not trolling, I'm interested in what 10 things FF got better for you in the last 10 years.

Say, I have been buying on Amazon 10 years ago using FF.

In which ways has FF made that better or easier for me as a user? Can't think of anything with Amazon.

The only things I can think of: More secure when misclicking somewhere and better video on Youtube.

Firefox's built in password manager is pretty good, ten years ago you had to install a separate extension for that.

The synchronization of browser tabs and history across devices is also very good nowadays, so if you look at some product on Amazon with your phone on the way home, you can continue the same browsing session on your regular PC right away.

There are also multiple profiles. That helps in case you have multiple Amazon accounts like one for shopping, one to mooch off your cousin's prime video subscription, and one to work with the AWS console for your workplace. I think you couldn't do that out of the box 10 years ago.

Good points, I concede for some users and perhaps the majority there is progress.

(For me - and probably many others - though I use 1password since the beginning, have 50 tabs open so sync is a challenge and never understood to use the profiles, perhaps I'm too stupid or the UI is bad)

When it came out I thought profiles was a good idea, eager to use it, but it's often difficult to say what is in what profile. AWS is clear, and banking, but reading some articles? For me to work the UI would need to be smooth so I don't need to switch profiles just because something is in the other. Perhaps I'm not focused enough ;-) It then was too complicated for me to use and switch and I dropped it.

Writing this in FF, where would I need to click to switch profiles? I have a drop down on the right (it's not in there), I have a drop down on the left (also no profiles), I have a menu at the top(can't find it there) and a drop down in my sidebar (no profiles in there).

Sync has no problem with lots of tabs - I routinely have multiple hundred open on multiple devices and firefox sync just does it's thing without complaining.

I have, at this moment, 5501 tabs open. Sync does just fine.

How do you work with 5501 synced tabs on your phone? I didn't mean technically but UI? I have a 38" on my desktop which is 30x (?) larger than my phone?

In Brave one can press command-shift-a to get a search bar for your open tabs. Otherwise I periodically consolidate similar tabs into same windows. It would be nice to have an ontological browser for tabs but search is normally sufficient.

On a phone iOS Safari has “tab groups” that effectively act as windows in a desktop browser. It also has a tab search feature.

On my phone, I'll just open a new tab and not even bother trying to get to the other tabs. The syncing is more phone -> computer than the other way around. And, beyond that, syncing is more useful for me for between computers.

It is an extension for Firefox, but one created by Mozilla. It's official in that sense, but it does seem a little strange it's not included by default.

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/multi-account-conta...

> where would I need to click to switch profiles?

Go to about:profiles. From there, you can create and switch between profiles. This is not as convenient as it perhaps should be, but I did find one add-on that claims to simplify the process [1].

[1] https://github.com/null-dev/firefox-profile-switcher

Will take a look

"Create, edit, delete and switch between browser profiles seamlessly in Firefox. Inspired by Chrome's profile switcher."

;-)

Multi-account containers are a feature I use tirelessly. Standardized add-ons are great too, so people can release one add-on and hit multiple browsers. I also really like Firefox sync for sending bookmarks/tabs between devices. Firefox is also extremely fast nwadays, and comparatively easy on system memory.

These are things that have improved in the last decade. I also like the fact that FF isn't owned by an Ad company that pushes binaries supposedly built from an open-source project controlled by an Ad company.

Containers and first-party isolation in FF are my killer features. Echoing your comments to the GP post, that didn't exist a decade ago and is genuinely one of the best improvements they've made in that time.

I just wish they made vertical tabs built-in. Or at least made enough UI hooks that extensions could do it properly (instead of duplicating the tab bar via side panels).

Yes, that's a major irritation. Or at least allow me to switch off the built in tabs when I have an extension that provides that functionality. It would be absolutely trivial to do so.

Better video on youtube? Youtube works like shit on firefox.

Open 20 tabs and you get delays. (probably intentional gutting by google)

On my one PC I have a Firefox instance with over 2500 tabs open. I'd guess about 5% of those are youtube.

I often open a string of 30+ tabs of youtube to watch in one go, and it works fine for me.

* sync of tabs and passwords across devices __that always works__

* multi account containers

* better implementation of standards than chrome (i swear to god chrome date pickers...)

* cool privacy features like blocking facebook properties, email relays, etc

* smaller memory footprint than competitors

to your point about things being worse than they were 10 years ago, in part i agree. the web as a whole has gotten much more bloated and frustrating than it was a decade ago. pages take gobs of bandwidth and memory, everything is in a walled garden or infected with facebook's tentacles. in terms of experience, imo it's really hard to separate the browser from the browsed because the end result is that the experience of using the web in 2024 is downright unpleasant, where it wasn't really before, but i just don't see that as mozilla's fault. i think without mozilla it would be even worse, and it can always get worse...

The FF I used a decade ago was far more embedded and matched to my workflow than the present day one, including more efficient use of screen real estate and far more powerful plug ins. As far as I'm concerned it's been a slow and steady slide backwards. Yes, it's more secure (probably) and it is faster (but I don't notice that all that much because I very aggressively block bloat on the sites I visit).

> No innovation

Except for Rust.

I thought we were talking about the browser, but yes I like Rust a lot, although I switched to Go because the benefits of the borrow checker were just not worth the effort in my use cases. I would wish more main stream languages would experiment with owner transfer though

   a = 3
   do(a)
   // can't use a

> the benefits of the borrow checker were just not worth the effort in my use cases

Hot take: it's usually not, and people are using Rust in a lot of places where it's the wrong choice. It looks a lot more appealing when you're writing an OS or a browser.

You’re omitting something crucial though. Between the commercial Netscape and the open-source Firefox, there was the open-source Mozilla browser. Firefox wasn’t the Mozilla organisation’s first free and open-source browser. Firefox was the cut-back reboot of the open-source Mozilla browser. So clearly Mitchell’s work to create a spin-off for Firefox wasn’t necessary for them to have an open-source browser.

Besides which – forming a spin-off company seems like super basic stuff for a lawyer? Why are you describing it as if it’s some crucial innovation?

Netscape always had free editions. It was simply closed-source until 1998.

Baker may be a savvy lawyer, but that doesn't make her a good technologist.

this kinda stuff is often way more important than any code of course!

Honestly, it sort of is.

Someone who'd got it wrong would have opened the door for the kind of IP clawback we're seeing with the cloud tech startups wanting to pull people into their companion SaaS products.

and openai is definitely becoming less open every week

> Mozilla was originally the Netscape browser, which was a paid browser. All browsers were paid at the time, until IE came along and was bundled for free with Windows. Firefox broke that chokehold, and make an open web possible.

AFAIK The Mozilla project (initially started by JWZ) started when Netscape made its browser open source. The reason for this was the loss of market share due to free IE. Firefox came a few years later as a spin-off from the Mozilla Application Suite. Mozilla/Firefox's popularity correlated with Linux's because we needed a good open-source web browser on Linux (and BSD), not because she saw some opportunity to make an open web possible.

> No, she didn't write any code, but she is directly responsible for forming a company that enabled Firefox to be free and open source.

Unlike Brendan's role (excluding javascript), she had a small part, but I would not call it significant.

IE didn't gain share because it was free (Netscape was, as well). It gained share because, with Windows 95 OSR 2.5, it because integrated into the operating system and no longer had to be downloaded separately.

While being bundled made it easier to start using IE, that didn't guarantee that people would try it, and it didn't guarantee that they'd continue to use it on an ongoing basis after that.

It may not be as obvious now, but at the time, IE often offered a better experience for both users and web developers.

IE tended to be faster and stabler than its competitors, and releases like IE3 and IE5 offered a number of innovative features and technologies.

IE coming with Windows clearly didn't prevent a large number of users from switching to Firefox once Firefox started offering a better experience, and then to Chrome once it started generally offering a better experience than both Firefox and IE did.

IE had better CSS support, as well, and JS scripting was more powerful (ironic, given that JS was originally a Netscape thing).

I would say that the turning point was when HTML 4 adopted a lot of things based on the way IE did them rather than Netscape (e.g. <div> + CSS rather than <layer> etc). By IE5, if you were on Windows, you pretty much had to be a die-hard Netscape fan to keep using it.

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