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Comment by krasin | Hacker News Reader

The new CEO, Laura Chambers, is an MBA and a former McKinsey consultant ([1]). I would not hold my breath about the future of Firefox.

1. https://www.linkedin.com/in/chamberslaura/details/experience...

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Laura Chambers is only the interim CEO. In the original announcement post, it was stated that she would stay for the "remainder of this year", and Chambers later said that she would move to Australia in 2024 [1].

[1] https://fortune.com/2024/02/08/mozilla-firefox-ceo-laura-cha...

Obviously she will. Jesus, that's about 2/3rds of the problems of Firefox right there.

Usually somebody serving in an interim position doesn’t make big strategic changes.

Are these "big strategic changes" or are they changes that have been obviously needed for a while and made quickly in order to stop the bleeding?

How soon before she gives herself a raise? Sorry hackernews, I mean her friends on the board give her a raise?

Because as far as Firefox can tell, that seems to be the job of the Mozilla CEO.

Hey now, Google paid very good money for that antitrust testimony.

Wasn't she part of the board that ok'd the raise for the previous CEO????

I guess that's a wrap then :( Very sad to hear this.

Maybe time to fork Firefox.

And then convince ~200 million people to use your browser so you can get the same bare bones level of funding via search deals Mozilla is having trouble sustaining on. Things do get in a progressively easier feedback loop after that though.

I almost wonder if the Edge/Brave approach is the smarter approach. Build something on top of Chromium, trading full independence for the ability to focus on differentiation, and then if you ever show you can actually make a more popular browser you're free to take over/break away from/fork Chromium for full independence again at the end. Either way you have a tradeoff.

Well, what if you want to.. lets say, keep Manifest V2 compatibility in Chromium? Judging by the compile times, Chromium is one of the largest open source projects out there. Maintaining a backport is going to be a nontrivial effort because your company isn't Google and can't just throw developer hours at the problem.

The amount of work is plenty true but the alternative (on the assumption you're assuming Firefox is failing and needs to be forked or replaced) is maintaining an entire browser and its Manifest V2 instance instead of maintaining a separate back port of manifest v2. Not really much better.

Firefox's future was written when they abandoned the rich add-on ecosystem and tried to compete with Chrome by being user-friendly to normies.

In the end, they lost both the power users and the regular crowd (which will use Chrome or Edge, because those come bundled or are advertised on front page of Google).

It'd certainly be convenient if it were true, but the rate of Firefox's market share decline was completely unaffected by the switch to Web Extensions. There are Firefox forks out there that still keep the legacy add-on interface around, and they of course get comparatively very little use, because very few people actually care.

And, of course, "being user-friendly to normies" has always been among Firefox's chief goals.

It's what got me off FF for a long time. I stuck around on FF 52 ESR(I think?) for ages, the last version to work with pentadactyl.

Then I finally switched to Chrome because it was much faster than FF and my extensions were dead anyway. I switched back a few years ago because FF became good enough again. I wouldn't be surprised if others did the same (and possibly didn't switch back).

When I switched, everyone I provided tech support in my family for also switched. I did not switch them back because I don't think it's worth inconveniencing them at this point.

Obviously my case is a miniscule amount of people, but it wouldn't surprise me if the story wasn't somewhat common.

This is what I did. Just switched back not to long ago.

But building something on top of Chromium defeats the entire appeal of a replacement for Firefox, which is to continue the fight against the Blink/V8 monoculture.

Certainly to some, to others it's just about having a browser which doesn't spy on you, use non-free components, or try to use all of your data for ads. Things are a bit different than the original I.E. battle where a monoculture around a closed source limited platform engine existed and monoculture isn't a neat box for the entire story anymore, especially if you're doing this because you think Mozilla is imminently failing because they can't find the money to maintain a separate engine to user's expectations.

There exist a number of reasonable Firefox forks right now.

Those already exist. The problem is the Mozilla organization has all the money and they piss it away because they are controlled by corporate types who care more about not pissing off their past and future bosses at Google more than pushing open and privacy protecting web standards.

Also, paying tech salaries would mean the suits get to pocket less of the money themselves.

Desktop linux market share is below 2% yet people aren't talking about it being on its last legs like with Firefox. How does Firefox's 3.5% market share prevent people from using it ? Is the 180,000,000 number of monthly active users simply too low ?

wow you are right, they have 3,5%. I thought they had like 25-30%. Safari had 18% apparently, I know 0 people who use Safari

> wow you are right, they have 3,5%

It depends a lot on the country. In Germany, Firefox' market share is larger since Firefox is viewed as the browser that takes the users' privacy concerns (e.g. tracking, DRM (there still exists Firefox EME-free), ..) most seriously.

According to

> https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/germ...

Firefox' market share is about 18.6 % among the desktop users in Germany, i.e. among the desktop browsers, Firefox has the 2nd largest market share in Germany (for all platforms: according to

> https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/germany

in Germany, Firefox' market share is currently about 10.4 %).

That explains things, I in fact work as a programmer in germany :)

They even have ads on the subway here

You don’t know anyone who uses an iPhone to browse the web?

Pretty sure that is where that Safari market share comes from.

> You don’t know anyone who uses an iPhone to browse the web?

What you write as a joke is in my opinion not one: when I consider the department hallway in the office where I work at (not tech sector), you will, I think, only find 2 iPhone owners among about 25 people. One of these iPhone owners is the boss, and the other one is a programmer who vocal about not liking Android.

So, depending on your surroundings, it is quite possible that seeing iPhones or iPhone owners is actually a somewhat rare event.

You’re in an emerging market I’d guess. iPhones make up 90%+ of the high value mobile user market.

I'm not in an emerging market. I'm in the US. Of all the people I know, only 3 use iPhones. I rarely see them in the wild, either.

My understanding is that iPhone usage varies wildly between regions of the US. I know that when I go to some areas, I see them everywhere and in other areas, almost never.

I work in Germany and I don't know any friend with an iPhone. Of course they exist, but it's a general a disliked phone here for engineers

> You’re in an emerging market I’d guess.

You are wrong.

Just today, a colleague boasted that he recently bought a new Samsung Android phone and paid about 1500 euro for it (I guess he bought a Samsung Galaxy S24); this is likely more expensive than an iPhone.

But what I rather wanted to tell with my comment above is depending on your surroundings, it can be a very common situation that iPhone fans/users are a small minority.

Except for my mother and sister, actually not no. But I meant on a computer

I know I was meaning that more as a joke but that 18% number is almost certainly PC + Mobile. There is no way desktop Safari has 18% market share. MacOS market share is likely less than 18%

iOS is about ~30% of the global mobile market and ~60% of the US market, and most iOS users use Safari as their browser. So you probably do know people who use Safari.

yes, I thought it was on computers also since as you say all mobiles comes with a default browser so the stats are quite pointless because you could just count the amount of androids and iphones and other phones

Isn’t that because it includes mobile which is heavily incumbent oriented. I think the FF share on desktop is higher.

It's a bit more scary for the average user to install a completely different OS than it is to download a browser they can get rid of in a click or two if they don't like it.

I can understand 2% for linux-based desktop OS, but 3.5% for a browser available on most major OS isn't great at all..

But desktop linux market share has never been in the double digits. Firefox once had 30%.

And the low marketshare does prevent people from using it. Because there are sites that only work if you use chrome and maybe safari, because Firefox marketshare isn't big enough to worry about. So users switch to chrome so those sites work, which decreases Firefox market share in a vicious cycle.

The chicken-and-egg is a valid argument. But it applies to Linux as well (no users -> no apps being ported -> no users).

I don't understand the whataboutism.

Linux does suffer from the issue of low market penetration, but it's always had a relatively low market share (and its actually getting better as of late).

Whereas firefox has been on a steady decline for nearly a decade due to incompetent management with conflicting goals, something that's unlikely to change anytime soon.

When I was in college, McKinsey was one of the name-brand, prestigious places students wanted to go and work after graduation. Now it seems to be the laughing stock. What happened?

It always was, you just didn't realize that as a student. At least here in Germany.

Nothing has really changed. You just got older and wiser.

MBB consulting is still a prestigious job for most students. It's probably not _as_ sought after as it was a decade or two ago, but I think most students at most business schools would be incredibly happy to get a job at McKinsey after graduating.

And I can guarantee that when you were in school, there were plenty of people who looked at McKinsey exactly like you do now. But most people don't form that opinion until they get out into industry and get exposure to management consultants in the wild.

Oh, this is going to go the way of Meg Whitman and Marissa Meyer.

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