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Comment by zamadatix | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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