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Comment by jhoechtl | Hacker News Reader

For me it's

> Mozilla develops their own browser engine

This is key. Without Mozilla we are aproaching monopoly as Safari aproaches gradually Internet Explorer.

Googles recognition of this fact seems to be exactly why they keep Mozilla afloat. Firefox is the best anti-anti-trust argument that have.

This seems to be a popular opinion, but I believe they probably do it because it's good for their bottom line. The MS case was very different. The only relevant market was desktop computing, they had a monopoly on the desktop OS market, they baked the browser into the OS for no good reason, and they were taking actions to make OS competition impossible. Having a high desktop browser market share number honestly isn't a problem.

It’s also hard to argue they don’t allow competition when literally anyone can pull the source at any time.

I don't think that's relevant to the argument about competition. Being able to pull (most) of their source code doesn't make it easy to write a competing browser engine. Why do you think writing a browser engine is an impossibly daunting task nowadays? Who made the web this way?

Every major tech company has used the outcome of the MS Monopoly Trial as a playbook of dos and don'ts to avoid getting sued.

In general, wouldn’t Chrome be much closer to being Internet Explorer?

Chrome already is the new Internet Explorer (I know about MS Edge).

Depends on what year the analogy is in ... (2002?) or on what platform. (iOS?)

Internet Explorer did their own thing and damn web standards. Chrome follows the standards.

Well, the chrome people have a hand in writing those standards…

Chrome basically is the standard. If Chrome adds it, developers will use it.

And this is exactly the problem.

Google is a better steward of their default position than Microsoft was, by a mile, so far.

But the web and the internet is more important than Google.

Use Firefox. :)

So does Apple, Microsoft and Mozilla. Google/Chrome does not write or edit the standard on their own.

Chrome follows a lot of draft standards that they themselves submitted. Not really the same thing.

The standard is edited and written by Google, Microsoft, Apple and Mozilla.

both

Chrome is doing the "I make my own web standards and push them through, ups now my feature is standard incompatible so I try to force change the upcoming standard just before it gets committed" thing IE had done in the past (it's e.g. the main reason why you sometimes end up with CORS issues on FF, the site isn't standard compatible as it doesn't handle a certain thing the standard requires from websites but due to a last minute exception for chrome doesn't require browsers to enforce).

And Safari does the "I don't adopt new standards forever and have strange bugs" IE think. Funnily like IE there are a lot of devs which swear that it has no strange bug problem (because they mainly use libraries developed on/for or at least tested with safari, but if you use some more newer tech it Safari support can be quite costly).

To be fair, IE and Netscape existed before there was an active standards body. 25 years ago standards were developed in a waterfall like process that took years.

The only time new features were released was when IE or Netscape pushed them.

Yes both Chrome and Safari are "the new IE" but for different reasons

I think people make too much of Safari lagging in the adoption of standards. Yes, they lag behind on what Chrome is pushing but they're also ahead on other features, like color spaces.

I'm familiar with Safari strange bugs but it's usually while I'm testing with VoiceOver so I have fewer occasions to notice bugs with Chrome or Firefox, which don't work as well with VoiceOver overall.

I think of Safari being the new IE because it's not as evergreen as other browsers; old but still usable iPhones and iPads can't run the current version and aren't allowed to run anything else. Thus, developers have more reason to care about what a browser from 2+ years ago supports.

A ludicrous and non-serious statement. Safari leads in several areas, and both it and Firefox push back against Google’s self-serving and privacy-threatening “features” it wants people to think are web standards.

> Safari leads in several areas

This is the first time I've ever heard someone say this. The overwelming sentiment is that safari is leagues behind, lacks features, lacks performance is has the worst standards support of all common browsers.

What areas are you referring to?

All we ever did at my jobs, when people complained "it doesn't work on safari" is put up a banner for safari users pointing them to either the app-store for our app, or to the fact their browser is not supported.

I've only ever gotten complaints from safari users that stuff was broken (It wasn't, their browser just did stuff wrong/differently/not-yet)

Position sticky, has, subgrid, and filters to name a few. And now it’s pushing forward color standards, better text layout, new image formats, and more css math functions.

Yes to all of this. It's easy to find plenty of features on CanIUse.com (with the Date Relative view) that were shipped by Safari before Chrome (Firefox had SubGrid way before the others but there was a long gap until Chrome finally shipped it).

Safari suffered from years of under investment. I understand that the situation has recently changed.

If you use Firefox for privacy reasons, and especially if you're concerned about your data potentially ending up with Google (or other entities), please be sure to read the Firefox Privacy Notice:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/

It currently mentions "Google" a number of times, along with "Microsoft", "eBay", "AdMarketplace", "Cloudflare", "Comcast", "Adjust", "Fastly", "our partners", and other entities.

I think a lot of people believe that Firefox respects its users' privacy more than it actually does.

They may be surprised to learn how many, and which, third-parties might be involved when using Firefox.

It would be true, if in practice all the finances of Mozilla didn't come from Google.

So it's like Google wearing a mask.

Google has an interest in not looking like an all controlling monopoly. I doubt they'd want to risk that by coercing Mozilla too much.

Google is paying because Firefox is popular. It is a chicken & egg problem.

Google is paying because if they didn't, Microsoft or somebody else might.

Google is paying to get / retain market share. Google is also paying to prevent antitrust suits.

Regardless of funding, it's still an independently developed browser engine.

I suspect they also want to avoid monopoly regulation noises. "hey look, this competitor exists"

Oh look, it's my least favorite HN trope.

Comment A) "Screw Mozilla, all their funding comes from their Google Search deal, they're just Google in a mask"

Comment B) "Screw Mozilla, they waste all this money on side projects (that would provide diversification and non-Google revenue streams) when they should be spending all of their effort on Firefox (which is effectively un-monetizable apart from the search deal - and you can bet hard money that there would be screaming if they tried)"

no, the criticism of their side projects is NOT that they would provide diversification, it's that they're usually politically motivated feel-good marketing distractions with no chance of ever producing additional revenue except maybe by bringing users to Firefox by convincing them that Mozilla better-aligns with their worldview or whatever

except oops all corporate politics are the same so the politically motivated feel-good crap from Mozilla is exactly the same as the politically motivated feel-good crap from every other corporation and so it's all just a waste of time and money and effort that COULD as you put it "provide diversification" instead, if Mozilla was competently run

> that they're usually politically motivated feel-good marketing distractions

most of them where not

especially if you look at resource distributions

Like tab containers, browser sync, firefox SSO, VR, FirefoxOs, Pocket, the send file thing, relay, VPN, privacy preserving Translation, TTS, reader mode, pdf.js.

Non of them are "politically motivated feel-good marketing distractions" but bets to diversification (which also mostly failed for one reason or another) (and yes Pocket contains political motivated nonsens in it's recommendation system, but by itself isn't a politically motivated features, but a feature I would want to see more of deeper integrated into FF, just REALLY without the recommendation system and a somehow more natural part-of-FF felling UI/UX).

I mean sure that color theme nonsense was politically motivated feel-good nonsense. But using that as point to get hung up on is exactly what the OP comment meant, people tend to be very selective about remembering things so that they fit their narrative.

That’s a great list of nice things that are easy to take for granted. While reading it, I couldn’t help but think of the “What have the Romans ever done for us” scene from Monty Python¹.

I didn’t know about Text to Speech (TTS) but personally wouldn’t have much use for it. The other things I didn’t recognise is VR. I’m guessing this refers to Firefox Reality on the Oculus Go VR Headset² (which seems to be no longer available).

¹ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ

² https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-reality...

> Firefox Reality on the Oculus Go VR Headset

yes, through not limited to the Oculus

and it kinda folded Hubs (https://hubs.mozilla.com/) into it

and and I think there was a bit of additional research level stuff never ending up in user hands

but both are somewhat dead, idk. if Firefox Reality still works with any VR headset at all (it might still work with non standalone headset usage) and Hubs is shutting down end of March, a community version still exist (Hubs ~= somewhat like VRChat from the idea but not as VR specific and just less interesting in general)

same for most other things they are either dead or fizzled out (and some are stables, but don't bring users, like pdf.js)

One thing I forget to mention is FF does a lot of work to reduce fingerprint-ability of existing interfaces (while trying to avoid breaking websites by changing/breaking existing interfaces, like some other more privacy focused browsers do). A bunch of this is done in context for the tor-browser but also benefit normal FF. Sadly you using FF ads more information to the fingerprint then any of the protections due to better fingerprint protection (something which is true for any form of privacy protection not used en mass by every one).

I'm going to name some side projects, would you like to explain how the are merely "feel-good marketing"?

- Rust

- LetsEncrypt (collaboration)

- Opus (collaboration)

- AV1 (collaboration)

- Mozilla Common Voice database

- FirefoxOS

- MozillaVPN

- Lockwise

- Relay

- Bugzilla

- Servo

- Pocket

- MDN

- The VR projects - even if you think they're dumb they're hardly political feel-good stuff.

- The new privacy monitoring services

- The Scroll partnership (defunct because Twitter bought them and destroyed it)

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

sure, except that Google has pretty much no control over firefox

Saying Firefox is Google wearing a mask is some wild conspiracy theory.

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