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Comment by gamepsys | Hacker News Reader

As a Firefox daily user, this list makes me better understand why Firefox has such a low market share. Reorganizing menus or adding alt text to PDFs won't make any impact on user adoption/churn because users don't care. The alt text specifically sounds like resume engineering for some developers that want "on device generative ai" as a bullet point on this LinkedIn. Bullet points like this wouldn't be a problem if Firefox had more resources, but the list of actually pretty small and doesn't have a lot of space for fluff. I think they should pick 2-5 things and focus on those, such as multi-device sync, privacy, speed, battery life performance, customization, etc.

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> I think they should pick 2-5 things and focus on those, such as multi-device sync, privacy, speed, battery life performance, customization, etc.

They did; they've been pushing on speed and privacy for a long time. It mostly turns out that the problem isn't usually technical superiority, unfortunately. (The problem is that Microsoft shoves Edge in users' faces every chance they get, and Google has been giving Chrome an unfair advantage for ages (notice that when people complain about Firefox being slow, it's usually on Google sites).)

Didn't they fire the Servo team?

They did. Servo was a test bed for experiments. It wasn't the only place for speed work. And was privacy a focus for Servo?

Without even scrolling down, there's a header describing the work they're doing for "Continuous work on speed, performance and compatibility", exactly what you asked for.

Anytime Firefox works on UI stuff, people seem to get really annoyed they aren't working on something else. You mention that "Reorganizing menus or adding alt text to PDFs won't make any impact on user adoption", I think it's the exact opposite. There is no greater thing the average everyday Joe cares more about than the UI, and if they just called it good 10 years ago, the project would be in an even worse state.

Are you saying that they should avoid writing about features that aren't "core" (privacy, speed, battery life, sync) when telling you about the work they've done? I mean, they do say that

> You can expect even faster, smoother browsing on Firefox, thanks to quicker page loads and startup times – all while saving more of your phone’s battery life.

and regarding privacy

> we’ve worked hard to make things like translation and PDF editing in Firefox happen locally on your device, so you don’t have to ship off your personal data to a server farm for a company to use it how they see fit

– so they seem to have ticked your boxes, but they've also committed the sins of boasting about design and used the "AI" buzzword.

Yes, "most people" don't care about "adding alt text to PDFs" but then most people don't even know what accessibility means. For the people who do need it, it's essential, and I think it would be awesome if it happens on-device instead of giving google/amazon/microsoft a description of every pdf image a blind person might want described.

I think this perpetuates the fiction of assuming browser share is directly tied to specifics of browser functionality instead of more important macro forces like differences in brand awareness and ability to leverage market sector domination.

There's been a proliferation of conflicting just-so stories purporting to explain the history of Firefox's browser market share, and they seem to relate to idiosyncratic preferences for customization instead of actual market dynamics.

> As a Firefox daily user, this list makes me better understand why Firefox has such a low market share

As another Firefox active user, I say this has nothing at all to do with it. I use Firefox because it lets me control what I need to control to be productive, but I recognize this isn't why most people used Firefox at its peak. 99% of the reason Firefox got so big was that IE was so awful. Edge is serviceable, so that takes away the vast majority of Firefox's former user base.

Firefox isn't going to grow as big as it was before Edge came along unless one of the major consumer OS provides a broken default browser on its platform and allows Firefox to run on its platform (iOS fulfills only one of the requirements). It won't grow as big as it was before Chrome came along unless both of the earlier requirements are met and Firefox renders Google sites better than Chrome.

I know we aren't going back to peak popularity. The concern is that FF moves to so little marketshare that websites no longer build for compatibility.

> Firefox isn't going to grow as big as it was before Edge came along unless one of the major consumer OS provides a broken default browser on its platform and allows Firefox to run on its platform (iOS fulfills only one of the requirements).

And even that “requirement” isn’t filled to anywhere the same degree — Safari has its issues but IE was on a different plane of existence in terms of brokenness, with some of the barest of basics being absent or needing hacks to make work (remember the DirectX filter hacks required just to have transparency support for PNGs?).

How are they stretched for resources? Mozilla's revenue is around a half billion USD per year.

It's important to note here that Mozilla spends the majority of that money on non-Firefox projects (something that has pissed off people who have wanted to donate to Firefox specifically for ages). Firefox itself gets a sliver of that.

Like many you are likely confused by the Foundation (MoFo) vs. Corp (MoCo) finances.

You can only donate to MoFo, and indeed it doesn't spend much (if anything) paying Firefox staff. This is because Firefox staff is on the MoCo payroll, which gets its revenue mostly from their search engine deal with Google. MoCo actually pays MoFo to use the trademarks that are owned by MoFo.

Specifically Mozilla Corporation paid Mozilla Foundation in 2022 under $20 million from over $585 million in revenue.

The relationship between Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation can make some details confusing. But most people who claim what they did never looked at Mozilla finances in my experience.

>something that has pissed off people who have wanted to donate to Firefox specifically for ages

Get pissed at tax law, not Mozilla. Mozilla Foundation cannot legally funnel tax-exempt donations into the development of products for a for-profit entity (Mozilla Corporation). That would be a crime.

MoCo could start an OnlyFans for "donations", it's a pretty hot fox after all, what with being, y'know, on fire.

Wow, if only there was a separate corporate entity which could accept donations but which wasn't the Foundation. I wonder what Mozilla would call such a Corporation.

IANAL - I kinda thought a company can't take donations? So obviously the answer is a Firefox Pro that is 99% the same but lets us give them money. Maybe give it crazy features like a compact layout and the ability to run extensions locally.

For profit companies can take donations. Most Thunderbird funding is donations to MZLA Technologies Corporation for example.

The alt text thing sounds like someone who thinks disabled access to the internet is an Important Thing. I'm not sure it will end up being better than an extension or doing the image recognition in a screen reader, but it's not necessarily cynical resume padding.

alt text is grate for blind people thanks.

Firefox has a low market share because Chrome is the default browser on so many systems and in IT departments everywhere. 99% of people don't think about which browser they want to use.

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