Personally and strictly my own ignorant and informal opinion, Firefox and by extension Mozilla Corp. was doomed the moment it decided to compete with Chrome by being more like Chrome. Firefox built its userbase by being different than the dominant browser, then decided the only way to not die was to be exactly like the dominant browser except with less icky behind-the-scenes privacy behavior.
That was a fundamental mistake. The who's-got-the-biggest-version-number dick-measuring, the constant deprecation of power features and customizability, everything that was intended to beat Chrome in a contest Google couldn't lose is the reason Firefox can't hold onto a decent market share. The 25% of internet users who wanted what Firefox offered ten years ago still want the same thing now, but Firefox decided it was worth losing that 25% trying to chase the 75%, and they lost.
25% seems like much too high a number for the group you’re talking about. I’d be interested to see some data on level of technical engagement and knowledge, but in my experience a large percentage of users don’t even have a clear idea of what a browser is.
The reason Firefox has lost market share in my opinion is because:
i) Chrome is pushed by Google.com, which has a near monopoly on search
ii) Chrome was bundled and installed alongside other software
iii) Chrome is built into Android and Chromebook
iv) Chrome has a huge advertising budget
And all of these factors combine to make Chrome feel like the default portal to the web.
Also for a period of time Chrome was undeniably a better, more stable browser. It’s only relatively recently with Electrolysis and Firefox Quantum that Firefox has regained a technical parity or superiority. And those changes depended on specifying a proper UI and Extension API which is the reason why the browser is no longer so customisable.
But Firefox Quantum only exists because of Servo, and vital parts of Servo (parallel layout in particular) have not been integrated into Firefox. It’s bizarre to see Mozilla sabotaging its long term chance at technical leadership not only by scrapping Servo but firing the engineers who built it.
I had an untechnical family member say unprompted last week they want to move away from Chrome but couldn’t use Firefox Mobile because it’s too slow. At the same moment Mozilla leadership was sacking its staff working on parallelising the browser engine.
>The reason Firefox has lost market share in my opinion is because:
My opinion is that none of those actually matters. The "one" single reason Chrome won market share was the same playbook how Google Search Engine Started.
Speed.
I watched hundreds of users, given the choice, or doing so themselves installing / using Chrome by their own selection. It was faster. The user experience was far better.
You could advertise the heck out of your product, but if it wasn't any good it wouldn't matter. For nearly 10 years Google Chrome was undoubtedly the fastest browser on the planet.
It wasn't until Quantum landed on Firefox before you could at least have a few metric of performance wins going to Mozilla, and that is also partly because Chrome has slowed down a lot in recent years.
> I watched hundreds of users, given the choice, or doing so themselves installing / using Chrome by their own selection.
I don't know who you are, but having watched “hundreds of people” installing a web browser sounds a bit dubious…
Personally, I have discussed with a few dozens of websites users and most of them would answer the question “what web browser do you use” with “Google” no matter if they were using Chrome, Firefox, or IE (there are few Mac users in my country).
Firefox users had it installed on their computer by some computer-savy relatives, and most of Chrome users didn't know were it came from (most believing it was already there beforehands) which is a good marker of people getting it bundled with other pieces of software.
I remember seeing non-technical people back in the days making the switch to chrome because it was faster indeed. Firefox had to do some catch up, and words of mouth didn't work in Firefox's best interest for quite some time.
back in the early days I remember people switching over to it because it had a built-in Flash plugin.
In more recent years, I've seen people installing it because they were sick of the pop-ups advertising it on Google sites, or they just assumed that it worked better with Google products because Google made it. Having learned that Google kind of made things that way, I'm not surprised.
Gmail was bait to lure millions into the Googleverse, where they usually don't leave.
Personally I'm kind of happy to see Microsoft Edge gaining some marketshare at Chrome's expense. (even if it's mostly just Chrome)
The discussion above, however, is about how Chrome came to grow so much while Firefox shrank so much, and for that the question is how did Firefox and Chrome compare historically. There was ~10y from Chrome's release until Quantum came out.
(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
I don't know if anybody REALLY can have more than 1000 tabs open as in completely loaded into RAM. When my computer is slow I pray that I don't have any unsent edit windows or unfinished youtube/twitch videos and just kill all the render processes.
Chrome kills them regularly on it's own, which means they simply crash with out of memory.
For me, Chrome generally handles killed renderers better, e.g. it shows a popup about crashed extensions and just reloads them. Firefox requires me to quickly disable and enable adblock and I lose the build in screenshot extension permanently (except disabling and renabling it with about:config).
But for chrome a renderer often just freezes and only a day later there is a popup about it which offers to kill it.
Firefox seems to handle the tabs better overall, but at some point session resume fails with javascript errors in the shell.
Chrome seems to handle session restore a bit better.
Yes. I remember when I first tried Chrome. It launched within 10 seconds while Firefox 3? 4?, my default browser back then, took almost half a minute to launch. It was fast.
That's relatively irrelevant - Chrome was much faster at the most important sites - which are coincidentally mostly google owned - but still faster - GMail, Youtube, Google itself felt faster on Chrome back then. Then there's the flash handling which was important back then.
Also FF was shitty at stability, it didn't have multi process architecture for the longest time and I've had a page crash my entire browser (especially in the flash days) regularly.
And then chrome started pushing excellent dev tools (even in FF nightly I get dev tools hanging on complex sites because of how slow they are)
Chrome was the better browser back then and it won the power users and developers, then it took over the casuals as it was advertised on google and it was recommended as the best by everyone - it took FF too long to catch up and now a lot of sites don't even test compatibility - I've been trying to switch back to FF before this fiasco for a month and it wasn't a smooth experience compatibility wise.
It sounds like you're describing how long it takes the browser to launch, when earlier you were describing how long it took to load pages? Browser launch time isn't nearly as important to most people as speed once running, because mostly you open the browser once, and then load many pages.
It's not just page load speed, although that is important. After the page load, some sites still feel slower (e.g. the new Facebook). It's also the speed of UI interactions, in particular detaching a tab is slower in Firefox than Chrome. All up, Chrome still feels faster to me.
> I actually bothered to load both side-by-side and check. Firefox loads pages faster.
WHo cares? A Ferrari and a Lamborghini in 2020 provide about the same speed experience. What matters is that for the past 10 years Mozilla had the speed of an old Volvo versus the Ferrari that was Chrome/Chromium in comparison. The fact that Mozilla merely caught up in the end is rather a proof that they lost technical leadership a long time ago.
I used Firefox and Chrome simultaneously every day for many years on everything from a low-end laptop to pretty quick desktop. Firefox for personal stuff, Chrome for work.
Speed's always been similar for me, Firefox has generally been more reliable (partly due to being able to block so much crap, probably). Chrome used to break with alarming regularity and need a total reinstall. Sometimes there was a site which wasn't compatible with Firefox, and if I needed it I'd open it in a Chrome incognito window.
These days I've switched to Vivaldi for the work stuff (vertical tabs, "hibernate background tabs", tiling!), though I still debug JS in Chrome.
> I watched hundreds of users, given the choice, or doing so themselves installing / using Chrome by their own selection. It was faster. The user experience was far better.
For the first time or because they were already familiar with it? Once you've established yourself as the "default", it can be ridiculously difficult to convince people to switch to something else. Google has executed this strategy perfectly and they know that there's nothing Mozilla can do or anybody else will do. And that despite the fact that Google clearly abused its dominant position in another industry to establish dominance in this field. I'm sick of Google abusing its position and I'm sick of people defending Google because it's a "free market". No, that's not how it works.
The statement is believable to me once there's context added.
IE was a terrible browser. Everyone knew it and Firefox was better in every imaginable way especially for "web masters". The Firebug system was a godsend.
Firefox unseated IE because of how much better it was. Microsoft could not get its head straight in this particular case. Always a non-conforming, slow browser with far fewer features.
That's what it takes to unseat the default - you have to be multiples better before people take notice in serious ways.
And, Chrome did that beautifully by leaning into the one thing the masses cared about. Speed.
Those ads were so good - extremely viral. Did they show anything objective or real? Maybe... maybe not. It's what caught people's attention and then when they tested it themselves, they believed it.
Personally I tested it and it was, by a very noticeable amount - I was hooked. Took me a bit of time to get over the loss of Firebug, but mostly sentiment because Chrome's debugger was quite good.
If Firefox was the semi-truck, Chrome was the Ferrari. Both got me to A => B. With firefox I could carry anything, plugins, extensions, whatever I needed. But it was a lumbering giant. Chrome came with none of that at launch but it went fast - and people talked about it.
I'd also point out that tabs and adblock were compelling end user features to the extent that nothing any major browser has on its competitors today compare to. Sync is the closest to a compelling killer feature any browser has got to these days, and all browsers had it very quickly (except Safari, which doesn't have to care when you don't have a choice on iOS).
The fact that Firefox was faster than IE and any technical expert you asked for recommendation would prefer it due to better standards compliance/extensions/having the only devtools were really the icing on the cake.
Google also has the kind of trust amongst end users, especially non-technical end users, that Mozilla couldn't hope to have since Google has their hands in so many pies. And as a technical friend/family member asked to make a recommendation, if anything the incentive is to recommend Chrome to reduce tech support calls when HangoutMeetDuoChat/YouTube/Photos/their preferred google product is acting weird in Firefox again.
It's hard at this point to see what any browser could do to build that kind of end user feature lead again this far into the game.
>Firefox unseated IE because of how much better it was.
Nitpick, but Firefox never had the majority of the market or a bigger piece than IE. Firefox was on the way to reaching that but they peaked around 33% share before Chrome came along and ate everyone's lunch.
I really want to like and use Firefox, but the difference (on a top-end computer) is very noticeable and annoying. Perhaps Firefox should work on their perceived speed, if that's the difference.
So you didn't measure it. Worthless opinions as to me on my gaming pc chrome is most definitely slower. Both are opinions and worthless without numbers.
Real world benchmarks show they are neck and neck leap frogging each other all the time, so both of you are wrong; they're generally so close a human can't tell the difference, it's all biases these days unless someone shows you the numbers. Lots of people don't realize the extensions they add can also severely upset performance, but that's on the user. My 4 year old computer works just fine with both of them and 4 or 5 extensions.
It also depends a lot on use cases and available resources. When on a single or just a few tabs, my perception usually favored Chrome, but in real usage I'm often keeping hundreds of tabs open and Firefox keeps being speedy enough most of the time while Chrome becomes unbearable very quickly.
Agreed, with a caveat: on non-Google pages. Google is actively slowing down their pages on Firefox (or at least heavily optimizes them, but just on Chrome - which is the same).
> The statement is believable to me once there's context added.
So, the statement does not mean anything anymore then. It should rather be: "it's difficult to unseat a technically superior product with an inferior one" which is patently obvious.
>It’s only relatively recently with Electrolysis and Firefox Quantum that Firefox has regained a technical parity or superiority. And those changes depended on specifying a proper UI and Extension API which is the reason why the browser is no longer so customisable.
No, they did not. Electrolysis was around before WebExtensions. Sure, Electrolysis wasn't backwards compatible and a lot of existing extensions had to rewrite part of their code to be compatible, and abandoned extensions were broken forever - or would have been once mozilla removed compat shims (unless somebody picked up the slack, which people quite often did). This was still a lot better than breaking every extension and forcing a new extremely restricted WebExtensions API that was a clone of the Chrome APIs but came with their own bugs and a lot of "TODO: implement actual API".
Quantum is just a PR term. The impact of Quantum-related changes to extensions was tiny if present at all (if the extension already survived Electrolysis).
The only reason that old non-webext extensions do not work anymore in Firefox at all is that they helpfully removed the actually code that would run the extension (but not really last I checked, it's still around to support mozilla-owned sideloaded/builtin extensions such as pocket).
comm-central (Thunderbird, Seamonkey) even implemented their own implementation of what was removed to get (restartless) old-style extensions working again, falsifying the claim that forcing a WebExtensions-only change was a requirement to get e10s/Quantum going.
Underneath it all, to this day most of Firefox is still javascript + XUL/HTML on the frontend with bridges (XPCOM, etc) to expose the C components.
PS: e10s shipped in v53, "old" extensions were only removed in Quantum, which was v57 (but not really removed, as I noted, just disabled for everybody except mozilla's own stuff).
I ran (and sometimes still run) a personal fork of 60esr (aka >57 ;) where I added back "old" extension support by git-reverting a few hundreds of lines of code that they removed.. That thing was Quantum too, all the Quantum perf/speed improvements were still present, and yet magically still supported all the old extensions I cared about.
The quantum versions of firefox are a lot more stable than the previous generation. Probably because they cut down on how many things extensions could get their grimey little fingers into. Also getting rid of more XUL helped. The new firefox is scads better than the old one. Sure I miss some extensions but that just is what it is.
Why do people keep saying they got rid of XUL? It's just not true. It's still there to this very day. Just look at browser.xhtml (the main browser UI file); it's a mix of HTML and XUL and the body tag is particularly interesting.
The first child element of that body is currently:
<popupset id="mainPopupSet">
That's not HTML ;)
They are trying to replace XUL with HTML and made some progress towards that. For starters they removed most or all of XBL.
From the perspective of an add-on dev it wouldn't have made much of a difference, it used to be manipulating a XUL DOM, now would have been manipulating a mixed XUL/HTML DOM, in the future it would have been manipulating an HTML DOM, not much difference except for tag names and attributes names really, and the rest was js and css.
I noticed the same thing when the certificate fisasco happend: There was this one special XPI file they pushed via Normandy and I installed it manually (it was posted in some discussion forms) to get my extensions running again without restarting Firefox.
If one unzips this tiny XPI, one finds javascript code which can directly install a certificate into the master store.
So there is indeed a very powerful extension system available, but only to Mozilla itself who can sign such extensions.
Probably all the old stuff can be brought back easily.
Please put your comment in a blog! Back then I searched for these topics and found nothing
>Probably all the old stuff can be brought back easily.
Not anymore. They removed/replaced a ton of stuff that only was used by extensions at that point. That might lower their maintenance burden, but for the most part it really was interfaces and code that hadn't been touched since the 1990, so it wasn't like it was a huge maintenance burden before.
That means it wouldn't be that easy to bring back the extension system where the old extensions would be able just run unmodified. But it would be easy enough to bring back newly created old-type extensions or modify existing old-style extensions to use whatever is present now instead of the old stuff that got removed.
But then again, old-style extensions had to check anyway if a new major release broke anything, and usually it did break some stuff for some extensions. It was the cost of doing business. Jetpack/WebExtensions could help with that; if you extension was simple enough to fit within their APIs.
In fx60 (esr) the removal of these "old" interfaces and other things hadn't progressed much yet, so I was able to just git-revert most of the removals that affected the extensions I care about and that was enough to run those extensions again without obvious bugs.
>I ran (and sometimes still run) a personal fork of 60esr (aka >57 ;) where I added back "old" extension support by git-reverting a few hundreds of lines of code that they removed..
Sir, I would really appreciate if you could share a patch for it.
I never updated them beyond 60esr and that thing is outdated and insecure as well. I don't really see a point in doing so now, other than to prove I did it.
It's disgusting that the search UI for Google in Chrome is different in Firefox. You can even see that it works fine if you switch Firefox user-agent to Chrome, so there's not even a compatibility reason behind it (and why should there be, we have web standards for a reason).
It’s not like they binned servo and decided not to use it improve ff. It did improve ff.
They seem to have decided that’s done and finished now. And there’s no longer any need to work on it - whether that’s a wise move or not is obviously up for debate.
Quantum was just one of the milestones, albeit an important one. Servo continues to develop and pass on many more features to Firefox. Shutting it down is basically shutting the major pipeline of progress that has gotten so many of us excited over Mozilla in the past several years. The decision does not augur well for Firefox and Mozilla.
I concur, it’s quite insane. All their initiatives brought back tiny, tiny figures compared to the google search deal. And that deal is so profitable because Firefox still has a decent market share.
Torpedoing the technological future of their browser is bound to reduce that share, at which point Google will likely offer much less money.
They are basically shooting their one trick pony in a leg, deliberately. It’s.... not smart.
It makes a ton of sense if you look at it from the perspective of what leadership has been seeing: All this effort on maintaining their own browser engine, met with continued decline and further irrelevancy. Despite best efforts, a likely trend towards disaster.
In the face of that, it would be reasonable to think that the cost is nowhere near worth the effort, compared to just adopting Chromium.
I think it'd be very easy for them to think that their goals for the modern web are not intrinsically tied to having their own, completely separate software.
Because maybe innovation should continue? some of the teams I can see closing for financial reasons but the servo team? that's like slashing your own wrists to see what happens.
> I had an untechnical family member say unprompted last week they want to move away from Chrome but couldn’t use Firefox Mobile because it’s too slow. At the same moment Mozilla leadership was sacking its staff working on parallelising the browser engine.
That's because Firefox is slow. I'm saying this as someone who's been using it as the main browser for at least a decade.
My latest personal anecdote. Firefox trackpad scrolling is lagging on my brand new Precision 7750 with vanilla Ubuntu 20.04 installed. Chrome doesn't have the same issue, especially considering Google's unfriendliness towards Linux.
Cannot verify and I am on Linux for a couple of years and on different hardware during those years. Arch-distribution, so maybe the defaults are what is different here??
Browsing, scrolling(with trackpad and without) startup time, etc. all fine.
One thing that I find interesting to always ask:
Performance under what circumstances?
There are users who have literally 200 tabs+ open and then they complain that everything is slow.
If users have 200+ tabs open and are experiencing slowness, I'd suggest that altering the users behavior isn't a fix. To me that's pure failure from Product designers to realize that "they shouldn't do that" doesn't cut it. Fix it.
Spending time and money on solving these issues isn't going to generate new revenue. I find it hard to believe engineers wouldn't want to try fix performance issues. I find it easy to believe leadership at Mozilla would find it unimportant.
I think you are wrong there.
As a product designer one never caters to edge-cases.
Besides having 200+ tabs open is very impractical, the way Chrome minifies all the tabs instead of making them slidable is just one prime example where the designers chose not to cater to the extreme. Even with a tab-behaviour like Firefox's it is a very unmanageable situation.
Also note that one might encounter a tradeoff in system-design where you could choose a very memory/resource-efficient design over a very performant one.
You cannot always get both.
Unfortunately, because Google is "In" just because it delivers mind-numbing ease via Youtube etc., this very vocal minority, claiming technical expertise scew impressions for the general population.
Similar to absolute views like :They do not care...
I think they care, not about the particular problem, but the product and how it meets the requirements of a general audience swiftly and reliable.
So the problem crossed their desk, they triaged it and closed it because it is an extreme use case which will not meet general requirements.
The same goes for all the multitudinous problems in that area.
I wasn't necessarily meaning the visual experience of having tab inception open, more along the lines of people feel that FF is slow. The 200+ comment was based around that there were quantifiers - it's the users fault for having slow software. "You're just doing it wrong".
From a Product perspective Chrome is the better product. I want to believe that Mozilla is capable of making FF the better product. Maybe it all boils down to Youtube and Facebook and in actuality it's impossible and they can't actually have a better browser. I don't really believe that. I do believe that Mozilla isn't on a trajectory to make that happen.
Luckily what you and I believe is irrelevant, unless we try to convince the masses by screaming at them long enough.
I wasn't referring to the tabs either, just as an example of people doing it wrong.
No one stops them, but in the old days natural selection took care of it. These days people think, because they have a misconception, they have a right to an opinion which a misconception is not. This is known as "The terror of the masses". Desinformation and Fanboydoom(we against them) is based on that.
Yes FF was slow some 5/7 years ago, but speed up quite a lot.
See here https://arewefastyet.com/win10/overview?numDays=60 . You can, of course, choose the Benchmark proving your point, or look at the bigger, quite different, picture.
And just because 200+ people write the same comment in spirit does not make it true (see benchmark-site) .
Also, as I have pointed out elsewhere in this thread, it is not just about speed. I agree that a site should not be agonizingly slow to work with, but that is not the case with FF (see benchmark).
As far as the reference to the trajectory is concerned, it is not s.th. that securely predicts outcome. You never know what the future holds.
Just think of the situation of MS or Amazone some 10-15 years ago.
Besides Youtube and Facebook have nothing to do with the browser; also note that Alphabet purposefully sabotaged their own website so that it performed bad or even breaks on a non-Chrome browser.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...
I would also like to remind the reader and you that I never said that the fault is with the user, I merely stated that you cannot demand a product owner, ANY product owner, to cater to ALL and EVERY extreme edge-case.
But since this debate of ours, I fear so, because you tried to warp above said statement of mine, is in danger of devolving into a fan-boy flame thread, let me close this with a quote I read in a facility of a philosphical faculty, in hopes that it gets people thinking before they regurgitate other people's/trolls/campainers opinion/misconception unreflected:
"People, eat feces, for a 1000 flies cannot lie."
>As a product designer one never caters to edge-cases.
The edges are where some of the most faithful users live. But you're right, it's becoming more and more clear, over various updates and certainly with the recent news, that Mozilla thinks they could do without the trouble and their PMs act accordingly.
Whether it's an issue that only one in a hundred users has to deal with, or an issue that every user has to deal with once in hundred of their actions in a browser session, an edge case is just an edge case.
I've been using Linux for a lot longer and on variety of hardware. I don't have this problem on my desktop, but the laptop and the trackpad are rather fresh, so maybe somewhere there's a bug or something. For some reason whenever there's a problem it's always Firefox, and rarely if ever Chrome. Example of another problem I had recently - websites like whathifi, tomsguide and a bunch of others were using 100% of one CPU core on Firefox, no problem on Chrome.
I left FF several times for being slow, being a memory hog, dropping extensions, not adding power features (vertical tree tabs) and come back from Chrome for ideological reasons. I might not be the core audience or user group, but I have not left because of i.) - iv.).
Relying on telemetry has been the biggest mistake developers decided to do in recent years. In the vast majority, only the most technically illiterate will keep telemetry enabled. For anyone with enough knowledge and two braincells to rub together, telemetry is an euphemism for spyware, so of course they'll do everything they can to disable it (also see all the Windows 10 "shut up" scripts, etc - people would rather run random scripts from the net than allow telemetry, even if doing the former isn't exactly that smart to begin with).
Relying on telemetry is heavily biased towards people who do not know what telemetry is.
Oh jees, is that what's happening? If they're only building for telemetry data, theyre screwed. Gonna end up with a browser for people who think the internet is a series of tubes.
I'm a developer, and I disable telemetry whenever possible, including in Firefox. I do this because I value my privacy (the same reason I use Firefox), and I don't want my system to make network requests unnecessarily. The way I see it, there are two possibilities:
(1) A significant portion of Firefox users think like me. In this case, Mozilla should not rely on telemetry because it excludes a sizeable portion of their userbase, and one that likely correlates with things like "believes in Mozilla's stated core philosophy" and "is passionate enough about browsers to recommend them to people".
(2) Not many Firefox users think like me. In this case, it's pointless for me to enable telemetry because they'll just ignore my needs anyway. "It is not worth supporting this feature, the data shows that 99% of people do not use it!" won't change if the number is actually 98.99%.
It would be like saying that, if voting involved putting a machine in my house to report information about my daily activities to the government, and they used that data to attempt to determine which candidates and policies I would prefer without actually consulting me.
I was already a full-time Tree Style Tab user by the time FF4 Beta came around in 2010 so I'm probably part of the reason Panorama wasn't popular enough :p
I just don’t think there are enough users who care about deep customisation through extensions compared to those who care about speed and stability, and Firefox traded one for the other in adopting a standardised Extensions API, and the changes that allowed in the browser architecture.
the current mobile firefox browser works great and it's not "too slow". They just simply didn't like their experience and told you it was "too slow" because they're biased again new things. Benchmarks (real ones on real web pages prove it) I agree with you though that Chrome engines are just everywhere and it's going to take some big sea change for that to not be the case.
It is a bit slow. It loads some stuff it thinks I want to see before letting me type into the one input box, which isn't even focused, so I have to tap in it to summon the keyboard), and only then can I type something.
> the constant deprecation of power features and customizability
They made ONE switch to a superior and standard extension model, and HN loses its minds. Do you really think you're in the majority here? Making it a more secure, faster and just better browser is just the only way forward. Without that Firefox would just be slow as hell, wouldn't play YouTube or Netflix videos, and not have any extensions left because no one wants to create an extension from scratch just for Firefox.
They tried their best and I hope it's been enough, even though the future looks bleak.
The WebExtension API even years later is afaik still less capable than XUL. They also deprecated plugins (NPAPI), a recent version has disabled userChrome.css and userContent.css by default and the pref is noted as legacy and the same is now considered for user.js if not removed. Also you cannot set a locally-hosted newtab page any longer.
>The WebExtension API even years later is afaik still less capable than XUL.
XUL extensions were an ungodly mess and arguably hurt Firefox more than they helped. Stability, performance, etc. issues were common to be caused by them. Which when everything is in a single execution context is not fun. Most of the popular extensions simply hijacked random internal Firefox functions which is why they couldn't just be installed together.
edit: I wrote the first Tag Groups extension back in the XUL days so I contributed to the mess.
I also wrote extensions and I did not find them to be an "ungodly mess". XUL was rather pleasant to work with compared to some of the other technologies I was programming with at the time
They were an ungodly mess, in my view, compared to modern approaches which is what matters in the context of this discussion. The issue also wasn't XUL but everything else related to how extensions functioned (same JS context as literally everything else, no processes, internal FF methods were being patched by extensions, etc.). Their power came at a great cost and their approach is inherently infeasible in today's security conscious world (even if you ignore the stability and performance issues).
They also killed off Live Bookmarks. I used that for years in FF and then later Waterfox until the PrivacyOne buyout, now I have to open a separate program to read my rss (rssowlnix)
Live Bookmarks died because it was ancient code that needed to be rewritten, but most people didn't use the feature. Mozilla added telemetry to analyze feed usage and the results came back with less than 1%. It was about resource allocation for development and no volunteers came forward.
It is so superior that to this day, Downthemall - an extension which is literally all about downloading - cannot even let you choose an arbitrary directory to put the files you downloaded.
> and standard
That was Google's "standard" that Firefox decided to adopt and even if Firefox decided to implement it, there was no reason to not also keep its own extension system - this way it would be able to have both its own advanced extensions and Google's functionally inferior extensions, essentially making it the most extensible and customizable browser by far.
> It is so superior that to this day, Downthemall - an extension which is literally all about downloading - cannot even let you choose an arbitrary directory to put the files you downloaded.
So much this.... the amount of bullshit extension devs have to do just to write basic features expected of desktop software is insane.
DownThemAll was a treasure, as was the old version of VideoDownloadHelper. They. Just. Worked. Exactly like one would expect them too. I haven't used DownThemAll since the transition but while VideoDownloadHelper stil does what is used to do -- technically -- its functionality is so gimped now that I've resorted to using youtube-dl
How many plugins work with the new Firefox on Android?
> standard extension model
One were Google already declared that APIs used for ad blockers are considered deprecated and might be dropped at any time? With one major browser vendor being actively hostile towards a large amount of plugins that "standard" doesn't do much. It certainly doesn't guarantee portability unless Mozilla completely jumps the shark and also kills ad blockers.
Before they had to be made specifically for Firefox for Android. Once they finish implementing WebExtensions it'll be able to install any WebExtension. I'd say that's a lot better than before.
I'll add that the few extensions already available were well-picked and honestly already fulfill all my needs.
For some reason I can no longer start the normal Firefox on Android, even after clearing everything and reinstalling it. So I am stuck with the beta version.
> Without that Firefox would just be slow as hell, wouldn't play YouTube or Netflix videos,
OK, this is just plain wrong IMO.
Speed is a major thing for me and I never had issues with it, even with 400+ tabs. I can go as far as understanding that not everyone was as lucky as me but it seems the speed issue is given too much weight.
> and not have any extensions left because no one wants to create an extension from scratch just for Firefox.
There seems to be fewer real extensions now than before. Yes: more websites packed as extensions, less working TST, Scrapbook etc.
Even now it lacks a lot of necessary APIs that the old one had - such as the ability to disable ctrl+q on linux. I would argue that only around now the new model became usable.
> Making it a more secure
In expense of usability.
> wouldn't play YouTube
It played youtube before and it would still play it without the switch.
Regardless, the old extension model was not the only power user feature which they killed (rss and panorama were two others).
> They made ONE switch to a superior and standard extension model, and HN loses its minds.
They did the same for Thunderbird recently. Given their approach to only provide the minimum of features and say "get an extension if you want anything more", that's an issue if you're killing those extensions.
It can do less but won't cause your browser stability, performance and other issues. Nor will writing them require reading the Firefox source code. XUL extensions routinely hijacked random internal Firefox functions which is why many had issues being installed together. Then all of it was executed in a single context (which is why they could hijack those functions to begin with) along with the UI and web page Javascript.
The end result would have been the same: broken backwards compatibility. The fundamental design of the original extensions was incompatible with a modern browser model (APIs only rather than hacking internal functions, separate contexts for everything, multiple processes, etc.). They chose to do it one go rather than piecemeal. So rather than having to check every version if some functionality your extension depends on is being removed you had to rewrite it once (well twice which was a mistake on their part).
It would have been gradual, and under most circumstances fixable with a bit of refactoring. Ripping the entire platform out from under people would not have produced the same result.
In the end the people who are most knowledgeable and most involved decided a gradual change was not feasible. Armchair quarterbacking them, without very specific and detailed arguments, just feels like the Dunning–Kruger effect in action.
Superior, as in defines a standard API. A clear API means the browser maker is free to change the internals of the browser, without worrying about changing something that some extension relies on.
> It's soo more than that. They'd destroyed all the old UI in favor of Chrome-style HTML+JS instead of platform-native XUL
It's a browser, the entire purpose of a browser is rendering HTML+JS quickly and efficiently. XUL primitives are not, on average, faster or more "platform-native".
>They added all sorts of weird commercial initiatives to someonething that was supposed to be ... nonprofit
You understand the problem here, do you not? People complain that they're almost completely reliant on Google for revenue, and they also complain about "weird commercial initiatives" to mitigate their reliance.
>They torched an entire ecosystem of extensions so they could be more Chromelike
XUL / XPCOM had significant, tangible problems. It's not just about being "chromelike", not at all.
> XUL primitives are not, on average, faster or more "platform-native".
At least on Windows they mapped to their native components. Sure spacing and a few other things were a little off (maybe because it mapped to GTK? I don't remember) but the look and feel then was vastly superior than the Electron-looking garbage that extensions have to do now.
> You understand the problem here, do you not? People complain that they're almost completely reliant on Google for revenue, and they also complain about "weird commercial initiatives" to mitigate their reliance.
You're not understanding me. Most folks have no problem with Pocket and whatever else. What they have a problem with is bundling it with the browser in a way that can't be removed, and then putting out a press release full of PR speak about how important and essential these extras are. These commercial iniatives were made mandatory, even when their beta versions were downloadable extensions
I'm all for Mozilla reaching out to whoever they want to partner with. But keep that shit out of the master repo. The downloadable base should be pure platform and nothing else, with extras as preinstalled, removable extensions. Essentially, the Winamp model
What I see there are mostly people issues that come with not wanting to pay for the talent you need to get the job done. It looks like they had the money to do this but it feels like they spent it on admin and marketing folks instead
The XBL document mentions more systemic problem but I maintain that they could have been fixed iteratively
>> XUL / XPCOM had significant, tangible problems.
> Significant problems that could have been fixed
Mozilla agreed with you for a long, long time. But we eventually realized that while yes, we could continue to keep fixing those problems, that the opportunity cost was large: fixing XUL issues was taking the place of improving stuff that web pages actually use, and it would be better to not be splitting the effort both ways.
(I work for Mozilla, though mostly not on the stuff being discussed here.)
>The XBL document mentions more systemic problem but I maintain that they could have been fixed iteratively ... >Significant problems that could have been fixed
It is not like the Firefox developers do not understand the value of iterative change. That was after all the basis for Project Quantum. If this were true, they would have done it.
But I'll let a Mozilla engineer explain this instead:
The problem is they get into to web standards game which is driven by Google to create pressure everyone else to spend millions on the newest standards.
I don't need the newest standards, 2000 web works perfectly fine for me (except HTTPs).
Firefox is slow with many tabs open on Win10, Ryzen X3900 with 32gb of RAM (writing this from FF)
They broke exetensions several times without any benefit to users, but losing extensions on the way. One of the core features for power users dropped for nothing - well for their own fun rewriting the browser and rendering engine several times, I guess it was fun at least doing "interesting things".
>well for their own fun rewriting the browser and rendering engine several times, I guess it was fun at least doing "interesting things".
Go on, install Firefox 3. Go see how absolutely _awful_ it was with multiple tabs open. How a single page would freeze the entire browser. How extensions broke XUL when the slightest thing went wrong.
Rewriting the renderer is not something done for fun. It was necessary for the to be able to do per tab isolation, as well as a not broken security model.
> Firefox is slow with many tabs open on Win10, Ryzen X3900 with 32gb of RAM (writing this from FF)
I literally have 432 tabs open at the moment I'm typing this. Firefox has automatically unloaded about 400 of those and is only eating 3GB of RAM. Check your custom config if you have any, because you certainly have something wrong. Win10, Ryzen 1600X and 16GB.
I'm using FF since Mosaic days and it was always slow. But how come if everything was bad back then, it isn't blazing fast with 100x faster hardware from my SGI days and several rewrites?
The old extensions were synchronous and ran in the GUI thread. Running firefox with extensions on a HDD would freeze all the time for me, before electrolysis.
What security model? Pretty much every WebExtension i've come across asks for practically everything and even Firefox's own addon page tells you to only install extensions you trust. At that point if you trust the extension source why bother with the security model in the first place? You already trust the extension developer to not break anything.
The one issue there is with developers that sell out their extensions to shady people. While I love the XUL era way more than this current trash, the security model with XUL would have done nothing to limit the blast radius and the update system would potentially install it silently
That said there used to be a human review system in place for extensions. I'm not sure if they do that any more
That is an issue with the current system too, sure an extension isn't able to look at arbitrary files in your system, but it still is able to look at your bank site, passwords, etc and can still do a ton of damage.
Web extensions aren't safe by default, you shouldn't trust them any more than any arbitrary EXE file.
I have to say, even though webextensions are clearly better and the way forward, i still kind of miss the old tamper data extension. ZAP just ain't as convenient to start up
Strangely I had the opposite thing happen, there were freezes after electrolysis, and it ran super fine before.
The freezes were the network, where if anything was required from the network the page would just pause for many seconds, this happened on all tabs, and after the pause they would all load/come back at the same time. Something was holding up all the network activity in Firefox.
Also there was a large amount of memory used, actually made it better by changing cache settings, the biggest being turning off the disk cache, for some reason that lowered the memory usage drastically.
But as far as I can tell the network pausing issue has mostly gone away now in the last year or so.
Because Firefox's "powerful extension model" basically constituted direct access to its internals, which prevented the Firefox developers from making the architectural improvements that were so sorely needed to make it performant.
> Firefox is slow with many tabs open on Win10, Ryzen X3900 with 32gb of RAM (writing this from FF)
Admittedly I'm on Linux, but I currently have approximately 7800 tabs open (no, that is not a typo). Firefox is a little laggy in its UI, but Chrome has never even managed to have more than a few hundred open without becoming unusable, so I'd say that Firefox is doing fine here.
Interestingly, the slowdown actually seems to originate from rendering the tab bar, not from the tabs themselves.
> Because Firefox's "powerful extension model" basically constituted direct access to its internals, which prevented the Firefox developers from making the architectural improvements that were so sorely needed to make it performant.
Not necessarily. They could have added and recommended stable APIs that solve most use cases while still allowing extension developers direct access to the internals at the cost of having to update the extension more frequently.
I wonder how you define 'open', if they are just URLs and perhaps content on disk (+persisted javascript state) - they are not open/live. What's the benefit compared to fetching the contents off the web and rendering them anew?
Personally, I use different windows with several tabs open related to each other, when I done with the matter I close the window.
2000 web may work well for you but there are many of us who desire and even need the newer web standards. I am glad we are extending our applications with open standards rather than closed implementation-specific solutions of the past.
I think we all really under-appreciate the marvel that is our current web. We run large complex distributed applications with remote frontends on our sandboxed environments. For most of the things I don't have to install apps anymore, which means as a linux user I finally get to access a similar ecosystem as everyone else. From running businesses to having fun to tinkering around, everything happens in this single window in our computers.
I have my concerns about google as well but I am glad mozilla and google have led to the interesting new web that we have today.
10-20 are so few you can get away with it in Chrome or even old IE.
Many is somewhere north of 200. Many of us are routinely on 400 and more.
As for why, I at least consider the computer an extension of my mind. What it remember, I don't have to.
Edit: Chrome can handle way more than that, it just becomes very tedious when you cannot see the tabs. Also I don't know if omnibar can search for open tabs like awesomebar?
I have to disagree. In my case, bookmarks are the place where "tabs" go to die. I use Tree Style Tab addon, and tabs (mostly self-)organize as I surf, do research on different topics and whatnot, and I jump in with a window title changing addon or grouping parent tab. I cannot even imagine using a browser without it. But bookmarks do not preserve any of that relational data. Session managers are also luckluster solution at best, because merging a few tabs, a tree or window with existing session is clunky at best. After many years of frustration, I have started working on my own tab syncher/organizer.
Bookmarks are only the coldest of storage for me, with exception of bookmarks bar where I place often accessed web sites.
"Ahhh, finally I got you bug: I saw this just the other day when I looked at x" works so much better when x is an organized as a tree of tabs, in the memory of my browser, a short scroll and a click away instead of having to hunt through bookmarks reloading all of them in hope of figuring out which one it was.
At least with the work I do it isn't alway obvious what is going to be useful or not. But while I don't have a photographic memory (quite the contrary) I'm often able to figure out approximately where to look and also able to find it there.
I'd even recommend you try it. If it works for a simple farmer turned engineer like me, think what it could do for a smart person like you! ;-)
The bookmark menu supports the same hierarchical organization, and since you're pretty much using so many tabs as bookmarks anyway, I don't see much of a distinction. Deleting bookmarks is a bit more fiddly than closing tabs, but in my mind that is a good thing as I find myself accidentally closing tabs all the time. And I bet the "Close Other Tabs" option probably scares the crap out of you
Tabs are supposed to be short-lived, ephemeral things. Bookmarks have the functionality you want
I think you are kind of rude both in that you suggest you absolutely know better than me, and also in how you present your opinions.
I suggest you take a step back and reconsider both:
- computers as bicycles for the mind. If it can do so much for me, think what you could achieve!
- how you interact with others.
PS: no, "close other tabs" doesn't scare me. If I have to close down something I don't feel I have finished yet I can select that subtree and export it to the clipboard as a nested markdown list which I paste into Joplin where it is searchable.
Also if I accidentally close down something I can just press ctrl - shift - t the required number of times, alternatively ctrl - shift - n if a whole window has been closed.
> I don't need the newest standards, 2000 web works perfectly fine for me
How about layouts being broken because (funnily enough) web developers are desperate to use features such as grids and flexbox that make their jobs less painfully awful?
Presuming you're a developer - surely you can sympathise with the desire to get people to upgrade their browsers so that webdev's lives are made more pleasant?
I, for one, think the HTML API (as in, the interface presented to the programmer, not talking about any other API meaning here) couldn't be worse.
How many attributes do you need to enable to place two pictures side by side in vanilla CSS? Is that composable, would the same set of flags work for two paragraphs? What about two tables?
HTML/CSS was never designed for the web we have ended up with, and I don't see how flexbox and any newer standard is making developers lives anything but miserable.
I believe flexbox does actually work for those cases, assuming you set the images/paragraphs/tables to be block elements (or wrap them in divs)?
Flexbox and Grid seem to me like recognition that the existing CSS primitives were designed for laying out documents, and don't fit well for creating UIs.
I think Firefox lost users to Chrome mainly because Google advertises their product constantly.
What you point out about trying to imitate Chrome is right though; when they dumbed down the very complete and functional settings window into an almost empty HTML page that forced to resort to about:config to do anything non trivial, or when they literally copied the terrible Chrome main window structure, I literally wanted to puke. I'm not sure however this is the reason why normal users distanced from the product. Firefox back then was the alternative to Internet Explorer and its load of security and privacy problems, so it started in a context where a good number of users actually wanted to switch to a different browser, despite some lock-ins such as Active-X and the like, I believe even Opera had some well deserved success at a moment for that reason, but none of them could compete anymore when the new kid in the block was a strongly and pervasively advertised product like Chrome.
Firefox today is faster and more user privacy friendly than Chrome; to me if most people don't use it is simply because they don't know. Small personal example: of the many people I installed it, the number of those that went back to Chrome is a single digit percentage, which should suggest they didn't choose Chrome initially, but rather they didn't know about the alternatives.
Now it's the time for all Firefox users to tell others that they chose Firefox, and why, then for Mozilla to invest some damn money in advertising!
Seeing Google from the inside, I have way more trust in it than the general public. But I do use Firefox as my personal browser because I like what they're doing with the tech stack. Having everyone just slap their logo on Chromium sounds like a way towards eventual stagnation.
This is the reason why I was initially excited about, and then disenchanted with Vivaldi. I initially had the impression that they weren't going to use Chromium, and that their return to Opera's roots meant returning to the spirit of innovation that made Opera so compelling back in the day (I will never stop singing the praises of Opera Unite). But then I learned that Vivaldi, too, would be based on Chromium.
I understand questioning the motives, but does the longevity matter?
I have a ton of bookmarks and some extensions, but those carry over easily across chrome variations. If Brave died next year you could switch back to chromium relatively easily, I think.
I guess, I may be missing something, and would like to know what.
Try the privacy sales pitch.
And for mobile there is Firefox-Focus.
Yes you have to do a lot of typing, but hell do I not miss targeted advertisement in browser.
It's really a shame, and I've mentioned this before. If Mozilla sells a 'Developer' version of Firefox that is technically fully open source, but the idea is that it will directly support Firefox development, I will pay, you can add tiers, a VPN (since they're going to offer this anyway) and other goodies (maybe I can finally have a cool @firefox / mozmail.com / foxmail.com email or whatever) and I would probably subscribe to pay for higher tiers if it brings me other benefits, the email bit I mention because they do already provide an email client, it's a shame they never produced their own email service to subsidize their efforts elsewhere.
Mind you they already have Firefox Developer edition, they can keep it free and add a Firefox Professional Developer Edition that guarantees funds go to better funding Firefox development and I will be one of the first to pay for it, if it's got a monthly subscription or yearly. No "discount" tactics either, please, it makes no sense for someone trying to maintain a lot of non-profit open source projects.
Functioning like Chrome in rendering and page features doesn't mean Firefox has to behave like Chrome in the UX. For example, why gut the ability of people to skin and customize their browser as they see fit? Why is Mozilla involved in a running battle against users who want the tabs below the address bar? Why entirely prevent us from sideloading extensions instead of letting us turn the ability on and off?
I think that this is misguided. If a malicious installer sneaks in toolbars it can also install a keylogger/send all of your data to a server/install a firefox fork with the toolbar preinstalled/etc.
If anything this kind of thing only hurts the users that know what they are doing (such as someone wanting to install a 3rd party addon or someone wanting to install addons via nix).
> If a malicious installer sneaks in toolbars it can also install a keylogger/send all of your data to a server/install a firefox fork with the toolbar preinstalled/etc.
If it's totally rogue malware, sure.
The toolbars, on the other hand, were coming from companies like Oracle that operated entirely within the bounds of the law.
Initially, IE6 was much better than the competition. But it was still buggy, and had some very weird rendering behavior. Over time, other browsers became much less buggy, but IE6 was still around. That's how IE6 came to be viewed, in retrospect, as a very buggy browser.
Chrome was the first browser to adopt an evergreen model, where updates were installed automatically. While Chrome (and Firefox, once they adopted this model) have had many bugs over the years, when they fix a bug everyone gets the fix. The problem with IE6 (and later, up until Edge) was that bugs were here permanently: something that web developers needed to work around for as long as anyone was still using that browser.
* Floated block elements would get their margins doubled, so people would typically use padding instead.
* Its implementation of height was more like min-height.
While I'm sure Firefox and Chrome have open bugs that are older than that, I'd expect them to be much less important than these critical misinterpretations of CSS.
Well, I can track down examples of similar critical bugs for Chrome, but then again, I guess it would just move the goal posts to another defence round for Chrome.
You think Chrome, Firefox, Edge, or Safari (the main evergreen browsers) have bugs that have been open for years and are as critical as considering an element's width to include its border and padding? This misinterpretation of the CSS specification was something that essentially all front-end developers had to work around for 10+ years!
Yes I think so, all of them have bugs that web developers have to work around, again should we look at Chrome's bug database or maybe AdWords has a better source of information for such workarounds?
If you want to point to an example bug, I think that would help me understand your point, yes.
(To give a sense a sense of the scale I think we're talking about, this would be a bug that, say, more than half of web developers have to understand and work around in a typical month)
Whereas Chrome makes life miserable for users not using Chrome, because of the sheer amount of non-standard, Chrome-only features used in current webdev.
Make better and paid/subscription based(!) dev tools, instead screwing the UI and disabling add-ons. People are buying jetbrains products even though free ones exist.
I do use firefox but all the auto-update features are off on desktop. On mobile I am/will be stuck with 68 forever, I suppose as well.
Perhaps FF developer edition was meant to test the waters for this approach? Do web people actually use that? I never got to the point of making it part of my process, but I'm not doing enough web to really have a process.
In any case, a dev browser can only be relevant if it's representative of end user browsers. The history of browser wars has shown that a superior dev experience can be a decisive factor in winning users, but it can never be more than a supporting role.
These days a far more plausible dev level monetization angle would be Mozilla's unique position as the origin of Rust. Spin out a Rust subsidiary that sells service and perhaps also some premium tooling/SaaS in the open market while doing work on Rust/Servo/FF for a nominal fee that allows both sides to keep the lights on.
But that (just like paid browser dev tools) would be B2B and apparently Mozilla Corp completely fails to see itself as a B2B actor outside of consumer eyeballs deals like the Google deal and the increasingly outbrainy start tab fillers.
But failure to go that way is hardly surprising. Where would the business skillset come from when the entire organizion outside the tech teams has more in common with the great money furnaces of Wikimedia than with anything else?
The only way I can see for that kind of transition to go well would be some form of merger/acquisition with someone already existing in those fields (consultancy and/or tooling). "you take the engineers, we'll be buying services". But the successful ones would be very reluctant to suddenly load themselves with the entirety of Rust. It would probably take someone owner-managed who brought a decent amount of idealism into the equation. Total number of candidates might amount to zero.
I don't know if that was really Mozilla's fault or that Google was always in a position where they could force Mozilla's hand.
When Firefox was at its absolute maximum market-share, Google was already the "start page of the internet" thanks to its search page. They used this and other marketing/bundling strategies (which were possible thanks to Google's resources) to aggressively grow Chrome's market share at an unprecedented rate. Compare Firefox' incredibly heroic battle against IE which, after a decade of advocacy, archived an unbelievably-seeming 30% global market share - with the rise of Chrome, which went from 0% to 50% in a few years and completely obliterated IE. [1]
Sorry, but that was never an even playing field.
It's amazing what they did manage to archive in their position - but with Google dominating both the browser and the way web sites are discovered, they have far more leverage to influence web standards than Mozilla has. I think Mozilla's choice was one of "copy Chrome and keep at least some amount of influence on the web" or "do your own thing and become incompatible with the web that actually exists".
I don't remember Google throwing any marketing at being the start page of the internet. That was a Reddit campaign trying to get users to switch from Digg.
I don't think so, i switched to Firefox about two years ago, after the major upgrades, and I think it's way snappier, faster and more usable than chrome.
Pretty much every Firefox discussion on Hacker news you have commenters that say they just can't stand Firefox because it's 10ms slower than Chrome. Google also has been advertising Chrome heavily for the last ten years. And there was a time when Firefox was undeniably significantly behind on performance.
On our Javascript heavy app Chrome is still about twice as fast as Firefox. Admittedly it is not your average app, but I cannot confirm claims that Firefox is almost as fast as Chrome.
Exactly my point. Mozilla used a rational numbering scheme where the larger the change, the larger the increment, with full integers being reserved for major changes. Then Chrome started changing its integer every few weeks and Firefox upended its own scheme to keep from looking unfashionable.
For a rolling-release model like this a scheme could include the date released, e.g. Firefox 20.07.x which is also used by Linux distros. Right now version numbers are pretty useless.
firefox lost it's market share because chrome was a better, faster, more complete browser. Mozilla didn't need to develop any strategy other than building and even better browser. So they tactically designed a safer language, then used it to build a better browser. It was working as planned, but they just abandoned it. Now they don't have a better browser and I wonder if they'll ever have one.
No.
Bigger marketing-budget and better positioning in reaching users.
If they use google with a non-Chrome browser they will be prompted to install Chrome because it is better.
Some people might have just installed it so Alphabet would stop nagging them.
Youtube supported some old deprecated protocol that only Chrome still supported so the users perceived youtube as performing better more reliable on Chrome, and it also gave Alphabet an excuse to say:" This does not happen with Chrome". Slyly withholding the information that Alphabet created this unpleasent user-experience in the first place.
So that smells of deceit, and manipulation to me.
Thus, even if it were true that Chrome is more performant than any other browser, I would not put my trust and security in a company resolved to use these types of actions.
// Edit 2
Well I just found out that Chrome is dropping/has dropped Certificate Pinning.
How is that for improvement of the security of you user-base?
FF still supports it.
//Edit 3
There was also a paper trending on HN on how QUIC aka HTTP2 threatens a user's privacy.
The design-decision was explained with performance in the paper; I can get that talking about a protocol concerned
with speeding up the internet, but coming from a company monetizing surveilance and targeted advertisement, is very disquieting.
Lack of good built-in RSS reader is puzzling. Could have been their way into offering paid web services as the cross platform browser is so perfectly positioned for this feature.
Sometimes, a group makes no poor decisions, or no none that actually matter, but their goals are overcome by events, and they fail. It's not about what Mozilla did, it's about what Google did; Firefox is simply not going to win against Chrome in terms of marketshare. Of course they can still win in terms of making their browser more awesome for the people who actually use it!
So would anyone care to explain how vimperiator style customization is possible with webextensions? Newer Firefox explicitly does not support that level of customization.
Yes I also use the various attempts at vim emulation in the newer Firefox versions. The attempts are commendable given the limitations of the APIs. None of them are anywhere near as powerful in terms of vim like behaviour. If you never used any of the really powerful old style extensions you have no point of comparison.
But this is irrelevant. Previously extensions could do anything to alter Firefox. Webextensions are deliberately limited in scope - this is explicitly stated by the Firefox developers. So to say extensions as well supported as ever is factually wrong. The support is much more limited now.
It's like going from a pad and paper to a typewriter. Sure, you can write much faster, more precisely, and everybody to the same standards, but you're fucked if what you wanted to do was draw a spaceship. Then there's always the apologists who come in to say that their ASCII-art spaceships are basically fulfilling the same function of the ones you used to draw and you should stop complaining.
I can't speak for the other 25%, but this is certainly true for me.
I stopped using the official Firefox when they decided to throw away the entire plug-in ecosystem and moved to Quantum or whatever. After they did, it's been a long, but very stable slide down in power user functionality and what made it Firefox.
As one of those conservatives who always whined about major changes:
Nah, that's not the moment of doom.
The moment of doom came when google chose to spread their browser bundled with freeware and people all around ended up just having it as their major browser. Many not even knowing how that happened because they never remove the check marks on the installers. I'm still pissed that people where I installed Firefox now use Chrome as their main browser without having even realised when that changed....I wish there would be a way to block just google/Chrome installers.
Most of the people don't know/care about where Chrome comes from or that it's good to un-google or whatever. It's just a minority caring about this. This minority is not relevant to the overwhelming dominance of google.
> Firefox built its userbase by being different than the dominant browser, then decided the only way to not die was to be exactly like the dominant browser except with less icky behind-the-scenes privacy behavior.
Yes, that's also were Mozilla lost me. Also since last year's questionable privacy problems, I really see no point in continuing to use Firefox. Just going for maximum performance/best integration which is Safari.
For sure alternative implementations will come, Kosmonaut looks promising. Actually KHTML/Konqueror which Webkit is based on also came out of nowhere, when the Web standards where already considered sufficiently complex for nobody to do a new implementation. So I think this is fertile ground for new efforts...
Agree the same thing started with Opera, previously they were known from inventing many features (some of them actually Chrome copied when it first appeared). Once Chrome started gaining traction they started be the ones that were copying Chrome. Ultimately dropping the Presto engine and becoming just another skin for Chrome. I didn't use Opera and later Firefox to get Chrome experience.
> Firefox built its userbase by being different than the dominant browser
To be fair, part of what distinguished Firefox from the original Mozilla browser was that it was more similar to Internet Explorer, e.g. supporting alt+D to focus the location field and that kind of thing. But I agree that becoming too much like Chrome is a bad idea - if I wanted Chrome, I would use Chrome.
> Firefox built its userbase by being different than the dominant browser
Not really. firefox rose tu domination as bland copy of the Internet Explorer, the dominating Browser that time. They also added parts of their own like tabs and addons, but that were just gadgets for those who knew about them.
> The 25% of internet users who wanted what Firefox offered ten years ago still want the same thing now,
What 25%? Addons are hardly used by anyone, except Adblockers. Even the most well known addons are only used by around 1-2% of the users. Adblockers are more popular, but even they seem to stuck by just 20 or 30% of firefox-users.
Firstly, the question of browser superiority and choice is not just about speed.
You wouldn't want to choose an operation procedure A) over B) simply because A is faster as A has a mortality rate 30%higher that B.
Secondly, the web is not high-end-gaming so a few ms more or less don't really matter IMHO. Also note that Alphabet might slow their service down deliberately, because you are not using their browser.
Lastly, to finish off with a strong argument, I want you to look at https://arewefastyet.com/win10/overview?numDays=60 . It always depends on the benchmark and circumstances, as I havn't checked other OSs on that site.
You mean you find the browser to be slower? There's more to a browser than its JavaScript engine. Firefox and Chrome also use entirely different rendering engines.
As for which browser really is faster, it depends on the workload. Someone already linked to https://areWeFastYet.com/
Google entered the game later.
So according to your logic one should always drop dead the moment s.o. else enters the game.
Besides, without having read all responses to your post, FF is different, or do you think Alphabet would condone a browser that has container tabs and disables a lot of advertisement/tracking out of the box.
Also offering what I had 10years ago, means not being able to to implement new features as quickly, it stagnates development;and on top of that, it will mean less innovation, so you could turn around, crying foul, and say that not enough has been done to be innovative.
In my opinion, it is a void argument, a friend to all is a friend to none so to speak.
And let's not forget, Google/Alphabet had Chrome support an old protocol that was deprecated to make youtube work best only on their browser. A move in itself qualifying as sabotage of a competing product. It is only possible because Alphabet controls a lot of the infrastructure, people use(more on that a few paragraphs down).
Mozilla needs money so they make a deal with Google keeping it as the default search-engine, which means giving revenue to their competitors since Alphabet also produces the Chrome-Browers.
IMHO, Mozilla is not at fault here. The everything is free mentality and the economic playing field is.
Alphabet, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple are the Robber Barons of the 21st century. Just like Rockefeller et all were a hundred some years ago.
We now see first hand what happens if they are not reeled in and not split up. There is an eerie similarity to what happened with the old barons.
Thankfully that process gained some tracking in some countries and I do hope it will continue.
Yes I am aware there is Chromium, Iron, Brave, Opera, but I am cautious and wouldn't want to touch them with a 10 foot pole, because the rendering-engine is provided by Alphabet which thrives on information gathered against the users will.
All nice products, but my argument here is the same as the one against foreign chips in domestic security products. There is always this hint of doubt. One only has to look at the development-frameworks e.g. Facebook offered for free turning every app based on them into a data gathering tool.
So I can only agree with posters below: FF is superior and more innovative and secure than Chrome and most people wanna be hip, not have to think and that is where the bigger advertisement-budget comes
in.
If one screams loud enough, people apparently do believe it is healthy to eat a certain brown excrement while being part of that a huge surveillance botnet that is Google.
//Edit2:
And regarding security and innovation in that area. Google was very innovative. It dropped Certificate Pinning for their Chrome-Browser.
The only thing that alerts one do MITM-Attacks if an attacker gains access to a key for signing a certificate.
IMHO one more reason to stick with FF or move over.
These days people think what Chrome provides is everything there is.
I for myself vote with my wallet. Adblocker(because Alphabet also runs an ad-provider, also for other sides), I do not use Google as search-engine and if I must hooktube instead of youtube :)
I have the same opinion. Yet multiple times I have been "corrected" on HN by former/current Mozilla employees that this strategy of trying to match every new feature in Chrome was the only option. Seems like there are some fundamental disagreements between Firefox developers and Firefox users. Whenever I read the Firefox developer discussions I always feel the tone is that "we know best". Other users do not have a voice. Sure you can donate to the Foundation, but as stated in the OP Firefox developers are employed and paid by the Corporation. I sincerely doubt they are interested in any constructive feedback from other users, even if they are supporters.
The mentioning of DoD contractors made we wonder: would the EU help fund the development of Firefox, in order to secure competition in the browser market?
Mozilla would need to restructure and move Firefox to the foundation, but MDN, Firefox and possibly Rust could be funded by donations, corporate sponsors and perhaps the EU, assuming the money could be directed correctly. It would require a management skilled in seeking out these funding options and a brutal focus on openess, but the latter IS something Mozilla knows how to do.
I think part of this deal must involve radically simplifying the web and reflect on the EU's sponsorship of W3C via ERCIM. We've seen web tech becoming more complicated all the time, with self-acclaimed "standardization bodies" (WHATWG) acting as fig leaf for Google's take-over of the web. Now with Firefox on the brink to drop out, like all other "browser vendors" (Opera, MS) except Google before, and failing to create a new browser engine in about 10 years of development (!) with highly competent developers, it must be clear to everyone there's something very wrong with trusting the web as the universal digital medium for accessing nearly every piece of information. It's also becoming extremely hard to find pages that used to be ubiquitous only 2 years ago, so we're heading into an information crisis (on top of information warfare). W3C may have acted in good faith, but in the end contributed to irresponsible CSS complexity (which, in turn, is the result of having no standing/statue and no representation but rather a "pay-as-you-go" sponsorship model). WHATWG have consistently denied including HTML/CSS profiles for simplified subsets (as eg suggested by MS). Time to stop playing this naive web march of progress game only benefitting very few US companies, at the expense of everybody else.
I don't think it's fair to make Google particularly responsible for WHATWG and the over complicated web. The other vendors were on board and used the sentiment against XHTML from those who directly did write-once HTML, right before the web out grew their manual skill level and became capable of offering tooling. The results have naturally been a hodge-podge since WHATWG was about using the sentiments of everyone against a standard, and the results are everything in every direction except the track the W3C standard was on.
What is needed in some ability to identify the extension, so that the user may substitute their own, or may want to cache it instead. This would also improve speed, since it can avoid download it for each separate web page, and can also substitute a native code implementation.
Not bad an idea at all! Hadn't considered bytecodes for layout algorithms, though I guess it would work with regular js as well, and I AFAICS Project Houdini is about providing the necessary core rendering API.
- specify profiles that can be targetted by web developers and browser developers; demand web assets to be delivered in sane and portable formats (rather than a mish-mash of JSON configs and plugins)
- in public tenders, demand that web sites for public information don't become apps: announce sites requiring JavaScript as application/html
- promote, invest into new web frameworks for apps (not sites) that abstract/isolate from HTML+CSS as underlying rendering mechanisms such that these can run stand-alone (like applets used to); I kindof like React, but unfortunately it ties apps to browser runtimes which isn't adequate for apps most of the time IMO
- transfer specs to standardization bodies with fair representation and transparency
- push for energy-efficiency; require that sites with not that great information density can render on easily-produced devices before the end of times
- push distributed web tech
Going for complete backward-compat is impossible, but humans used to do just fine without today's web of shit. HTML is rooted in markup technology which had highly organized content representations since the late 1960s.
> announce sites requiring JavaScript as application/html
You assume sites would deliberately make their sites stop working in browsers because you don't like JS? This is not going to happen. What would be the incentive?
> - in public tenders, demand that web sites for public information don't become apps: announce sites requiring JavaScript as application/html
That would be bold. Unfortunately I dont see any lobbyist being motivated to inform policy makers accordingly and no politican himself having the knowledge and cochones for this step.
I'm all stoked for publicly funded open-source software, but somehow The EU and most governments seem to be pretty bad at doing this. I recall numerous initiatives that aimed to create open-source ecosystems with massive amounts of public money (billions of euros for some projects) in the past, each and every one one of them ended up as a big disaster.
The latest attempt at publicly funded software is Gaia-X, the EU's (actually mostly France and Germany's) plan to build a European data infrastructure. I really don't want to be negative but I have a really strong feeling that it will fail as well (of course not before all the money has disappeared).
It would actually be cool to see what a organization like Mozilla could do with a sizeable public grant, they can't possibly spend that money worse than it's being spent now.
Why would the EU give even one cent where the C level execs and board members collect cushy pay-cheques and fire the "hard" skilled people?
Who appoints the board of Mozilla? What will it take for them to be replaced? Can they even be replaced? It's apparent they're protecting a CEO who in any other organisation would have been canned years ago.
Yeah for some time I had high hopes for FiWare but it turned out it was just subsidies for the tendering companies without ANY real incentive for a sustainable business model past the funding period.
I was responsible for securing the funding for such tasks from the EU for Mozilla. This can work, e.g. [https://browser.mt/]. However, the latest layoffs have basically gutted this plan.
Is there any chance of the EU funding a Firefox fork that is optimized for integration with other EU initiatives, e.g. data sovereignty and individual data ownership, https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/08/11/1006555/eu-data-...? If a fork is too big a bridge to cross, how about extending the roadmap of an existing-but-neglected Web Standard, contributing reference implementation code to Firefox?
Mozilla wasn't built in a day, and neither will successors. Step one is to get funding for one person with a forward-looking vision and experience with the non-public history that got Firefox to this point. There is a narrow window to preserve a subset of the brain trust for core features (Servo?) before developers get scattered to the winds of other companies.
Finally, if Firefox will eventually lose to Chrome, perhaps we need to step back and look at core protocols (like the Gopher reboot) and new security models (e.g. running each browser tab in a hardware-isolated virtual machine). Extensibility was a core offering of Firefox. There may be new optima on the trade-off chart of security vs. power, when running on newer hardware.
Generally the EU wants to fund open projects not companies.
So funding the implementation of a Web Standard in a Firefox, say, is “out”, but implementation of a browser extension is “in” as it’s (more-or-less) browser independent.
This would likely require the bulk of Mozilla to be based in Europe. It could be achieved for sure, but it would take years to transfer the relevant knowledge. I don't expect MoFo and MoCo leadership to be willing to entertain such possibilities, considering how "valley" their outlook seems to be.
People don't move abroad easily, particularly very experienced ones with the historical and institutional knowledge that is really key for a project the size of Firefox - uprooting their families to a foreign (and likely not even English-speaking) country, is a difficult choice. This goes double for Bay Area / SV people used to massive salaries that are hard to justify and achieve elsewhere, and people moving to Europe where immigration bureaucracy is not trivial. Would you take a pay cut and force your family to emigrate just to keep working on a browser, when you've probably plenty of easier and more rewarding options?
As for remote, the political support to fund a project effectively based in the US would be zero.
You also forget that EU institutions don't typically enjoy the freedom to spend a few hundred millions on the spot - they have processes and rules and parliamentary oversight to ensure agreement between 27 governments. It's not like the US president cutting a check, more like the US Congress approving funds - to get any significant amount, it would take some time.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but it would realistically be "next year" (at least) rather than "next week".
I think remote work is missing the point here. It's politically difficult for governments to spend their tax revenue by paying a largely foreign workforce.
Not just politically difficult, it's also generally unwise. In the event of deteriorating relationships, you'll suddenly lose access to what you've been funding, because the US would declare it "a matter of national security" and outlaw the export. You can still work with the sources you have, but it'd be hard to keep it running smoothly. Much better to not have that risk if you're going to spend billions on it.
It makes so much sense for the EU to start investing in an open web and open source software. A relatively cheap option to move towards a society with better data protection and online civil liberties.
I’ve never took the time to really dig into the details of what the EU is exactly doing right now, but it seems regulation is higher on the list than investment and innovation.
They've actually funded quite a few projects through their Next-Generation Internet initiative [1] [2]. Relatively small grants, but many, and available without too much red tape, which I think is a huge boon in getting projects off the ground - if just a few of those are a success, so is NGI.
(Disclosure: I'm the recipient of one of those grants.)
EU research grants have an incredibly high documentation burden and Europe in general still has a problem considering software development as research. It's usually everything that leads up to the development and then the development itself is mostly an afterthought.
The fine European-academic tradition of considering actual development as grunt work that is an unworthy thing to do for the great minds. You can see where it got the European software industry as compared to the US. It is endlessly frustrating.
"Software Engineering" in Europe is the other kind of bad, learning methodology without knowing what it is applied to, and learning some "enterprise grade" rubbish.
It is as if no one who has anything to say in academia here knows how good software is actually created. And that is probably the case.
Does somebody know what the remaining ~750 people are working on? How many of them work on Firefox, Pocket, Lockwise, VPN, HR, marketing, ...? Is there somewhere an overview about that?
Many here disapprove with the recent layoffs and especially the areas affected by them, but I'd like to better understand how many people still work on Firefox (desktop browser, mobile browsers, dev tools, servo, ...), compared to topics like Pocket and VPN and supporting roles like HR or marketing, to get a better picture of how how I feel about Mozilla's future.
A possible alternative source of income for Mozilla I think would be, and one I haven’t seen mentioned before, providing consulting services in their areas of expertise.
For example, demand for Rust engineers seems to be steadily increasing[1] and I can’t think of a better company with a larger concentration of Rust expertise than Mozilla. Perhaps the same could work for other areas (ex frontend), but I’m biased toward Rust.
Due to lack of experience in this regard I’m not sure if this could actually work, but I could imagine allocating part of their engineering time budget to consultation, whose income would fund their core products.
[1] Besides all the articles popping up about starting to employ Rust by well known companies, my anecdote as a full-time Rust SDE is that I’m getting more and more requests on LinkedIn, and not just for the usual crypto roles.
There are so many ways for Mozilla to leverage their core competencies. Unfortunately failed management with no means to remove them means none of that will happen.
Executive leadership at Mozilla is a disgrace that has now caused a tangible negative result on the future of the internet. The fact that Mitchell Baker still leads this organization is insane. An absolutely inept failure somehow still leads Mozilla. It’s absolutely crazy
You do realize that Mitchell has only been ceo of mozilla corp since January, right? And that almost all of the C suite has turned over in the last few years?
I completely agree. It’s depressing to see the whole thing steadily come apart at the seams due to their own leadership (or lack thereof, one could argue).
Actually I realize what I wrote above is less true now as they have fired a good number of their incredibly skilled engineers, many of them of course Rust developers. So I suppose my post should be rephrased along the lines of “what Mozilla should or could have done”.
Yesterday I started donating $10/month to the Mozilla Foundation. TIL it’s not the Mozilla Foundation that develops Firefox.
I stopped using Chrome when they added the “feature” that logging into gmail was the same as logging into the browser.
If there was a little notification to the top right in the Firefox with a link to “pay”, even if it was optional, there is some proportion of users who would. And I would bet that your average Firefox user is an order of magnitude more likely to do this than your average chrome user.
So I wonder why they don’t do this? I’ve had similar frustrations for other products I get for free that I wanted to pay for.
I had the same question. And what's even stranger is that the Mozilla.com (not.org) website has no way to send them money, and doesn't even mention the paid products like the VPN. At least Pocket gets a mention which I think you can pay for.
So yeah the link is out there but you really have to look for it. Which is actually s.th. quite nice.
Imagine they would go about nagging people. You might say one of 2 things:
a) So in their face, others are probably donating what do they need me for
b) So in my face, that is indescent, I do not donate.
Whatever the choice happy donating; I already did.;)
That's the Mozilla Foundation. Firefox is developed by the Mozilla Corporation, which is a for-profit entity wholly owned by the Foundation and with separate funding. In fact millions of dollars are transferred from the Corporation to the Foundation in royalties every year. Donating to the Foundation does not fund Firefox development!
If you want to support just Firefox, and not the other Mozilla initiatives, there's no way to do that. People reasonably do not agree with the other things Mozilla spends their money on.
Mozilla must put the advocacy bits aside and focus on the core product. Perhaps the problem with a non-technical CEO is that the advocacy and new shiny stuff is given as much importance as the invisible (and insanely complex) work that makes a browser fast and safe.
A total failure of strategy here - if the leadership couldn't find other revenue sources and partnerships in 5 years they have to fire themselves. Instead they axe the future of Firefox.
I'm not sure. I think advocacy is a core part of its USP -- Mozilla is privacy-friendly, and that's an important point, especially as all internet users, even average consumers, are being constantly hit over the head by how data-hungry these huge corporations are.
It's an uphill battle, sure, and there are a lot of things to overcome, but I'm not so sure I'd blame the leadership on this entirely.
Mozilla is doomed when it's held to such an impossible standard (such as being "spyzilla" for supporting TLS PKI).
All this poo-pooing on Mozilla doing anything less than paranoid-extreme makes people leave for other browsers, which aren't any better, and often are way worse for privacy.
Does anyone know if the new stuff touted over the last few years (servo, webrender etc) is going to make it into the mainline Firefox release?
I moved back to Firefox back when they released Quantum and was really excited about the plans to make it even better - the blog posts from Lin Clark around parallel layout engines, web render etc. made me really excited about the trajectory of FF [1]
I know this stuff is complicated and they're working to get it right, but I heard in the recent round of layoffs most of the Servo team has been decimated. WebRender is only in the mainline releases for Windows and experimental everywhere else [2]
This is completely anecdotal, and maybe I’m the only one, but native browsers have become so good that I’ve gone from decades of using Netscape/Firefox/opera/chrome/whatever to mainly using Edge and Safari. I don’t really need to share a profile between my browsers as I use windows at work and Mac/iOS for personal use.
We’ve gotten to a point in time where the browser is simply really good, and I think that simply makes it hard to make a living if your primary product is a browser.
Even Microsoft abandoned having their own because they no longer needed it to be completely their own to sell their products.
Just the other day I saw a job opening for a "Chrome developer." First time I've seen that, and I thought to myself, "wow, we've really turned a corner..."
No, it was at an SaaS company. I hope you get what I'm saying here...it wasn't Google looking for an engineer to work on the Chrome browser. It was for an engineer to develop exclusively on the Chrome platform.
> In ten years it’s possible that the Mozilla Corporation may be just a memory, with the Mozilla Foundation surviving as a modestly-funded advocacy organization.
Maybe I'm pessimistic here, but what exactly could a "modestly-funded advocacy organization" with nothing left but their brand archive against Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc?
Without Firefox, I don't see what kind of leverage they would have to continue their mission. Firefox also was what gave their brand relevance to the public.
The only thing I could see is them becoming a political lobbying organisation or "think tank", trying to advance their mission by pushing for more internet regulation. But even then, they will be pitted against vastly more powerful lobbies.
Agreed (Mozilla employee 2013-2017). If I were going to add something, it's how important Mozilla was c. 2004-2010 when "the Internet" was dominated by OECD knowledge workers using Windows. When iPhone brought "the Internet" to everyone (mainly via its clone Android) c. 2010-2015, browsers moved from the center of the action to plumbing. Like a retired sports star, Mozilla has never been able to cope emotionally with the idea that the world has moved on. Worse, because on some level they know it, the cognitive dissonance gets sharper every year.
The google contract seems totally at odds with mozilla's privacy focus.
And there seem to have been too many off-target projects recently.
IMHO, they should keep a focus on privacy, and the core browser, adding VPN and perhaps CDN services, all bundled as a subscription. Maybe also ad-free search; perhaps duckduckgo should buy mozilla, or vice-versa? I think a lot of people would be willing to pay for a 'safe, private portal' to the internet.
I think advocacy alone is almost worthless when it comes to defining standards and ensuring they're open. You have to have code (and users) in the game.
I have to say this is one of the instances where I’m glad Apple’s hunger for profit and privacy engineering intersect. On Mac at least with Safari there is a privacy oriented browser left.
Given that they are probably the only company that could pull it off, I'd really like to see apple become more open(i.e. Stallman-ism constrained by reality) philosophically - they love to tell their users right and wrong, but if they made a fairly open ARM MacBook that I could run anything other than MacOS (If it's not windows I want things like eBPF to play with) I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
I’m slightly annoyed to agree with you here, but I do. I also hope Epic takes Apple to the mats and gets some concessions from the justice department with regards to all the stuff going down with ‘platforms’ and ‘app stores’.
Brave is moving fast (and not doing a perfect job) trying to find a revenue stream that doesn't involve selling out their users. They're trying a lot of new ideas and from what I can tell are learning from their missteps (though I think the linked situation was blown way out of proportion for what it actually was).
Seems like exactly what's needed in the context of the current situation, no?
Well.... move fast and break things it not necessarily a nice motto especially if you burn down the very house people live in. And let's not forget, it was deliberate move.
I for one am glad I never used Brave.
There are only a very few rules that shan't be broken.
Breaking trust is one of them, because it is easy to loose and hard to regain, so far FF/Mozilla 1, Brave/Chrome 0, I do not know about Vivaldi.... MS and Apple do not really count, as they are OS-Vendors and can betray user trust in a different manner.
Mozilla has had more missteps than Brave because it's been around longer. I can't name all the ones which betrayed trust, but the Mr. Robot scandal comes to mind:
Having said that, I still use both Firefox and Brave. It's ok to make missteps as long as you fix them and learn from them. Otherwise, I'd never use any product and never have any friends. No one is perfect.
I am really surprised they did not go for the VPN offer way sooner. It's a massive market in which all that matters in how much you trust your VPN provider. And the only insurance you've got is your VPN provider telling you they don't collect data which is hard to believe considering how much money user data is worth. The only thing Mozilla has plenty is people trusting that they are fighting for greater privacy as they've always have. It seems so obvious that I would like to know if there's a reason they did not go for that sooner. Consider also that integrating a user-friendly Mozilla VPN manager in the browser could bump Firefox downloads. So why?
I'm less worried about the product than the organization.
IMHO, Mozilla as a company has never really had a credible business model beyond Google (mainly) choosing to compensate them for directing some search traffic to them (and general ass coverage when it comes to allegations of monopolist behavior). The layoffs are a consequence of their strategy for finding alternate revenue streams being simply too weak to produce tangible results. Certainly not anywhere near levels that would allow them to justify having the ambitions of a big VC founded silicon valley based company with offices in e.g. the middle of the real estate bubble called Mountain View (as well as several other premium locations world wide).
What they do technically with their browser product is fine however and worth protecting. I just don't see that costing in the order of hundreds of millions/year. A couple of million goes a long way to keep a world wide collective of developers going. Many OSS projects manage with far less. It doesn't require maintaining offices in the downtown areas of SFO (in addition to Mountain View), London, Paris, Portland, Berlin, Taipei, etc.
I use Firefox exclusively; like many other users. The wider community of Firefox developers and users has plenty of ways to keep the project going long term in one way or another.
Same with Rust. Rust will be fine without Mozilla. It's widely used and loved by engineers useful to quite a lot of companies. IMHO the rust community is actually much less dependent on central management by anyone (including Mozilla) than the Firefox browser. Most long lived OSS projects need independence like that and thrive because of their independence.
Luckily, Mozilla has a very decent licensing policy (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/license-policy/) that crucially does not include any copyright transfer. That means their role is strictly as a facilitator of development; not as an owner of the copyright to the code. That means that in principle there is room for other companies to get involved or for independent developers to get involved.
Which is why I'm not worried about the project surviving the drama of their mother organization imploding or not. I hope it leads to some sensible changes in the Mozilla Foundation.
I don't think that would have made sense: Mozilla stays relevant by producing a browser that lots of people want to use. This requires substantial investment in developer salaries, or else other browsers get better and you don't.
If they had taken your approach, I think they wouldn't have been able to get out Quantum, and then Firefox would be much smaller now, and be even less able to influence the direction of the web.
But they only spent a fraction of the cash on developing Firefox features like Quantum that people want, and essentially wasted the rest of crazy projects (FirefoxOS), buying things that their users hate (Pocket), and outlandish C-level salaries. They could have paid the core developers and had the endowment.
If they wanted to do the non-core stuff, that's something that the foundation that managed the endowment might have done with x% of its capital, simply by investing in companies that align with Mozilla's mission.
They have a pretty significant cash pile which they mentioned last year. The quarantine kinda threw a wrench in things, but they are still paying the people they let go through the end of the year. So it's not like they're imminently about to run out of cash.
Mozilla can take government grants or even subscription money to become a Cloudflare for consumers. Enable uses to content rate any content including youtube videos and protect each other at massive scale. As a parent I would pay for a safer browser experience for my kids. The Disney of browsers if you will. Provide a leader board of sorts for top contributors who have given time to rate content, money to the foundation, code contributions, etc. They don’t have to sink down the advertising hole either. This is just the tip of the iceberg of ideas I saw in 5 minutes. A corporation paired down to focus on consumer problems or government contracts related to internet security can be nimble and beat the FAANG model precisely because they don’t have to bend to the will of advertisers.
I have to chime in...
Mozilla seems to pull back on its investment in web standards and browser engine development for revenue reasons.
Instead focusing on Pocket, VPN services and similar stuff, all the while keeping up a dubious privacy-advocating public image.
Pocket, Mozilla VPN etc might look like they promise more short-term revenue.
My view is that Mozilla wants to complete its metamorphosis into a near-irrelevant Opera clone.
Gecko/Servo, Firefox and MDN are the valuable parts of Mozilla (to me). Introducing paid premium membership to MDN would have been acceptable. Now I fear that I have to revert my Chromium->Firefox switch.
Also, people might not be as gullible as Mozilla thinks regarding their pro-privacy stance. They recently did a billboard and train ad campaign in my area (germany) about tracking and how they claim to prevent it. I doubt that won over significant numbers of users.
Sure, they struggled to survive going down the developer-centric "poweruser" road. I don't dispute that.
What they're missing is revenue-generating consumer products on a large enough scale. Still, I fear that on the basis of their current portfolio and corporate image they won't be able to become competitive in that area.
Introducing paid products focused on more niche markets (e.g. developers) would have seemed more sustainable to me.
Let me iterate on my comment from the Manifesto submission [1]
Their number one point is:
>The Internet is an integral part of modern life—a key component in education, communication, collaboration, business, entertainment and society as a whole.
Mozilla can use the internet and spend their billions on young third-world talents and offer them a job that educates them in web- and browser development. They only have to be in the bay area if they want copying Google to be their number one priority.
There could be thousands of engineers working on Firefox and servo with the benefit that
1) they would develop content that would be guaranteed to work on Firefox and secure Mozilla's position. They would have a path to a growing user base that would lead to an even bigger Google income.
2) there would be a career path without the need for immigration for third world talent, which would end colonial economy dependencies and make the world a better place.
With such an engineering force, they could enter plenty of markets and won't depend on the Google money in the future.
The good thing is, Firefox and Servo is open source. If Mozilla doesn't want to do it, some other player can.
Definitely secured for the executives and directors. They have very little incentive to make things work and continue to hire their friends and pay themselves lavish salaries.
Mozilla had a lot of useless parasites. None of the mouth-breathers who organized the witch-hunt against Brendan Eich had any meaningful contributions to Firefox or Thunderbird, they used to work on irrelevant projects like OpenBadges. They seem to be gone, but I suspect they are laying off the wheat and keeping the sycophantic chaff. There are only 263 contributors listed on Mozilla’s git repo, and many are not employees.
> But as the number of Firefox users decreases (due to the growing market dominance of the Chrome browser), and those users click on fewer online ads (for example, because they’re spending less during the COVID-19 pandemic), the willingness of Google and other customers to pay the Mozilla Corporation for those users decreases accordingly.
> Thus when COVID-19 hit and the Mozilla Corporation hit a brick wall in terms of search engine revenue...
Did the pandemic really have an impact on search engine revenue? From what I can tell, users are spending more time online, viewing (and maybe even clicking) more ads and searching for more things online. Google's stock is back to its pre-pandemic peak level, so they seem to be doing fine.
Did Google play hard-ball with Mozilla during their contract negotiations, and manage to lower the cost of their default search engine deal? If so, I feel like that should've generated a bigger outrage than some Chrome UX/Security people tweaking the URL bar. Especially with all the antitrust stuff going on.
Companies are spending less money for ads, some even went bankrupt. People also have less money to spend, or are just careful not wasting it in uncertain times.
Though, yes, in most countries it normalizes, but the dent in income is visable.
And yet, Google’s revenue only decreased by 2%, and Facebook’s increased by 11%. I can see Google making an argument not to increase the amount of money they pay to Mozilla this time, but not to decrease it.
Not really? Revenue in Q1 and q2 for Alphabet were sinking. What went up were other areas than advertisment, as also they were doing some budget-savings, to reduce the actual fall of revenue, saving some costs at the end.
Hmm, yeah I was talking about total revenue, but "Google Search & other" revenue went down by about 13% between Q1 and Q2. Which is not great, but the market seems to think this will be a temporary thing (their stock is trading at February prices).
I always felt that Mozilla should have seen nodejs as their future, and in kind tried to build a gecko powered version (and therefore could have a real successor to XulRunner - electron before its time) I think this may have been a seriously missed opportunity to unset v8. However quantum may have been a little late to the party.
I’m not as vehement against their other moves, though. Pocket could and maybe can be a real business, if they focused on delivering a top tier experience. I thought it could have been a better feedly and/or pinboard alternative, I just haven’t seen enough compelling features there as of of yet. After all, Mozilla Needs alternative revenue streams beyond their search deals.
I also think they could have been an internet identity broker, bringing a unified web identity via their Firefox account service. Alas that may have been too big to crack.
May need to reinvestigate Pocket, but aside from that and just using Firefox as my main browser, I feel like they lost a lot of steam and some goodwill with the developer community.
> I doubt that Mozilla management or employees are interested in the Mozilla Corporation becoming a DoD contractor, and it’s unclear to me how much government or foundation funding Mozilla could attract as an R&D lab focused purely on civilian applications in the Internet and web space.
I think there might actually be some interesting opportunities here. Consider:
- Digital Propaganda and Misinformation are increasingly seen as key national defense issues
- COVID-19 has accelerated digital transformation and exacerbated the digital divide
- FAANG is under increased anti-trust scrutiny
- USG has strong mandates for web accessibility that current web tech makes very difficult to fulfill
- Privacy implications of AI/ML is getting more attention
Mozilla is well positioned to contribute to positive solutions in all of these areas.
I like the comparison to Bell Labs and Xerox PARC. Like those organizations, Mozilla was being kept alive by corporate money (primarily Google's) and never developed the ability to be a sustainable business on its own.
Five years ago it was clear that possibly the best thing that could happened to the future of Firefox, Mozilla, and the Web would have been for Mozilla Corporation to have gone belly up. But we're past the point where that might do any good with respect to salvaging Firefox or Mozilla's name.
Mozilla Corporation's role today is to siphon away any attention or enthusiasm that might otherwise be directed towards the ideals that Mozilla was originally created to facilitate. The Mozilla Corporation was supposed to have been set up to further the ideals of the then already extant movement that had been operating on a shoestring budget. The imprimatur should have been to direct its paid staff towards doing the boring work that unpaid (but highly effective) volunteers weren't interested in—not to wrench control away and consolidate power within a (now-proven ineffectual) company making ill-conceived commercial plays while trying to fit in with the culture of the Valley and squandering billions.
In the early 2010s, I attended a conference—one sponsored by Mozilla—and brought in on their dime, having been a fairly involved contributor for a few years, but not someone on the corporate payroll. Another guest and I mentioned how poor a job the travel agency had done, essentially fleecing Mozilla and doing much worse than if we'd arranged for travel and accommodation ourselves and then forwarded the bill. "Mozilla has a lot of money" was the response. After the better part of a decade, Mozilla's revenue has only grown, and so has their propensity to squander money.
The best option we have now is for folks to wake the heck up, to realize that the Mozilla that exists is not the one portrayed in either its messaging or fixed in the minds of casual slacktivists, to start a grassroots effort (a la early Firefox) to work on an independent browser—where, unfortunately, the best bet at this point is probably in leveraging WebKit against Chrome and Blink, given what an untameable mess the modern Web has become (not helped by the FirefoxOS efforts; nor the mess that Gecko codebase has become)—and most importantly never allow that effort to be subverted in the way that the Corporation managed to cannibalize and take over Mozilla.
But that's not going to happen, because Mozilla continues to position itself as the organization where folks with a casual interest in the health of the Web are supposed to direct their good vibes, while thoroughly proving itself to be unworthy and incompetent at upholding the principles it's supposed to be fighting for, and while time and time again, the public have proven themselves to have short attention spans on the order of months—so, by the end of the year Firefox and Mozilla will be back to being perceived as your old chum that's fighting the good fight, instead of being steered by a bunch of clueless, well-salaried Bay Area devs LARPing as some motley crew with your best interests at heart, all while the term "non-profit" gets bandied about in public discussions, much to their delight.
This outcome was anticipated much earlier in a 2006 interview with Mike Pinkerton (ex-Mozilla, now Tech lead for Chrome on Mac & iOS):
"And then, kind of, they lucked into Firefox. I mean, seriously, they got really lucky that Firefox — that Ben was able to execute so successfully, because I have no idea what would have happened to the Foundation without Firefox. It probably would have just blown up and you know, dried up and blown away. [...] And so they kind of transitioned from that to, “Well, okay, now we’re a corporation and we’ve got our big ticket item, and we’ve got to make sure as many people buy it as possible. And you know, and how do we continue to — how do we continue to ensure that revenue coming in?” You know, so they transitioned more from “Wow, we’ve got this great thing, let’s share it with the world!” To, “Well, we’ve got this great thing, we’d better keep making money off of it.” And I think a lot of those decisions have sort of tainted where the project was going. Bringing in — you know, they’ve got all this money, so now they bring in all of these marketing and manager people who haven’t been part of the community, who don’t understand why Firefox is successful, because they didn’t see what it was. They didn’t grow up through that failure to see why it’s a success and now they’re making the decisions to continue the success."
100% this. Mozilla needs to move out from SV. Their boards,executives & managements are way too cosy with other execs.
Firefox has been absolutely decimated by Chrome.
When MS(Seattle) was the monopolyin web browser, Mozilla (SV) being in SV worked great. Time to move Mozilla out & to be honest, it's probably time for Mozilla HQ to leave USA.
Chrome didn't do anything Mozilla could have done if they had put the vast majority of their funding into the browser instead of pet projects.
Dear Mozilla execs, stop thinking of yourselves as thought leaders. The browser is the fundamental way to access the internet. This is where 99% of your focus should be. Keep iterating and making it better and easier to consume, protect and develop with Firefox.
The last 10 years of firefox have been embarrasing tbh.
> unfortunately, the best bet at this point is probably in leveraging WebKit against Chrome and Blink, given what an untameable mess the modern Web has become
Is there a maintained OSS browser based on Webkit? Do you think it's viable for a new Webkit-based OSS browser to become sustainable by user donations, assuming initial sponsorship by other non-profits or EU?
Konqueror[1] can toggle between KHTML and Webkit at runtime.
GNOME Web (formerly Epiphany)[2] is Webkit based.
Surf[3] (By the suckless st/dwm people) is WebKit based.
That said, Surf would be unlikely to move to chromium from my perception of the views of the suckless group, and their opinions of how software would work are really opposed to mainstream appeal, Konqueror undoubtedly will eventually replace QtWebkit with QtWebEngine for at least the Webkit support (if not dropping KHTML entirely - KHTML's own readme suggests not using it), so that leaves Gnome Web as the one open source browser aimed at a wider audience using Webkit.
I have been forcing myself to use Firefox the last two months. Ignoring some performance issues on Google branded sites, I have yet to experience any incompatibilities.
The reason I am going back to Chrome is bookmark usability and Chromecast support.
Posts on the r/Firefox subreddit and official Firefox support pages mention that Chromecast uses proprietary API's, and can/will not be reverse engineered or implemented. I never noticed how often I use the ones at home or work until the ability to cast wasn't available.
As per bookmarks, I love not having my bookmarks visible in my main while browsing, and having them on the new tab page in Chrome is wonderful. I tried to pin my bookmarks to my Firefox top sites, but felt clunky using a hotkey or the menus to view all bookmarks.
It's easy to criticize from the outside. The question we should ask ourselves is what we should have done, and can still do, to help Mozilla's mission. I just set up a monthly donation, as I should have done a long time ago.
They could though. If enough of us start donating, maybe the leadership will make the necessary organizational changes to make donations go toward Firefox development. It definitely won't happen if we don't do our part.
This thread, paired with the Google/deprecation thread, feel ironically aligned.
Mozilla seems to be deprecating parts of their organization, and Google deprecates products constantly... except for Chrome. Chrome has had a fairly reliable and well maintained product path.
I used to use Firefox constantly, but between Safari being excellent on my Mac, and Chrome being preferable for work related things -- and their decent profile synchronization, I find myself a little mystified every time I go back to Firefox for a spell. Just little things, but they definitely feel like the 3rd wheel now.
Hey author of the posted blog, as a Baltimore resident (and librarian!), I love the shout out to the Howard County library's "choose civility" campaign![0] Nice site.
I'm starting to sincerely hope there'll be a fork of Firefox or at least a separation from Mozilla, and for Quantum/Servo to be separated and made an easily embeddable. The inability to donate directly to projects has imo has had a direct result of requiring Google money.
Firefox and Quantum don't need 100M to survive. That's that just absurd. Even if you had 250 people working on it for 100k each, you still wouldn't get to anything as crazy as 100M. 100k for working on open-source is a pretty good salary.
There's no need to branch out and make all kinds of other side projects that have to fit under the Mozilla umbrella. Splitting focus like that just makes it become a juggling game of who needs the money more, shifting focus between projects and making it difficult for donators to comprehend where the money is going to.
When I donate to KDE, it's doesn't come as a surprise that I can't request my donation to be earmarked for something. The project is for a desktop environment after all. It's in the name and it's the flagship product. But when your flagship product is a browser and you don't provide people the possibility to donate to that product... well, what's the point in donating?
Even the argument of "I know better what to do with your money than you do" sounds incredibly pretentious. We hear that all the time from politicians and we clearly see where that money goes to: their pockets, their friends pockets, some other project we never heard of and THEN it goes to the project we thought it would go to. If I wanted to give my money to an institution I didn't believe in, I'd pay more taxes.
> 100k for working on open-source is a pretty good salary.
The kind of people you're trying to hire have the option to earn 3-4x as much working for a FAANG. Being excited about working on something you believe in can get you a long way, but that's still a lot to ask.
If money were everything, nobody would be working on opensource.
I'd jump at that opportunity. Earning a third or a even a quarter of what I earn now would pay for every single one of my living expenses and even allow a comfortable life. There's no way that salary would be OK for a corporation, but for doing something I truly believe in? It's friggin' great.
> If money were everything, nobody would be working on opensource.
A large majority of hours spent on open source are paid, though. Developers working full-time on open source projects at various large corporations. I was in that category from 2012 to early 2017 working on mod_pagespeed, for example.
There are many small labor-of-love open source projects, but large ones are uncommon.
> I'd jump at that opportunity.
There are definitely people who would be happy to make that trade; I'm not claiming that you're the only one or something like that. Instead, what I'm saying is that there are a lot of people who are willing to take a modest pay cut to work on a public-benefit project like Firefox but aren't willing to take a ~60-75% one. And, further, Mozilla isn't going to be able to make a top-notch browser without hiring many of these people.
Also, when estimating total employee cost from salary, a good rule of thumb is to double it to cover indirect compensation and overhead such as healthcare, retirement matching, employer's share of income tax, office overhead, IT infrastructure, etc.
It's really interesting that Mozilla doesn't funnel donations to software development interests. There are successful open source projects that do so, such as Linux Mint [0]. Maybe what's really broken is the idea that a browser needs a backing corporation to fund it?
Personally, I can see no better way to keep an open internet than through the development of meaningful software that serves that purpose.
The problem is that Mozilla Corporation needs to exist for various legal reasons, and that it's impossible for Mozilla Foundation to channel funds to Mozilla Corporation for other legal reasons.
Whereas Linux Mint literally just operates a Patreon / Paypal / Bitcoin account and distributes the funds between a couple of people.
> that it's impossible for Mozilla Foundation to channel funds to Mozilla Corporation for other legal reasons
Do you know details about that? I can imagine that there'd be tax complications, but would have expected a foundation could buy things/services from an entity it owns.
I'm not a lawyer but I can only imagine it's quite tricky when the Foundation is a tax-exempt charity and the funds in question are being used to the primary benefit of a for-profit entity which it owns. It would be a bit like having your cake and eating it too, in terms of the legal provisions of the tax code.
I wasn't suggesting the Mozilla Foundation channel funds to the Mozilla corporation. I was suggesting that the Mozilla Foundation own Firefox and use donations to the foundation to fund Firefox development.
> What’s the last innovation they dropped on the world?
Rust, Wasm (although a joint project, inspired by asm.js which was purely Mozilla) come to mind.
Also, I consider keeping the focus on privacy in an age when huge behemoths of companies are determined to steal every aspect of our lives for profit to be truly important work, much more important than any tech innovation.
Creating a "new browser" is monumental task, and it's not enough to make something that works. Browsers are extremely high risk pieces of software with an attack surface comparable to an operating system.
Building something competitive means being able to make reasonable assertions of security, and that takes tons of resources.
Quantum has proven CSS can be parallelized, and Rust is an enabler for complex multi-core code.
WebRender (and ongoing work on Servo/Pathfinder) shows that browser graphics can work on the GPU. Not just a couple limited CSS properties on carefully selected layers (like in WebKit/Blink), but all of it.
They did show Chrome how to block autoplaying audio in a way that does't annoy the crap out of users.
The screenshot feature is great and I use it constantly.
The containers implementation is pretty slick, and it enabled the first-party Facebook Container add-on which makes it harder for FB to track users across the web.
Edit: And readability mode, which was added a long time ago but I'm including it because Chrome still doesn't have one.
>What’s the last innovation they dropped on the world?
They got a lot of great improvements and under-the-hood innovations out of Servo, and had more in the pipeline, and MDN served as a bedrock, reliable, gold standard documentation for modern web development.
Coincidentally, the two things they just completely scuttled.
This is true. Mozilla knows well how to market to the tech crowd with the "we're the saviors of the internet, privacy, everyone else is evil" marketing. For the billions burned, you'd expect a lot more. The internet browsing experience feels the same as it did 10 years ago.
- Realize it lost the browser wars, abandon FF and base it on chromium. It might upset the average FF geek on HN but you're not paying for FF development - Google is. As FF user base keeps dropping Google is not going to be interested in funding their development. No one cares about FF enough to actually fund it. Google just is because they want to push you ads.
- They need another revenue model. Probably focusing on B2C products. They should start acquiring more companies to buy growth.
Inventing an entirely knew programming language with new concepts that is aiming at smart people and basing critical components of the web browser on it.
It is this kind of decision which freaks out the ordinary HN reader but is otherwise an alarm bell to any sane business responsible.
That was a fundamental mistake. The who's-got-the-biggest-version-number dick-measuring, the constant deprecation of power features and customizability, everything that was intended to beat Chrome in a contest Google couldn't lose is the reason Firefox can't hold onto a decent market share. The 25% of internet users who wanted what Firefox offered ten years ago still want the same thing now, but Firefox decided it was worth losing that 25% trying to chase the 75%, and they lost.