I call this the "eat your vegetables" strategy of browser promotion.
Yes, browser engine hegemony is not a good thing. No, Firefox is not the solution.
Mozilla has proven repeatedly that they are not up to the task of competing with Chrome. The market has steadily moved away from them ever since shortly after Chrome was released. They've not once, in the last 13 years, done anything to make a dent in that loss of market share.
Firefox is now 19 years old. It has always ran on "webdevs just need to be better about testing in Firefox". When the only alternative was IE 6 and 7, that worked. But it's now been longer that that strategy has not worked than the period of time that it did work.
I don't have a solution, but without massive upheaval within Mozilla, "just use Firefox" is also not a viable solution. People aren't going to "eat their vegetables". You need to come up with a more compelling, longer term strategy than backing a perennial loser.
You're free to try to convince me that Mozilla has the capacity for change. That somehow, they are going to completely change their management corps and corporate culture enough to be able to get out of their quagmire. Extraordinary claims are going to require extraordinary evidence.
>Mozilla has proven repeatedly that they are not up to the task of competing with Chrome.
Seriously? Mozilla has simply proven they can't compete with Google on ads: Chrome has been promoted everywhere from TV, Web banners on all major media websites, Adwords placements on all "browser" queries, even subway stations in all big cities... starting with the bundling with Google Earth more than a decade ago. Most people around me switched to Chrome because of all the popups on the Google homepage and because companies slowly replaced the "IE required" with "Chrome required" over the years.
Mozilla also couldn't get Firefox to be preinstalled on billions of Android devices either. I wonder why.
You've described the playing field in which Mozilla has to work. But it's not going away. If Mozilla can't figure out a strategy to deal with that, it doesn't change anything.
I think the sentiment is that WE need to do something too, and I don't see how you really diagree with the OP in terms that what is happening is bad, so what are you going to do about it, if FF is not the answer?
Not an attack, really interested in ideas other than just give up.
I'm more invested in the web being a viable platform for feature-rich applications, in competition with walled-garden app stores, than I am in defeating browser engine hegemony. I'm interested in defeating browser engine hegemony, but I have no specific love for Firefox to stump for Mozilla being the David to this Goliath.
With Microsoft, Facebook, and Samsung shipping Chromium-based browsers and being in direct competition with Google across industries, I don't think there is much danger of Google taking over the web. If things get really bad, I can easily see all of the chromium-based browsers forming a consortium together and hard-forking. But I only see them staying in the game if the web grows and continues to be a viable alternative to native applications. So what I do is I make sure that my apps are usable across as many of them as possible, and not just Google Chrome.
I'm sorry for the vent of frustration that is coming up next. But I'm sick of hearing 5% of the market being one of the loudest voices in threads like this. WebRTC is killing the CPU, WebAudio keeps clipping, I can't run graphics ops in a worker thread, so the UI becomes unresponsive during scene transitions. I can't do anything about these things. I've tried. I've gone to great lengths to maintain as much fall-back compat with Firefox as I could. I finally just gave up because it was taking such a large percentage of my time that it couldn't justify it for being able to reach only 5% of the market. A portion of the market that, quite frankly, tends to not be very interested in spending money. Making Firefox better is not my job. My job is to make web apps.
Have you ever talked to any Mozilla employees? The stories they tell of the corporate culture make my blood boil for them. I mean, hell, after the latest purge, one of the projects they kept on (Hubs) has no developers working on the API support in their browser (WebXR, they fired all of the VR developers working on Firefox).
Maybe if we gave up on Firefox, those developers at Mozilla could be put to better use on browser projects that aren't managed poorly. People said Google was stupid for starting a new browser engine. They didn't start from scratch, but eventually they got there. There are other browser engine projects out there. Mozilla even chucked one of the more promising ones out of their umbrella. So yes, let's stop sending good money after bad and give up on Firefox.
In what way exactly Firefox is not up to the task? Mozilla manages to maintain and constantly update a non-chromium based browser engine that implements most of the web standards and is fully usable for anyone, with much less resources.
This graph only covers the last decade, but it's enough to show that the trend for Mozilla ends in irrelevance. I personally think it's already there, but I wanted to keep my original post a little more pragmatic.
How can you look at that graph and say "you got this, Mozilla"?
I personally think a big part of the problem is that part where you said they implement "most of the web standards". Most isn't good enough, especially when the web standards are growing. We need the web standards to grow so that web applications can successfully compete with apps in walled-garden app stores. That's what I care about. I care about not being beholden to Apple, Facebook, and Google taking a cut of my revenue or having a say in what content I publish.
I have apps that would be hobbled to the point of being nearly unusable because of missing web standards in Firefox. I can release very high-tech apps in Chromium-based browsers that can go toe-to-toe with native apps on features and performance. I can't do that in Firefox, both because they have given up on several platforms that I care about and because they are falling behind on web standards on the other platforms that are left.
Out of the big 3 (with edge being basically chrome at this point), safari is waaay behind firefox and chrome in terms of number of implemented standards and they still have plenty of market share — as if market share would at most correlate slightly with technical merit. And I don’t think that firefox would have gaping holes in terms of standard-compliance.
Safari is A) only available on two operating systems, both owned by Apple, B) is mandated on one of those OSes (iOS), which C) just happens to be their most popular OS.
I don't think it's very surprising that share of Safari for browsers across all OSes closely matches the share of iOS. Safari on macOS is only about 1/3rd of an OS that has 6 or 7% of the market, so you're only going to get about 2 points there. Firefox on macOS mirrors the rest of the market.
Chrome is #1 on all platforms except iOS, where it just literally does not exist. Safari's relative popularity over Firefox is due to lack of choice on iOS. So no, I don't think you can make that claim that technical merit does not matter.
If Apple were forced to allow other vendors distrubte their browsers on iOS (and they should be forced to), you would not see any uptick in Firefox's numbers, but a relatively big uptick in Chrome's numbers. I'm guessing like 10 points.
Exactly. It appears the market share of a browser is more linked to marketing, publicity, promotion, monopoly, rather than the coverage of web standards, as you pointed out. I bet if we give Firefox to Google and give Chrome to Mozilla tomorrow, Firefox will still end up having 60% market share. How much resource you have determines how big the territory you can enclose.
How much of this is technical versus the constant promotion on Google.com, youtube.com, etc.? It's been a _long_ time since I had significant issues supporting Firefox (and the warts I do find are just as commonly Chrome as Firefox) but using it primarily I see fairly regular upsells across Google properties and near-constant friction from Google developers choosing to implement features in a non-standard manner with user-agent checks or use of Chrome's earlier APIs rather than the standard ones (they blocked U2F/FIDO from Safari users for a long time after release, for example).
The GCP console breaks Firefox every month or two, Meet is the lone service which can't reliably do video chat, etc. That's probably not an explicit goal but it definitely highlights the risks of a single company setting priorities for so many different popular services.
This is all the same sort of environment that Chrome entered into back in 2008, versus Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
Yes, you've accurately described the challenges that Mozilla faces. If anything, it was easier for Chrome, because at that time Firefox had successfully clawed about 1/3 of the market from IE. So yes, things are harder for Mozilla today.
Which is my point! That's all just excuses for the inevitable failure of Firefox as a viable platform. It is not a viable plan for making sure Firefox survives. It's self-pitying, backwards-looking, naval gazing, and as long as Firefox's biggest proponents continue to engage in it as their main line of defense, Mozilla will never claw back any market share.
Can't live without container tabs anymore - Firefox is actually killing it with great user focused features. Give it a try, many of us actually enjoy vegetables just fine for what they are!
Chrome is heavily promoted on some of the most high traffic websites. Users of those websites are told they should use Chrome. So they do. There's nothing Mozilla can do about that. Mozilla doesn't enforce antitrust. No upheaval within Mozilla will change it.
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Yes, browser engine hegemony is not a good thing. No, Firefox is not the solution.
Mozilla has proven repeatedly that they are not up to the task of competing with Chrome. The market has steadily moved away from them ever since shortly after Chrome was released. They've not once, in the last 13 years, done anything to make a dent in that loss of market share.
Firefox is now 19 years old. It has always ran on "webdevs just need to be better about testing in Firefox". When the only alternative was IE 6 and 7, that worked. But it's now been longer that that strategy has not worked than the period of time that it did work.
I don't have a solution, but without massive upheaval within Mozilla, "just use Firefox" is also not a viable solution. People aren't going to "eat their vegetables". You need to come up with a more compelling, longer term strategy than backing a perennial loser.
You're free to try to convince me that Mozilla has the capacity for change. That somehow, they are going to completely change their management corps and corporate culture enough to be able to get out of their quagmire. Extraordinary claims are going to require extraordinary evidence.