- Cut out all (or at the very least, most) initiatives that don't serve the goal of promoting Firefox's market share or sustainability going forward
- Donate the major money drains that aren't Firefox to the Apache Foundation or another worthy custodian
- Fire all inessential staff that don't want to work on Firefox.
- Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money, and cut their salaries (bonuses tied directly to increase in Firefox market share).
- Make sure that all donations from now on are redirected to things that support Firefox development and nothing else, period.
- Make whatever partnerships are needed to have a steady stream of income, be that donation or selling out to Google or Bing.
Firefox is in trouble. Firefox is also Mozilla's raison d'être, and they should embrace that. We as a community, cannot afford to let Firefox languish until the only browsers in the world are Chromium derivatives. The diversity of truly independent browser engines is far too important to give up without a fight.
Current CEO is a cancer to Mozilla, her main goal seems like to make more money personally before Mozilla goes bankrupt. As long is as she is there - there is no hope
> In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to." [0]
I'm a firefox user for over 10 years.
I think I'm now convinced there is no future, I'll have to start to adapt to another browser now. I'll give Vivaldi a try.
That was the layoff where they got rid of all the rust people?
Its going to sound harsh, but they are loosing market share to browsers that didn't have to invent a new language to write a browser in.
So, getting rid of those people was probably a positive impact for firefox since they were mostly just yak shaving instead of actually improving the end product. The users don't care if you wrote it in C++ or fortran as long as it performs well, doesn't eat all their ram, or create giant backdoors.
Letting "the lets rewrite our core product in $COOL_TECH_OF_MONTH" people run a product is a sure sign of something that will fail if its not already. Lets invent our own computer language to do it is even worse.
This feels like a gross mischaracterization of the intent and work that went into Servo. You say this as if nothing else was being done on Firefox concurrently even though this is demonstrably false - and in fact, portions of Servo were integrated into Firefox (see: Quantum).
Firefox keeps losing on technical merit because it is fundamentally impossible to keep up with Webkit and Blink, which are all backed by massive corporations and are throwing money at the engineering and project resources to actually move things forward.
Your take was wrong. The move to rust was great and used to improve security and maintainability of the browser. They cut the wrong people. What they should have done was whack everything other than firefox and coders contributing to that code base and employees supporting that effort directly. They have awful leadership currently that are just milking their exec offices for the cash.
> The users don't care if you wrote it in C++ or fortran as long as it performs well, doesn't eat all their ram, or create giant backdoors.
In the short term, yes. In the long term however, this strategy could have been crucial. And the long term is precisely where open source software usually has the upper hand.
> The users don't care if you wrote it in C++ or fortran
Web site users don't care if a site's written with NodeJS or assembly; but that would make a huge difference to bugginess, development speed, feature set, etc.
Firefox is getting bogged-down in some areas due to its C++ codebase; especially trying to introduce concurrency (in a way which doesn't break everything, or cause unforeseen security implications, which is often the case in C/C++)
Yes, but consider the engineering effort to create a general purpose memory safe language vs just a domain specific one in comparison to the work required to write a browser, which also includes another domain specific language (javascript).
Seat of the pants, I would say getting something like rust on par with g++/clang code generation, and 3rd party tools is probably in the same ballpark engineering wise as actually maintaining the browser.
And if you spend a little time looking at firefox, there is/was a lot of low hanging fruit. I've mentioned elsewhere the difficultly building it, but even more than that, is that pretty much every single version of gcc that came out for a while would break firefox in some fundamental ways. And overwhelmingly these breaks were caused by crappy C++ programming where people were doing things that were known not to be syntactically correct but no one bothered to fix them. Then frequently instead of actually fixing them they did things like switch from building with an old GCC to a newer clang because it threw fewer errors. Then they claimed that the result was "faster" than gcc, despite the fact they were comparing an old version of GCC with a newer version clang. When the work was done to actually get it to build with gcc, it turned out to be even faster. (not that gcc is better than clang, only that ideally a project like firefox would compile cleanly with a wide range of compilers). Said compiler warnings are frequently valid, and analyzing them at least to know if its true is a worthwhile code quality exercise.
Yes, you have to ask yourself why everyone is using V8 as their JavaScript runtime and not Mozilla’s equivalent or why every alternative browser is using Chrome as a foundation.
Or XUL wasn’t packaged as cross platform GUI framework.
And then of course the Firefox mobile fiasco.
My guess is that the engineering and management don’t interact. Two different companies within the same company, no coherent vision.
What FF mobile fiasco are you speaking of? I am using FF mobile happily and have been for years. I haven't noticed any issues with it. Was there a business level fiasco or something?
One objective fiasco is the inability of FF on Android to keep multiple tabs in memory. Older versions were capable of it without issue, ever since the tab unloading feature, Firefox has been reloading tabs at the slightest pretense.
Switch apps? Tabs get reloaded when you're back.
Lock & unlock phone with Firefox in focus? Tabs get reloaded
Switch tabs in Firefox? Tabs get reloaded...
I wish I was just ranting, but all of the above happens with a single active tab loaded...
That is interesting to me because that isn't my experience. I just tried the lock screen for example and I couldn't get any of tabs to reload, foreground or not. I'm on Android 10 running on a Moto G7. Maybe it's affected by vendor settings?
Quite a few devices experience this though. For the record, I use an S9, and used to have 50+ tabs with no issues on older versions of Firefox - now I cannot have one tab remain open without a reload if I lock my phone with Firefox focused and turn unlock it a minute later. And that's with Firefox explicitly exempt from each and every kind of battery/memory etc. "optimization" by Android...
Doesn't happen for me. OnePlus 8 with Oxygen OS 11.
The one thing I really miss in FF mobile is the opposite.. Pull to refresh or another gesture that accomplishes that. The current two tap option is too slow.
The main problem is that they're not making money with their core product so they need to experiment and innovate to find ways to make money.
I agree they probably didn't need to invent rust: that was an happy accident, the kind of things that happen when you have really smart people around. If they had a money making accident we would be talking about something else, but I guess they would need a different type of culture for that to happen.
This is not how you run a company and it shows.
It's impressive Mozilla is still around if you ask me - but I suspect it has to do with Google, M$ needing someone easily controllable to keep the anti monopoly government people away from browsers.
> The main problem is that they're not making money with their core product so they need to experiment and innovate to find ways to make money.
Firefox is owned by the Mozilla foundation, the corp is only there to help develop it since having developers work directly for the foundation is apparently complicated. Non-profit foundations don't need to find ways to make money with their core product and they should not try to - instead they can seek funding elsewhere, for example from donations and government grants.
No the corporation was founded because having a major corporation like Google pay so much to a foundation was difficult for tax reasons.
But it did push them over the edge IMO. They're behaving like a corporation now, with a CEO pulling as much money as they can, too much PR etc. Through the Google deal they have become what they were fighting. But they're not very good at it, hence the low marketshare.
Rust and servo were how they were innovating, and where a lot of the competitive features came from. By firing them, Mozilla made clear that they do not care about these things. The CEO is quite clearly a parasite hell-bent on extracting as much value as she can before bailing for the next victim.
The problem--and I feel the pain here deeply as a security person myself--is that that innovation was primarily along an axis (security) that no users care about (with a small bit of performance from concurrency, but there were clearly other ways to be faster), and was draining resources away from innovation that users cared about... which I'd claim was even going in the opposite direction: for many years now they have been continually tearing out the non-philosophical reasons I used Firefox in the quest to build a clone of Chrome, something the world doesn't have much use for as it already has Chrome.
Remember that the users still using Firefox are mostly technical and privacy fans that do care about security a lot.
Focusing on the mainstream user at this point will not help as they're already so far gone they don't even remember the name Firefox anymore.
They should focus first on making it and excellent browser for the users that still care. Then word of mouth will bring it back to the mainstream as it did the first time.
It's not even that they're building a clone of Chrome - Chromium is actually adding features like tab groups.
It's more that they're removing not-Chromey bits, not adding the Chromey bits, and removing Firefoxy bits like search keywords via bookmarks and the like.
As a Firefox user I disagree. Their work on Servo and Rust resulted in many performance and reliability improvements. WebRender for example came directly from Servo.
It's unfortunate that after those changes, the Mozilla team did not take criticism in public forums very seriously and brushed it off as noise. I personally stopped using Firefox after some of those "architectural" changes started producing "dead" tabs - the tab could not be interacted after load.
In place of "We're listening", users that complained got a "Works fine on my machine" bundled with a few rude words in places like Reddit. Not the core teams fault, of course.
Someone with more time can probably set up a scientific test of the performance claim even today - set up a bunch of Selenium tests to open JS-heavy sites in multiple tabs on older versions of FF upto current version using BrowserStack or SauceLabs.
The question is, would the work have been done sooner, or more effectively if they had just fixed the C++ code rather than spending a lot of time creating rust, only to rewrite said code?
I mean to this day (and i just tossed off a firefox build yesterday to see if most of what I was saying is still true), the firefox maintainers can't even be bothered to fix the tens of thousands of warnings that appear when built certain ways. That is a really low bar to cross with a C++ project, and they haven't even bothered. I've worked on projects where we had a recommended compiler, but we always spent some time assuring that the project appeared to work with the latest gcc/icc/whatever, because at some point those newer compilers would become the defaults, and also because they frequently pointed out issues in the code. Its just a cheap way to fix undefined behavior bugs.
So, I think the only answer to that is yes, that long stretch before they dropped the rust code was wasted time/effort.
Mozilla didn't really invent Rust, and its looking quite likely that Rust is going to be just as significant of a contribution to the world as Firefox was (long term).
I wish Vivaldi wasn't horrible. I gave it a real try on all my devices for about 6 months a couple of years ago, but it is just too unreliable and prone to crashes and random issues. I've been way, way happier on Firefox ever since.
If Firefox goes the rest of the way down the tubes, I'll try Edge before I go Vivaldi again.
Her logic assumes that another company would actually pay her that much. Given how disastrous her tenure has been to Firefox's user base, I'm skeptical that another company would even want her as CEO, let alone pay her this much.
Any replacement CEO is going to be thinking, I'm trying to beat Google, Apple and Microsoft on a tiny budget and if I dont succeed people will blame me personally for it all, complain about me online and claim that no one else should employ me. That's a gamble for anyone coming in who has better options and so attacks on the CEO for being a failure only help to create a moat and increase her bargaining power.
The replacement "CEO" should be someone like Linus Torvalds, someone who is not in it for the money but for the satisfaction of crushing his opponents where it matters: mind share among developers followed by market share. Someone who does not try to go with the flow of fake virtue and bloated CxO remuneration. Someone real. Someone who has the testicular fortitude to say ¨NO" to the social justice crowd.
Maybe Brendan Eich can come back? Do a Steve Jobs, take back the project and make it into what it was meant to be, primus inter pares among browsers.
I'm extremely curious what you think her job is and what her job actually is. I don't know either one. But I must be waaaaaay of base if 2m+ is a reasonable salary for the workload and responsibility.
And if we want to get conspiratorial, If she thinks her main job is getting the most money out of the Google deal, then Google would be more than happy to pretend shes doing great in the negotiations and pay 5m extra.
The sooner Mozilla loses its dev culture and talent the more power Google has.
> By 2020, her salary had risen to over $3 million. In the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic.
Yikes, makes me also consider just switching off it again
For me, the crypto wallet built into Brave puts me off. I want my browser to be a browser, nothing more than that. Other than Brave, the option is Vivaldi, but that's not completely open source, and the devs refuse to completely open source it, making me doubt the trustworthiness of it.
That's because you're looking at this with your "professional" hat on. If your look at this with your "philanthropist" hat on, the optics are suddenly very different.
There's a weird type of logic going on where almost everyone who would be willing to do it for almost free is probably not qualified for the job. Would you really stake the future of your foundation on someone who still needs to build their resume?
$2.5 million per year is in the top 0.1% of income in the United States. No matter how you shake it, whether you want people with management experience, tech experience, browser experience, or some combination thereof, you will find a significantly large number who would be able to do the job, do it well, and make more than their current salary.
I bet any mid level tech manager from a large company (who loves open source) would do a much better job and work for 1/4 her salary until he proved he was worth her old salary and raised the tides of success for the company.
You could make this same argument about professional athletes, but all across the world no one seems to follow through on this obvious money-saving hack. So I presume it's more complicated than you're suggesting.
Japanese CEO salaries are famously very low. The Toyota CEO makes about USD 3.5m. There are other C levels that make 3 times what the Toyota CEO earns in direct compensation.
Japanese CEO salaries in general seem to be below USD1m on average.
Toyota is a huge company though. It's nothing like Mozilla. I would imagine there's a lot of responsibility riding on it. And I'd imagine that in Japanese culture badly performing CEOs actually face consequences.
I disagree, if you're a company raking in $270B a year in revenue, you want the absolute best running it. The Toyota CEO is like 0.001% of the revenue, an extremely small price to pay for the right management.
I don't believe that for a second. Unless you just mean it in the sense of "90% of people that apply to a job aren't good at it". You can get many many qualified people for $250k.
Paying more doesn't get rid of the risk, so yes do the version that has risk but without the bonfire of cash.
If I cared badly enough about the mission and it wasn't a for-profit enterprise, I'd take the pay cut. The non-monetary part of my compensation (the feel-good factor and the actual good done in the world that I can't get in a for-profit enterprise) would more than make up for it, at least for a couple of years.
Market rates don't matter all that much if the person setting them has a significant influence on what they are. It's like a child determining their allowance based on which one of their friends was able to grab the most money from their mom's purse.
I don't think this has anything to do with arrogance, this is simply the market value speaking. Ginni Rometty did something similar with IBM; while being a terrible CEO ("IBM was the worst-performing large-cap tech stock during Rometty's tenure, dropping 24%" [1]), she got a whopping $20M per year [2] during her first 7 years of being a CEO, and she got $20M golden parachute [3] upon leaving the shell of an IBM.
This is not arrogance. This is simply the pay of a CEO, regardless of their performance.
Mozilla is not IBM. They may compete against the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Apple, yet they are not those companies either. The scope of their business interests are minuscule in comparison. Heck, their share of the markets that they do compete with those companies in pales in comparison. So yes, there is an element of arrogance in her claim.
> This is not arrogance. This is simply the pay of a CEO
You have a social responsibility to take care of the people working below you, which as a CEO is everyone. If you fire them and give yourself a raise, perhaps it is not arrogance but it definitely is gross negligence. No amount of "this is simply the market value" corporate doublespeak is going to change the fact that doing so takes you further and further from being an actual human being. Perhaps this is okay with you, but I think it should be questioned and mocked.
IBM is more than two orders of magnitude bigger than Mozilla in terms of both spending and headcount. On a log scale, Mozilla's scale is about halfway between IBM and your local McDonald's franchise.
CEOs of smaller companies typically don't command that level of compensation, and when they do, it's generally because the company performed well and their pay was heavily perforamnce-based.
> I don't think this has anything to do with arrogance, this is simply the market value speaking.
What market value? Firefox's market share is down 85%. It's hard to believe there's not someone cheaper and more capable available. This sort of extravagant CEO pay might be excusable if the company is actually booming, but in this case, it really looks like it's just plain greed: loot the company while running it into the ground.
Saying "yes" to a powerpoint presentation about why a poor CEO should be given a $20M bonus due to staggering bonuses of other CEOs (such as in Facebook or Google) while underperforming as fuck.
What "CEO"? Does every mom-and-pop shop get a "CEO" with $3M compensation? Does every startup? I don't think Mozilla leadership deserves to be placed among big tech executives with standardized pay.
It might be that they need to pay that amount to attract top CEO talent. But then again, I'm not sure if Mozilla should be large enough to need a top CEO. I mean effectively reducing it to just the Firefox team would be fine with me. And then it's maybe 80 people to manage in total. So that's one regular office building and you're done. It doesn't sound like the CEO will be critical for anything in this company.
> When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."
Then go work somewhere else!
If you can make 5 times as much somewhere else, and that's all you care about, quit Mozilla and go work somewhere else. Her attitude and greed are unbelievably infuriating.
I would have zero problems with her salary if firefox wasn't a sinking ship and was actually increasing market share (or at least holding on to it). I continue to use it, as it's a great product, but I wonder how long before google cuts off the spigot of money.
But the CPI is fairly accurate, and those who calculate it are doing their best with a problem that doesn't have one easy to compute answer. Regardless, I know just from personal experience that your numbers are way off. My grocery bills haven't gone up 50 to 100% since 2012; what I spend on clothes and software and veterinary visits hasn't gone up 50 to 100% either. The only thing that I might buy that contradicts this is a GPU, but that's an exception (and other computer hardware hasn't risen in price that much).
Also: as part of my job I can check prices in a major sector of the retail industry as far back as 2015, and I absolutely do not see such major inflation as you're arguing. Inflation is bad right now, but hasn't been that way for several decades.
>But the CPI is fairly accurate, and those who calculate it are doing their best
Completely disagree.
>Also: as part of my job I can check prices in a major sector of the retail industry
That is probably the problem.
>clothes and software
Clothes = imported from countries we export inflation to. Software = ~0 cost to duplicate.
Inflation doesnt hit the whole population equally or at the same time, and it doesnt hit all products uniformly.
The items/services we all want/need, that are scarce, and can't be imported from our foreign "slaves", are where you will find it concentrated. Healthcare, housing, university, etc...
My earlier observation 50%/10y, 50%/5y is closer to reality for the vast majority of the population.
How much did housing go up in price in the last 10-12 years (300%? 400%?)?
Remember when house prices went up 20-30% in a 6 month period of 2021? Not inflation?
How is that a problem? Let's say I work in the grocery industry. Everyone has to buy groceries at some point, whether wealthy or impoverished, and for those on lower incomes groceries are a fairly major share of total consumption. I can check those prices and they haven't gone up nearly as much as you're saying. Ipso facto you're just wrong.
> Remember when house prices went up 20-30% in a 6 month period of 2021? Not inflation?
Inflation is more than just home prices, and just because something is more expensive than it used to be doesn't mean that inflation is the culprit. Supply and demand are still factors. Regardless, rent is accounted for in the CPI (though not assets like home purchases).
Got anything besides home prices? Car prices haven't gone up that much, at least. I can hardly think of anything besides houses and GPUs that (a) impact me and (b) have gone up fairly drastically in price. (Though around here, the suburbs of greater Cincinnati, home prices haven't generally doubled in ten years; my home's valuation is maybe 15% higher than it was when I bought it five years ago.)
>The items/services we all want/need, that are scarce, and can't be imported from our foreign "slaves", are where you will find it concentrated. Healthcare, housing, university, etc...
It seems you didnt read anything I wrote since you avoided my earlier point and are still ignorantly talking about retail goods that are, for the most part, subsidized, imported from countries we export inflation to, or experience heavy shrinkflation.
I also mentioned inflation is not evenly distributed. Different areas/segments of the population experience different rates. The Ohio housing market may not have been hit as hard, probably parts of Michigan fall in that same boat (these are not desirable markets), but most houses did 3-4x in the past 12 years.
I will move on... Everyone will understand the hurdle rate is higher than 7.5% after enough time has elapsed (just like they did with the BS 2.5% CPI number we used to use) and the standard of living decline is significant enough that it cant be ignored anymore. The investor class generally understands the new yearly hurdle rate is 20%-30% (must earn atleast ~120% of last year's return just to break even). Saylor and a few others makes this point often...
I'll leave those that disagree or aren't interested in learning to figure this out the harder way.
As someone who knew someone who worked there she is absolutely nuts and her thinking is beyond radical. She will destroy Mozilla if she doesn't step down. Assuming it's not too late already.
Pretty sure Apple/Safari and Microsoft/Edge have the monopoly shield taken care of at this point. Firefox on its current trajectory will bleed to death slow enough for nobody to notice. Mozilla stopped innovating in the one product of theirs anybody cares about. I sort of wish Mozilla would die faster so the current executives bleeding it dry would move on, and hopefully someone who actually cares about more than the money could revive it.
> to keep Firefox as a shield against monopoly claims
Not with that marketshare! Assuming you're right, it seems she's failing at that too; there is no appearance of worthwhile competition from Firefox, which fighting for a distant #3 spot
Well they fired the previous competent CEO for political reasons. If politics and what you do in your private time is more important than competence, then this is what you get. Well deserved. FireFox getting it what it deserves. If you hire CEOs based on being women or having nice private beliefs, instead of competence you can eat failure all day long as far as I'm concerned.
A big part of the problem IMO is that Mitchell Baker is a lawyer, not a technologist or engineer. She does not understand how software companies are supposed to function.
I used to strongly support the mission of Mozilla. When I first read about the practices of upper management I felt like a fool for ever having donated in the past.
That is not going to happen again and I don't even like Firefox so much anymore because of it.
> High salary and a golden parachute would be required to attract anyone good enough to succeed.
I'm not sure if the best way to get someone to save a dying product is a golden parachute which rewards them for running it straight into the ground. You have to make sure they're not risking everything to keep Firefox going, but ideally they'd have some skin in the game so they don't have an incentive to just loot whatever they can until it dies before sailing away from the burning wreak with even more money.
It's not a reward for failure, it's an insurance policy.
Here's a CEO job offer: take on a nearly impossible task, for a salary that is far below the market rate. If you fail (and you probably will!) it might damage your career and make it harder for you to find another job. If you succeed, you will get prestige, but you still won't get a lot of money.
What kind of executive would accept an offer like that?
A golden parachute is the insurance policy: it says to the candidate, we know this is a nearly impossible task, and it might damage your career if you fail, so we will guarantee you some money if you fail in order to compensate you for taking on that risk.
I would really love to hear even one example of a CEO's career being damaged by failure in any material way.
Meanwhile, people for whom income is literally making the difference between getting food on the table and not get 2 weeks at best, often nothing at all.
I mean, I'm actually sympathetic to the idea that no one should take a job unless it has absolutely zero risk of ruining them financially if they fail at it, but it's pretty clear that this is a benefit only extended to very few people who don't really need it.
> Here's a CEO job offer: take on a nearly impossible task, for a salary that is far below the market rate. If you fail (and you probably will!) it might damage your career and make it harder for you to find another job. If you succeed, you will get prestige, but you still won't get a lot of money.
Keeping in mind that "below market rate" is still "retirement within a few years at the Mozilla CEO's rate.
So even if your career were damaged, and it's easy to not have it damaged, you can retire after like 3 years. That's a fine insurance policy.
> If you succeed, you will get prestige, but you still won't get a lot of money.
Of course you'll get a lot of money.
1. You can give yourself a raise. If the Moz CEO had come in and we saw market share increasing do you think anyone would give a shit about increasing their pay? The issue is it's tanking and they laid off a ton of people at the same time they took a huge pay raise.
2. Executives are compensated with stock. Company does well, your stock goes up.
You don't want that kind of executive anyway. You want someone that identifies with the market and is seen as a safe hand to run FF into the long term future. That alone will do a good part of stopping the drain.
At the position FF/Mozilla is in, even finding such a person is a challenge:
Ideally, FF would need a developer or another seasoned IT person at the helm, but let's be real most of our profession find management borderline disgusting at best.
The MBA/beancounter/finance-type execs have no fucking idea about the business or the spirit behind a project like FF, all they care about is financial numbers - and the ones you might want from that group can earn ten times the compensation outside of the NGO sector.
And the NGO execs... most of them have absolutely no experience leading a project as large and international as FF and the ones that do (e.g. Greenpeace) don't have any idea about technology either.
As stated, the offer is for a job that's almost sure to fail and will damage the taker's career if it does. Combine that with undermarket pay and it's definitely a tough ask, even if you restrict yourself to those who feel strongly about Firefox's mission. If you buy into the notion that an effective CEO has a particular, rare set of skills in business strategy and people management, then your job gets even tougher.
Most people cheered when Pat Gelsinger came back to Intel and I bet he even believes in Intel's mission, but he likely wouldn't have accepted an 80% pay cut relative to other industry CEOs. And Intel's prospects are infinitely better than Mozilla's.
I think Mozilla and Firefox are cherished by a lot of people who would like to see them thrive.
But I think if given a choice, most of those people would prioritize the survival of a viable competitive web browser. The name of the product and the sponsor of the product are less important.
So a related question might be, "What would it take for a Firefox fork to succeed?"
If you think the CEO of Mozilla is a cancer, a fork solves that issue. Obviously, there are a lot more concerns than just the CEO. So, what else would a viable fork need?
In the end, Mozilla could implement any measures that would work for the fork, and probably do so easier. So answer the question for the fork, and you've answered the question for Mozilla.
Well a large part of the problem with a fork is that you don't see a lot of random drive by contributions. As a possible contributor myself a couple times, firefox is a development nightmare because it doesn't have a good autoconfig system that lets one download the code and start being productive quickly.
Then like chrome, i'm betting most people can't actually built it in reasonable time on their laptops since it burns a good 64 core machine with 128G of ram for a hour or two. Screw up said configuration, and your in for another rebuild loop. It can take days just to get a working development environment.
No, that is one the problems you have to solve before you can have a successful fork unless you happen to have a few million a year coming in to compete with the main branch.
I've been known to waste a weekend or two a year working on open source projects. These though generally are small things that scratch and itch for fix a bug. I don't work on projects where it takes a month+ of weekends just to get a working dev environment. I don't think that's unusual, you have to pay people to put up with that kind of pain.
A fork in no way solves this because you can't for the devs who mozilla is paying. Firefox is a huge project requiring devs with lots of experience in the technology who also like to be compensated. You can't fork firefox, you have to change the leadership or nothing else will change.
It's related to funding, but recognition is really important. Actually forking (as opposed to the GitHub fork button) is generally seen to be hostile and and will split the community (see e.g. ffmpeg vs. libav). This means that getting a fork to succeed is much harder than it would have been for the original project. For example if the Mozilla foundation went after government grants and donations for funding Firefox instead of trying to monetize the browser they'd probably have much more success than any unproven fork could ever dream for.
$1m is senior engineering manager compensation in the valley at several companies just a short drive away from Mozilla’s offices. It’s far below CEO compensation.
Anyone who is capable of succeeding as the CEO of Mozilla would be giving up millions of dollars they could easily make elsewhere in the valley if they took only $1m as their comp.
So? Not the entire world is US-based. Tech salaries in USD are way out of whack compared to elsewhere.
I also bet that for the type of challenges facing Firefox and with my proposed reforms, a motivated senior engineer who knows what they are doing would be just as good or better compared to a standard CEO.
There is a wide spectrum of CEOs skills and compensation. A SVP, VP, or even director level person at Apple (and the like) could be CEO of Mozilla (and would be happy to take a CEO title and steer their own ship).
I'd bet there are couple internal people at Mozilla that could be promoted to CEO and be happy with CEO pay and be successful too.
"Capable of succeeding" meaning what? If you switch to a normal manager and suddenly save the company 2 million a year, and they stop making the current trend of decisions, that sounds like a win-win. CEOs aren't magical rarities.
Sounds perfect. Any up and coming CEO wannabe could take the Mozilla job to prove they've got the chops. Then, after turning things around, they could ride off into the sunset at any of those other corps. Everybody wins.
How much money do you think a Sundar or Satya-type person would be willing to accept? Certainly not as little as the current Mozilla CEO is being paid!
"- Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money"
That has to be the first on the list, because that is the prerequisite for everything else.
Unfortunately there is no mechanism to achieve this within Mozilla. The people that need to go won't; they've got their trophy titles and they've feathered their nest as they want it. Thus Mozilla and Firefox with it are doomed.
Solving that would take a fork, just like it did with Netscape. It would also require an endowment of capital to fund a core of developers for years just to catch up with blink/webkit/etc. At this point the best plan might be to adopt the latter.
Thing is the market is producing this without Mozilla. Brave and others are delivering real alternatives to Chrome, Safari and Edge.
So at this point what is the value proposition of saving Firefox? That's a rhetorical question; I get it. I just don't know if it's enough to attract the developers and funding to do it. It's conceivable; one could imagine a leader with the passion to inspire people and attract the funding and developers.
Maybe that person exists. If so they won't be doing it under Mozilla.
> Thing is the market is producing this without Mozilla. Brave and others are delivering real alternatives to Chrome, Safari and Edge.
And in the end, it's all WebKit derivatives under the hood. That is the danger. There used to be three major distinct engines (Firefox, IE/Trident, WebKit) plus a boatload of specialized ones (Opera)... and that competition bred improvements and features. These days it's all about walled gardens, which is what the "market" (aka a bunch of ultra rich companies) wants, and Firefox is the last truly independent fighter standing.
Sadly, Firefox has been mismanaged for almost a decade now.
We are snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Just as "the open web" is becoming fully viable as an application platform, it is morphing into "Google's VM".
Was an endowment needed for LibreOffice and Maria DB? I don't actually know how it happened with those two, but they both seemed to be more or less grassroots forks when people realised that Oracle won't ever be a good custodian. Perhaps a Firefox fork here could emerge in a similar way.
I don't know about LibreOffice, but my recollection was that MariaDB was initially less a reaction to Oracle actually having been bad for MySQL and more a fear that Oracle would potentially {be bad, close the product, ...}
> Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money, and cut their salaries (bonuses tied directly to increase in Firefox market share).
If Mozilla is just Firefox then why to they need a CEO at all? Why does a web browser need an executive team? It doesn't make any sense to me. Linux doesn't have a CEO. Python doesn't have a CEO. Postgres doesn't have a CEO.
But all those projects have commercial support in some way because other companies rely on them and provide resources. It's unclear to me how Firefox achieves the same. Maybe that's a question a CEO can answer.
If you think you need a CEO then it makes perfect sense to me to pay them a competitive salary. For the same reason you should pay your devs a competitive salary. You can't just say "they should work for less". That's unfair and unrealistic. Either you need one and should pay for a good one, or you don't need one at all.
> Donate the major money drains that aren't Firefox to the Apache Foundation or another worthy custodian.
> If Mozilla is just Firefox then why to they need a CEO at all? Why does a web browser need an executive team? It doesn't make any sense to me. Linux doesn't have a CEO. Python doesn't have a CEO. Postgres doesn't have a CEO.
It doesn't matter what the top position is called: CEO, the Grand Warlock of Yendor, or Benevolent Dictator For Life. CEO ≈ whoever is in charge and entrusted with enough authority that they can elevate or kill whatever they are managing, and that was probably the intended meaning.
> Or how about they donate Firefox to Apache?
Apache has a reputation as the graveyard of open source software. If Firefox gets donated to them, it's curtains. Maybe if they went elsewhere it could work.
Or, they could create a Totally-Not-Mozilla Foundation and bring trustworthy old-timers with the right vision on board. Then they could either do a hostile takeover aka LibreOffice, or coax the original Mozilla Foundation into handing over the brand peacefully.
>Or, they could create a Totally-Not-Mozilla Foundation and bring trustworthy old-timers with the right vision on board. Then they could either do a hostile takeover aka LibreOffice, or coax the original Mozilla Foundation into handing over the brand peacefully.
> Apache has a reputation as the graveyard of open source software.
Interesting. I did not seem to know that. I always thought that Apache was a leader in open source since a lot of the notable tools (i.e. Spark, Airflow, Kafta) are maintained by Apache.
Are there any articles that I can learn more about this?
It's an interesting point. A significant number of Apache (big data) projects do indeed seem to be "in the attic"[1]. But they have high profile projects that are well maintained. AirBnB created Airflow then donated it to Apache. Do they still use it internally and contribute to Apache Airflow? Do other companies contribute?
Spark is central to Databricks, the company started by the original creator of Spark.
So at least for a couple high-profile Apache projects there are for-profit organizations with an interest in furthering development.
I assume Databricks pays devs to contribute to Spark, I actually don't know.
So maybe Apache Firefox with a Mozilla corporate sponsor isn't such a terrible idea. Although again, I have no idea what the commercial motivation would be behind supporting Firefox development.
You are answering the question "how can Mozilla make more money", but that wasn't what was asked. Mozilla as a whole is profitable already, and revenues have been growing close to 100% year over year. As a company they are in great health.
Except that's not what users care about when picking a browser. Google has too much money, tech, marketing and too big an existing user and device base to make any kind of direct competition feasible. Giving Mozilla a few hundred million dollars extra isn't going to make a difference.
The subtitle of the question was "What would you do if you were in charge of Mozilla? How would you save Firefox?"
My answer is an attempt at addressing these two questions. My goal wasn't to make Mozilla more profitable, but to ensure that it's focused on what should be its core mission, rather than the mire of sideshows that they engage in at the moment.
Also, I don't care how Mozilla the amorphous blob of a corporation is doing. I care about how Mozilla the vehicle for the survival, promotion and development of Firefox is doing, and that one seems to be on the brink of death if nothing is done to change the current course.
As a regular end user why do I care about what Mozilla's mission is? Apple makes shiny devices, Google gives me great free services, and in return I use their (perfectly great) browsers. What is one single reason to use Firefox?
As long as these large companies continue to put effort into their browsers (which Microsoft didn't do with IE), users are simply never going to switch, the same way no one is using desktop Linux or LibreOffice or DuckDuckGo.
I wish Firefox would focus on being a useful tool (like the rest of the software I use). Compare Firefox's first-run experience with that of GNOME Web: Firefox is obnoxious; GNOME Web just gets out of the way.
I believe in Mozilla's mission circa 2004, but I'm not convinced that Firefox does any more.
The other day I opened up Firefox to discover that the theme had automatically changed to some garish pink monstrosity, overlaid by a popup that asked if I wanted to keep the new "colorway".
Did you actually took the time to setup firefox to your liking once? From the above post it looks like you didn't.
Pocket is pretty much invisible, especially if you remove the button from the toolbar. The only time I see mentions of the mozilla VPN is when I go to the configuration of an existing container and I see the option to integrate it to mozilla VPN.
> Did you actually took the time to setup firefox to your liking once?
Yes. I use Firefox pretty much exclusively.
I'm saying that the first-run experience, and the amount of setting up it takes to make Firefox less intrusive, illustrate that Firefox is not as focused on being a useful tool as I would like.
Compare that to browsers having more market share and firefox isn't any more intrusive or less focused at being useful. Chrome is totally shitty in stock form as well unless you love ads and don't care about privacy.
I have set up Firefox to my liking but UI reworks and new anti-features mean that I have to invest significant time for each update to just get things back to how I like them.
I agree. More than this, it's not just “I don't like change and I have to tweak Firefox to my liking”; it's “I don't trust that Mozilla is acting in my interests; I expect that any changes are to my detriment”.
It is not like every update break everything. They did one major update that broke a number of extensions and they didn't even do it without prior announcement and time for extensions developpers to adapt them. Appart from them those are tiny changes.
I actually don't use the direct Firefox branch anymore, although my wife and daughter have it on their computers so it is often available to me. I tend to use Firefox Developer branch so a lot of these complaints people are seeing I haven't experienced. (haven't experienced in the normal Firefox on other computers either so sort of weird, maybe I set up a don't bother me with changes profile a long time ago and I just forgot)
I'm not sure how critical this is in practice; but the way this evolved may be a symptom of the fact that Blink's authors' motivations align less well with those of an ad-block user than Firefox's authors' motivations do.
The worry of course is that once there truly are no competing rendering engines, that google will no longer feel the pressure to put user's interests before those of sites of even itself. And because blink and webkit don't really compete (still nice to have two, but on virtually no devices are both engines serious alternatives), that day is pretty close; it's likely already having an impact.
There’s no guarantee that lightning will strike twice in this case.
When Firefox overtook IE6, Microsoft had been colossally mismanaging IE for years, which meant that IE had become a rusted husk of what it was in its glory days. This made for incredibly strong incentive for web developers to support an alternative, because having to develop for an utterly broken browser for an indefinite period of time was intensely unappealing. On the end user side of the equation, Firefox’s incredible speed, UX improvements, and robust support for extensions did a lot to win people over.
Fast forward to today. Google is infinitely more savvy with web developer relations than late-IE-era MS could’ve ever been — they keep devs “fed” well enough with a steady stream of new shiny features that it’s unlikely that they’d ever revolt. For users, the difference in speed and UX between Firefox is negligible or even works in Chrome’s favor (which is tilting further in Chrome’s direction with every site that’s developed and tested only against Chrome).
Additionally, the barrier to entry for new web engines is so high now that anybody trying to build a browser that is to Chrome what Firefox was to IE is almost certainly doomed to fail unless backed by a company with deep pockets and no expectation of return on investment for many years.
This is an interesting argument. But this is effectively stating that Google has to be a good steward. If that is the case, then there really isn't much of a problem afaict (i.e. majority is happy).
If Google is treating devs and users well, there is no reason to switch. It's when they falter on one, migrations can and will occur (given past history as experience).
They don't have to be a good steward. They can simply be a good-enough steward until they kill off all remaining competition (of which - hey, only Firefox is left!), then they can coast on minimum effort for as long as it takes for the web to die off and for the app-ification process of everything to complete. Then they can move on to greater, bolder things.
Exactly. Once there’s nothing but Chrome, there can never be another significant challenger because the barrier to entry is too high.
Additionally, even in the situation that Google is a “good steward”, their total dominance means that there is no room for meaningfully different visions of the web to compete, which is very bad.
And if Wal-Mart drives the local Mom-and-Pops out of business by undercutting them, that's fine too because people wouldn't switch if it weren't better.
</analogy>
Bootstrapping competitors is hard. Driving your competitors under and then cranking up the heat when the field is clear is a classic strategy.
The DRM industry's answer to the previous waves of DRM and DRM-breaking was Denuvo.
The copyright cartel's answer to copying via digital bypassing and the analogue hole was to make it all but mandatory to cryptographically secure every single element in the chain between their own servers and the pixels on our displays, and refuse to serve HD content if your hardware and software won't implement that. Not to mention, DMCA.
Just because Firefox was the liberation from IE6, doesn't mean it will be proportionally as easy to liberate ourselves from Chromium if it does become the only browser engine.
I mean, we don't need competition, sure. But we also have a social structure that utterly depends on competition for economic efficiency. I'm not seeing the popular up-swell for communism quite yet, so until that happens, having privately owned monopolists act not just as single providers of critical goods and services, but also control access to information about those goods and services, and the publications reporting about those goods and services, and getting to pick which shops get to even open their doors, and the roads to those goods and services, and the banking system you need to pay for em... you know, that might just weaken your negotiating position. You just might get shafted.
These aren't the weak little monopolies of times past, stuff like standard oil - these new setups are much more clever, and much more pervasive, and much more powerful.
Oh hey, as it turns out tech companies are making obscene profits (so much for economic efficiency!), and we've given them little legal monopolies by implementing copyrights, patents and contract law in just the right way to make competition almost impossible. Startups competing with them need great luck, huge pockets, a brilliantly found niche - and even then they'll probably just get bought or simply fail.
I mean I get that browsers are just one small element of the whole puzzle. But on the other hand, it's also one of the few where avoiding lock-in might still be fairly easy. I don't blame anybody for using chrome - use it myself on occasion - but I'll avoid it as long as it's at least easy to do so.
Browsers are complex. Just because Netscape managed to commit corporate harakiri in just the right way to leave a spoiler for Microsoft behind doesn't mean that'll happen again. The web is quite different now from then, and much more centralized. If google were to dominate; or to simply share the pie in a non-competitive truce with apple, well, users would have very little leverage over google/apple whenever new developments were to slowly evolve the web into a whatever benefits the corporate bottom line over users interests; for instance by tracking users or playing gatekeeper. Note that that can happen even now, but more insidiously: by _preventing_ evolution that might protect users from exploitation.
Browser complexity is an issue in a more direct, plainly technical way too. Even from a purely technical perspective it's just nice to see alternatives, and the world is a big place; the extra investment spread over the now huge online economy is surely worth simply the extra reliability that such reproducibility brings to design of the web fundamentals and discovering new, useful platform features.
If you only have one implementation, it's very easy to accidentally have oversights in the spec that in effect render the true spec "whatever the browser does"; and while I applaud the pragmatism in that approach, I don't applaud the design-by-coincidence that then results in some pretty bad api's being permanent gotcha's in new webdev. Some of the API's that resulted from MS + apples more... "innovative" moments are pretty terrible, and here to stay.
Basically: having a bit of competition is just a good idea for all kinds of reasons, especially when the downsides are... well what exactly? Why would you want a blink monoculture?
It can, hypothetically. Whether that realistically would happen is another question (and I wish this distinction was more clearly grasped in conversations about these things!).
As a strategy, it would be reckless in the extreme.
On mobile, definitely. I realize that many people like to complain about the mobile version of Firefox, but it offers extensions when their competition does not.
about the same but soon chrome is going to be handicapping adblocking and ublock origin dev said he'd probably have to back away from it since they are crippling the interface he used primarily (basically taking it away in the name of "security").
Security, privacy, and customization are why I use it. It takes a lot of work to do it, but you can lock down firefox very effectively and you have more freedom to decide what your browser is and isn't allowed to do with firefox than anyone else.
In the end, what we're missing in browsers is a browser that works for you instead of exploiting you to make money. Out of the box, firefox doesn't hit that mark today, but at least it can be beaten into submission. No other browser gives users that kind of control.
I actually do use duck duck go. There doesn't seem to be any advantage to using G search anymore, the web has reached a critical mass of trash that just overwhelms unspecific searches.
Yeah, DDG can even give better results at time than google does. Google search has gone from being exceptional to becoming ad filled trash. Every other major search engine (directly or indirectly) gets their results in part from Google, but since most spammers are focused on Google the father from google you get the better results can be.
I recently switched to try out ddg (again). Local search is terrible. Other searches have at least been ok. Nothing so far seems worlds better, but there does seem to be a bit less spam in the results.
However the one reason that instantly pops into my mind is containers. I can easily have multiple "accounts" without mucking around with multiple browser profiles. This alone is worth it switching from Chrome to Firefox for me.
I use Firefox because I believe its important for there to be more than one browser implementation (rendering engine) in the world. If you believe the same, go and download and use Firefox, even if it inconveniences you to do so. Now, about Skia...
It's not user-facing features that move users from one browser to another, it's the number of websites they use that don't break with one or the other.
Because I consider websites with obnoxious ads and a bunch of tracking "broken" Firefox gives people a lot of reason to switch, but unless they try it for themselves they have no idea what they're missing or how the pages they visit would look and be improved without all that junk.
I agree, and imho firefox should even bet more on user privacy (for example adopting strong measures against fingerprinting, and migrating away from google as a default search engine).
They recently signed a new deal with Google, and those deals more or less completely fund the development of Firefox, so I don't see a change there happening any time soon.
I think the major problem with a privacy focus from a business perspective is that not enough people care. So you have to spend both a lot of time and effort _being_ better at privacy and then also a bunch of time and effort trying to convince people that it matters.
For a minute there Firefox was running significant advertising against Chrome along these lines, and touting its improved speed, but I don't think it really moved the needle for them.
> . So you have to spend both a lot of time and effort _being_ better at privacy and then also a bunch of time and effort trying to convince people that it matters.
The good news for Mozilla is that the task of trying to inform the public on privacy issues doesn't fall to browser makers alone. Many businesses spanning multiple industries are offering services for people looking for better privacy and they're working to convince more people of the need. There are also several non-profits and online communities which are spreading the message about the importance of privacy and security. The news media also often reports on abuses of our data as they are discovered. As more and more people become aware of how they're being screwed over as a result of handing out the intimate details of their lives like candy the market will grow.
The bad news is that the largest and most powerful companies are making money hand over fist exploiting our private and personal data and they're working hard to normalize it and shield themselves from legal responsibility. The influence and money they possess, along with support from the state which also benefits by taking copies of that data for themselves is no small hurdle to overcome, but the entire system isn't sustainable if we really want freedom and equality so at a certain point the tide has to turn or we fall into total oppression.
I have not seen an important website genuinely break in a long time. Certainly not enough to build any sort of decision heuristic. Who are these people who have websites break all the time on Firefox but not in Chrome so much it drives them from one to another?
The problem with building a web browser is that if you introduce too many new features then you are breaking with web standards. The most you can do is add some user conveniences like sync, themes and extensions, but those don't go far enough to make enough users consider switching. A browser can, by definition, never have a "killer app".
There is so much more a browser can add beyond just rendering websites "correctly" - and even that does not mean always rendering them the way the designer wants. Just a few things that could win over power users:
- Better tab organization. Vertical, tree-style tabs are an improvement possible with extensions, but surely we can do even better, especially if with direct support from the browser.
- Better bookmarking. All bookmarks should take a snapshot of the website in case it disappears or changes and should have fast full-text search. And those are only the obvious parts that are missing.
- Integrated ad-blocking and user scripts/styles to enhance and fix user-hostile websites. Make it easy to share these with non-technical users. Really anything that puts the user in control. This includes the Browser UI too - firefox has been going backwards con customizability.
- Ability to keep up with websites directly through the browser. Aka bring back RSS support and actually make it useful.
- Anything that works against the centralization of the web. Allow users to comment and share websites with their friends or community right from the browser in a way that is resistant to censorship.
And this is just what I could think of right away.
LibreOffice is the dominant OpenOffice fork and the main alternative to Microsoft Office, unless you count Google Docs. LO seems much healthier when compared to Firefox, if anything.
This is exactly right, and as you’ll see from the long tail of answers, there isn’t one that actually applies to normal people.
It used to be that IE etc was actually quite bad, and Firefox was substantially faster while adding important features like tabs. That’s when the nerds installed Firefox on their parents computers. Then FF languished, Chrome came out and was much faster and used less resources. So the nerds replaced everyone’s browsers with Chrome.
Now everyone is using their default browser from their phones, or apps, or inline system browsers in apps. All the browsers are roughly equivalent now, so the nerds don’t have a lot of reason to go around and change their parents browsers. Plus you don’t have any real advantage to changing the mobile browser from Chrome (Android) or Safari (iOS). Thus the market has shifted away from desktops, FF lost there, hasn’t regained, and has made almost no inroads on mobile.
They need a reason for the nerds en masse to go and change everything, while inertia and incompatible built-in password managers will make this painful.
Once Google have a total monopoly there is nothing stopping them from making adblocking impossible and add even more user tracking/data gathering.
It's a stance.
And tbh I don't see much difference with Firefox when using Chrome
(besides all the data that I can see leaving my computer to go to google servers even when I'm not on any website)
The real (and often downvoted) answer is that Mozilla compromised on their core values. A "death by a thousand cuts", as it were.
For me, it started back when "sponsored tiles" were first announced in 2014. On the surface it was obviously advertisements, but many defenders tried to argue that it was a "good thing"
Then there was the proprietary Pocket extension baked into the browser with no easy removal. Again, many defenders tried to argue it was a "good thing"
Then the "studies" channel was used to push a Mr Robot ad. It's unclear how it was aligned with the values, but defenders tried to argue it was a "good thing".
They partnered with Cliqz to collect data and make recommendations. Again, defenders tried to argue it was a "good thing"
They partnered with Booking.com to push advertisements, going so far as to argue that they didn't receive any monetary compensation and that it was just a "social experiment". Again, defenders tried to argue it was a "good thing"
This is just a sampling of the events in the last 8 years (sponsored tiles was 2014). Every single time, they may have received some sort of benefit, but a number of users who bought into firefox for the security and privacy aspects ... felt betrayed and left. Because if it isn't about the privacy, what is the USP of firefox? "Not google" is only a small part of the user base.
> The real (and often downvoted) answer is that Mozilla compromised on their core values. A "death by a thousand cuts", as it were.
I expect it's downvoted because it's laughable. 99% of browser users don't give a shit about those things. If a poll were to be taken of the HN users who switched to Chrome, I doubt even a quarter would cite that as the reason.
It was indeed a death by a thousand cuts, but the thousand cuts were
* popup advertisements for Chrome on the frontpage of the most visited website on the planet
* Google paying off Adobe, AVG, Avast and others to make their installers include Chrome using disgusting dark patterns
* Android, the collapse of desktop browsing in comparsion to mobile browsing, and people that will just default to using the same browser on their laptop/desktop as on their phone
* Netflix DRM that didn't work on Firefox for a few months
* Youtube, Google Meet and Google Docs refusing to work properly on Firefox
* The word "Google" becoming as synonymous with simply using the internet as the internet explorer icon was in the 2000s
* Chrome was and to some extent still is legitimately snappier than Firefox
Agreed, these are the macro-level events that really drove user adoption. The narrative (especially the Mr. Robot thing!) are totally out of proportion to their actual impact on user adoption and aren't the all-or-nothing tests of credibility or integrity that people are suggesting they are.
— but they are symptomatic. The Mozilla of 2004 wouldn't even think of doing user-hostile stuff like that, because they were trying to make a useful tool rather than a lifestyle brand.
Those things will have disillusioned people who used Firefox because their goals were aligned. I agree that Google being Google will have lost people who used Firefox simply because it was a good tool.
I use Google Meet with Firefox on my M1 Mac every day. The only thing that doesn't work for me is camera backgrounds. Would be nice to be able to share audio when presenting, but I almost never present.
99% of browser users is not relevant, the question is how big a percentage of FireFox' users (the ones that remain, that is). Because if you lose those that is a much harder thing to recover from than to not win back the other 99% that you don't have anyway. And I suspect that the FF users of old care very much, though, of course I'm only speaking for myself here.
>And I suspect that the FF users of old care very much
But do they? Firefox's rise was largely due to IE6 being pure trash, and the average user of a web browser in 2008 being a lot more knowledgeable than the average user today.
Marketshare, by definition, is the share of the market. The market has expanded dramatically, but desktop browsing itself has plummeted, and a lot of users are just going to default to whatever they're using on their primary device (their phone), which is Google. "Google" is synonomous with using the internet in the same way that the internet explorer logo used to be in the mid 2000s.
Even if it is one percent (which I highly doubt) and that one percent is committed enough then that's enough of a core to guarantee the success of the project. It doesn't need a team of 1000 to build a browser, much less to keep an existing one patched and rolling along.
Quite on the contrary, even a team of 1000 won't be sufficient to maintain compatibility if your marketshare is so low that website and webapp builders ignore your concerns.
A non-Chromium browser needs to maintain a critical mass of users to be sufficiently large to ensure that the world wants to stay compatible with it, and having 1% of marketshare is not sufficient for that, no matter how committed these users are - if firefox drops to 1%, then it becomes irrelevant and the project has failed at its goals as the "web standards" become equivalent to whatever chromium does.
Browsers get influence to keep the web as we want it to be mostly based on the quantity of browser users which websites want to attract and keep; without that all the best code in the world is useless and doesn't even give you a seat at the table, much less a strong say for how the de-facto standard web practices will change.
> Quite on the contrary, even a team of 1000 won't be sufficient to maintain compatibility if your marketshare is so low that website and webapp builders ignore your concerns.
As a browser maker your "concerns" should really be web/internet standards. If websites and webapp builders aren't complying with standards and are building their stuff to only work in non-standard compliant browsers that's a separate problem that no web browser can solve.
Perhaps that's not how they ought to work, but that's definitely how they work - web standards are effectively determined (e.g. in WHATWG) by a consensus (or in some cases unilateral action) of makers of browsers with nontrivial market share; and that's how this has been happening for quite some time now. If you've got 20% market share, then your opinion (and your implementation choices) matters much more than that of the multiple <1% browsers.
I fully agree. If the consistent messaging is meant to be "use this browser, it's private and respects you", but it's then compromised by advertising and data abuse, it seems hypocritical and damages adoption of the browser.
I don't recall very many people defending Mozilla on the Mr Robot or the Booking.com missteps. Even current and ex-Mozillans lambasted them for those.
I recall a few people defending the sponsored titles (or half-hearted defenses about how it's bad but not that bad since you can turn them off) but those defenses seemed to be largely drowned out by the overwhelmingly negative response.
The only of those that I recall having anything close to "many defenders" was the Pocket integration.
I know you're saying this not the question being asked, but what's your source for their revenue growing anywhere near that rate, or indeed at all?
As far as I can see their revenue peaked around FY 2017 at $562 million. In 2018 that number was about $450 million and short of expenses, they were short of expenses again for 2019 but for a $338 million settlement from Yahoo/Verizon.
The most recent reported year, 2020, saw a slight drop in their search income but a sharper cut to expenses (mostly by cutting about $60 million in "software development" expenses), putting them back on track, in a way.
They've had a steady increase in subscription income, but it's still dwarfed by the current search deal (in 2020, just shy of $25 million in subscriptions vs. over $440 million from search).
I think that the point of the GP is not necessarily about money, but to have the structure focus on Firefox. ie that it should be the source and the objective of the funding to have all the attention that it needs.
The last thing Mozilla needs is to spend more time pretending they're a big tech company and can compete with those guys. They should focus on Firefox (as GP said), not build a communication platform that will then fail versus Signal/WhatsApp/Hangouts/Teams/etc.
Yup. Someone else will likely do a better job building those. Mozilla's (and only Mozilla's) core competency is browser building, and they should stick to it. Anyone can build a communicator, but building a full browser engine is becoming a forgotten skill.
The decline of Firefox started with Chrome's JavaScript engine, who was years ahead of Firefox's performance. The focus on JavaScript-heavy websites was already growing, and Firefox was slow to catch up.
Now they're about the same performance-wise, but the mind share lost was brutal. there was a period that the only advantages Firefox had over Chrome were memory use and extensions, and they had to get rid of the NPAPI extensions for security reasons.
The basic problem for Mozilla is they poured a ton of effort into improving performance and marketed that heavily... and they basically didn't gain back share at all.
Pivoting would kill Firefox, and this is exactly what we should be trying to save if we care about some version of the open web. Indeed, I'm advocating for pivoting away from all of these other things, and towards Firefox as the one and only concern for the organisation.
> DuckDuckGo already proved there is an appetite for something like this.
An appetite, yes. But not a major one. A privacy-focused, ad-free approach would be hugely appealing to the HN crowd. But I’m less convinced about the public at large.
They get most of their money from advertising deals with those major companies (such as by putting google in as the default search engine). Competing against them would likely result in those companies removing the advertising dollars and tanking the business.
> Competing against them would likely result in those companies removing the advertising dollars and tanking the business.
Google paying Apple massive amounts of money to keep Google Search the default search engine on their devices doesn't seem to be affected by the fact that Pixel phones (or Android as a whole) and iPhones are competing. Though I gotta admit that it could be because Google doesn't have the overwhelming winner position in that market, as opposed to the web browser market.
However, I still find Google pulling the funding unlikely, given (afaik) the reason for Google "financially supporting" Mozilla is exactly because Google is afraid of being legally called out as a monopoly in the web browser market. The only point at which I can see Google pulling that funding is if Mozilla ends up on the same level as Chrome in terms of posing a danger to Google's dominance. At which point, Mozilla has already won and doesn't need Google that much to sustain itself, so I wouldn't pose it as a strong concern.
Mozilla getting rid of the Google default search engine deal would be the best thing that ould happen to Firefox. That money is not free, it is (amongs other things) a shackle that keeps Firefox from going too far against Google's interests.
I know many people who used to use Firefox and moved on to Brave. Brave has a mission that is easier to get behind and till it’s unclear what Firefox is trying to be.
I don't think that's true: Brave is actively building independent revenue-generating services so they have a footprint on the web instead of just being a company that makes a window to the web.
And they are growing. The big thing there is just positioning, and being aggressive in the right places.
That's the fundamental problem with Mozilla: MS, Google and Apple can leverage web footprint and physical platforms to market their products and generate revenue for browser development. Plus Apple's happy to take money from Google. Brave's building some kind of revenue-generating platform that stands on its own.
I don't know if Mozilla has a vision in that kind of way.
>> We as a community, cannot afford to let Firefox languish until the only browsers in the world are Chromium derivatives. The diversity of truly independent browser engines is far too important to give up without a fight.
There are a lot of people oh HN who agree with that but then use a different browser for whatever reason. I feel like these people are being very hypocritical and should use what they want to succeed. Firefox is very usable and increasing its market share starts with you. Or to use another cliche - be the change you wish to see.
That's not to say Mozilla doesn't need to get their shit together, but if market share drops too low they will not be able to get money to do the things they need to do.
> Firefox is very usable and increasing its market share starts with you. Or to use another cliche - be the change you wish to see.
I use Firefox despite long standing bugs. Somehow a browser that aggressively throttles background tabs is still able to leak memory to background tabs. For the longest time Firefox messed with my wireless headset, they finally added proper support for web audio APIs and things are better now.
CPU usage is still all over the place. Some inactive tab will cause FF to spin CPU usage up to 100%.
Firefox still leaks resources, I can shut down all tabs and still have the media playback process using up tons of CPU and RAM.
WebGL performance is worse than Chrome.
TBF it has been getting steadily better over the last year, I have noticed a marked improvement. I'd say a year or so ago it was noticeably bad on a regular basis, now it is an occasional annoyance. But it should never have gotten that bad.
More to the point of the question, Google spent a LONG time pushing Chrome, hard. They paid lots of # to bundle it with app updates years ago. Visiting Google properties causes banner ads "Download Chrome!" to appear. A few years back YouTube videos would occasionally just stop working in Firefox.
And now days with Node development, well, Node developer tools are built into Chrome. React developer tools run in Chrome.
A while back I spent a few weeks figuring out how to configure Firefox to work exactly how I want a browser to work, then months happily using it. Then a big update was released and everything broke. I never bothered to get it working again. And despite claims of performance improvements that came with the release, it still chugged slower than Chrome. I would love to use a browser that I can actually configure how I want without things breaking every week, even if it's slower in general. But if I can't configure reliably and it's slower -- what's the point?
Actually there is a fairly secret long term version of windows 10 that also does without all the bullshit. No store, no constant massive feature updates, etc. Windows 10 LTSB / LTSC. They try to make it seem like its only for embedded machines but its basically just stripped down windows 10 with a lot more similarities (feature wise) to what windows 7 was.
RedHat has no magic Mozilla sauce, they simply ship Firefox ESR and upgrade it every year. You'll have the same breakage in the end, just yearly instead of monthly.
They offer nothing I cannot get elsewhere and thus I have no reason to switch.
When it first came out, Firefox was faster, lighter and offered way better function than the alternatives at the time. Since then, competition has been fierce in the browser market and they’ve done little to distinguish themselves in any major way from their competitive set.
Until they do something so vastly incomparable in the market, they gonna continue to falter.
For an average person, I think this argument is fine. But we're on HN where we can discuss something with a bit more nuance. There's two major things that I see that FF offers that Chrome doesn't, including chromium alternatives. 1) More privacy. Chrome tracks you substantially more than alternative browsers. In addition to that, is simply the chrome ecosystem, see next point. 2) Chrome's dominance defines the web. A decentralized service doesn't become centralized once one player takes 100% of the users. It happens long before because a big player can throw their weight around and force others to do what they want. Chrome already acts this way. We talk about this extensively several times a year here, so I'll let others state this argument better. But the short is that Google can define protocols, more tracking analytics, etc.
It really comes down to two things.
- Do you want to encourage more privacy across the web?
- Do you want the web to be more decentralized?
If you want more privacy and less centralization, you should use FF. I don't think it is just about the services that they offer. I think we can go deeper and talk about the future of the web in general and how our choices affect that.
Firefox promises all these things, but I think that by and large the problem is that it just doesn't deliver on them for the average person. And average person is how we get the market share and safety in numbers.
FF definitely offers more privacy for the average person when compared to Chrome. I'm not sure what you're talking about. That normal people don't care? Well that's why I said the conversation about "products" was fine for the average person but not here on HN where we're experts and there's more nuance.
Right, I've never walked by my computer at midnight to discover its awake and hammering the disk scanning everything that's installed on my machines like chrome does.
You're right, but neither can we wait for legislation to be passed. So attack this problem from multiple fronts. And even after legislation is passed that doesn't solve the second problem of centralization.
Multi Account Containers is the key reason I use Firefox. I have to juggle multiple accounts for the same services for work. Containers makes this trivial. The closest chrome has is profiles which require a separate window and are just generally far more painful to use.
Temporary Containers as well. An entire throwaway container by default. I can just accept all the cookies and closing the tab deletes them all. No management.
Nothing else comes close.
I'm glad this exists (although it appears there are extensions in other browsers that do the same thing) but I never have more than 10 tabs open, so it's not something that would make me switch.
I'm glad it exists too. If you ever have a need to juggle tabs this extension is a godsend. Believe me, I've tried finding similar functionality for Chrome/Edge and aside from Edge vertical tabs, the rest are a kludge at best.
Sidebery is great, but I had to switch back to Tree Style Tab because I hate animations, and while Sidebery is impressively configurable, not all animations can be disabled (https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery/issues/517).
> They offer nothing I cannot get elsewhere and thus I have no reason to switch.
I'm not going to tell anybody else what their reasons are or should be, but for me voting against the browser monoculture was a reason to switch.
Most people won't care enough, of course, but to me it's not that different than voting for a candidate in an election who might not be the absolute best fit for my personal interests but who seems better for an overall political culture, or some other similar compromise.
On Desktop, I can agree. But uBlock Origin on Android is only possible on Firefox afaik (and one of the major ways Google uses Android for Ad revenue leverage)
Recently switched to Linux and only installed Firefox. When you force yourself to use it, it's doable. I think only once in the last 6 months did a website not work (my dumb HOA website). Other than that, it's more than sufficient.
It crashes sometimes but if that's the price for not having coercive software controlling my life, so be it.
Not claiming, that your experience isn't true, but: Firefox hasn't crashed for me in years! And I am a real tab hoarder. 400 tabs and more are not so uncommon for me. Then again I don't allow arbitrary websites to run all sorts of shit scripts. It might or might not be your hardware, or it might be the websites you visit.
Not the OP, but I consider it a soft crash every time I update Firefox in my OS, and it won't allow me to spawn new tabs until I restart Firefox. Annoying behavior they've included a couple years back.
If I understand what you're reporting correctly, then that's something your OS "included a couple of years back".
If you install Firefox from Mozilla's site, it won't have these update problems. What's happening is that your package manager is swapping Firefox's bits out from under it while it's running. Firefox's built-in update system doesn't do that.
Which is not to say that I think you shouldn't be using a packaged version of Firefox. Personally I'm running Nightly so I don't have the option anyway. Generally speaking, I vastly prefer sticking to my package manager's stuff.
I just wish the package managers would fix their Firefox updates. (I don't know what the right fix would be, and I imagine it could be hard.)
Then someone at Redhat was probably bribed by some Googler, cause it only happens with Firefox updates /s
Joke aside, Firefox is aware that it's been updated and the new tab states that I have to restart my browser. I'm not familiar with the inner workings of Firefox, I just expect it to have everything it needs to function, in working memory. I've been using Fedora for close to 14 years now, Firefox always installed from system packages, and the updates always replaced the existing files on disk without it affecting my application experience. No other desktop app I use has this behavior after updates while they where running.
A big fuss? No, got used to it already. But I still consider it a soft crash state that I encounter with Firefox.
Er... just yesterday I had the crappy update experience that everyone is talking about. And that's using Firefox Nightly, with a downloaded build. So I'd need to look more into this to understand what the actual situation is.
Hm... though now I wonder... I also had a cron job that ran me out of disk space. I wonder if that contributed to make it more like the external file replacement situation?
Strictly, Fedora doesn't support doing updates while the system is running (or at least they don't recommend it).
An alternative that might be smoother in this regard: use a flatpak version of Firefox instead. (Firefox is in Fedora's flatpak repo, and on Flathub.) GNOME Software updates flatpak apps in the background, and you just get the new version the next time you open the app.
Not sure from which perspective your comment comes from. dnf update or dnfdragora updates (if you prefer a GUI) are all done while the system is running.
Sure, distribution upgrades nowadays are just like Windows update requiring a system reboot and a black screen with a useless progress bar to stare at (that's also a pretty annoying relatively recent addition).
GNOME is not my cup of tea. And until flatpak delivers tangible finegrained software sandboxing (at least Android level sandboxing), I'm not really interested in using it for software that's already packaged in the dnf repositories.
I use Fedora because it has newer software, pretty stable in my experience, and my knowledge is transferable to RedHat/Enterprise Linux. But I stopped buying into most of Redhat's desktop innovations a while ago.
> Not sure from which perspective your comment comes from. dnf update or dnfdragora updates (if you prefer a GUI) are all done while the system is running.
> Sure, distribution upgrades nowadays are just like Windows update requiring a system reboot and a black screen with a useless progress bar to stare at (that's also a pretty annoying relatively recent addition).
Silverblue doesn't have a black screen with a progress bar — it just boots straight into the updated version. I assume Kinoite (like Silverblue but with Plasma instead of GNOME) is the same.
> And until flatpak delivers tangible finegrained software sandboxing (at least Android level sandboxing)
It's cool, I get it. You find these adequate solutions to existing problems. But they are replacements of some issues for new issues. That's why I'm not onboard with Redhat vision for a Linux desktop, that's why I stay away from GNOME, Flatpak, rpm-ostree distro flavours. They are almost an 80% of something, then a coin toss away of being deprecated/ignored.
Those tools are not teaching me how to fish, but how to carve out and build a fish rod, fish anatomy, and anything in between. When all I want is the proverbial fish.
Things got dicier in the server space since the IBM acquisition, e.g. RedHat 8 experience was anything but good, and their entry into the container space with UBIs. A pile of things breaking, when switching the Dockerfile from CentOS to RedHat. Even more ridiculous things, like RedHat 8 offering a license that allows X install for free, but then the ISO wasn't even distributed by torrent file and the download speed for me in EU was under 100KBps.
But anyway, here I am ranting about RedHat, when I didn't want to. My main complaint is still with Firefox, it wants me to restart the browser but I can use the existing tabs just fine for any web browsing. Nothing is bricked by the update, just Firefox deciding when I should restart my browser, just like the very vague Windows experience I left so long ago.
You just probably use the web browser much more often to catch it after an update.
And afaik, the reason for this is that they can only maintain a known good state this way, as well as making freshly patched security patches available as soon as possible.
I don't think the package managers are at fault here and this would be much more easily fixed in Firefox itself by not touching the filesystem after Firefox starts - resources are already bundled so you only need to keep a handle open (package managers don't change file contents but replace what the filename points to) and only fork instead of executing new processes (keep a pristine process running to fork from if you want).
Yeah, I think there are measures I could take to help the situation but it's a little low on my priority queue at the moment. The crashes are rare and not really a big issue for me.
Hmm, interesting, because I don't force myself to use Firefox. I use it because it's just plain better than Chrome, in that I can configure it just the way I want.
I use it almost exclusively on Linux. It was much worse just 9 months ago. I do close and reopen it every week or so, it reopens all my tabs per my config, and it never gets sluggish on me if I do that. I agree with commenter above. I prefer it, with its flaws, because of configurability. It's been 6 months since I ahve been forced to open a site in Chromium. It tends to be some bloated highly commercial (F500) site that requires that.
Damning by faint praise shows how bad it is right now for FF. Back in the golden age of Firefox (arguably, before the versions started incrementing like Chrome), it was a pure pleasure to use, even if certain things like ActiveX refused to work. Now, if we "force ourselves" to use it, it's "maybe OK".
I can't remember Firefox crashing in recent years and that includes times I approached 2000 open tabs. Though after using the same profile for over 5 years now it has trouble remembering the color scheme for whatever reason.
I'd say that's usually a problem with websites and not the browser.
Many websites are just designed with the 80% of most frequent configurations. And when autoplay is disabled, the browser window is too narrow, a special font isn't loaded or a cookie is blocked all bets are off.
I never had Firefox crashes until Ubuntu 21.10 which I think made Firefox a snap, now I get crashes when it tries to load fonts. And I get that colour scheme thing now too.
I use Firefox. Not exclusively, but most of the time, on principle.
I would call it usable, but not "very usable". For normal people, Chrome(ium) UX is better. For power users, Vivaldi is a far better choice despite the Chromium browser engine. And for both of these groups, Firefox UX worsens and improves seemingly at random.
Quite frankly, I'm conflicted whether I should recommend Firefox at all. If I say "look, here's Firefox! It's more private than Chrome, and almost as fast and error-free!", and then Mozilla goes on to ruin that perception 6 months later (as they are wont to do), then it's my reputation and credibility at stake. Not only is that an unnecessary ego hit, but also makes me look like a liar (or at best, like an ivory tower dweller divorced from reality).
The hamburger menu, for one. It's extremely unintuitive. Not the fact that it uses a hamburger icon, but that even simple things like accessing the full list of my bookmarks involve multiple clicks. If you know the keyboard shortcuts then it's not a problem, but I want common UI items to be accessible from the UI.
Besides that, the UI is just sluggish a lot of the time. It feels that Chrome(ium) has a far better latency response.
In both cases you get a list of bookmarks on step 2 and you get a full, searchable, editable view in step 3. The global shortcut for the third step is the same in both (ctrl + shift + o).
I want Firefox to succeed. But that doesn't mean I will use an inferior browser, especially when I feel the decision makers at Mozilla are out of sync.
I don't understand what you need. Go and try Firefox. As a person that uses Firefox as a daily driver, both at work and at home usage, I can't recall when I had to switch to Chrome. In 2010, maybe. I don't know what other "awe-inspiring endorsement" you need.
Firefox did not save my marriage nor did it make me a million dollars, no.
Do you use Firefox because it’s a better browser or because of philosophical reasons? If it’s the former, then I want to know that somebody thinks it’s the best way to browse the web. If it’s the latter, then tell me it’s worse but the politics of supporting Google are distasteful to you.
Don’t tell me it’s “very usable” because I’m going to interpret it as the latter which may or may not be correct.
I actually don't use ad blocking. If there are ads and I don't want to see them, then I don't visit that site again. The site has chosen their business model and I can choose which sites I want to visit.
I also like buying things that I might like, so seeing ads (and ads that are targeted to me) isn't necessarily a bad thing to me.
I agree with your topline goal, but I am surprised by the way you think about it. Most of what you recommend has no obvious connection to firefox-the-program.
Like...
> - Donate the major money drains that aren't Firefox to the Apache Foundation or another worthy custodian
> - Fire all inessential staff that don't want to work on Firefox.
> - Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money, and cut their salaries (bonuses tied directly to increase in Firefox market share).
> - Make sure that all donations from now on are redirected to things that support Firefox development and nothing else, period.
All of these are good suggestions if the problem is that Firefox is running out of money or has too few resources. But that's not my impression at all!
Google's strategy with Chrome demonstrates how valuable it is to develop other compelling services that use cutting-edge standards supported by your browser. Google does it in a way where they freeze out other compatible browsers, but Mozilla does not have to. I would say that the number one thing that Mozilla can do to support the web is to make web standards meaningful again - and the best way to do that is to develop things aside from web browsers to demonstrate the value of those standards.
> We as a community, cannot afford to let Firefox languish until the only browsers in the world are Chromium derivatives.
I don't think Mozilla having non-Firefox projects harms Firefox. I think there is every reason to believe that a healthy Mozilla has Firefox at the center, with many other ongoing projects.
My impression is that Mozilla is too focused on basically everything that isn't Firefox - to me, it's axiomatic that Firefox wouldn't be in such a horrifying shape if they were focused on it. They are lacking for attention, and not money, which is why they should jettison everything that isn't Firefox or doesn't serve Firefox. Anyone else can do funny extensions or VPN or what have you got, but browser-making is Mozilla's core competency that no one in the FOSS ecosystem has mastered to the extent they did.
It seems evident to me that if they made Firefox into a power user browser again, somehow, then power users would flock to it again and bring in some of their peers and family, putting it back in a safe 10-15% range of market share where it can't be picked off or ignored by Google. And I know that power users are leaving en masse - I stuck with them through thick and thin for nearly 15 years, and I'm finally getting ready to leave if the situation doesn't improve.
> I think there is every reason to believe that a healthy Mozilla has Firefox at the center
Neither Mozilla not Firefox are healthy, in my assessment. And this is exactly because they are getting sidetracked instead of centering on Firefox.
> it's axiomatic that Firefox wouldn't be in such a horrifying shape if they were focused on it
In my experience many things come to be in horrifying shape because of focus as well, so I don't agree with your logic.
> which is why they should jettison everything that isn't Firefox or doesn't serve Firefox.
I mean, 4 / 6 of the products on their product pages have Firefox in the name[1]? Really begs the question on what you mean by "doesn't serve firefox." I guess you mean you don't like the VPN or Pocket?
> if they made Firefox into a power user browser again, somehow, then power users would flock to it again and bring in some of their peers and family
I think maybe the reason we have different views on this is that we might view the user base differently. I'm not sure how you mean "power users" - it's a fuzzy term - but I suggest we start at the number of people in the worldwide IT industry[2]. Probably not all super users, but likely more technically savvy. It seems there are about 55,000,000 of us, but that's in an internet user population of 4.66 billion[3]. That puts the power user population at about 1.4% of the people represented in the market share statistics. So if global relevance is your goal, I'm not sure that the power users are gonna do it. Even if Firefox dominated the market they would need to bring a lot of friends and family along to get the people needed to push Firefox up ~6%.
The web is just way, way bigger than it used to be and is serving way more people. I totally agree that Firefox is failing to find a convincing foothold in the modern web, but I'm unconvinced that appealing to power users would benefit the browser or the web more than any other group. I also think that, if Firefox caters to a particular demographic with unusually deep expertise, that they risk moving the browser in a direction that's less appealing to users who lack that deep expertise.
> My impression is that Mozilla is too focused on basically everything that isn't Firefox - to me, it's axiomatic that Firefox wouldn't be in such a horrifying shape if they were focused on it.
I really don’t think that most of us would have any meaningful knowledge on this without having first hand experience, so I don’t think these opinions are of any use.
If all that is left is chromium, then you can kiss what is left of web standards good bye. Google will set the standard, taking input from any other tech player big enough to have a seat at the table.
Its bad enough ISO certification boards and official positions of the W3C can be bought or corrupted. Let there be only one engine, controlled by Google? And even the pretense of a open and fair playing field goes away.
Open source and open protocols were not resistant enough to for profit corporations.
Now our standards are dwindling, open source projects and standards boards re completely co-opted, and the conversation on mailing lists and forums sounds like the never ending squabbling and finger wagging from your Fortune 500 HR department.
Foss and open standards have been captured by capital. And it shows in the culture.
Hell, it shows in the conversations around places like this.
Exactly. This is why Mozilla, as the only credible custodian of the only credible Chromium/Blink/WebKit competitor, needs to wake up and die trying to stop that future, if needed. If they lose that war, there is no reason for them to exist over Brave or Vivaldi, for example.
> If all that is left is chromium, then you can kiss what is left of web standards good bye.
Well, we've already done that. Google a) dominates the standards bodies and b) releases "standard" features that are only standard because Chrome says so
However, I think they need to answer the question, why should Firefox exist? If there is no compelling reason, well, there you go. If there is, double down on that make that reason shine. They have wasted so much money on the wrong things, IMO.
If Firefox dies, the open web dies. It's that simple. For the open web to remain open, there needs to be at least one more truly independent source of authority regarding how a rendering engine should work. Everyone else has thrown in the towel and abdicated that authority to Google by embedding Blink.
Google is either actively malicious to the open web, or doesn't care about it other than as something they can strip-mine as a revenue source. They sufficiently diversified into mobile and Android that the death of the open web would be but a blip to them.
IMO, Firefox should consciously be that alternate source of authority. How they accomplish that organisationally is irrelevant, what is relevant that their browser as a whole is competitive and focused enough that it stops haemorrhaging market share, and can start to slowly rebuild it as people look for a way out of Google's ecosystem.
That is a reason why the world should want it to exist, but it isn't a reason why anyone individual would consider it better than Chrome.
Firefox used to at least directly target segments of the population with its more comprehensive developer platform, but they have slowly been tearing that out for many years and now Chrome is converging to the same place.
At best I would say "the reason for Firefox to exist is because we need it to exist" argues we would have to prop it up using some kind of government intervention--to deal with the "it is at least slightly worse for every given user"--but the problem is we need people to actually use it, not for it to merely continue to be developed, and "require some random percentage of people to draw lots and be forced to use Firefox" is probably a dystopia for other reasons.
Why does everyone always forget about Safari in these discussions?
Safari has a respectable marketshare on mobile / tablets. Not as good on desktop but it’s not a lost cause.
It's not a relevant browser. The last time I have seen Safari installed on a Windows machine was likely 2013-14, if not earlier. It doesn't have an Android version (which makes it less relevant on smartphones). It doesn't support Linux, which lots of the power user/tech trailblazer crowd is using. It's not open source, unlike Firefox or Chromium. It lags in features (which to be fair, isn't bad when they impact privacy).
I don't think there's a good case to be made for Safari outside of Apple devices.
Those things don't matter. Just by existing Safari is making sure web developers can't solely focus on Chromium. If we disregard mobile, Safari still has more marketshare on desktop than Firefox.
> Apple's offering, Safari, currently holds 18.34% of the internet browser market, with an
estimated 844 million people using it in 2021. Safari also makes up 23.78% of all
mobile device browsers worldwide, which is high considering Apple holds 26.35% of the
mobile vendor market. https://backlinko.com/browser-market-share
I think the other thing that makes it less relevant is that Safari is using WebKit and at this point its just a WebKit derivative. Part of the value that Firefox provides for better or worse is alternate components that force things to actually try and meet standards.
I've never seen Safari on an Android or Windows device. I would imagine this is on the list of things that is technically possible, but not a real world use case.
>they need to answer the question, why should Firefox exist? If there is no compelling reason, well, there you go. If there is, double down on that make that reason shine.
Unfortunately, that reason (browser engine diversity)is compelling to people who understand the situation, but not general consumers - and it's impossible to make general consumers care, unless maybe Firefox went for an edgy "rebel against the man" vibe.
I feel like I understand the situation but I'm doubtful that browser engine diversity is compelling. It seems like duplicate effort. As long as Chromium accepts pull requests, what's the problem with browser monoculture?
(In case it's not clear, I'm asking in earnest. I'm not trolling.)
- - - -
edit: Okay, pull requests alone are not enough, but the objections y'all are raising seem like they could all be answered by forking, no? If Google upsets their users then a different browser has a chance to gain users:
- Ad-blocking
- Better extension API
- Maintaining backwards compatibility
- No Manifest V3
- Better vision of the web than Google
In other words, effort expended on duplicate functionality for it's own sake is wasted. Why not let Google do the heavy lifting and then improve on their work, rather than trying to compete head-to-head on the whole enchilada (of a complete browser engine)?
A browser monoculture allows one entity to dictate how the web works. Even if you can open a pull request against Chromium, that doesn't mean it will get accepted without the approval of Google.
Right now, backwards compatibility is protected by competing browsers. If one breaks backwards compatibility too often, it risks becoming known for having sites not work on it.
In a monoculture, Google could take aggressive moves to prevent ad-blocking. In a monoculture, Google could push more ad focused features like FloC. Google could integrate more ways to allow browser fingerprint (not saying they would, but there would be no recourse).
With competition Google knows that people could balk at any point so they must balance their interests with their users' interests. In a monoculture, they wouldn't have to.
Anyone can "fork" it by making their own build. Which will quickly become worse than useless as it falls behind security patches. A secure fork is something that is easy to start, very very hard to maintain.
The possibility of forks does little to prevent a Chromium monoculture from embracing, extending, and extinguishing the web. (Something like Brave, with an independent revenue model, does help some with the bad maintainer problem. But it doesn't help with the constant stream of everyday bugs in the underlying engine, ones that would get set in stone with a monoculture.)
We're already there. 4% Firefox market share may as well be zero. What is the current recourse for Chrome pushing a monoculture? I don't think it matters today what Firefox does or objects to.
Because Google is still in control. Saying that Chromium "accepts pull requests" is misleading. That's true, but the overall direction and large architectural decisions are made by Google.
For example, see Manifest V3 (and the deprecation/removal of old versions). Almost everybody that hears about it disagrees - users, extension developers, etc. However, despite it's popularity being as low as could be, Google is still putting it in.
Today, if I see an article about FLOC (or whatever they're calling it now) and don't like it I can go and download Firefox. In a Chromium-only world I'm SOL.
The problem with browser monoculture is that it will erode the authority of the spec over time. Having multiple independent implementations of the same spec means that developers won't be able to merely code to one browser and treat it's quirks as gospel.
A good example of what happens if you only have one implementation is Flash Player. People programmed to the implementation and not the (non-existant) spec. So any reimplementation of Flash Player is largely an exercise in chasing after implementation bugs in the Player that badly-developed movies rely upon. Even Adobe's official internal documentation on SWF and AVM2 is woefully incomplete, because the actual "spec" is the proprietary source code of the player and whatever tribal knowledge had been accrued from decades of maintaining it.
The sole implementation in this case (Chromium) being Free Software does alleviate this a little, but the spec is still more of a suggestion than a reality.
I know it's in bad taste to complain about downvotes on HN, but why is this downvoted?
It's a legitimate question, in a realm that many people including in HN's general demographic don't consider.
If someone wants to learn something, why not help them instead of downvoting into oblivion because they don't know or disagree with something you know/believe?
Edit to respond to edit:
The biggest reason I think is that there's no way a fork would survive - the only way that it could would be if Microsoft/Apple/Facebook/$SOMEBODY_WITH_MONEY threw their weight behind it, which is unlikely, because any change which harms users will either help or be neutral to any of these companies.
I think it's the opposite. A lot of the HN demographic has in fact mulled this over time and time again, and has no patience for those who don't account for the possibility that one day, the monopolist will stop being a nice guy when there is every incentive to do that.
I would rather educate than downvote, but downvoting has gotten to be more emotional than based on the site guidelines, so not everyone sticks to that.
(FWIW, I don't give a crap about up/downvotes, I want to engage in a deep discussion.)
Back in the day when it was FF vs. Microsoft Internet Explorer the need for a competing FOSS browser seemed very compelling, but I don't think FF won marketshare on that, rather it won on merits: FF was better than IE.
Today the situation seems different. To me it seems to make sense to let the engine become a standardized component (developed FOSS-style) incorporating work by Google for speed, security, and reliability, and let the diversity and competition happen on a higher, more user-facing level, in terms of policy and politics and UI/UX and so on.
If people wanted features, why was Opera always so niche? It used to be so far ahead in features. I guess Brave today has quite a few features. Maybe Vivaldi.. I haven't looked really.
I think the real issue is that the vast majority of users don't really care about browser features beyond a certain point, a point which all modern browsers have easily covered. You could sit a person in front of Chrome, Firefox, Edge, or Safari and they'd barely notice. If there's attachment to a certain brand, it's mostly emotional. Arguing that people should use X over Y is like arguing that they should drink Pepsi over Coca Cola..
It's hard to differentiate a browser in such a market. It's just a window to the web, with tabs and bookmarks and a handful of features. And an adblocker extension, for some 30% of users. Beyond that, it just needs to work and be fast.
> The biggest reason I think is that there's no way a fork would survive
If the fork offers something compelling to entice users then it would presumably survive, otherwise not, but would they save FF then?
The whole problem under discussion here is that FF is losing marketshare. The things that differentiate FF in the minds of the mass consumers aren't directly related to the browser engine. Chrome/Chromium is arguably better on the fundamentals (speed, security, reliability) so why not take their core and implement user-attracting features on top of it?
I think the idea of having competing FOSS browser engines is largely a holdover from the bad old days of Internet Explorer. The main reason that browser engine diversity might be useful is that it makes for a certain robustness in the face of errors and crashes. If everyone is using the same browser then everyone is vulnerable to the same zero-days, for example.
> Okay, pull requests alone are not enough, but the objections y'all are raising seem like they could all be answered by forking, no? If Google upsets their users then a different browser has a chance to gain users:
Forking is an uphill battle starting at 0% market share, which is less than Firefox has now.
If your fork is stuggling to gain users then it's not really worth forking, I agree. You wouldn't fork for forking's sake. Whatever compelling features are going to win users away from Google Chrome could appear in Firefox or in a hypothetical Mozzila Chromium, but with the latter you're getting effectively free work from Google. And a Mozzila Chromium fork would start off a little better than 0% market share just on hype, I think, eh?
I think that's a bit too far - for example, Thunderbird is a great web client. I do think they should have found a way to hold onto the Servo team and make that engine more useable and better than the base chromium engine. If they had been able to keep the Rust foundation on board, it would have also made sense.
However, I do agree that their leadership has made terrible decisions and they've absolutely focused on the wrong products.
Thunderbird was on my mind when I was writing this. I think it ultimately comes down to whether they can afford any missteps or side concerns at all - and if the answer is "no", then Thunderbird must be cut loose no matter its value. It can always be mothballed until the times get better, or it can even be given "on loan" for some fixed duration to another trusted FOSS foundation and re-adopted when the time is up.
As good as Thunderbird is, I wouldn't want it to be anywhere near the top of Mozilla's priorities list right now.
I think Thunderbird gets to piggyback on some Mozilla infrastructure - hosting, CI/CD, receiving donations into a dedicated Thunderbird pool - but has been mostly cut out as you describe for some time. https://blog.thunderbird.net/2012/07/the-community-is-standi...
Thunderbird has always been their opportunity to demonstrate their stack is a general ecosystem, but it's headaches show that their stack isn't a good ecosystem for anything that isn't Firefox.
They shouldn't be trying to build thunderbird for its own sake, they should be demonstrating their equivalent for electron and feel pressured to make it no worse for users than the current Thunderbird, but attractive/stable enough for outside developers to choose over electron/etc.
For the record, I disagree with the assessment that they should be building an Electron email client. Most users are already using a paid/monetised Electron email client, a soon to become Electron client (like is supposedly planned for Microsoft Outlook), or a webmail interface.
Electron clients cannot compete on deep technically obscure feature sets, simply because they didn't have 20 years to accumulate them. They cannot compete on latency. Thunderbird should remain native.
Er, you do realise that Thunderbird isn't exactly native, either, what with it being based on XUL (or whatever's still left of that these days) and Gecko?
I think you are using dichotomies inappropriately to invoke the standard biases that have trapped the Mozilla community.
Something that competes with electron is not electron. Non-native includes RLBox which is now going to secure Firefox according to Mozilla. Mozilla is on record regretting thunderbird's poor Integration with the Firefox stack as a trial for thunderbird devs and a tax slowing Firefox engineering.
This holding pattern has gone on and on because no one wants to establish the correct API layer to maintain as an inherent tax for Firefox engineering that enables all F/OSS to reuse the NS* stack correctly with good documentation.
In the long term this means chromium has an ecosystem and Mozilla's stable ecosystem consists of just one browser. However flawed chromium is, it has no competition for most developers and competition with WebKit for a handful.
The obvious thing to do was continue to invest in Servo. If they could have produced a parallel layout engine, which could provide app like animations without fiddling on desktop and Android, and then make that easy to embed, they could have made real inroads into blink/webkit.
You're absolutely right. The fact that so many other browsers are based on chromium, is a blatant condemnation of how the Servo engine has not met an important demand. If Servo was properly useable outside of Firefox, we would have seen more open-source browsers use it.
Yeah but Mozilla has been subverted, since the current CEO got on they are a lightning rod for Google against browser monopoly legal attention, while trying everything possible to neuter them from being a real threat.
Thus she cut the thing most likely to provide a real threat to chrome.
Another interesting idea: what if they courted alternate browser projects and/or environments like electron to use the Firefox engine the way those currently tend to use Chromium?
I don’t know if Firefox is currently harder to integrate than Chromium, or if they would just need to gain some sort of edge (no pun intended). But they could for example:
- Provide first-class documentation for integrating
- Provide some kind of stripped-down version that’s optimized for Electron-type scenarios; perhaps they could make it more resource-light for this usecase than Chromium is
Gaining marketshare this way could garner better support from websites and/or libraries, and might also prompt corporate support from invested companies
> Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money, and cut their salaries (bonuses tied directly to increase in Firefox market share).
They fired the CEO that knew what he was doing. Personally, I think Mozilla is getting what they asked for.
What makes you think Brendan Eich would have been a good CEO? He was CTO of Mozilla during the period that Chrome was eating Firefox's lunch. He was probably more responsible for Firefox product decisions at that time than CEO Mitchell Baker.
"throwaway" is fitting, given the quality of this comment. I was CTO from 2005 (when we incorporated Mozilla Corporation for taxpaying reasons; before that I had a Chief Architect title; I was also on the Mozilla Foundation board) through 2014. Firefox market share grew until 2011. Whatever the causes of Firefox peaking then, if you blame me for the fall during my last three years there, you can credit me for the rise from 2004-2011. Use a consistent yardstick.
Point of clarification: Mitchell Baker was not CEO at that time (and never had been). She was chair of the board. The previous full CEO was Gary Kovacs, succeeded by acting CEO Jay Sullivan, then Eich for 9 days.
I feel they should start trying to out “out innovate” the other browser developers. Stop playing politics, which Google will always win, and just start making new “cool shit” that developers want to use! Hire the best innovative thinkers in the industry and set them free to invent browser apis for developers to use.
Also, they should be attacking things like electron, and “hybrid” mobile app development. Build a toolkit based on Gecko for cross platform development that addresses the problems with electron.
> Hire the best innovative thinkers in the industry and set them free to invent browser apis for developers to use.
I think they should be doing the opposite: Adding features the users want to use and keeping the web as simple as they can get away with. Google is already busy giving web developers whatever APIs they want, that is not a fight Firefox can win.
I would instead argue that Firefox's Gecko engine is beyond saving and that any money invested in it now would be better donated to other community projects because there isn't enough resource to catch up. Sticking with Gecko will eventually lead to the dismise of Firefox the organization.
Microsoft, with their resource and their ability to bundle Microsoft Edge in with Windows, couldn't get any appreciable amount of marketshare. Firefox, with less resource than Microsoft, won't fare any better.
Rebuilding Firefox with Chronium would salvage whatever the mindshare/marketshare left. Then Firefox could still wield some influence with their marketshare and the threat of forking Chronium.
I'm 100% onboard with Chromium being the universal de facto standard for the web as long as it's open.
Really, all I want from a browser is Chromium, full features without disabled APIs, with a few extras like Sync, P2P stuff, and codecs, fully open.
Right now, I think anyone with name recognition and marketing ability could probably develop a winning browser for 50k or so. Just... take chromium, add sync, and an ad blocker for high bandwidth video ads. Done. You have made the world's best browser, the rest is business stuff.
Mozilla itself didn't think the Gecko engine itself has a long term future either. After all, Mozilla funded the development of the new Servo engine for eight whole years, and it slowly replaced pieces of Gecko with Servo.
After Mozilla laid off all Servo developers in 2020, the future doesn't look bright for Gecko or Firefox.
This set of policies would spell the end of Mozilla, and the end of Firefox unless the community (or another org) picked it up. Mozilla is mostly funded by search engine companies, the largest being Google, and any direct attempt to compete with Chrome would probably end a significant chunk of that funding.
Like it or not, unless Mozilla does what Google sees as acceptable, Firefox can't continue. The only way to turn Firefox around and continue development would be to find an alternative benefactor.
Mozilla is mostly funded by search engine companies, the largest being Google
Not only that, but this creates perverse incentives for Mozilla. Google funds Mozilla to avoid charges of monopoly, and that disincentives Mozilla to compete with Google and make Firefox a competitive browser to Chromium.
Mozilla is currently funded by Google but why are you assuming that a non-profit oriented Mozilla could not find other funding sources? All their past attemts seem to be about monetizing the browser but just like Google has been throwing cash at them there will be others whose motives are more alligned with Mozilla doing the same. As far as I am aware there is no way to donate to the development of Firefox and even if there was I and many others would not do so while Mozilla while the Google funding steers Mozilla's interests.
Would Mozilla be able to get as much without Google as they get from Google? Probably not, but if they do follow the suggestions of the OP then hopefully they would not need as much.
Use all/most of the money from the Google deal to build a fund. Even doing this for a couple years will build a huge backup plan for Firefox and they can look at not relying on the deal for survival. Instead work off the interest earned on the fund.
True, but at this point it doesn't feel to me that the community has that much to lose. If we're truly sub-5% like Statcounter says, then as long as we minimally muzzle this particular paperclip maximiser (say, the browser engine must remain Gecko or an in-house project and cannot be Blink, user privacy must be no worse than currently, selling data or "partnering with" third parties is disallowed) and let it run for a couple of years, at least we'll get a viable browser out of it.
Despite my constant advocacy for Firefox for over a decade, a family member whom I respect greatly told me directly and in no uncertain terms that they do not wish to use Firefox and wish to switch to Chrome instead because of numerous issues they have observed. And the worst part is that as much as I wanted it to, Firefox wasn't up to it. I cannot help but think that this is a microcosm of what's happening more broadly.
Cutting organizational expenses might be good for unrelated reasons, but I don't see how that increases the market share of Firefox, and I can think of a few ways it could decrease their market share.
My goal, if I were CEO, would be to reduce organizational expenses (and increase other forms of revenue) to the point where the 100s of millions of dollars from Google ($562 million in 2017) was not required for covering the cost of firefox development and spend all those millions on advertising firefox until Google stopped giving it. I can't see where having such a large part of your finances coming from your biggest direct competitor could ever be a good thing, but at least spending it on increasing firefox's market share directly through advertising would have a certain irony associated with it. At least of the Alanis Morisette variety.
What he said was: get rid of the people who are not interested in making the Firefox browser better. Get rid of the distractions. Focus on the browser.
If the goal is to plow all available resources into Firefox, then cutting down on expenses that don't directly or indirectly support the existence of Firefox seems key.
The CEO and upper management do loads to steer the ship. If all they care about is enriching themselves, they will likely struggle to find developers who are in it for the passion.
Look at Google. It is a late-stage, post-IPO business that’s now, frankly, ran by the CFO with a CEO who cares only about the board and an ever-increasing stock number.
The people who have passion left for the most part. Replaced by those who only seek to enrich themselves and climb the perf ladder.
Would those who have passion stuck around if Google was ran by people who still had passion? I’d imagine a much greater number of them would still be there.
I guess my post was meant to capture the idea: "Do you find it suspicious that you are recommending CEO/Management be in it for the passion (and low pay!) but seemingly not expecting software engineers to make the same sacrifices?"
> Would those who have passion stuck around if Google was ran by people who still had passion? I’d imagine a much greater number of them would still be there.
Why not just lower compensation for software engineers? Then all the dispassionate perf-chasing engineers will leave for greener pastures and you'll only be left with people who are passionate about the products Google builds, no?
> not expecting software engineers to make the same sacrifices?
Are you talking about the same sacrifices? I haven't seen anyone here asking the CEO to not be paid at all, only those questioning the absurd amount. I don't think going from 1 000 000 to 100 000 (which would be a lot lower than what it was before, just to show the extreme) is even remotely the same "sacrifice" as going from 100 000 to 10 000 per year.
But to answer you original question, yes, Mozilla should also be looking for developers that believe in the mission instead of just trying to maximize their wealth. That should probably include moving the company somewhere cheaper.
on a more serious note, what if mozilla fires ALL execs? will it just crumble under its own weight or will that "industry linked remuneration" be replaced with more money for actual developers who get things done and are not in for the quick buck like address bar ads?
I'm hoping for the latter. Or if not, the that if the Firefox collapsed, it would re-emerge in some fashion as a grassroots community project with non-Mozilla governance.
Look at what happened to youtube-dl - even before the DMCA takedown, nobody was doing anything about the leadership being AWOL despite the huge PR backlog. Then, when it was taken down, various forks popped up, including yt-dlp which became a natural potential successor. They injected lots of potential, because the main authority was absent and they seized initiative.
Even after youtube-dl came back, they eventually went under a new management. The entire space of YouTube/video downloaders is better off for the DMCA incident, even if taken by itself it was a harmful event.
Mozilla falling might just reenergise Firefox, though I'd obviously much rather they undergo a priority shift instead, so we can keep continuity.
That’s rather inaccurate; yt-dlp grew out of youtube-dlc, which was started by the author of this ticket: <https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/26462>, filed in August 2020, some time before the DMCA in November 2020.
> Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money, and cut their salaries (bonuses tied directly to increase in Firefox market share)
And people wonder why non-profits and NGOs don’t attract the best talent. This entitled mindset is the why.
That people who want to do good work should earn less. Perfect! Let them pay for their vacation with goodwill and air.
This is especially rich coming from the HN crowd. Everybody wants a revolutionary but in the neighbour’s house.
There is a vast ocean between strugling to pay for your vacation and making millions every year.
And there is no "the HN crowd" - don't fall into the trap of assinging to collective consciousness for groups and then complaining that it does not behave rationally.
Assuming the board are unable or unwilling to salvage FF for the sake of Mozilla, would it be worth considering starting a new non-profit browser based on FF? A new organization without all that baggage? WaterWolf or something?
Donating money isn't going to help them. It might help them look good to some techies that follow that information, but otherwise most wont care.
Mozilla needs to focus on other products to use in tandem w FF. Email service that is private, VPN (i think they have a partnership), Thunderbird, zoom like platform. They need office/business solutions most likely. Devtools, dev services, etc.
I'm not saying forget FF, but they can't just focus on 1 product or they are doomed.
I know their phone project fizzled, but I wonder if there's a market for a Chromebook competitor. Position it as a privacy-respecting product for schools. Introduce kids to the idea that Chrome != The Internet.
https://www.kaiostech.com/ is the lineal descendant of FirefoxOS. It got to scale on the same plan: attack the low end of the Android market where the fatter, more recent versions do not fit.
They should also consider more "Oxidation" of Firefox components, if only because it lowers the bar for mere mortals to make open source contributions.
In corporate leadership, homophobia is not a "personal view," it is a matter of governance and directly impacts talent acquisition. Further, Brave browser is a Chromium browser that does little to stop the browser engine monopoly at risk here—it does nothing meaningful for browser diversity. Not one comprehensible point is made here besides, I suppose, treating Eich's firing as a political issue.
My thoughts on this are that every time I see a news piece about Firefox it's about "social justice", some code of conduct controversy, or something else utterly unimportant to web browser selection.
Being "Open Source" does nothing for me when Firefox engages in the same crap as other closed source browsers, like Pocket. Mozilla also allowed social issues to take precedence over retaining good engineers. Whether you like it or not, even assholes have a basic right to exist and the more recent culture of shun and cancel has had negative consequences for society as a whole. Maybe they were assholes, but I don't give a shit how nice the developers who made my web browser are.
I suppose the problem with Mozilla is the CEO/people who make decisions about Firefox, replace them and maybe Firefox could be revived. But I have extraordinary doubts that Firefox is salvageable at this point. Mozilla's priorities have strayed so far from mine that I cannot see them becoming something I care about any time soon. I suspect it is similar for others.
There is not one issue with Firefox, the people in charge are not competent. It's mistake after mistake after mistake. These mistakes are a direct result of prioritizing diversity over talent.
I think this post assumes that Firefox is an inferior browser, and that the cause is mismanagement.
But is Firefox an inferior browser? I think it used to be, but over the last couple years, it has made massive improvements in features and performance. I use it in both desktop and mobile, and I prefer it over Chrome.
As a software engineer, I rely heavily on my browser for work. For me, the multi-account containers in Firefox are the must-have feature. No other browser can offer the ease of separating multiple test accounts, and multiple gmail/gsuite accounts for multiple enterprises separate.
Also, I like how Lockwise on mobile is divorced from the browser, making it easy to use it to manage passwords across websites and apps.
Maybe the problem with Mozilla, then, is marketing. Maybe not enough people know that Firefox is much, much better than it used to be. Or maybe the general sentiment is echoed in your post. People don't feel that Mozilla is focused on writing good software, so they don't expect Firefox to be good.
Personally, I think the biggest cause for the loss of market share is simple:
Safari is the default on iOS and Chrome is the default on Android, and population of mobile devices is exploding, and there are no mainstream mobile devices that are carrying Firefox with it.
I agree - Firefox today is super solid. It blows away Chrome in terms of memory management and I have less compatibility issues with it than any other browser.
I agree with you on marketing and mobile - if the defaults are good enough on mobile then people are going to mostly use that. And while Firefox used to be hugely popular Chrome has really taken over its market share. Butnow Chrome has gone from a lean and simple browser to a bloated mess that chokes when you have too many tabs and starts using gigabytes of ram.
It has problems with memory, performance, rendering and battery drainage.
Every year I switch to Firefox and use it as a main browser. It usually goes for a month and then I need to switch again because Firefox has too many glitches.
Firefox has had a bad policy of not fixing the basics first before new features.
I do use Firefox as my main development browser still but that is because I’m more used to the developer tools than the alternatives.
That's funny, because I've had the same experience as you—but in the opposite direction.
In my experience, Chrome has problems with memory, performance, rendering and battery drainage. Every now and then I try to use Chrome (or a derivative) as secondary browser and I give up because it has noticeably higher latency for simple web page loads, and more likely to suffer irritating repaint flashes.
It's a common story -- people use browser A, start noticing a variety of problems, switch to browser B and everything is so much better. After a while, they start noticing a variety of problems, switch to browser A, and once again everything is so much better.
Those people are not being stupid, that is their real experience.
Sometimes the problem is in a web site (an update starts leaking memory, for example) and whatever browser is running gets blamed.
Sometimes it's just natural human bias—we want to see patterns, and we want there to be a solution ("just switch browsers!"), so we get selective in what we notice and don't notice.
Sometimes it's because profile cruft piles up, and resetting would fix it.
Sometimes the problems really are in one browser and not the other. There are plenty of legitimate problems to be found, and things change pretty rapidly.
How would resetting the profile help? It means losing addons and their configuration, the bookmarks, the open sessions and the tabs, the history, the about:config settings.
It means losing a lot of stuff, yes. It sometimes helps because some things slow down as state is accumulated. So resetting can speed things up, at the cost of losing all of your state.
But the comparison point is switching browsers, which also loses lots of state.
(In both cases, you can import a subset of your state into your new profile, and you'd probably get most of the performance advantages.)
I believe all browsers have been improving in their resistance to the accumulated state problem, but I also believe that all browsers are still susceptible to it.
For what it's worth I haven't had an issue with Firefox for at least five years. And in the entire history of using Firefox I've never had a problem that was solved by a profile reset—though that might be because I'm a technically savvy user who can troubleshoot with relative ease.
Any time I've tried switching away it's more to see if I'm missing out on something... and it turns out I'm not.
I’ve encountered annoying bugs like Firefox being unable to render elements when SVG filters are applied to them so they just disappear, or smaller things like extreme banding on gradients that no other browser has.
My biggest issue was (maybe still is, I quit using Firefox last year) is that on wide color gamut displays, like every MacBook Pro, it renders colors completely wrong. So it would render literally every website, save black and white website, completely incorrectly.
My main browser these days is Safari (so I’m still enjoying a lot of browser bugs). When I really need something to work or need specific de tools I switch to Chrome. For me Firefox is in a middle ground between those two browsers, resulting in me never actually using it anymore.
In case you wouldn't know: Firefox for iOS can now act as a password manager. So, even though Lockwise has disappeared, the function is still there through Firefox alone.
Several APIs that make powerful web applications possible are missing (e.g. WebUSB, various filesystem access APIs) and Firefox generally tends to lag behind Chrome when it comes to new APIs/web features.
The lower market share means that many web sites don't support it properly. For example, I need to keep a Chrome profile around for Zoom since the button doesn't even show up on Firefox, and when I tried to join a Teams meeting with Firefox, it failed in some non-obvious way, causing me to be late to a job interview (may have been due to some extension misbehaving or some config issue). I don't know if that's just because the sites don't test and do user agent sniffing, or whether Firefox is actually missing some APIs that would be required, but from a user perspective, it doesn't really matter, I can't use the browser for things I can do with Chrome.
> Several APIs that make powerful web applications possible are missing (e.g. WebUSB, various filesystem access APIs) and Firefox generally tends to lag behind Chrome when it comes to new APIs/web features.
WebUSB may not be the best example, as it was disabled by Chrome because there is no way to secure it. Though I agree in general that some APIs (WebGL) were experimental and behind a flag for too long in FF.
As a counterpoint, Firefox is/was ahead on some important APIs (WASM, U2f)
I have not shared your experience with Teams or Zoom. I use them both daily from FF on OSX.
And this is one of those places where FF could break with the pack. Sure implement webGL/usb/whatever but provide a simple browser and page enable/disable function for those people who aren't interested in having random websites sending rogue mining code to their GPUs, or various other API's that have questionable merit if you goal is a simple browser API/surface/function.
You're not very good at mind reading. I'm not advocating pro-bigotry. I just want a browser to focus on being the best browser, and not "fact check" for me.
A good time to remind everyone that when you donate to "Mozilla", you're donating to the Mozilla Foundation, which is the social justice part, not the Mozilla Corporation, which is the browser part.
The vast majority people who use web browsers have literally zero knowledge, awareness, or interest in these things. What actually seems to have happened, is that a long time ago now, their techy friends recommended they use Firefox instead of IE. Then those techy friends recommended Chrome because it was even better. Now it's arguably the case that Chrome and Firefox are equivalent from a non-techy standpoint, but non-techies don't want to move browsers over and over. That large audience is largely lost to Firefox until there there are big enough practical downsides to Chrome or upsides to Firefox.
As it stands now, even if techy people, who might be put off by the things you mention, were to be made perfectly happy again, if they recommend Firefox without a significant practical justification, non-techy people simply will not change from Chrome back to Firefox again.
Importantly, more and more people have just grown up with Chrome, never having used Firefox or IE even once. Even if Firefox stays as good as Chrome, more and more people will start their web browsing experience never having considered Firefox and just always having organically used Chrome. This alone will lead to Firefox losing market share over time, even if all existing Firefox users keep using it and loving it.
In my mind, it's clear that the reasons Firefox lost market-share are technical/practical, and the way it might regain market-share is also technical/practical improvements. That will be hard though, especially given Firefox would probably need technical/practical dominance on Android as well as on traditional computers.
If Google shut all the doors making ad blockers on Chrome virtually impossible that'd be interesting. Ad blocker use is pretty high and might be as high as 40% and if those people all defected that'd do it. Probably why Google can't do that though even though they clearly want to.
> I don't give a shit how nice the developers who made my web browser are
It sounds like you do give a shit that they care about "social justice" and you don't want to use their browser because of that?
Or are there specific features / functionality / performance / security issues that prevent you from using Firefox and are somehow caused by the worldview of the developers?
I am someone who does give a shit about not wanting to reward assholes.
There is one thing I think is worth noting. There's always all of this talk about, "It's the talent that matters, not the social justice stance of a developer. Keep the talented assholes; don't hire for social justice posturing!"
Well, I'm waiting to see all of those displaced "talented assholes" band together to create a product so compelling it will *prove* they were replaced by inferior developers for "social justice" reasons. By now there should be so many uber-talented people who aren't given their fair shake because of their abhorent political/social beliefs.
Or maybe... just maybe... those assholes talk a big game (as assholes often do), but aren't as indispensible as they believe themselves to be?
Being an "asshole" is not a white or black thing. Do you use linux? Because for many people, Linus is considered an asshole.
So, I've worked for a lot of effective asshole in my life, I may not have always liked them but I almost always respected what they were achieving.
So, sure someone is against gay marriage, i'm sure if you look carefully you can find uncomfortable things about anyone. I mean for some people just flying a US flag is a uncomfortable because it represents a country that still hasn't come to terms with genocide against the native people and imported slavery, as well as an economic system that rewards people for behaviors far more offensive than whether someone believes in gay marriage.
I've been sitting through my own companies D&I training for the past year or so, and the most important takeway I've gotten is something one of the trainers said, taken out of context... "We all need to get more comfortable with being uncomfortable"
So, if you damage your org over something did on their own time serving their own opinion your no better than them. Yes people trying to tell others what to do with their own personal lives (in their own personal bedrooms) is pretty sick, but so is getting into peoples private beliefs that they aren't wearing on their shoulder.
Just interpreting what the OP said and not really sure where I stand on the topic, but I think he means that "social justice" controversies have purged asshole devs that were competent developers producing good features and that firefox as a product is not as good due to that. Taking senior engineers off the roster will usually impact the product whether or not they were assholes.
As far as I can tell, OP's talking about the replacement of Mozilla Corporation CEO Brendan Eich, who had an engineering background[0] and was CTO but made a small but controversial donation to an anti gay marriage campaign, with Mitchell Barker, who came from a legal background and was formerly the president of the Mozilla Foundation.
At the time this was pretty divisive, because it was a candidate with objectionable social opinions but great technical chops getting ousted by a candidate who was uncontroversial but seen as more business-minded and more inclined to broad-spectrum activism outside the confines of Firefox's typical free software and online freedom work.
[0] he was the creator of javascript, among other things
Your timeline is off, FWIW. Brendan Eich resigned in 2104 and was replaced by Chris Beard as CEO from 2014 through 2019. Mitchell Baker became CEO in 2020.
In my experience Firefox has become a much better browser in the last 18 months, so if there was an asshole purge then maybe that helped?
If Firefox is missing specific capabilities that make it noncompetitive, and those deficits are traced to the asshole purge, then @rpnx might strengthen their argument by citing those examples.
Yea, could be that a purge helped. I tend to think assholes produce a toxic working environment and are almost like malignant cancerous tumors in the way they impact a company in the long run.
I give a shit that the people building my tools are injecting their politics into my tools in places where they don't belong. Browser makers being happy to decide what I should see on the web will make me bail.
Now, there are of course parts of politics that are pertinent to the tool in question - privacy issues for browser developers, for example, or tracking.
Both the Brave and Vivaldi teams have people I know I disagree with politically. But I like their products, and I like the companies? Why? Because whatever the companies' employees views, the two companies' politics are about user control and privacy, and they walk the talk. Both in their own ways that reflect the people making the tool, but insofar as the companies are political, they are political in a very, very narrow way.
Basically, they understand their job is to make hammers and not to sermon about flower arrangement. Mozilla (and much of the tech sphere, sadly) is increasingly the reverse.
I use Firefox daily and I have no idea what the hell you are talking about. What does Mozilla have to do with "cancel" culture? Is there some huge news article I am missing out on or something?
Likely rooted in the experience with Brendan Eich who had a long history with Mozilla, was appointed as CEO and then (due to his personal political contributions, mainly Proposition 8 related) essentially forced to resign as CEO due to the accompanying backlash - https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/brendan-eich-steps-down-...
According to wikipedia he now an "ardent" anti-masker for Covid and now people are trying to get him to step down from Brave browser. Does this guy just not learn?
Which shows what a joke Wikipedia is - a series of fiefdoms controlled by heavily biased editors ... the Talk page for that article is hilarious. It (correctly) points out that "ardent" is used nowhere in either source linked - one of which is a tweet, the second a NYT article that itself references a tweet. The dialogue is purposely crafted to encourage the reader to form a prejudiced opinion. Why would this even be relevant to his bio?
The guy literally invented Javascript and cofounded Mozilla. So he made a few political contributions that the Twitter mob didn't like. Maybe if Mozilla focused its efforts more on fixing actual bugs instead of countless UI/UX changes and seemingly purging their ranks of wrong-think, maybe more people would use their browser and we wouldn't be asking these questions.
I personally despise that we have a browser monoculture, but there are few legitimate reasons to use Firefox on platforms that support Chromium.
I don't think supporting a mandate to wear a basic cloth mask is a hill anyone should be willing to die on.
I'm fiercely, fiercely pro-mainstream-science, and there's no doubt that proper N95 masks (or better) are very effective against respiratory disease transmission. But mask mandates almost always permit basic cloth masks which lack strong evidence of efficacy. If we're not going to mandate an effective mask, I honestly don't see what the point of the mandate is.
N95 masks work. Well designed, well fitted, correctly worn, hygienically cleaned cloth masks probably work okay, though good evidence of this is still limited and based largely upon assumptions. From my own observations, the overwhelming majority of people are wearing a mask of poor quality and/or in a manner which the scientific consensus couldn't possibly agree was effective. And I doubt most people are washing them with soap and water every single day.
If we're not going to mandate an effective mask, I honestly don't see what the point of the mandate is. It makes as much sense to me as seatbelt mandates accepting a knitted scarf as an acceptable seatbelt.
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"Cloth face masks show minimum efficacy in source control than the medical grade mask. The efficacy of cloth face masks filtration varies and depends on the type of material used, number of layers, and degree of moisture in mask and fitting of mask on face."
"The use of cloth masks during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic is under debate."
"Until a cloth mask design is proven to be equally effective as a medical or N95 mask, wearing cloth masks should not be mandated for healthcare workers."
"In 2015, we conducted a randomized controlled trial to compare the efficacy of cloth masks with that of medical masks and controls (standard practice) among healthcare workers in Vietnam. Rates of infection were consistently higher among those in the cloth mask group than in the medical mask and control groups."
"Your cloth face mask isn't protecting you against the coronavirus variant omicron, health officials say. As common as cloth face masks have become, health experts say, they do little to prevent tiny virus particles from getting into your nose or mouth and aren't effective against the new variant."
"They found that the effectiveness of the masks varied widely: a three-layer knitted cotton mask blocked an average of 26.5 percent of particles in the chamber, while a washed, two-layer woven nylon mask with a filter insert and metal nose bridge blocked 79 percent of particles on average. Other masks scored somewhere in between."
Yea, not having to work with assholes is pretty great. Maybe there is some tradeoff to be made and a balance where keeping a productive asshole around could be better for the product than purging said assholes, but I think a team with that toxicity can't be sustainable in the long run unless its a team full of assholes that are content.
> every time I see a news piece about Firefox it's about "social justice", some code of conduct controversy, or something else utterly unimportant to web browser selection.
This can't be true, unless you have extremely unusual new reading habits.
The problem is when some assholes are actively engaged in denying basic rights from others. If you say "well those assholes have a right to exist", you're effectively saying "the assholes have more of a right to exist than the people they're trying to erase."
Could you clarify what basic rights you are referring to, whose existence ”the assholes” are trying to erase, and what methods they are using to do so?
I think they're talking about the creator of JS giving money to a political cause trying to block gay marriage.
There was a big huff about it in the tech space for a while when it happened and he ended up secluding himself after that for a while.
It was really not a good look. In the years since, we've seen a much larger push to shine the spotlight on behaviour that would have previously been swept under the rug or hidden behind technological "tenure".
If the "asshole" is being an asshole on the job yes. If the problem is that the coworkers don't like the "asshole"'s beliefs or what he is doing in his free time then they should be told to deal with it.
I agree that it is your prerogative as a consumer to decide how much you care about the integrity of the companies who make the products you use. Maybe it's just my inner Hank Hill talking, but I don't think a responsible consumer would ever say, "I don't give a shit how nice the developers who made my web browser are." The way I see it, if you're willing to be an asshole for profit to someone else, then you're willing to be an asshole for profit to me too. So I appreciate and support companies who make deliberate choices to treat humans better, especially ones made at the cost of profits.
- Prioritise getting the new extension framework fully functional. And continue innovating on the capabilities that are exposed. Especially on mobile where the new fenix engine is still limited to a small whitelist of extensions
- Sort out the multi-profile story. Container tabs are great, but the chrome model is also a great fit for many workflow (e.g. different people in a house or home vs. work profiles).
- Try and work on making Gecko easily embeddable again. Webkit/Blink gets all the attention because it's easy to embed into things. I suspect Gecko needs to compete in this market if it hopes to survive. It needs to have more than one company invested in it.
This ship has probably sailed now as they've fired most of their Rust and Servo teams. But IMO they ought to have created a rust-based cross-platform UI framework. They tried to do it web-based with Firefox OS but that was too slow. But with a Rust solution I think they could have owned both the mobile and desktop application spaces, which could potentially have made them a bootload of money and been a huge win for linux.
Chrome’s Profiles are the #1 reason I use it over Firefox. If Firefox had as complete of an implementation as Chrome then I would consider switching, but until then Firefox is a non-starter for me.
I use all 3 of these profiles all day every day for work:
* one personal profile logged into personal Google
* one work profile managed by the company, logged into company Google
* one development profile with all the debugging extensions installed, like React and Redux tools (they require access to all pages all the time)
I would imagine huge number of non-technical users share a computer and want their own chrome profiles so that they can access their own emails without signing out of their family members. I know my middle-aged parents use Chrome in this way for example, and it would be a blocker for switching them to Firefox.
Is this basically a use case where they don't want to create separate Windows users for some reason, but still would want their own private space in the browser?
With containers you can. It's literally opening a new tab.
If you have two profiles open at the same time like described you can easily switch desktops. The clear seperation of work and private browsing sessions helps me as well.
What is easy here? In Chrome, on macOS, it's command-` to switch windows and command-shift-m to open a new window in with a specific profile.
Also, links always open in the profile that is currently in the foreground. Is that possible in Firefox? Last I heard it isn't, but I haven't checked in a while.
Yes, there is but I don't know if it works for macOS since it works for me in Windows.
Set the profile you prefer to open for links as a default profile and make sure to tick the option to automatically use the default profile without opening the profile manager. Then for the second profile, you need to use the shortcuts for that with the argument like this
firefox.exe -P "<profile_name>"
And make sure you leave it as capitalized P, I believe that is the argument. Then apply the setting and click the shortcut. It should be opening links to the default profile that you set in the profile manager.
I use Firefox's container tabs all the time, which segment exactly the same way as profiles (albiet with the same extension pool). Personally I prefer having blended tabs in a single window, or having additional segregation; I keep Amazon punted out to it's own container, as well as social media. I know it won't stop all the cross-identificaiton, but it should at least help.
In Chrome there's an icon you click to switch. Honestly, if someone would create a FF extension that was just that, it would probably cover 90% of what's considered superior in Chrome.
have you used container tabs? those are effectively "different profiles" for what most people consider them. It's still shared extensions and history and bookmarks but you can login with different accounts in different tabs and it keeps that separate.
I use container tabs, temporary tabs and the containerise extension to help manage things. I use it so there's stronger isolation between the websites I visit, and cookies are cleaned up when I close the browser.
That's on my main/personal profile.
I have separate profiles for work stuff, one for each client or organisation I work with. On those, I only access sites that are relevant to the organisation, and I have a lot fewer protections. I keep long sessions, I leave cookies in place, etc. It's a lot more convenient that way.
An important UX difference is that Firefox's default "New Tab" keyboard shortcut doesn't respect the container of the current tab. I've found that it's really easy to accidentally switch back to the main container.
about:profiles looks like a debugging page, not something you use for launching a profile. And I'm not referring to its aspect, but usability. It's not made to be used daily.
I'll have to see if it can be "designed" with userChrome.css or something and I'll give it a try.
The only thing I can think of is that the UI is not as nice as chromes for switching? in chrome you can switch the profile from a menu option and there can be more than one profile active at a time with separate everything including extensions and bookmarks.
in firefox you don't get that easy switch and I am not sure the gui for the profiles is enabled by default. you have to manually start up firefox with a -P flag from the command line to get the profile manager. And you only get one profile active at a time.
This isn't true. As I'm writing this, I have three Firefox windows open, each in a different profile. What makes you think you can only have one profile active at a time?
were there any hoops you had to run to get that to work? afaict that's not possible ootb without adding a flag to the command line. I'll admit that I haven't really tried it since many years ago.
for 90% of the users out there that we need to convince to use firefox: having a command line switch is about the same as not having the feature at all... chrome has a menu item that brings up a brand new window in that profile.
I want firefox to succeed and it's my daily driver.
You do have to use the command-line and there is a single hoop: the `--new-instance` flag. I agree the situation could be made "normal" user friendly and it isn't right now.
When I open Chrome, I can open any profile straight away from the menu. On Mac, there’s just one Chrome icon.
When I open Firefox, I have to go to a page that looks like a developer debug mode, and then open a new profile in a new Firefox instance. I now have two Firefox icons in my dock. I normally work with three profiles, so now I have three Firefox icons in my dock all called Firefox. 66.6% of the time I press the wrong one.
The problem is that Firefox has to be at least as good as Chrome to succeed. Being _almost_ as good as Chrome means people will just use Chrome.
It doesn’t sync your entire experience. I have a completely different setup for each profile, and then I use Containers _within_ each profile. They’re not the same thing.
This is my personal opinion only, so take it with a grain of salt.
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Mozilla can't save Firefox. It's not that Firefox can't be saved, but rather that Mozilla as an organization is not capable of doing so.
My take is this - Despite a history of being relatively privacy friendly, the vast majority of funding for the organization comes directly from Google (To the tune of ~90% of their total funding, straight from Google so that Google can maintain its position as the default search in Firefox).
That leads to insurmountable conflicts of interest - They claim they are for people and for privacy, but they are funded almost entirely by Google, and have to secure search deals for their continued existence (the latest just this year: https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-go...).
In this light - I believe it actually BENEFITS mozilla to keep Firefox relevant, but not good enough to replace Chrome. If the browser genuinely becomes good enough that customers start switching from Chrome to Firefox en mass, Mozilla needs a replacement funding plan because Google can essentially turn the lights off at any point by simply refusing to pay them for search at next contract renewal.
While they've dipped their toes into paid products... most of them are not particularly relevant or compelling on their own merits (that's not to say they're bad, just not all that innovative or likely to drive enough revenue to replace the 500million a year google is paying them)
So not only do I not believe that Mozilla is capable of "saving" Firefox in this way, I don't believe they have the right incentives to even seriously try.
The unsaid part is that Google keeps Firefox alive so that they are not hit by anti-trust over in-browser search. That's why FF will always trail Chrome, its the designated loser. If it weren't for anti-trust, Google would have bought out Mozilla years ago.
You can't buy out an open source project. If Google bought it out and started messing with it, there would be an immediate outcry and Firefox would end up with the community fork winning out, just like it happened with MySQL and OpenOffice.
A browser would not do well as a volunteer driven open-source project. It is simply too big and too complex to be able to get by without full-time paid developers.
I don't follow this line of reasoning. Google pays Mozilla for the search traffic. If Firefox overtook Chrome in market share, Mozilla's position would become even _more_ favourable and they could command a larger sum from Google. If Google threatened to end the agreement, Mozilla could simply walk to Bing/DuckDuckGo or whoever else.
Right now, Google pays more than Bing or DuckDuckGo.
Perhaps Google just has mountains of spare cash, which DDG doesn't. Perhaps Google gets extra value as FF both provides search traffic, and keeps competition regulators off their back. Perhaps Bing thinks if FF changed the default search engine away from Google, 95% users would change it right back.
But if Bing is only willing to pay 70% of what Google pays - could Mozilla survive losing that much income? Or would it trigger a death spiral, with less money meaning less development meaning lower market share?
As far as paid products go, it seems like a no brainer to offer paid plans for privacy focused email or other g-suite-like collaboration services. It seems like Mozilla needs additional revenue streams.
>Mozilla needs a replacement funding plan because Google can essentially turn the lights off at any point by simply refusing to pay them for search at next contract renewal.
And then Bing/Yandex/Baidu buys the rights, and all that changes is the amount they get. It'd drop if Google publicly vowed they won't bid on it anymore, but there's also the possibility that someone like Yahoo pays more than Google like what happened in 2015.
It's not like Google is arbitrarily deciding how much money to give Mozilla, they are buying something at the lowest price they can.
I think Google is fairly arbitrarily deciding how much money to give to Mozilla (and it's roughly their current OpEx) - They aren't just buying search, they're also buying "competition" in the browser space.
Further, the kind of transition where Firefox might gain users from Chrome isn't instantaneous, and it turns out users have a preference here (most users don't want to have google removed from Firefox - they still prefer it. Mozilla is quietly testing a program to use Bing as the default, just to see how loud the feedback is: https://www.pcgamer.com/firefox-is-conducting-a-study-to-see...)
So there's a tension here that's beyond just enterprise deals.
Last - that deal didn't actually work out very well for Yahoo, and that was when Firefox had nearly 15% of the browser market (vs ~8% today).
>Mozilla is quietly testing a program to use Bing as the default, just to see how loud the feedback is:
Or Mozilla is running market research to show that X% of users don't care about the default search to drive up the price. As the deal isn't arbitrarily Google deciding an amount to give them, it's a bid between the major search engines. Just like it is for Safari.
#1 reason: Google has been spending millions of dollars on ads. 2010 many subway, buses, and TVs had ads about how fast Chrome was. Advertising works! Early adopters switched, followed by mainstream users.
Additional Key Strategies:
Google focused on developer experience with its tools.
Google shipped a good enough extension system.
Google invested in matching or beating a few key features but kept Chrome a leaner project overall. Worse is better and 80/20 rule.
Ecosystem evolution:
Google successfully got every major browser vendor to move to their rendering engine, except for Firefox. Gecko has always been harder to embed.
Slowly over time, some web devs stopped testing their work on Firefox since they were using Chrome and most browsers "just worked" like Chrome. Every week I hit a site that I have to use in Chrome because of a bug I'm seeing in Firefox.
Mozilla went all-in on trying to disrupt itself with a mobile phone operating system, which didn't work out.
Mozilla dabbles in many strategies (Privacy, Games, Advertising, WebXR), but none have been successful in growing active daily users.
Some people say Mozilla should focus on executing Firefox, but I think Mozilla is smart for trying to re-invent itself because the browser is a commodity, and if Google wants to own that on-ramp to the internet, it will.
Netscape and Firefox 1.0 were massive products. Mozilla needs a 3rd act to return to a significant marketshare.
> #1 reason: Google has been spending millions of dollars on ads. 2010 many subway, buses, and TVs had ads about how fast Chrome was. Advertising works! Early adopters switched, followed by mainstream users.
Not to mention paying the likes of Adobe, Avast, AVG, and Oracle to have their installers auto-install Chrome using dark patterns.
The amount of people in HN who think they can do a better job at being the CEO of every company; or being the president of any country; or being better than whoever is trying to something, astounds me.
Dudes, if saving Firefox was so easy that could be described in a single comment like that, it would have been saved already.
There are more people at Mozilla than the CEO, she is not responsible for all decisions. She is a quite nice person to be honest, has always been very kind to me while I was volunteering and later while I was working there. She is more into the Mozilla mission than many here.
Also, people need to understand that Firefox is not the reason for Mozilla existence, Firefox is one of the tools that Mozilla has (and depends on) to fullfil its mission. People need to wake up and realise that Firefox is the last remaining independent browser, and that fighting against Microsoft, Google, and Apple is damn hard.
There is a huge intersection between people who are often saying they know how to fix Mozilla and those using non-Firefox browsers. If people here who cares about Mozilla would volunteer, and also use the browser, Mozilla would be in a much better shape.
People who keep saying things like "cut their salaries", "cancel all projects", have absolutely no idea how all this works, or even how Mozilla works. I understand you're all frustrated, but you're going at it from the wrong direction. You need to remember that it was side projects that made Firefox. At that time the workhorse of Mozilla was the Mozilla Suite. It was also non-Firefox projects that brought up Rust and many other cool technologies.
Not specifically about Firefox but: if nonprofits can’t pay for talent then you get what you pay for, crappy talent for important positions. That said many people have your mindset so that puts all nonprofits at a disadvantage against any for-profit initiative as far as getting talent goes. You shouldn’t need to martyr yourself to do something good.
> Also, people need to understand that Firefox is not the reason for Mozilla existence, Firefox is one of the tools that Mozilla has (and depends on) to fullfil its mission.
No. This is arguing that the tail is wagging the dog. The only reason why people care about Mozilla at all is not their social projects, not the fact that they released a VPN, or the fact that they maintain Thunderbird (OK, fine, for some it is). The reason they care is because Mozilla is developing Firefox.
Subtract Firefox from Mozilla, and you get zero or less. And yes, we realise that Firefox is the last remaining independent browser - which is why it's alarming that they are focusing on anything else when the market share is so low. Their ship is sinking and they are debating whether the orchestra should play Bach or Mozart on the way down.
> Also, people need to understand that Firefox is not the reason for Mozilla existence, Firefox is one of the tools that Mozilla has (and depends on) to fullfil its mission.
This is why I downvoted you. (edit: will undo, this misunderstanding needs to be discussed.)
This is the big misunderstanding.
If Mozilla can do something in addition to Firefox, fine.
But Firefox is simultaneously Mozillas biggest contribution to the open web and their main income source.
Sacrificing Firefox for a higher goal is almost literally to butcher the goose who laid the golden eggs.
> Want to fix Mozilla? Take an active part in it.
Try that and get flagged for advocacy(!). Seriously: see the tab strip api to see it in action.
>There is a huge intersection between people who are often saying they know how to fix Mozilla and those using non-Firefox browsers. If people here who cares about Mozilla would volunteer, and also use the browser, Mozilla would be in a much better shape
I have to agree with this. You see everyone on HN talking about the importance of Firefox in the fight against Google's monopoly but yet when you read comments about anything web related many (maybe most) commenters say they use Chrome (Someone should do a HN Poll).
There is no excuse to use anything other than Firefox if you claim to care about things the open web, software freedom etc.
very simple answer, because Mozilla doesn't control the infrastructure that runs on 80% of smartphones in the world and ships Firefox as the default browser.
It really has nothing to do with the bespoke features that people on HN pay attention to. Firefox doesn't control any platform and defaults matter. There's a reason Google pays them a gazillion dollars to be the standard search engine, which you can change with one click. It's also why Safari is still going relatively strong.
Microsoft was forced to allow browser choice in the EU. I don't see why Apple and Google shouldn't be subject to the same, with the added condition that browser rendering engine diversity gets preferential treatment.
Give users a 60% chance to see Firefox as the first option, then show them the multitude of Chrome/Safari-based browsers.
The problem is that even when that choice is given, every Google search pushes Chrome, Microsoft constantly pushes you to switch to Edge. I'm not sure how much Apple pushes Safari, but last I heard it actually gives superior battery life on Mac OS so there's a real technical reason to not use Firefox.
Because no one cares anymore about browser diversity now that the main browser is open source, runs on every platform and complies mostly with browser standards. Not to say it isn't important. But it was way worse when IE was creating a dependency on IE and Windows due to poor standards.
One thing missed when talking about Firefox's market share is desktop versus mobile market share.
If you look at Wikimedia's metrics, Firefox still has ~10% market share of the desktop browser market[0], not too bad considering Firefox is not the default browser on any platform outside of linux systems for the most part, and that Mozilla is much smaller entity than competing browser vendors. Still down from the ~30%[0] desktop share they had, but now they have 2 large competing entities offering default browsers so the decline is somewhat expected.
Also, contrast this with Firefox's ~0.7% share on mobile[0] where Mozilla has never been able to get a good foothold.
As long as Firefox isn't available as a default on mobile and as the share of mobile device web browsing increases, Firefox will keep losing total market share as a percentage.
Strategy wise, refocusing efforts on retaining that 10% desktop share might be a good idea. From there, work on building up more of the desktop share and then try marketing the mobile browser to the desktop browser community to build up mobile browser share.
I feel like Firefox on Android should be more popular than it is. Chrome is default, but it doesn't offer an Ad Blocker. Firefox with uBlock origin is a far superior experience. Although there are other 3rd party chromium-based browsers that are just as good.
I suspect that it's poor market share is due the very poor performance of the older fennec implementation.
I tried to use FF on Android, and while it's capable and works rather well, perf-wise Chromium is just years ahead (I use Brave).
You can see it well on JS-heavy sites like Twitter, the difference is very easy to perceive with loading time, scrolling perf, and also with memory management (Firefox evicts pages from memory cache aggressively compared to Chromium; you sometimes switch a tab or switch an app, go back, and bang, it's gone and needs a reload); and I have a decent good phone (not top shelf, but a "high-mid" Pixel 3a, probably 60-70th percentile within Androids?).
I use Firefox mobile for the past 3 or so phones. To be blunt, it sucks. The only reason I haven't switched to a Chromium derivative is because I don't want to migrate my bookmarks, because they don't have as good ad blocking support, and out of sheer stubbornness.
I came to say something similar. I'm a diehard Firefox user, and can articulate all sorts of things about it I love, but mobile has been hugely disappointing. I still use it but there's a massive discrepancy between Firefox mobile and desktop.
Desktop is great; not that there's nothing that could be improved, but I love it and do not want to switch for any reason.
Mobile has weird lags and hangs that I don't understand, and has this weird crippled extension system. Going into Nightly and adding some of them helps a little but not really. Its UI has been strange at times, and these little changes keep cropping up that I don't quite understand.
I still use it but I have thought about moving to something else, and the main reason I don't is because it's so convenient to sync between devices.
There was a big part of me that was suspicious that when mobile started becoming dominant, someone in Mozilla made a decision to migrate the mobile browser to something more advertiser-friendly to recoup funding, with the idea that the desktop would be the libre target and the mobile version would be the moneymaker. It just all feels so inward-focused and not user-focused, with crippled extensions and weird UI tweaks all the time.
It has gotten far better in the past years, although it still has some pretty crippling bugs and tiny yet incredibly annoying UX issues (e.g. can't easily wipe the cookies for the site you're currently on, try opening a URL from your clipboard in incognito).
But Firefox has gotten sufficiently close that the overall experience of Firefox with an ad blocker beats Chrome with ads.
Out of interest, what hardware do you have? I had a Samsung S7, and the difference between Chrome and FF was minimal (Chrome was slightly faster, but only just). That's quite an old device, but I wonder if somehow it being a high-end device when it was new still counts for something...?
Cat S52. Although a 6502 managed to respond immediately to input 47 years ago, so I don't understand how a modern processor could struggle with this today.
I’d argue that FF could possibly convince some manufacturers to preload Firefox with uBlock installed as a faster browser (if UCBrowser could, surely FF can).
This. When I joined my prev company in mid 2018, I checked some graphs, and mobile users market share was around 45%. When I checked the same graph in mid 2021, mobile market share was >60%.
Many people don't have a desktop anymore those days, or barely use it.
Every time I restart Firefox, I get about 8 different prompts for "See what's new!" "Reset your Firefox profile now!" "See our new diversity initiative now!" etc.
It feels like opening a Windows Me installation from 2000. I just want to get browsing done.
That's...not the case (and never has been) for me. You only restart it when you get an update (in which case that wouldn't be very often)? Or you did something whacky in about:config? Or maybe a bad extension. Dunno, not normal
Huh that's fun...I've had pocket disabled for so long that I forgot it was a thing. I've always been pretty vigilant about turning off nonsense like pocket, so I suppose I'm not as typical of a ff user as I thought...but still think what the parent comment described sounds abnormal.
I only start FF when I get a customer report about an issue on FF. I guess I start it seldom enough to always trigger some sort of watchdog?
Anyway, here's my 2 cents. I only open FireFox when a customer reports an issue, and I'm always barraged by a deluge of unwanted info, which doesn't encourage me to open FF more often.
If you're on the stable channel you'll see a single tab of "unwanted info" once every six weeks. Half the time it's just a generic "Firefox updated!" page.
May be OS-specific, or it may not happen when you've set Firefox to restore previous tabs when restarting, or there may be a way to turn it off.
I don't remember seeing many of these on my actual machine (I did get the color scheme nonsense if I remember correctly), but I'm constantly seeing these in dev/testing VMs where I just installed it for testing and occasionally keep it updated.
Search for mstone (browser.startup.homepage_override.mstone) and set it to "ignore" (without the quotes) am not sure why this has to be done this way and I don't have it disabled since I want to know what's new, but hope it helps.
Oh and browser.disableResetPrompt and set it to true. Create it if it doesn't exist
He's exaggerating a bit bit his point still stands. After an update there's at least one extra tab about the update, and sometimes more like the recent-ish stupid color scheme feature.
Exaggerating isn't particularly helpful, makes me thing the problems the OP has with the browser are more based on perception of "culture" or something rather than the actual product
It's not about perception. The browser's job is to display webpages and otherwise get out of the user's way - Firefox constantly fails at that, much more than a lot of paid, proprietary software even.
Really? I've never had that happen and I've been using Firefox for 2 decades. Occasionally I've had a grumble about it not being the latest version, but that didn't stop me.
Short of the removal of flash I can't think of anything you could be referring to, so perhaps rather than exaggerating some actual concrete examples would be good.
Also been using FF for 2 decades, but can corroborate the experience you cannot.
I have seen all those things he complained about. Diversity initiatives, new features, etc. For me it appears as a new tab on restart that I have to close, and it does feel like it's every single time I update, and sometimes between updates.
It is especially annoying on a seldom-used machine where the browser will typically be outdated every single time you start it up. To make things worse, the machine is rarely used and only gets powered on when you actually need to do a task right away, so the bullshit update notifications are infuriating. I can put up with the updates themselves for security reasons, but intentionally getting in my way for no functional reason is too much.
I believe the reset thing is due to it being a good way to solve user problems that have accumulated over time.
It seemed a bigger thing a few years ago, but if you keep seeing it, then they've probably identified you as someone likely to benfit from it. I don't think I've seen it for years.
This is just speculation though.
I just get an update "what's new" tab after every update, which seems reasonable if you are adding or removing things.
Chrome went heavy on marketing. And their marketing was compelling. At a time when the web was really slow, Chrome advertised speed - remember those Chrome ads where they'd load web pages while something flew by the screen?
At a time when the web was dangerous, Chrome advertised security. Remember when Flash wasn't sandboxed? When Java executed automatically? When nothing had auto-updates?
Firefox caught up, but at best it's "as good". What's it really doing for me?
The answer is presumably privacy. And that's cool. But most people have a hard time understanding what "privacy" means. Further, you can say Chrome is weak on privacy, but it's hardly as bad as people make it out to be.
So basically Mozilla is, at best, equivalent to Chrome, but Chrome was way better for a long time. So it's got to convince people to come back, but its only selling point is really vague.
And then you have some other stuff like companies can manage Chrome via GSuite. So now your work computer is X% more likely to run Chrome. So now you have to choose to have a different experience at home and at work.
What would I do?
1. I'd refocus on the mission. Privacy is critical, security is critical. That would mean a number of things - how is it that Brave is the first browser to integrate TOR? Isn't that insane? TOR has been using Firefox by default forever, and no one thought "maybe we should just support this thing, and start heavily contributing to it" ?
2. I'd invest heavily in next-gen performance and security. Chrome has In-The-Wild zero days being exploited - that's an opportunity. The web is heavier than ever - that's an opportunity.
I'd focus heavily on that. I'd push benchmarks and I'd market those features heavily.
3. I would fire every executive who took a multi-million dollar bonus while firing tons of employees.
That's just day 1 stuff.
Going further I'd consider what it would look like to see Mozilla in the Enterprise. Integrations and management features built into the LTS releases are an obvious start.
#1, Listen to the users, even if it makes the developers lives harder and the code base uglier. (although the firefox build system is just sad, and is a symptom of the entire project, "make" should actually build a working browser)
Stop fsking with the UI and using creative non native looking stuff just to be cool like chrome, and instead focus on making the rendering/JS/developer tools engine best in class. Along with, stop breaking shit. Hiding shit in about:config and then silently removing the option doesn't make users happy, if they spent the time to figure out how to disable search in the address bar because they are tired of accidentally telling google/etc where they are browsing than actually honor that setting, or better yet, give them that option in the config UI rather than pretending they are all idiots and don't understand how computers work.
There are too many chrome only web sites, so make the developers happy with tools that make their jobs easier. About:memory is better these days, but its still a far cry from what it could be, and AFAIK its still doesn't have something similar for CPU or networking outside of the network and cpu tracing functions in the developer tools. I want to be able to manage my browser with similar functionality to my OS (aka what tab is sending/reading all this data, then drill into what/where its sending it along with better whitelist/blacklist functionality/etc)
Then for users, you will gain their appreciation if it feels faster than chrome, which far to often is still false (despite it too getting better). And yes, for tabs, menus and the like using the native widgets not only will make people happier when they change their system color schemes and firefox isn't doing its own thing, but the system components are frequently far far faster to render than firefox's. And yes, sometimes the code to have multiple UI toolkits is ugly, as is the code to support optimizing some JS path, deal with it, thats the job.
I could go on, but others have said some of my other points.
Firefox is losing market share due to shortsighted/poor decisions from leadership, and a harsh anti-competitive landscape from Microsoft/Google/Apple.
Firefox is difficult to save because it's been on constant life support from Google to misdirect antitrust investigators. Saving Firefox would involve not only raising its market share (which would probably have to involve a deal from Google/Microsoft/Apple or legislation because they currently preconfigure their systems/devices to use their proprietary browsers, which are mostly "good enough") but also find a way to wean Mozilla Corp off of the Google payments, which would mean investments in tangentially related services (like VPN, etc.)
> find a way to wean Mozilla Corp off of the Google payments, which would mean investments in tangentially related services (like VPN, etc.)
I disagree - the way forward should be for Mozilla to stop acting like a corporation and start acting like a non-profit. They will never be able to compete with tech giants when it comes to selling things and services in order to throw the profits at the browser - and trying will only incentivize them to make the browser worse to help sell things. Instead they should emprace that having an open browser that is not controlled by a for-profit corporation is a common good and seek people, organizations and governments that agree and are willing to fund it for that reason alone.
Users absolutely don't care where their browser gets paid, but financially, Mozilla Corp is dependent on an external entity's good graces to pay them.
Mozilla Corp makes 400 million per year from Google money. If this money dries up in 2023, then the browser has to find a new deal, or close shop (figuratively speaking; I'm sure it'd lumber on since it's an open source browser). This is a fair amount of business risk, so "saving" the browser probably would involve figuring out how to keep the lights on without a search engine deal.
I don't care that its losing marketshare as long as its still used and supported, just like how I don't really care that most computer users aren't using the command line anymore. The age of the average user being choosy about their web browser is over, and the hand wringing about market share is not important. Users either use the browser that ships with their OS (safari, the limited people on edge), or they download chrome because youtube and gsuite have been giving them banner ads to download chrome for a decade and that's where their autofill passwords are saved.
Instead, mozilla should really lean in on catering to the techie who is going to come to the conclusion to use firefox no matter what mozilla really does anyhow, just from the fact that its not google and you can do more with privacy oriented extensions. It's always frusterating when mozilla does things they really don't have to do, like break certain CSS configs with the move to proton for no reason other than change is good I guess (like, why pull another python 2/3-esque debacle when you don't really have to and could just support legacy syntax?), or taking out niceties like the built in RSS reader, which I found handy to confirm a feed looked OK before throwing it into my actual RSS reader. There are other issues too. Maybe I'm not doing it right in firefox, but I have to go into chrome to find the correct CSS selectors to use in a given webpage for javascripting.
Maybe it has to do with its competitors being a 1.7 trillion dollar company and a 2.5 trillion dollar company!
Winning against those requires not only better technology AND marketing AND consumer favor, but also leverage in the legal processes that enable/disable network effects. So anti-trust is unfortunately one of Mozilla's biggest hopes.
I think the point here isn’t winning, it’s surviving. They need to maintain enough market share to keep going, but they don’t need to be the dominant browser. The goal of avoiding a monoculture can be achieved with a smaller marketshare.
Googs just gave them $400m which means they have soooo much more than $400m. FF has to pay all of its budget with that, so hiring lawyers to take on Googs with that same bucket of money will never work. Googs will continue to give Moz $400m, but then turn right around and spend $401m on their lawyers to fight off whatever Moz can afford.
You can have the best product and still receive little traction because the competitor is a megaCorp with huge marketing budgets and able use its size to make it harder for the little guy with the better product to compete. At that point, legal recourse tends to be the only action left. Googs isn't afraid of this, because they know Moz can't compete financially.
With Google giving them new golden handcuffs every year Mozilla is unlikely to do anything to upset the status quo, including lobbying for anti-trust enforcement.
Restore "User Customizable" as a top-level priority. I came to FF initially over 15 years ago because add-ons could change almost anything including fundamental appearance and workflow. When changing to the new, far more limited add-on infrastructure ~5 yrs ago, Mozilla promised that new APIs would be added to re-enable hugely popular add-ons like Tab Mix Plus yet this and other add-ons users relied on still remain impossible to implement.
This "Have It Your Way" capability would be a profound differentiator and user value proposition to stand out from the sameness of Chrome and Safari. I still use FF but to make it usable I have to install my own UserChrome.css and User.js which isn't easy for non-tech people. On top of that I regularly have to go "fix" new UI behaviors that Mozilla's designers keep shoveling into the UX in a constant game of Whack-a-Mole.
Firefox is already more customizable than Safari or Chrome. If Safari and Chrome were growing in userbase due to being more customizable than Firefox, it might make sense.
It was losing tons of users to Chrome long before that changed. And Firefox was significantly slower and taking longer to integrate new features due to that customization around the old extensions model.
Be the "User Agent" in the truest sense of the word that is sorely missing in the browser landscape nowadays. For that, two things are necessary:
1) become absolutely trustworthy again
2) become the power user's choice again
To me, 1) means absolute control over updates and network connections. Become the antithesis to the patronizing "Ask me again later" school of thought which has become so sickeningly widespread over the last few years, and instead accept that "no means no", whether you disagree or not.
And I don't have to mention "partnerships" with entities like Cliqz or sneaky downloads of marketing extensions.
2) - Firefox tried to appeal to average users and failed, losing a lot of what made it appealing to the power users and evangelists in the process. Reversing that will be painful, because it means allowing people to shoot themselves in the foot, and accepting that some people will do that occasionally.
Making a useful power user browser means accepting that a lot of its value will be created by other people, and supporting that with a deep and comprehensive extension system, instead of clinging to Googles table scraps. Having a useful extension system also means the ability to install from any source I want, no Ifs and Buts.
All of these are risky. Useful tools often are. Give Firefox back its USP and a reason to exist, because "it's not Blink" on its own simply isn't good enough... even if maybe it should.
The best way to predict the future is to analyse the constraints on what can happen.
There is no mass-switching campaign in favor of Firefox. The only foreseeable hope of one happening in the future, is if ManifestV3 kills adblockers, and people decide to switch to Firefox; but now there are so many competitors that oppose ManifestV3 (Brave, Opera, Vivaldi) that Firefox isn't ideally positioned to benefit.
Otherwise, there is no reason to expect the factors behind Firefox's decline to disappear.
Apple bundles Safari with their platforms. Google advertises Chrome on their web properties. Microsoft heavily discourages Windows users from switching away from Edge, and occasional "bugs" reset Edge as the default browser. Most corporations promote Chrome to their employees.
There is no major reason to expect any of this to change. The likeliest change is antitrust action, with "browser choice" screens[0], but I don't see why that would help Firefox more than other browsers.
There's no reason to think that continued incremental improvements in Firefox (the current path) can prevent its decline.
The ballsiest thing Mozilla could do is switch to a forked Blink engine (Mozillium?); they'd save tons of engineering resources which they could refocus on user-facing features & UX, they'd have better webcompat with cutting-edge things (VR, MIDI, etc), they'd still be a part of web standards decisions (since they could still choose how their Blink fork deviates from Google's), and could encourage other Chromium forks to rebase on Mozillium instead of Chromium. But Firefox's most diehard fans would never forgive Mozilla, and they might lose as many users as they gain.
It's hard to think of anything Mozilla can do to double Firefox's market share. Continued decline is the most likely path.
Well, if they reproduce pre-Proton UI, Developer Tools and userChrome.css this way I'll just use it without complaints, despite being former diehard fan of Firefox. Because when they killed XUL addons and started messing with UI/UX every so often I stopped being one and now already consider it one of the Chrome average lookalikes on PC as there is no practical difference between using ungoogled Chromium (before manifest v3) and latest Firefox in my use-case. With Chromium being slightly better because I don't need to jump through hoops to install unpacked local addons there.
Firefox, like most modern software, is suffering from Winchester house syndrome. Hiring full-time UX designers and making them perpetually justify their salary will eventually turn any software into an unusable, unlearnable amorphous blob that blindly follows trends and alienates even the most determined users, much like hiring dozens of full-time plumbers for your house would transform it into a sci-fi movie set given enough time and money.
Mozilla Foundation is all about fattening the C-suite payroll (including board members) and whatever payola they can get and not about the corporate lifeline they are supposedly to dutifully protect which is Firefox.
Firstly it is much much harder to keep a clean sheet, when you focus on privacy, than when you merely focus on introducing features and pushing your own agenda like the Chrome project does. Just one misstep and you can already lose lots of believers of the good cause. And missteps Mozilla had more than enough of during the recent years.
Secondly they time and time again incorporate things, that privacy minding people do not wish to have in their browser and make the defaults so that it is "on" by default. This erodes people's trust in Mozilla's vision and where the journey is going.
Another reason, which is a huuuuge fail in my opinion is, that I still!! cannot donate specifically for Firefox, for Thunderbird, for whatever, but only to Mozilla overall. I cannot donate with a cause, but only with trust, which has been slowly eroded. They will not get those donations they hope for and then in turn make stupid decisions, thinking that not so many people want, what they are making now, because they do not donate. Duh! I would immediately donate to projects like Thunderbird. You can pry Thunderbird from my cold dead hands! They should shut up and take my money.
Firefox makes poor decisions. I've been trying to use firefox for years and just gave up this past weekend. As far as I know, there's no way to customize your firefox home view on android so that you have a permanent, customizable set of links, and nothing else. You can have "recent bookmarks" which disappear eventually, presumably once they're no longer "recent".
Can you imagine being the one to approve such a bone-headed design? I gave up and downloaded opera instead and it's been perfect. I have my desired links up when I open a new tab, nothing else, and life is good.
I tried that and it doesn't work. It shows all your "top" sites, with "add to top sites" letting you pin some to the top of the list. I don't want a list of my top sites, I want a list of bookmarks. For some reason FF Android only lets you have recent bookmarks (temporarily) or pinned top sites + other top sites. It's absurd that such a basic feature isn't provided and a great example of the stupid decisions that firefox seems to enjoy making
That wasn't the request? Also what do you want on your "custom home page"? If this is the feedback firefox developer get I think I'm beginning to understand why firefox gets better so slowly and why shit like " color way" exists
I have my browser default homepage set to ~/home.html. I maintain all my common links in that local html file.
There was a period of time where FF didn't allow a "file://" URL as the default for a new page or tab, but it works now. I'm not sure if Chrome allows it.
At least in my eyes and I suppose in the eyes of other techies and open Web idealists:
Because Mozilla became just another classic corporation that's laser-focused on extracting value for shareholders and executives and nothing else. A year or two ago an article about Mozilla made the rounds here: executives collecting fat bonuses (and some leaving afterwards?). Some mere months later they fired a lot of people.
Is that the right signal to send to a community that wants an open Web browsing experience? Squeeze any money you can and then fire staff. Those pesky people that have the audacity to want money for their work, how dare they!
As the (currently) top commenter @selfhoster11 says, cut out everything that's not Firefox or is not related to its mission.
I could probably agree to use some of their other offerings like Pocket or VPN, assuming they're done well. Mozilla needs the diversified income, like badly. They are at the mercy of Google and always have been. *THIS IS NOT OKAY* and should have been addressed like 10 years ago. If the expenses are so huge, well, again, fire everyone who's not working on Firefox or closely related to it.
Finally, Mozilla needs no "executives". Get a CEO, CTO and CFO who are passionate about the mission, get rid of everyone else at the top. It's a semi-charity organization, the hell does it need a board of directors for?
Thanks for the call-out. I think you make an excellent point about them becoming just another corporation. I don't donate money to them for that exact reason. If there was some way for my donations to get routed straight to the Firefox team, even with enormous inefficiencies and percentage cuts, I'd still do it because I want the open web to exist. As it stands, I have no way to support that ideal monetarily.
A board of directors is more important for a non-profit organization than for a for-profit one. They are part time, serve in a non-executive role, and are in charge of the overall direction of the enterprise, and for a non-profit organization are usually supposed to represent the general, public interest since non-profits have no shareholders to represent. The Mozilla Foundation is a 501(c)(3) and so that goes double for them.
Well, they don't seem to do what they are supposed to do then. I don't think such an organization should give away golden parachutes (fat executive bonuses, including on the way out), yet they did so a few times.
And yeah I know the Foundation and the Corporation are separate. Potato tomato. Point is, they should not act like a corporation. But they do, and they'll kill Firefox, that seems a very likely possibility at this point.
What enterprise? It's not rocket science, they are building a web browser. They are supposed to have just enough layers of management to be a thin wrapper between Firefox developers and the outside world. Collect donations, make sure developers are working on Firefox and get paid on time each month. That's all the community needs and that's all the community is asking for.
For myself, I am moving off of Firefox right now (I don't yet know to what though, recommendations welcome) for one reason: they keep changing the UI in ways that I find irritating and then deprecating the methods to change it back. For me it's really that simple. There are other issues I have with FF but that's the one that got me to the point where I'm ready to abandon FF entirely.
> What would you do if you were in charge of Mozilla?
Concentrate on docs, standards, and libraries. Be the "one-stop shop" for all the information and software one needs to do things with the Internet.
> How would you save Firefox?
First you have to answer the question, why save Firefox?
What's so bad about having fewer browsers? (I know most of the arguments, I'm not asking you to repeat them I'm asking you to revisit them.)
Rather than saving one particular browser, I would make it easy for anyone to create a custom web browser.
If you really want to save FF you have to discover or create something about it that beats the competition: speed, reliability, ...? Those are "table stakes" these days, so what is the differentiator that makes it compelling?
Well there is also that Mozilla likes to proclaim how much they care about privacy but then keeps adding telemetry and a million of other ways that the browser leaks your data without any easy way to opt out (when it should ALL be opt in) not to mention the search deal with the anti-privacy devil. So I disagree that we have seen whether a focus on privacy is enough only whether privacy maketing without actually backing it up is enough.
First of all I would structure Mozilla as a software development organization rather than a social justice organization. Current Mozilla leadership seems to believe they're running a UN NGO, rather than stewarding a software project; and the software itself has suffered because of this shift in priorities.
Secondly I wouldn't worry about browser market share. Mozilla's place is to supply browsers, and Web and internet tools, that are open source and free of corporate control. Market share is something for for-profit corporations to worry about; under my Mozilla so many other things would take priority: security, standards compliance, maintainability (the goal would be a "long now" browser that can exist and be maintained even if the foundation itself goes away), portability across platforms. Even with 5% market share, if Mozilla offers a viable alternative to corporate browsers for those who need one, that's a strong niche userbase to keep going on.
The current Mozilla organization is too unfocused to reliably provide a viable alternative to Chrome. That may ultimately be what kills Firefox.
I actually have wondered about this. Given the changes in the way tracking protection has been done, have there been any actual studies/analyses that show Firefox is losing marketshare? If it's all based on ad companies and server-side detection, I'm unclear that you could actually correctly make the claim.
If anyone has links I'd be interested in reading; I'm sure there are fingerprinting techniques, but ones that rely on JS would potentially be prone to being miscounted due to NoScript (365k+ users of it according to FF).
For the record, I do not doubt that chrome dwarfs everyone, but I'm curious about the way the numbers are being reported/studied.
I have the same question as you. I will add that it is possible Chrome’s market share might be partly artificial since Firefox might be using Chrome’s User Agent string so that websites “compatible with Chrome only” remain usable.
I also suspect a lot of the "Firefox is losing marketshare" is driven in part by ad companies, especially the huge one named Google.
Given how many websites think Firefox in Enhanced Privacy Protection mode is "an ad blocker", of course ad trackers think Firefox is losing marketshare because it isn't feeding their trackers.
Between that and how Mobile Firefox still has to use platform browsers (and a lot of user agent detection picks out the platform browser rather than the "user browser" on mobile), I'd be surprised if Firefox marketshare has dropped as much as the narrative believes.
That said, even before Enhanced Privacy Protection and Mobile, Firefox was down in marketshare compared to the behemoth competitors, and so even if it is a trick of "Heisenberg metrics" that Firefox is losing marketshare, it probably could stand to gain marketshare (to push us away from the growing monopsony).
Here's my perspective on this - Chrome has established itself as the baseline. The baseline is no longer the W3C standard, it's Chrome due to all of the experimental future W3C spec items being in Chrome. Chrome leads the spec, and with its 70% market share developers allow it to.
Firefox will always be playing catchup because of this, regardless of their market share. This leaves three main reasons for using Firefox:
1.) decoupling from Google / ad privacy
2.) promoting browser ecosystem health
3.) familiarity / history of use
Unfortunately, these three items lead to a very narrow TAM, especially when talking purely about new users. The gap will continue to grow as sites that work in Chrome but don't work in Firefox, despite the site using things not in the W3C spec, will be seen as Firefox issues by non-technical users. These users will eventually default to Chrome.
We need a better way to communicate this: Chrome doesn't "lead the spec", it "rushes out ahead of the spec". The developers using non-standard features need to be held better accountable for using non-standard features, and Google needs to be held better accountable for releasing non-standard features ahead of standardization processes.
W3C is seen as no longer relevant to HTML specs having delegated "HTML5" to WHATWG, and WHATWG seems to exist entirely to rubber-stamp Google's will (up until Firefox or Safari or increasingly less common Microsoft complains, and then they try to compromise, sometimes). WHATWG seems to have no teeth to hold Google accountable to standards processes and the Emperor Has No Clothes. (ETA: And yes, that's a hot take that's very unfavorable. I understand many individuals still care inside the W3C and WHATWG, but the end result of collective action is a dangerous rubber-stamping of a Chromium monopsony.)
Apple and Mozilla can't be compromised with. They want certain powerful features to just not exist. They don't trust users to choose for themselves. They are trying to ensure privacy at all costs by making tools that could be used to spy unavailable, no matter what the purpose.
If devs want to make something, Chrome wants to make it happen, and I want to use it, then I don't want Mozilla trying to block up the whole works.
Especially not to "protect my privacy" from a site I completely trust, that might even be an intranet site I built myself.
What's next, are you going to disable downloading executable files, probably the most dangerous browser feature of all?
There's no nice alternative, or sometimes no alternative at all besides making a native app for a bazillion different platforms.
Maybe WHATWG actually isn't just rubber stamping things because they're a google puppet, but at least partly because... it's what devs want.
> They don't trust users to choose for themselves.
No, they don't trust advertisers and spyware companies (the two seem inseparable today) to choose for them. Google has a massive conflict of interest in being the web's largest advertising network owner and sometimes the web's largest spymaster, in addition to owning the web's most common browser.
> What's next, are you going to disable downloading executable files, probably the most dangerous browser feature of all?
Firefox has had a relatively consistent stance on that since 1990 something and always had warnings when downloading executable files and worked hard to make sure that malware can't just download executable files it wants when it wants. As someone who remembers the malware wars of the 1990s, it was a reason I switched to Firefox in the first place!
It still amazes me that Chrome just auto-downloads EXEs willy-nilly without warnings or user consent, because I still remember what it was like the last time a major browser did that by default.
> it's what devs want.
That's my point: devs as a collective are morons. Devs as a collective include a lot of people whose salaries pay them to build adware, spyware, malware, and worse. Devs as a collective lack a major ethics body or ethics reviews and so far no dev has had to stand trial for a clear violation of professional ethics.
That's why you put things behind a permission system. If a site requires a spy permission to view content.... then the user can decide if privacy matters in this case.
Fingerprinting someone who doesn't care is already trivial. Just ask for their email or sign on with google or Facebook. Or don't even bother and just listen through the Google alarm clock. Or find us with our Tiles.
Mozilla wants to kill all spyware, but what about services that would probably cost a lot of money without spyware?
Unless you outlaw those(In which case I'd probably have some angry letters to write) or provide a cheap alternative... the kind of people who click "accept" on location access prompts are already spied on 8 different ways.
It's kind of an uphill losing fight to protect people from something most people like.
> What's next, are you going to disable downloading executable files, probably the most dangerous browser feature of all?
Funny, that's exactly what Google does (and all other browser follow Google) if that executable is from someone small enough that can't affort to threaten Google with a lawsuit because that's the only thing that will get them to care about false positives in their "Safe Browsing" gatekeeping list.
Mistreatment of users is quickly eroding 3. for me, and I deeply care about 2. A family member already explicitly asked for assistance in migrating away from Firefox.
I wouldn't try to save Firefox, I'd try to save the benefits of an open web (I'm assuming some variant on that is their actual mission statement but not checked).
Firefox itself is just one in a series of reinventions. I am at peace with using a Firefox branded chromium fork in some future date as I think a balanced corporate sharing economy similar to Linux is probably the best we can hope for.
On that theme, some kind of more loosely combined ecosystem that involves internet archive, Wikipedia, Mozilla, OSM, Atom, open standards, free software, royalty free tech and democratic governence and pro-consumer advocacy in a global context is probably a good idea, to counterbalance large corporate interests. It probably already kind of exists in some ad-hoc manner, but further moves in that direction would be good.
> Firefox itself is just one in a series of reinventions. I am at peace with using a Firefox branded chromium fork in some future date as I think a balanced corporate sharing economy similar to Linux is probably the best we can hope for.
Except Chromium is not that. WebKit might have been but Google and/or Apple decided they'd rather want their own fiefdoms than play along. Both companies have made it very clear that they want to be in control.
It seems like a lot of people would have liked to see Mozilla double-down on Firefox to the exclusion of all else.
Personally I would have leaned towards the opposite approach to meet their stated mission of ensuring an open internet. Historically, Firefox has been the means by which Mozilla earned a seat at the table, but I would have liked to see them diversify their portfolio a bit rather than relying entirely on a single browser. If I had been in charge, I would:
Focus on developing Rust, Servo/Gecko, SpiderMonkey. Keep projects like Firefox and Thunderbird as reference implementations but encourage Microsoft, Brave, Opera, and open-source forks to build their own products based on Mozilla technologies. Assemble a broad coalition of companies that base their web browsers, email clients, feature phones, smart TVs, consoles, etc on Mozilla technologies. Explore using licensing and corporate memberships to offset decreases in advertising revenue. The end-goal being to ensure that Mozilla-based browsers capture enough of the market that they have a seat at the table with Apple and Google and then use that leverage to push for web standards that are beneficial to end-users.
Of course, that ship has sailed now that Safari and Firefox are the only browsers with a non-negligible market-share that are not built on top of chromium. Given Firefox's trajectory, Apple is realistically the only player left who can prevent Google from dictating the direction of the web. If Apple decides to throw in the towel or let Google drive, webpages essentially become Chrome-pages.
Firefox is losing marketshare because Chrome is the default browser on Android devices and Android devices are the number one device in the world. Most people don't even know how to change their default browser.
I don't think Firefox needs saving. Those who use it are active and committed to it.
> Those who use it are active and committed to it.
Are they though? Are they so very committed they'll take all the crap Mozilla throws at them? Because Mozilla sure is trying their very best to get rid of Firefox users.
> I don't think Firefox needs saving. Those who use it are active and committed to it.
Don't be so sure. I stuck to Android though thick and thin since 2.1 or 2.2, but my next phone will be an iPhone, because I bloody had enough of their nonsense.
Firefox is harder to replace, if only because it's the only counter to Google's browser monopoly (so I consider it a moral imperative to keep using it), but if they keep reducing openness and end user control, I will eventually snap and abandon them. And if I'm nearing this point, then many have already passed it because I have a remarkable tolerance for shitty FOSS software. A family member already requested I throw out Firefox and install Chrome, and I complied because honestly, I can't fault them.
Look, I hate to say it, but Firefox is not the counter to a Chrome monopoly. Firefox lost this fight quite some time ago, and the only thing truly stopping Chrome from owning the web is Apple and Safari.
Yes, it's true that it's fairly anti-competitive behavior to only allow WebKit on iOS, but the painful truth here is that it stops Chrome from being spread around enough devices and taking over. Google cannot push Apple around anywhere near as easily.
Firefox is a literal drop in the bucket compared to that effort.
Same here after many years of using it. In my opinion, and to try to keep the internet free, we should look into supporting LibreWolf (a Firefox fork) just like most people moved from OpenOffice to LibreOffice.
My view is that using any Chrome derivative is still aiding and abetting Google. If Firefox really does die out and all we have left is Chrome derivatives, then yeah it seems like Brave would be the best option then, but that will be a sad day.
As I understood it, Google doesn't really want Firefox out of the market since it keeps them out of anti-trust issues... which is why they pay Mozilla to be the default search engine. Without that money, Mozilla would fail. Mozilla obviously doesn't want to fail, so they keep taking the money from Google. I don't see anything about that flywheel which puts Mozilla/Firefox in the drivers seat of their fate. They exist as part of a cost-benefit analysis on the part of Google.
So to phrase this question in a different way, how does a fat-smoker lose weight and quit smoking? They just do. If Mozilla/Firefox wants to legitimately be competitive they're going to have to change the nature of their relationship with Google.
Now, if you were to ask me personally what I would do?
...I would probably try to strategically create an imbalance between the big tech firms by getting cozy with a specific firm, forcing other firms to compete in places where they don't want to. Facebook doesn't have a browser or a mobile offering... which is slowly hurting them (e.g. cookie apocalypse) they might make a decent ally. Amazon is similar, but they don't have an easy symbiosis, unless there was a way to create something between AWS or prime video. Samsung, Adobe, or maybe Salesfore are all bad fits, but if Mozilla created a product strategy to align and maybe have native support for adobe or Salesforce they might be able to make something happen.
In my opinion, I don't see anything like that happening in reality. Mozilla will probably slowly fade away, each CEO getting the comp that they can squeeze out while the business is still making money. Sometime 10-20 years from now we'll think of them like a sun microsystems or silicon graphics.
(*This was a quick throw together... I maybe incredibly off about the details of the Mozilla/Google relationship currently)
I'm really at the point if I see another stupid popup from Mozilla about something I can 0% about when my Firefox updates I'm going to switch to something. I use Firefox because I'm trying to support the little guy but honestly when the little guy doesn't care about supporting me back then it's time to move on.
While Firefox has many small imperfections compared to Chrome, the big point IMO is that Firefox is not preinstalled on any large consumer OS/device besides Linux.
It has many little details that aren't as good as Chrome but I don't know how much that affects adoption. Even if it does, that last bit of polish is very expensive to fix and they would need users or another mechanism to fund it.
I would focus heavily on getting Linux to be more mainstream. There is already growing momentum behind Linux and a lot of room for organizations (like Mozilla) that can typically execute on long multi year strategies better than the anarchy of FOSS. There's a lot of work to be done on all levels - partnerships, marketing, technical, finance etc. so people in all roles could contribute.
Maybe that would even play out outside Mozilla, like people leaving and joining other companies that push OSS ahead until it gains enough users for Mozilla to be relevant again.
I think they could transition to being a developer tools company with a focus on building enterprise web applications with the goal of making the "default" web development process correspond to their mission statement.
I think that Chrome and IE proved that the most important users are developers and business admins. If Mozilla wants to make the web a place for real human users in line with their ideals, then they need to focus on making their vision the default for developers and businesses.
The number one issue with the browser ecosystem right now is Safari. iPhone browsers being forced to render with Safari's engine is already bad. Blocking browsers from having extensions is far worse in my opinion. Most of the reason I use Chrome and Firefox on my desktop is their rich array of extensions.
If I were Firefox, I'd sue Apple to hell for abusing their dominance in OS and device market share to block me from competing fairly in the browser market.
Even if every safari user switched (desktop and mobile), it still wouldn't do much more than double the marketshare and yet remain a small fraction of what Chrome has.
I find it difficult to say that iPhone safari is the reason that Firefox is having trouble when overall, iPhone safari has less of an overall market share than Firefox currently has.
I left Firefox for political sentiments that most of you do not share, judging from past conversations here. There are enough people like me that those events likely continue to put downward pressure on their market share. But not all that much in the big scheme of things. The larger effect of those politics was a change in leadership. Firefox used to be led by a passionate, opinionated technologist with a clear and consistent vision. His replacement, while more politically palatable, seems to have a weaker grasp of the market and the technology. The direction of the browser's market share reflects that. CEOs are non-fungible.
The primary "author" of Firefox changed, and that had a similar effect to the change in author of the final season of Game of Thrones.
My opinion is that Google deliberately "killed" Mozilla by giving them almost infinite cash.
Mozilla can’t go anywhere because as a business, they have no incentive nor any culture needed to survive. They are spoiled by Google whatever they do.
They are like someone so rich that they don’t have any more goals in life. They are still there but they goes nowhere.
Ofc I’m talking about the company, not the employees that did put hard work into the great product that Firefox still is.
It’s too bad because the web have a great need of a Mozilla-like company/foundation.
Mozilla could have been the anti-Google and they could make tons of money by just providing some cloud services (mail, calendar, storage,…) but they just can’t see it because anything will be harder to monetize than their deal with Google.
My opinion? Mozilla should take a big portion of it's funding and direct it towards the fight for browser choice -- and the biggest offender here is of course, Apple. There's already some tailwinds in their favor here (the Epic court case, general grumbling about the 30% take, etc), take the opportunity and ask openly that Apple support browser choice, and hammer them on it repeatedly.
I wonder how many users they would actually gain from this. People that both care about browser engine diversity on iOS but don't already use the webview version of Firefox.
I want to be done with Firefox so badly. I just don't want to go to Google.
There's this really obnoxious issue where search in the address bar has taken a complete dive recently.
For example, if I want to go to reddit.com/r/videos and it's a page I go to often, I can't just type "videos" because the suggestions that come up are links to threads I've visited recently. None of the suggestions are to reddit.com/r/videos which I visit far more often than a thread I've visited just once.
And it triple annoys me that this used to work just fine but then they recently changed it when they put in those stupid paid suggestions / ads.
I left long ago for Vivaldi. Glad I was gone for the ads in the search bar by default. That kind of behavior, to me, shows a change in priorities away from the user.
In Vivaldi you can set nicknames for bookmarks. So you could type
“Ctrl+L” to select the address bar
then
“rv” or “vid” or whatever you want, to take you to the bookmarked r/videos page, which you can also leave out of the bookmarks bar if you don’t want the clutter
I do this all the time now, since most websites I visit are my frequently visited (probably true for everyone). Optimize life’s most used code paths my friend and come on over to Vivaldi. This is not a paid ad lol.
That presumes Google is paying Mozilla primarily to secure the search market. But if they're paying primarily to secure staying out of anti-trust court, Firefox culling ads doesn't affect whether big G keeps their wallet open.
Do you need $500m/year to maintain a web browser? Cut all the dead weight, rebuild trust, and you could probably do just as well on donations. For one, I'd be donating to Firefox every month, if there were such a fund ringfenced only for Firefox development.
They're not getting that money for the ads. They're getting it to be a decoy for anti-trust investigators. Which is not hampered in the slightest by adding a default adblocker.
What if we forked it with a Kickstarter campaign to fund core engineering salaries, followed by a low monthly subscription. Personally I'd happily pay if I knew the money was going where it should.
I wouldn't pay a subscription for Firefox but I would donate regularly if it was freely available and managed as a non-profit without any deals that make them beholden to megacorporations.
* Aggressive competition who are ready to use dark patterns on all platforms to push their own products. All of Google, Microsoft and Apple are doing it one way or another.
* No financing. Pocket and Mozilla VPN are rather miserable revenue streams and therefore FF relies on the likes of Google for the bulk of their budget which means that they are limited in what they can do against Google.
* Really old code base that needs to be adapted for the modern web which takes money and resources from other initiatives.
* The Mozilla Foundation which seems to consider the browser a golden hen that will provide them nice profits to waste.
Saving it is nearly impossible. The things to happen are:
* major legislation that must level up the browser market or an economic shift that will break Google, Microsoft and Apple dominance on the major user platforms.
* a miracle new money tree should grow up in San Francisco such that it will be an independent revenue source for the project.
* much more people and organizations should invest in improving the browser either with money or effort (magic tree or failure of all other browser engines).
* Firefox should be liberated from the foundation and be a community project like Debian so that people have better feeling of ownership of the project.
Nobody wanted to use the original open source Mozilla browser because it was a weird groupware suite monstrosity derived from Netscape's code. A few clever people created a standalone browser using the Mozilla engine and called it Phoenix. It was eventually renamed Firefox in 2004.
Start another Phoenix that focuses on being a better, slimmer, faster browser than the Chromium ones, just like the original was a better, slimmer, faster browser than the Internet Explorer monoculture.
They already did; it was called servo. Management killed the project and fired all the engineers. You may have heard of the rust programming language...
For the past years FF updates seem to focus on the fact that: One-two new color themes are available: "Try these out, tune your browser! Look at the 1000th time we're shilling Pocket because people like bookmarks!" instead of appealing to the more important aspects of a browser like firefox which is chosen by "more tech literate people": precisely because it's not chrome; for usability, privacy, features not being removed in the name of "reshaping the web", customization, etc.
Also, let's hit a nerve here: Mozilla& Co, ideologically speaking, and by "following the money", are mostly the same hand dealt as Google.I speak for myself but i'm sure many other people also use FF only because there are legitimately no other options besides Chrome, except maybe some obscure ones like qutebrowser/browsh/lynx/etc which aren't really something you jump to for daily driving due to the pain of installation/usage.That or maybe one still has to close/migrate/transition the google/mozilla account for the bookmarks sync features, which is the only useful feature and reason why one should use these 2(/3 including edge I guess) browsers.
To answer your question(s), I would do nothing, because I won't save Firefox.If they save themselves that's fine, but with a fresh memory of the netscape days and the battle of the browsers for the "advertisement bucks", this is not the first rodeo of the company/project/browser, and the usability of the browser is, again, the only reason i'm using it.As a side note, they're way too political for my taste.
Everybody is moving to mobile and almost nobody uses Firefox on mobile. However, Firefox mobile does support extensions. Is that something that could emphasized? However, Firefox speed on mobile is much slower than Chrome. That should probably be improved upon.
For desktop there's not much of a distinguishing factor left. Chrome is good enough. I like Firefox for the privacy, but is that enough of a distinguishing factor for regular (less privacy conscious) folks?
FF implements what they call 'smart sizing' on Android. The basic principle is the larger the amount of disk space available (on Android they use disk caching) the larger the cache size. You can inspect this dynamically on your device in 'about:cache'.
I am violently critical of FF's current direction but to be fair to FF the reloading of tabs is a compromise to deal with how little disk space there usually is on Android (because the OS itself hogs large chunks of it in most Android devices).
I use firefox on android. Its frustrating at times. It doesn't integrate well with android stuff like opening up in apps I think. It takes me to the app store or doesnt even open in apps. Google stuff like looking at reviews doesn't work in firefox.
Because Chrome works well enough to be, at worst, "okay" for the average user.
People only really change tech when the one they currently have is visibly & obviously worse, which is part of what spurred the initial migrations to Chrome (I remember switching from FF and in awe at how much faster Chrome was).
That's not to say Chrome hasn't been acquiring it's own list of missteps (manifest V3, restricted Chrome Sync, even attempting Flow), but none of them so far are the type that a non-tech-savvy user would care about, or even know about unless explicitly told.
Then you add on the massive budget Chrome has, compared to Mozilla's struggles to find a revenue source, and it's not hard to see why it's having a hard time.
With that in mind, the obvious solution is for FF to find something distinct it can excel at that the average person finds attractive and that allows for monetization in some way. Problem is, no one really knows what that would be, and the current attempts at being privacy-focused just...aren't widely applicable enough. (Whether or not people should care about privacy is a different debate, and how to get them to care about privacy is its own rabbit hole.)
The reason I used Firefox daily many years ago was because of the Firebug debugger. The more complicated pages became the more important it was to have an excellent debugger/browser combination. Chrome launched with a solid solution and has kept pushing but it isn't nearly as good as debuggers in other platforms. All the browsers are all pretty bad at debugging the lower level stuff like graphics. What is the GPU doing? Why was rendering this last frame slow? What is happening inside of this WASM blob? Is transferring information in and out of this worker the problem or was it the worker itself?
If Firefox had an amazing debugger I would use it every day. I focus on graphics so this is where my mind is at but there are plenty of things that would benefit everyone like a better memory profiler or maybe being better about explaining to users how to fix issues. Chrome's Lighthouse might focus on how google works but it will also provide solid tips for how to make most websites better. Sure it might be wrong if you really know your stuff but it is also a great place to learn if you don't think you know it all.
My 2 cents, I think the browser wars are lost, handily. We should start focusing on contingency plans.
I don't think we all agree on what the impact of Firefox market share evaporation is, but my main concern is Google having totalitarian control of the internet: the Browser and Search.
To combat that, I would focus on decreasing the reliance on browser specific tech (specifically: javascript, but also html/css, and maybe HTTP to a certain degree), ensuring that that the web can be browsed without being at the mercy of the client. Return to servers front-loading the entirety of web content. Obviously this would require a massive cultural shift.... The ethics of web dev would have to be shared by vegan-comparable evangelists. (I realize how unrealistic this is after typing it)
I would also try to produce a PoC search engine that mercilessly punishes the ad-driven web, which - we've all noticed- is becoming increasingly pervasive.
Accomplishing these two things, I wouldn't be too concerned about Firefox specifically. Obviously these are immense- perhaps unrealistic goals- but it's what comes to mind.
> To combat that, I would focus on decreasing the reliance on browser specific tech (specifically: javascript, but also html/css, and maybe HTTP to a certain degree), ensuring that that the web can be browsed without being at the mercy of the client. Return to servers front-loading the entirety of web content. Obviously this would require a massive cultural shift.... The ethics of web dev would have to be shared by vegan-comparable evangelists. (I realize how unrealistic this is after typing it)
I don't think it is an easy thing to accomplish but a cultural shift away from depending on the latest tech is exactly what me need. Make not having good backwards compatibility as shameful as "works best with IE". Make it acceptable to run "old" software again and laughable to force users onto new versions in order to get security updates.
> I would also try to produce a PoC search engine that mercilessly punishes the ad-driven web, which - we've all noticed- is becoming increasingly pervasive.
Yes. There have been some search engines posted here for the old web, but I haven't yet seen one that primarily punishes based on ads.
Firefox is losing market share because there is so little to differentiate it from its competitors.
In its heyday, Firefox grew popular as the browser that saved us from the manifestly inferior Internet Explorer.
Nowadays, Chrome, Edge & Safari are nowhere near as bad by comparison, meaning users have far less reason to switch from defaults. And I’m counting Chrome as a default just because it is pushed so hard.
What to do then? Find a point of differentiation that gets people excited.
Here’s an idea: a radical return to the idea of the browser being a user agent. That is, fully on the user’s side.
Ads blocked by default. AI to warn of potential native advertising. Auto-flagging of dark patterns. Auto-flagging of any form of deceptive practice. A database of sites known to engage in shady tactics. Reader mode that works everywhere.
Firefox: your personal internet bodyguard.
Sadly I don’t think it can happen until the organization is weaned off Ad money, and it can’t do that until it tackles the complexity of the web which demands so many developers. Which probably means making a stand against further scope expansion of HTML/CSS/JS.
FF is already taking a stand against JS scope expansion. That's exactly why I don't use them.
While AI tools would be great(I'd like to see a "content may be generated by deep learning" flag, I have very little interest in supporting a campaign against web bluetooth, battery status, keyboard layout detection, etc.
The user-respecting way is just to put them behind permissions.
They do way too much that's not _Build the best browser in the world_.
Persona, Pocket, a whole bunch of non-technical stuff....
It adds up. I wish they would slim their team down dramatically and become a lean mean killing machine to build the best browser in the world. But unless they get sponsored by some billionaire I don't see that happening.
I think it's too late for anything to save them now, but integrating a social overlay on the entire Web, built directly into the browser, is one play that I think might have kept them relevant if they'd started at least a decade ago and really nailed the execution.
It'd have to be something that gives you a reason to use FF over Chrome or Safari or IE/Edge. A social approach has "virality" to it. "Oh we're all posting on this Tweet in FF-Social, that's why you're not seeing the replies. Go get FF and join in. Here's the invite link for our group."
Some add-ons and (earlier) wrapper sites tried similar things, but I think FF is one of the few companies that might have wanted to try this, had (at one time) the critical mass & goodwill to pull it off, and had the right vehicle for it.
They should copy everything DuckDuckGo android browser does and develop in this direction.
Basically default mode should decruftify all the websites you visit. Destroy all the known garbage on websites that doesn't serve browsing expeirience just tracking and advertising.
Have an easily accessible slider to adjust level of this intervention for current website so you can turn all the crap back on if site doesn't work or complains, or disable event more (javascript, decorative styles).
I'd be also happy if they provided additional tools for modifying the way content is presented, for example influencing order of repeating element like table rows and other. Filtering. Site specific bookmarking. Linking to specific positions in the document. Highlighting.
It should bring back the control to the user and give the users more control they ever had
One strategy might be to pursue creating software to run on the server or as a proxy. There are probably a number of optimizations that could take place on the server that would benefit from knowledge of how browsers will interpret a page. Eg, you could inline certain styles or other resources to speed up loading, rather than requiring the browser to request them separately. I think chrome benefits from being the best way to view a number of google properties, and it would be interesting if firefox could respond by being the best way to view diverse other sites on the web. Note that I'm not suggesting they purposefully break features on chrome, but rather that certain browser features might become nore useful if there was a guarantee that servers would take advantage of them.
So many answers missed the fundamental point.
It is open source.
That means Google, Microsoft and anyone else is able to contribute and with enough contributions from these sources, the basic philosophy will be influenced by these sources. If you do the work you should get kudos & reward....
-Containers were / are brilliant
-Containers with "some sponsor leakage" ( it's not called that but that is what it is) is shabby and so google.
-Default search engine is Google is obscene, regardless of how much sponsorship you get.
-Turning off telemetry should mean what it says. What it really means Firefox still stores it locally, just doesn't transmit it (for now?)-so Microsoft.
First step: ditch the CxO-suite payroll; Mozilla has turned into a giant C-suite sucking sound on its finance and has gone blind to its original tenet.
2. Revert to Redhat pre-IPO corporate model (and stay there)
3. Restart and fill up PAID development team
4. Massive support team in response to user-support/feature-request
I'm using Firefox fulltime, both on my work and my personal machine. The two things I'd love to see are:
- Fix the ever-growing memory usage on Linux
- Make it the best platform for using Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)
Despite PWAs not being a mainstream thing now, there are still a lot of them. Particularly on Linux, a PWA can be the best option for software that doesn't have a native client - e.g. Outlook 365. PWAs have a lot of untapped potential, mainly due to mobile software authors not being familiar with the approach.
With Firefox standing for the open, net-neutral web, it makes sense to me that they would also stand for web-based, cross-platfrom, appstore-neutral apps.
If Google goes through with the manifest V3 change, there are going to be a lot of people looking for a new browser. They've become accustomed to browsing with blockers (tracking and analytics) and won't want to use a browser that doesn't easily support blockers.
Firefox can scoop up a lot of these users if they don't force out blockers and other addons using manifest V2. I could see articles in Fast Company, Gizmodo, etc. with headlines like "Is Firefox the Hot New Browser (Again)?". It could lead to a huge wave — and hopefully to Google walking back their promises of a forced transition.
I'd create a Chrome OS alternative (like CloudReady which was bought by Google) for old Intel Macs and other laptops that won't get official Win 11 support, and maybe partner with some productiviy SaaS to have a working GDocs and Office 365 alternative.
Open/Libre Office and their UX are too complicated for normal users like most Linux apps that are modeled after professional desktop applications.
Considering the amount of hardware that's out there and never will work on newer operating systems having a easy to install and use OS for web productivity tasks will very likely be a big driver for overall market share.
I'd try to find ways to make Mozilla a better browser, instead of trying to convince people with ideological arguments, which is obviously not sufficient for a mainstream browser.
Things that could convince me:
- automated clicking for cookie banners
- built-in password manager with network storage
- better bookmark management, with bookmarks as icons on the start page, similar to mobile phone home screens
- built-in video calls with browser sharing (many years ago I saw a tech demo from Mozilla that looked a bit like around.co)
- cloud-storage for tabs and cookies/storage, maybe even JS state, so I can switch machines and get an identical browser window.
People should listen to Dr Robert Epstein [1] and never use a google product again.
Google are an advertising company and master manipulators. They have unprecedented control over people very thoughts and opinions. They should be avoided at all costs by any thinking person.
Of course, none of this helps Firefox. If anything, it suggests that they are pretty much fucked.
I mean, the reason everybody moved to Chrome last time was because it was faster than Firefox/IE and it included Flash so you didn't have that stupid update popup every time you logged in. Flash isn't a thing anymore, but if they could make it faster than Chrome (not just as fast) while keeping up with web standards, it would work.
I don't know where you get money for such a venture, but IBM (Red Hat) and Amazon both a vested interest to not have a browser monoculture and don't already run a browser project.
> but if they could make it faster than Chrome (not just as fast) while keeping up with web standards, it would work
This is easier to be said than done, as browsers are mostly limited by I/O nowadays. There's a little you can do about it other than introducing something like AMP. I'm afraid Google is going to win this one.
At the end of the day the main problem of Firefox is that it fights against companies (ab)using their market power in one market to foster their browser on people.
- Google: Try to use anything made by them with another browser and without a blocker and see how long it takes until you get the "SURF BETTER WITH CHROME"-ads thrown into your face
- Microsoft: Edge is pre-bundled and you get little nags in the Google style noted above all the time. Various menus contain little "try out Edge, a browser made for Windows!"-ads
- Apple: Doesn't even allow other browsers on some of their platforms, deeply integrates the browser and the OS in others (i.e. exactly the behavior which got Microsoft in hot water in the 90s)
I don't think it's possible to fundamentally change the trend without intervention of government agencies that forbids Google, Microsoft and Apple from doing this and neither EU nor US show much interest in doing so. So, things will continue and at best Mozilla can hope for some stabilization at the bottom of the ladder.
Side note: Mozilla has done various things over time I'm not happy with, but all of these are at most accelerants. They didn't change the fundamental trajectory, so unlike other commentators I think they are not relevant to this topic, even though we could discuss day in or out if e.g. the pocket acquisition and all that came with it was a good thing.
Mozilla was able to gain market share against Microsoft before by targeting power users who then recommended FF to others (or just installed it for them) so I disagree that Mozilla's current disdain for power users is not relevant. Even if they would have lost the average user anyway, their own decisions is what is going to lose them the rest that is keeping them from obscurity.
I agree that competing with these megacorporations on their playing field is unrealistic, which is why Mozilla needs to start competing in places where these megacorporations don't want to. Mozilla's marketing department has already realized that privacy is one such area, but their developers and culture still need to catch up with that.
Firefox has a bunch of issues these days, but you cannot overlook Google's use of dominance in search, online docs, mail, and video to push people onto Chrome.
When you're hit with "you should use chrome" on all your most common sites, and the sites you use favor Chrome, it's hard for any browser to compete.
I know people like to bash Mobile Safari, some of which is reasonable, it's really important to realize it's pretty much the only reason sites aren't chrome only at this point.
- Fight against Apple in court on the iOS browser monopoly.
- get Web extensions (real ones, like uBlock) into Firefox for iOS.
- start a campaign around Web browsing speed (using numbers with Privacy Protection and/or uBlock0 enabled). That’s the last competitive advantage FF has, and it needs to use it to gain marketshare.
- Keep investing in Open Web initiatives (such as ActivityPub). Mozilla, like it or not, is one of the last bastions of the open web, and they need to keep investing in it (with research such as Persona).
Cater to power users. Remove as much bloat as possible Focus on extensibility. Setup stupid simple self hosting for things like bookmarks/pw manager.
Longshot: go all in on bringing mainline Linux to the desktop/mobile. Linux systems are the only place where Mozilla is the default. Hyper focus on high performance with Linux systems. Memory footprint and battery drain are abysmal. The way security controls for extensions are implemented requires stupid amounts of memory.
I think it's fine to hold Firefox to higher moral standards than its competitors, but what I don't like is the general negative vibe in which people criticize it (or Mozilla) for not being perfect. There is always a constructive manner in which we can suggest stuff and I sometimes feel that the criticisms are too derisive and maybe even toxic. We may need to reach a collective agreement that some things, like browsers, should not be tied down to business models, but rather to make them a public tool or utility. Sure, people working to improve it and maintain it should get properly compensated for it, but eventually we will reach a point where no more 'growth' can be squeezed out of a product, and that's when privacy-invasive measures start to creep in (as we've seen with Chrome). So, my argument to save Firefox is to stop trying to make money with it, and perhaps lobby governments around the world to mandate its usage or to add dedicated government IT workers to contribute patches and maintain localization and internationalization (not just for Firefox, but for other FLOSS stuff). It's not a crazy idea, since a lot of countries have rather efficient socialized postal services...
Few device manufacturers and platform ecosystems appear incentivized to bundle Firefox, perhaps because it doesn't provide much in the way of competitive moat-building opportunities in return for the partnership (there is the Google sponsorship, which is probably helpful in their unique case because it provides a defence against allegations of monopolistic behaviour).
The cost of bundling for Chrome and Safari is low, because it's software -- so they are included with a large number of devices, especially where commercial partnerships can be formed (generally on favourable terms to Google and Apple, respectively, I'd expect).
I don't think that the average user notices much difference in terms of behaviour and functionality between any of these browsers. I'll admit that there are probably rare exceptions like vendor-pushed codecs where one or other browser tends to have an advantage (again, typically leveraged by partnerships with streaming content providers).
So: I don't know, but it's something to do with getting Firefox on more devices by default -- and that's not something that happens easily when supply chains are easily influenced by a small number of upstream "ecosystem providers".
Never understood this convo about Firefox dying or all the complaints. I love Firefox, been using it since 2005 or so. Firebug was awesome back in the day and FF Developer Edition w/ all its developer tools is still great. Only annoying thing they've done recently is rename/re-sort a bunch of menu options that undid years of muscle memory.
Someone explain to me why I would switch to Chrome? If anything I'd switch to Edge before Chrome.
The most important thing to a regular user, is that their websites work. But for websites to work, the developer had to test in Firefox. So, Firefox's alienation of power users has hurt its regular userbase.
"What would you do if you were the head of Mozilla" sure reads a lot like "what do I want Firefox to do".
Firefox lost the battle for average users against Chrome. But it's always been a favourite of power users for a reason. It's time to listen to power users again, or be extinguished (incidentally, that's the third stage of EEE).
Become a browser with privacy features, instead of a "privacy browser".
Enable battery status(Important for kiosks), web midi, web USB, web bluetooth, all of it. Just put it behind an option. Stop trying to keep useful web app functionality out of the web. I don't want to support that.
Start innovating and give us features nobody else has.
Integrate with Yggdrasil to trust 200: URLs on the tunnel as secure contexts(Or let people set a whole interface to be secure).
Bring back FlyWeb, immediately. When flyweb died was a key moment that made me lose all interest in FF.
Give us a way to package a website into a manually installable and redistributable "Box", that can be trusted as a secure context, with a manually selectable data folder, so it all just works like a traditional app. Like Web Bundles, but manually installed and treated as secure, with services that can run in the background all the time, etc.
Don't just lag behind or catch up to chrome, support everything they do, go past them and make web apps truly a replacement for desktop apps.
Stop trying to kill everything that can be used for tracking and let the user decide on a site by site or app by app basis.
> Also, people need to understand that Firefox is not the reason for Mozilla existence, Firefox is one of the tools that Mozilla has (and depends on) to fullfil its mission.
I can't see stopping work on that as a significant resource saving. Most power users want less tracking anyway.
Taking measures to appeal to a more enthusiast audience won’t do much for the numbers.
Only the masses will, and the masses moved long ago to Chrome because it was a 10x product. The alternative was awful. Not only this, but it was backed by Google, the world’s entrypoint to the internet.
Now, Chrome continues being “good enough” if not great.
For me, I have no reason to move, even being a reasonably privacy-conscious person.
Build more SaaS services users can pay for, like Mozilla VPN[1] which enhances privacy , better user experience and keep things more secure.
Mozilla needs recurring revenue stream strong enough to help them get off Google deal and scale up revenue to compete with big guns on equal footing.
Firefox has the advantage of not being advertising driven, privacy focused and a great brand.
Services like say Identity(expand Firefox account for say form-less login to supporting websites), password management (LastPass), payment/credit card management , their own email/calendar service to complement Thunderbird, notes/clipboard like Evernote/notion , screen recording sharing like loom and so on and deeply integrate to their browser to provide seamless experience .
Focus on services which browsing better/ safer can build strong revenue runway that can fund all the ambitions they have for other projects
Opt -in for any service and modular. Nothing breaks regular experience. Just offer better convenience people will pay, one thing Apple get right.
[1] Yes it is white labelled Mullvad VPN, but it is still recurring revenue for Mozilla.
This has been a really interesting debate. One of the assumptions underlying many of the comments here is that the web is still the default paradigm of the internet. This is still true to some extent - we consume content on web browsers on a range of user agents: laptops, desktops, mobile devices, embedded hardware, fridges, and a range of other IoT devices.
But how long is that going to be the case?
Will the web be the default paradigm in the age of the metaverse? What if Firefox was able to be a metaverse platform? There was some early work done on this in around 2014 by @vvuk, which integrated WebGL. VRML integration also progressed. At the moment, Facebook is changing its entire organisation to focus on the metavers (see also their Oculus acquisition), while Google and Apple own the hardware (mobile phones) that it will presumably run on, and have their own browsers. Microsoft's Hololens is also heading in this direction, but they already have Edge.
Facebook needs a web browser for the metaverse. Mozilla needs to remain relevant. Strange bedfellows?
More and more people are concerned about privacy and security, see the popularity of VPNs in recent years. So Mozilla should concentrate on making Firefox the most privacy enhanced browser along with being the most secure. Marketing should double down on getting that message across.
Additionally it looks like Web Assembly has a promising future, so Firefox should having the best support for that.
The focus shouldn't be Firefox per se, it should be Gecko.
In this market, we've got an army of secondary secondary browser players-- the Vivaldis, the Braves, Yandex's browser team, the smouldering wreckage of Opera, and yes even Microsoft's Edge and (to a lesser extent) Apple's Safari teams.
I'm sure every single one of those developers knows they're living with a belligerent landlord: they're going to spend too much of their careers having to unwind anti-competitive or just "we wouldn't want to include this in OUR browser" features in Blink.
Make sure you're a serious option for them. Make Gecko as embeddable as Webkit.
In this plan, the endgame actually has a fairly low Firefox market share, because it gradually evolves to be the "packed-in reference implementation" of the Gecko engine. Instead, we focused on building a healthier web ecosystem. More people end up using Gecko!Edge or Gecko!Vivaldi or whatever, and this breaks up market share enough that Google can't barge their way through the standards process by unilaterally cramming features into Blink. The individual vendors can more completely focus on their custom improvements while expecting that the core browser engine isn't going to be polluted to serve a specific (and not their own) commercial interest, and have a vested commercial interest in supporting Mozilla to do the heavy lifting for them.
In the short term, I think maybe they could start appealing to this market as a "too important to fail" concept. Think of AMD 10 years ago: the products are mediocre right now, but everyone knew if they went bankrupt, the industry would stagnate majorly for a long time. That might be a justification for soliciting foundation memberships or hackathons to encourage development work on their engine.
Dissolve the Mozilla Foundation and put everything into browser development. I got some weird email about how valentines day sucks(?) from Mozilla this morning that was somehow supposed to convince me to donate or something. I don’t understand how a software company’s software became an afterthought. I almost think Google is paying them to purposely mismanage Firefox.
The main reason I left FF after trying it out for a couple of months last year is that after 21 years it still doesn't support multilingual spell checking properly.
For anyone writing in multiple languages daily this is a deal breaker.
1) Quit the internal politics
2) Quit the "for the people, not for profit": money is how people in a society find consensus on what needs to happen
3) Build something useful and charge for it
More specifically, if I were Mozilla I would build a semantic web browser capable of understanding what's important on a page (it boils down to text, images, videos, comments and forms), extract it, render it in a NATIVE, CONSISTENT and LIGHTWEIGHT (as in CPU / Mem - no electron, no HTML, JS, CSS), user defined way. Nobody wants today's 10GB webpages and 300 popups. Test it on the most popular websites, sell on a subscription basis for people tired of interacting with crappy websites and modern frontend apps. And, of course, offer an option to see the real page in a normal browser for when things don't work or you actually care about seeing someone's design or about running someone's code.
Fix the code base cruft; focus on reliability and performance/responsiveness. I'm still tracking a tracker bug regarding "do this every time" for PDF attachments not working. It was opened a decade ago, and is treated as too tough to fix. Something fundamentally is wrong with the code base.
The only reason why Firefox even rose to prominence was because it was an arbitrage opportunity back when IE6 was "the Internet" and Mozilla already had a superior browser (remnants of Navigator) that they needed to remind users existed. Firefox has been on the down swing since Google released Chrome.
When the top web browsers being used today are completely funded and highly-prioritized by the biggest tech companies in the world and are defaults in their respective platforms (Edge on Windows, Chrome on Android, Safari on macOS and iOS), and when all of them are really, really good, there really isn't room for competition.
Additionally, I think browsers as a "thing that people use heavily" are on their way out. Most people are anchoring to platforms that, at best, take advantage of webviews. For many people, "The Internet" is Google, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and $STREAMING_SERVICES, all of which are mobile apps. This, along with significant hardware and bandwidth advancements and the crypto thing, is why I think the "metaverse" is going to really take hold. But that's another HN post.
Anecdotally, the _only_ thing keeping me on Firefox is Multi-Account Containers. That's _literally_ it. I have been wanting to use Safari since forever since it's so heavily optimized for macOS and, now, the M1 CPU architecture, but the isolation guarantees that MAC provides are amazing. That's not enough to build a huge browser userbase with, though, as most people don't give two shits about tracking cookies, fingerprinting, or whatever. (I only give one shit myself, as I've started using Safari on mobile now. Firefox on iOS is just too buggy, and many web sites don't even recognize it as a valid browser, which is insane to me.)
That said, Mozilla VPN is a really good product that is not free. Maybe it's in Mozilla's interest to pivot onto web-adjacent ventures that are profitable?
Firefox declining market share cannot be reversed. The users have stuck to Chrome for years and they don't care about the broken websites that Firefox can't render or support. In the long run it will continue to decline and Google will just see its not worth it.
Firefox is beyond saving. The question is, what can Mozilla do to save itself?
They had a chance with Rust to turn that into something like Erlang Solutions did with Erlang. ie. A Rust Consultancy and will be able to make a significant amount of money in the long term with that. Instead we were given a corporate foundation that is already in chaos by Amazon.
Mozilla has given up on its mission statement and has partnered and joined the anti-privacy gang: Google and Facebook as they watch them push whatever hostile web standard to W3C, and being powerless to stop or object them.
May I suggest that our best effort in saving Firefox is to enforce existing pro-consumer laws which breaks up large companies like Google while promoting laws that protects our privacy.
Firefox’s biggest threat is a company with a really broad range of products that all coalesce into selling scary profitable ads.
This had been answered well by others, so I'll pose an even better question: "why do we need Firefox?"
To answer my own question: without at least one competing browser, all web standards are effectively controlled by Google. It'll be AMP from here on out.
I've switched from Firefox to Edge in the past year and it's been a marked improvement. I like the cross platform compatibility and syncing works great among Mac/Windows/iOS. Edge started really poorly but has developed into a first class browser, and combining the privacy enhancements of Firefox with the performance of Chrome.
At this point, not sure why I would switch back to Firefox TBH, unless MS really screws something up. My advice would be to create a seamless cross platform browsing experience that has feature parity across all devices. Keep the privacy first strategy, and look at incorporating key add-ons (could they purchase a Bitward/1Password/LastPass?).
What's wrong with this message? Are you against ads revealing who's paying for them and who's targeted? Against transparency of algorithms? What exactly is the issue?
I don't see any reason to leave after reading this.
To me, I think it's impossible to evaluate those statements in a vacuum and not consider the obvious second-order effects that result from it. Advertising transparency is of course a good thing, but what happens in a culture where perfect transparency exists and one side is repeatedly targeted by activists in Tech, Media, and Finance for deplatforming? Suddenly every advertiser that goes against a narrative can be targeted for elimination. What sounds like a bright and positive message is suddenly a tool for personally going after your political enemies and probably creates even more divisiveness and conflict.
There's a lot wrong with what she said, but especially her opinion that tools should amplify "factual voices" by default. There is no central source of accurate human knowledge to even attempt to do this with and we know that what's considered true and accurate can change. This alone is a disgusting and disqualifying opinion and anybody who espouses this viewpoint should be considered a propagandist and tyrant in waiting and certainly unable to head an organization dedicated to an open Internet.
Most of these comments focus on things like 'features'.
Chrome wins mostly because it has 'distribution'.
'WordPerfect' may have been better than 'MS Word' but it doesn't matter if every version of Windows comes with a link to 'MS Word'.
Google uses its dominance in Search to dominate adjacent spaces.
Firefox is simply not 'that much better' enough to convince consumers to switch, and/or they don't have the marketing budget to communicate that to the world.
It's a bit of a commodity product, and Google has significant leverage.
FF would have to work with a lot of partners to convince them to focus on FF for the thoughtful reasons we want them to, even then, it could be hard.
My experience with Firefox has been mired with seemingly random breaking changes, going back to Firefox 2.0. I'm always having to search through menus to find common tasks and features in software I've used since the mid 2000s. The UI also doesn't respect native desktop conventions but seems modeled after a mobile app.
I'd put all emphasis on performance and embeddability, and practice a lot more restraint towards UX changes nobody asked for.
I'd also either tone down all the privacy talk several notches, or actually walk the walk and make telemetry and A/B studies opt in. Right now they just seem self-righteous and hypocritical.
Browsers aren’t a product anymore. Browsers are a feature and a commodity. Every platform is expected to have one out of the box.
Most people use the default browsers on their mobile devices and I’d bet many of the people who don’t use the default browser on their PCs have downloaded Chrome because it can sync bookmarks with Chrome on their phones.
Using the non-default browser takes effort and most people don’t care enough to try. For Firefox to overcome that basic barrier, it needs to be a lot more attractive than the default browser. For most users, it’s just not.
Other companies that only make browsers don’t have high market share for the same reason Firefox doesn’t.
firefox lost out from me because some sites didn't work correctly, so i'd say that the first right move would be to really see what can be done to win over more developers as the browser they use for primary development. both firefox and chrome have good developer tools, but how much further could firefox be taken? how much community outreach might land firefox on more web developer desktops? are there corporate barriers to getting firefox on more professional web developer desks? how might they be removed?
also, have viable competitors for both chromebooks and android.
To me, they absolutely shunned their core audience -- people who wanted greater flexibility and configurability than existing browsers could give them. As a power user who used to have Firefox humming along exactly how I wanted it (thanks to things like Keyconfig, etc.), I now really perceive next to no difference between Firefox and Chrome. Yes, there's philosophical reasons that make them differ. But in terms of what they offer to the end user? There's no difference. They neutered themselves.
Can we validate that it is in fact losing market share first?
It's possible there are other factors such as the increased privacy capabilities and integrated tracker blocking and tendency for Firefox users to value and use these features and plugins, or even useragent string spoofing... I do the later so I look like a chrome/windows user because some sites will block features from Firefox for no reason (and also it's nice to be less trivially uniquely identifiable).
Where are the stats you are using and how are they collected?
> if the percentage of users with telemetry disabled has increased a meaningful amount over time.
Yes, this was my main thought... It's possible what is being measured is the increased sensitivity of FireFox users to privacy issues, and the increased capabilities Firefox offers to it's users being used, including the option to disable telemetry.
>Mozilla has actually done some work to measure users with telemetry disabled;
That's kinda funny :D it's a meta telemetry telemetry... although as they mention it contains basically no info beyond the fact that telemetry was disabled and is only run on a small sample.
I suppose the only other way would be to attempt to count all the downloads of binary packages through all the Linux repo mirrors, flatpak, snap etc and then finally windows and mac in-browser downloads... which sounds like a nightmare so I can see why no-telemetry telemetry would be attractive.
It's basically a `if (random() > threshold) POST cookie-less-origin/telemetry-{{ telemetry_enabled() ? "enabled" : "disabled"}}`.
I don't consider this telemetry. It does not keep any data on you, track you over time, or even fingerprint you.
I think this is a great way to get an approximate usage stat, while preserving privacy, respecting the no-telemetry choice, and keeping network overhead ridiculously low.
I do and I specifically configured my browser not to send telemetry. Any kind.
> It does not keep any data on you, track you over time, or even fingerprint you.
You can't know that. But if there is a concrete privacy issue is also irrelevant. There is a) a trust issue and b) a disregard of my wishes issue, which only reinforces (a).
> I think this is a great way to get an approximate usage stat
It doesn't matter how great this is for its intended purpose, that does not make it right.
> keeping network overhead ridiculously low
0 network connections outside of what I browse is what I asked for, "any" is ridiculously high compared to that.
Hardware. If Firefox had a phone to compete with Android, even if was $1000+ it would gain ground. Also selling laptops to compete against Chromebooks.
The hardware has to be top of the line and work perfectly with the OS. Work with every major linux distro to make sure they are compatible with no fuss. Only make one or two models total. Rally the entire opensource openhardware community around a single high end model. No companies working on their own lines, but allow any manufacturer to release a phone or sell parts that match spec.
Firefox' performance and battery life on laptops/mobile is horrendous when compared to Chromium-based alternatives. Especially on slower devices.
I've got an older laptop that I use for simpler stuff only. Video playback is horribly slow when compared to native clients, and the CPU fan sounds like a fighter jet if I try to open some of the heavier pages in Firefox. Chromium-based alternatives run just fine (albeit with twice the RAM usage, but that's not a problem for me).
I've always thought they should create their own Electron engine, or NodeJS variation. Should have reached out to the Deno team about using SpiderMonkey instead of V8.
Granted, users don't know or care which engine they're using, but it would allow Mozilla to "control" important infrastructure that apps are deployed on. Maybe it would turn into a revenue stream by providing official support, or maybe it just helps keep Google's fingers out of everything.
I think Firefox is done. Not even the people who are the most enthusiastic about open web, software freedom etc. can be bothered to use Firefox. I still use it but I have a strong impression that a lot of people on HN and other tech spaces full of people who tend to care about this sort of thing are using Chrome.
I'm not sure how they can morally justify contributing to the death of the open web by helping Google's monopoly, but it seems inevitable at this point. Trully sad
> I'm not sure how they can morally justify contributing to the death of the open web by helping Google's monopoly, but it seems inevitable at this point. Trully sad
I agree, Mozilla should stop taking Google's money.
Firefox mobile can't save a webpage anymore. They took away essential features and each new release I have to learn new ways to turn off their money making initiatives.
Why losing marketshare? Because it's a statistical error on mobile, and world is going mobile more and more each year. 60-80% of visits are now mobile, depending on country and website type.
Without mobile, any investment in desktop no matter how good would still mean losing marketshare in general.
But winning mobile is not possible IMO. Android Chromium is just too good, slicker, faster, better managing memory etc, and Apple bans other engines and Apple users go all-Apple most of the time.
Part of the issue is that it's not attractive to volunteer for.
Simply put, why would I volunteer my free time to support a software project whose CEO makes somewhere in the ballpark of 70x the average American salary?
Mozilla likes to pretend that it's an egalitarian, collective endeavour; but it's really not so different than any other private software development company. It's not even all that unique in the licensing conditions that it places on its software.
I will continue using Firefox because of tab containers, and the Temporary Containers extension. Nothing in Chrome comes close to that, even with extensions like it. It's not total privacy, but it's something every browser should support. I think Chrome has the ability to run separate user profiles from the command line, which is something I hope Firefox can do. I'd love to run "default settings" as one user profile, and my own settings as "here's this paranoid dude". Usually I jump to Chrome or Edge when my privacy extensions get in the way of using a banking website, and I don't want to tune umatrix.
There are 3 things I think Firefox needs to support: CEF, Rust, Dev Tools
Something that gets brought up over-and-over is the Chrome Embedding Framework (CEF?) or the API designed to embed Chrome. Firefox isn't as easy to embed as Chrome, and would benefit greatly if it could be oriented to interface with this API. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_Embedded_Framework Firefox needs to support being a fast and light applet. Forgive me for saying the words we do not use.
The 2nd is Rust. Rust was the best thing Mozilla could have supported, but instead they axed the dev team and gave it to the Linux Foundation. That's probably a good thing in the long-run. Rust is a really innovative paradigm shift in language design, and it will be so much bigger than Firefox. However, the development of Firefox technologies with Rust should have continued. We were so looking forward to Servo. Chrome is perceptibly faster, but we were on track to wipe the board with memory safety. I personally would use a "correct" browser over a fast one.
The 3rd is dev tools. People develop with Chrome for amazing dev tools. As an easy example, if you look in the Firefox Network dev tool/tab you can add a column to show the value returned with a common response header. In Firefox you can only choose to show these 6-8 headers. In Chrome you can add additional (custom) response headers, for things like X-Application-Whatever. It's very nice to show your application's custom headers in the dev tool window like that. I've been asking for it for a while on Mozilla's bugtracker. I don't know where to jump in and add it myself.
Make breaking news once again for user privacy!
Firefox once had problems with performance (and usability a bit) compared to chrome.
They fixed that, i think.
Can someone explain to me whats missing from Firefox feature or stability wise? I'm now using Chrome at $NEW_WORK and I can't see the single reason why I would prefer it. The only other time I've launched Chrome in the last 5+ years was to use some Google services like Stadia
Killer Firefox features for me are: sending pages to another browser to act on later on (and I use it a lot) and plugins in the Mobile Firefox.
I don't think we should save Firefox. IE is not opensource, so Firefox is very important. Chromium is opensource, so we needn't to stick with multiple browser kernels. Once Google Chrome change bad, we can use Vivaldi, Brave, or Edge.
But we should save Mozila. We need to gather such a group of idealists. They will act as the vanguard to explore the future: create rust, rewrite chromium...
I wish they'd advertise it better.
I use Firefox mobile and it's so much better than Chrome I'd hate to go back.
If the mainstream were aware how much better advert-less browsing is, by using adblockers on Firefox mobile, that would probably solve the problem.
I'm also a fan of having the address bar at the bottom for easier reach, though I admit it's a niche thing that sounds like a gimmick.
Just to add what I see as a positive move, there is progress regarding multiple mic selection in webrtc. This is the kind of thing that practically matters to me, and there is work being done as far as I can tell. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1238038
I left Firefox about 8 months ago and I haven't looked back. On desktop, I was tired of these constant "company partnerships" and so I decided to give Vivaldi a shot. I haven't looked back (for a variety of reasons, including how customizeable the whole browser was).
On mobile, I switched to Brave and I grew to really like groups of tabs.
Firefox should stop taking money from Google. Instead get a consortium of FAANG companies to bid and pay for traffic and rotate the benefits on a regular basis. Attract best in breed developers by advertising their contributions in the webpage.Lobby government to have Firefox included in all operating systems shipped with OS
If mozilla could be written in Rust, maybe it will be the fastest and people love it? It got to be function based sale, nothing else. Free VPN with it, like Opera - that is why I use Opera event though it is limited in functionality.
Add more features which people can use it beyond browsing. Change some thing fundamentally!
I think there is still fallout from this. A lot of their core users had their long time workflows alienated
The announcement of XUL removal started a time of uncertainty for community developers that led to increase in addons bugs or being abandoned, that webextensions still struggle to match in quantity and quality
Together with constant UI changes, tab groups removal, occasional serious bug, bookmark bugs, firefox sync bugs, and in general being slower, just created a too unstable environment. And people were slowly forced to look at alternatives, forks or chrome like, palemoon, waterfox, icecat, librewolf, chromium, iridium, ungoogled-chromium, brave, opera...
I am still thinking in changing back to Firefox, as it is better with x2go which I started to use recently, but my main day to day is still in Iridium until I get time to change it
As Chromium's monopoly approaches and passes critical mass, the likelihood of a nasty zero-day increases. I wouldn't go so far as to hope for a terrible hack, but humanity putting all its eggs in one basket like this is just begging for consequences.
I defiantly use nothing but Firefox unless a website won't work with FF.
I thought Firefox was making a come back but maybe I was wrong - personally I started using it again everywhere maybe a year ago. And of course I was all about Firefox way back in the day. Chrome going to shit led me straight back and it has been super solid with a decent array of extensions and themes and whatnot.
Work on javascript engine more than anything else.Find a partner for this if you have to.
I use some JS heavy websites and the difference between Chrome's V8 is wide enough to not switch back.
Also there's this annoying bug typing in urls in the address bar face an unreasonable typing delay.
They should do what Microsoft did with Edge and periodically fork Chromium.
Chromium is a better browser and it's open source (BSD, GPL etc). They should take advantage of the license. The argument for browser diversity doesn't make sense to me when chromium is open source and hard forks are always possible.
Perhaps Mozilla could partner with DuckDuckGo and PureOS Librem and make a privacy-centric mobile smart phone with:
- PureFireDuck OS
- PureFireDuck search
- PureFireDuck voice & text
- PureFireDuck email
- PureFireDuck maps
- PureFireDuck app store (an app store unfriendly to spyware apps)?
I'd focus on beating Safari in terms of power consumption, better native integration(iCloud sync) & using these as a springboard for anything else. It's very difficult to recommend Firefox/Chrome/Brave on a Mac over Safari unless someone really needs specific addons.
The last time I checkout Firefox was about a year ago. It still uses ugly lagacy windows UI elements in its history/bookmark manager, and switching between personal/school account was a pain in the ass.
I think it is too far away from Chrome and beyond saving.
More is more. Focus on the power users again, don't just remove features because metrics say they aren't used. Information density and ease of use of power features are critical or they jump somewhere else and don't market the browser anymore.
Give the innovations a rest for a couple of years, and redevote the funds to security development. Hell, do that for four years! Many of us long-term users are held hostage by the fact that security updates (which we need) come bundled with this tosh.
I know that's reductive and perhaps not to the standards of this website, but that's really it for the majority of people who couldn't care less about the diversity of browser engines out there.
I use Firefox for all my ordinary desktop browsing and "it just works" most of the time.
That said I have worked at places that have given up on Firefox compatibility for single page applications. If I've got any choice in the matter I do most of my development in Firefox and let the testers work out problems that turn up in Chrome. However if the app is solidly broken on Firefox I wind up using Chrome like the others.
If a browser fails in some key function even 1% of the time that's enough to drive most users from Firefox to Chrome.
To win back market share Firefox has to be much, much better than Chrome. That's how Firefox won market share from IE in the 2000s and how Chrome won in the 2010s. Firefox feels ever-so-slightly slower to me on loading most web pages and has more failures in loading page elements that I notice than Chrome.
"Just works, most of the time" isn't just works. Just works is perfection or as close to it as software can get.
If someone implements containers and VPN-in-containers in another browser, I'd switch. But it's so core to how I do my work, I'm unable to move until a better option exists. Profiles in Chrome doesn't do the job.
I'm trying to save it by continuing to use it, and everyone should do so as well. Once it is gone Google will have pretty much absolute control over the web (not that they don't already, but it will be official then).
People didn't stop using it in a vacuum. There were powerful internal and external factors for those reasons, and unless they can stabilise the internal factors (which are the only ones they can control), they are a sitting duck.
A lot of what I see is laziness. Using what's most popular and afraid of investing time to switch (even though it's really not that much effort). A lot of those people are technical and are even here regularly.
This is slowly becoming another Microsoft Internet Explorer where all users will lose on this.
You probably can't save Firefox. Between Edge and Chrome, you're fighting against billions of dollars worth of free advertising, nevermind the advertising Google and Microsoft actually spend money on.
Tough question. I think at this point Google is unstoppable; users care about UX not technology and Google has billions in cash to invest in UX(their UX still sucks from time time).
My biggest problem with Mozilla is that I pay them a monthly donation and it is real hard to cancel it. They had no problem accepting it. It's just a bit too nasty.
There's no need to save Firefox. When Firefox came out, it was a breath of fresh air. Because of Mozilla, every browser is now really, really great. Even Microsoft's browser is standards compliant and open source! Yeah, I get the arguments that Webkit is too pervasive and Chrome is too tied to Google and all of that... but in my opinion, Mozilla wanted a world where every single consumer had the choice between numerous high-quality browsers, and that's the world we currently live in! Firefox is losing this current battle, but Mozilla won the war.
The problem now isn't the browser, but rather the websites. Too much tracking, too much fights over who owns your online persona, and not enough usability (I'm so sick of passwords).
Mozilla always had a unique skill... they were a non-profit that was great at taking complicated technical issues that plagued the internet, and packaging them in a way that was usable. They took hard problems and made it so nobody had to think about them.
I'd love to see Mozilla do the same for identity. I'd love to see them be the company that killed password, and made it so identity is simple, easy and safe.
First off, Google can't do it. Nor can the other big players. Why? Because identity and tracking so to tied to their core business model, they have to back off imposing it. Otherwise they'll be accused of making it so "you need a Google account to use the web". (Or in Apple's case, they've had to go so far the opposite way that nobody really uses it.)
There's a lot of money in this! Identity is very closely tied to payments (it's crazy how it's 2022 and in the browser I still am typing in my credit card number).
To me, identity online is tied to an email address. You can have an email address with your real name, a few throwaways, etc. Identity doesn't have to mean YOU specifically. I'd love to see Mozilla work with GMail/etc... but also spin up their own email servers. Since most people now access email from a client (Apple Mail, Superhuman, etc), having a headless email server would help both privacy and also put them in a great place to help own identity.
Lastly, Mozilla always was fighting two wars at the same time. They both wanted institutional changes for the Internet (aka standard compliant browsers) and also were building a really nice implementation of it (aka Firefox). I feel like this is how they should approach identity. Getting everyone to follow the same standards (i.e. I can still use my GMail account for anything listed above), while also building their own stellar implementation of it and giving their competition a reason to compete (their own mail server, including these identity features in Firefox, etc).
> a world where every single consumer had the choice between numerous high-quality browsers, and that's the world we currently live in!
I strongly disagree. There are numerous browsers than can render websites well enough but not a single one that puts the needs of user first before everything else.
at this point network effects of Chromium are so great that only antitrust procedures can do anything about Google's domination, just as they did with Microsoft a decade or two ago. (Remember that?)
The same argument can be made against Google now, since the browser has effectively become an OS.
oh, they do... development cost on multiple platforms (browsers) makes one of the platforms is not as well supported in aggregate. cost to switch for the user is not big, so you end up with sites which 'work best with chrome', which creates a positive feedback loop.
Statcounter lists FF market share as sub-5%. I'm inclined to believe that, since a lot of people I know have switched to Chromium derivatives, or straight up grew up on Chrome. Heck, a person recently requested my assistance with moving to Chrome and named Firefox as the reason. And that's someone I put on Firefox many a year ago.
Firefox is getting unbearable for average users. It's getting unbearable for me, a geek who has infinite patience for FOSS as long as it serves my goals. Well, Firefox no longer serves my goals. I'll keep using it for as long as it remains usable, then I'm switching to Vivaldi. At least it cares about power user use cases.
...and apparently, the conclusions still haven't landed. Firefox lost because it has no reach. They lost on mobile and they don't have billion user properties to push their browser in the way Google has.
Any and all discussions about Firefox UI choices, its engine, whatever...are completely irrelevant if you have near zero reach. This problem cannot be solved with engineering. Nor will it be solved with donations.
Firefox lost and lost a long time ago. It's over. It cannot compete with these market forces. The world in which Firefox was successful, before smartphones, massive online services and a stagnant IE, no longer exist.
With this in mind, what should happen to Firefox? Short term to mid term, keeping it alive and hoping Google keeps wiring Mozilla tons of money, because without it, Mozilla would soon cease to exist.
Long term? I don't know. I would hope that the technical product somehow can be preserved and kept functional, but maintaining a browser is a costly business. It's not the type of project to send to Github and say "best of luck".
The common narrative in the web community that having an extra independent browser engine around is great is mostly a "feel good" story. Having a slightly crappier engine does nothing for developers or users. Firefox also doesn't keep the web "honest" as it's so small now that it can be ignored entirely. There's a reason both Edge and Brave picked Chromium.
As for Mozilla, I have little confidence in their ability to reinvent themselves, with or without Firefox. One of their ex-employees expressed it well on Twitter: they got addicted to a fire-hose of free money which they largely pissed away on fruitless projects.
As counter point to that I would say that besides failed projects, Mozilla has made very meaningful contributions to foundational computing, think Rust and WebAssembly. It's extra painful that in particular the most useful part of Mozilla, the above, is scaled down.
Mozilla these days comes across as a woke blog. Preachy, deeply political, yet without actual impact. I follow the simple rule in life where if somebody is constantly telling you how virtuous they are, they are the opposite. Because good people don't need to tell the world that they're good. "Progressive" Mozilla is quite the fan of neoliberal economics, as they fire a huge amount of workers (even during COVID) whilst enriching themselves as reward for...running the company in the ground. They are THE privacy browser (nope) and build an advanced container to castrate Facebook, yet don't do the same for Google services (for well known reasons). It's all very hypocritical and hollow.
Preaching is not only tiresome, it also doesn't pay bills. So go an do something useful in establishing "revenue earning products". A bookmarking service and a rebranded VPN fail to impress.
for me, Firefox is nothing special. For privacy, I choose Safari. For extensions, I choose Chrome. Sometimes I use Brave as well. Firefox is the last option.
It's interesting, often prompted by Mozilla doing something particularly silly I try out the competition and every time I go back to Firefox utterly unimpressed by the supposedly better Chromium based browsers out there. Honestly I don't see what people like so much about them.
Most recently when they came out with Colorways I decided to give Vivaldi a shot for the first time in a few years, since it has that easy custom color theming without a pointless time horizon. First problem I ran into was that the built-in ad blocker breaks YouTube. Not a great first impression, but hey you can just disable it and install uBO. But I quickly came to miss the flexibility of Firefox's interface. On the surface Vivaldi is very customizable, but you quickly run into a wall when wanting to go outside what they've built. For example, you can put the tab bar anywhere, but you can't have it in multiple places or pretty it up beyond changing the colors. Firefox on the other hand has enough tab management addons for any taste, plus it supports custom CSS within the addons themselves and at the browser level.
The alternative browser I've been most impressed with is actually Edge, but I can't tolerate it constantly shoving features I don't want in my face or the mandatory telemetry.
So to answer the question, I would save Firefox by breaking the mobile browser duopoly. Desktop Firefox is already obviously better than Chrome and Edge, even in the basic experience with no addons, but people just use Chrome for some reason. I think it comes down to habit, an over-reliance on Google Apps that work better with Chrome's tight integration, and familiarity due to Chrome being the only serious browser on Android. And on iOS the situation seems to be even worse: non-Safari browsers are forced to use Safari's engine anyway, and all of them offer a noticeably worse UX than Safari so why bother. Of Firefox's problems, losing on mobile is the easiest to fix, not that it's super easy. Mozilla "just" needs to focus creative resources on building a compelling alternative browser on Android and a functional one on iOS. That would go a long way toward bringing users back.
Another thing that might help is for Mozilla to make a clear (down to earth, jargon-free) statement of its values and goals as a nonprofit. I think a lot of the criticism Firefox gets in tech circles isn't exactly sincere, because many people have switched away from Firefox due to actual or perceived political differences but don't want to come out and say that, so they contrive or exaggerate some UX or privacy issue. If Mozilla's leadership would speak openly about these issues it might make those detractors a little more comfortable saying something like "I don't use Firefox because the causes they support go against my political convictions", rather than the current situation where they might be reluctant to say that and start a likely pointless argument over whether Mozilla supports a certain cause or not.
For me at least, I switched away when they started shoving their political views in my face. I get enough of that from all other aspects of life, I don't think my browser should be telling me how to think.
- Cut out all (or at the very least, most) initiatives that don't serve the goal of promoting Firefox's market share or sustainability going forward
- Donate the major money drains that aren't Firefox to the Apache Foundation or another worthy custodian
- Fire all inessential staff that don't want to work on Firefox.
- Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money, and cut their salaries (bonuses tied directly to increase in Firefox market share).
- Make sure that all donations from now on are redirected to things that support Firefox development and nothing else, period.
- Make whatever partnerships are needed to have a steady stream of income, be that donation or selling out to Google or Bing.
Firefox is in trouble. Firefox is also Mozilla's raison d'être, and they should embrace that. We as a community, cannot afford to let Firefox languish until the only browsers in the world are Chromium derivatives. The diversity of truly independent browser engines is far too important to give up without a fight.