Per the article, this is irrelevant. The case being made is that the figure seen by the government falling under 2%, which it is getting close to, will trigger a chain-reaction of consequences that will dramatically hurt Firefox, and it's not clear if Mozilla, the organization, could weather that.
It doesn't particularly matter whether or not the figure is accurate in that context. Maybe that can be fixed easily by having Firefox contextually relax tracking a bit or by having the government change how they perform the tracking, but the status quo is not really sustainable. And that's really all the article is saying at the end of the day.
I work in govt tech, we already internally do not care about FF support at all and only really look to chrome based browsers (chrome edge mostly) and safari. Many people don't even know what it is anymore, seems like time killed this browser too. Mozilla spending too much time/money and other crap over the years
What does a government site need that you can't do on firefox? Honestly this is disenfranchising, you should consider the ethics of what you are proscribing for the populace. I should have a right to choose a browser that respects my privacy from a PC.
It's clearly not about what is needed, it's about what is tested. And spending resources on a browser that appears to have 2% of the market is not going to be a high priority.
"appears to have 2%" is doing a lot of work he. If the earlier comments are accurate, the government stats are based on Google Analytics data that is specifically blocked or obscured by Firefox.
That 2% kind be breached, but the data doesn't accurately represent usage if Firefix is blocking GA in any meaningful numbers.
What's your proposal? Because taking an approach that isn't data driven means it needs to be a replacement, and you need to convince people that it's worth the risk of nepotism and bias.
For starters, how about not using a proprietary service from one of the biggest tech oligopolies which has strong economic incentives to misuse any data that passes through it? If government needs accurate tracking numbers to base its decisions on, it should roll its own tracking for those numbers.
My proposal was simply that data-driven decisions should be made based on accurate data.
Nepotism and bias aren't the alternative here. If you require that decisions are driven by data and you don't have access to accurate data, you should default to doing nothing. If anything, nepotism and bias sneak in when decisions are made despite the fact that no accurate data is avaliable.
so govt should spend tax payer money to support a browser by the numbers no one uses? for "virtue" ? going to have a hard time convincing people of that one
Exactly. There are a plethora of browsers out there, and no one can be expected to test against all of them. As long as we go for a "government conforming to industry" mentality, then the cutoff has to be somewhere, and if Firefox doesn't make that cutoff, then that's all there is to it.
No browser deserves special treatment here. And this is as true for Firefox as it is for Lynx.
A long time ago we had something called "standards" that were intended to solve this problem. The idea was that developers of different browsers would get together in a neutral forum and agree common ground that everyone would support. That way developers could reliably build upon that common ground and expect their products to operate correctly in any browser. It was an excellent idea that heralded the success of the modern WWW.
Naturally this enforced competition wasn't in Google's interests as its browser became dominant and it adopted the infamous Microsoft strategy to deal with the threat. Apparently we're fast approaching the extinguish phase.
The correct solution to this is for influential public bodies not to insist upon supporting any specific browser or browsers but instead to once again support open web standards and therefore free access to their information and services for all.
This is almost certainly in their own interests anyway. Google has a nasty habit of suddenly killing off its non-standardised extensions. Relying on functionality that other browsers don't necessarily support as well seems unwise.
This, but for so many issues. Innovation is being stifled by platform monopolies. Standards can too but right now that’s not the primary cause. It’s a balance.
Nonsense. Only completely trivial standards work without testing actually implementations against each other.
How do you think WiFi devices work together? Is it because WiFi is a standard? Not really - it's because WiFi vendors all test their chips against other WiFi chips on the market.
I've been the person doing that testing. Checking interoperability with a range of other devices is one way you can look for problems but when it comes to signing things off the standard is the final word. Do you know what happens to the devices that don't comply with statutory radio transmission standards? They don't get sold.
Typically the cost of fixing the problem and going through the whole certification process again from the start is significant. There are some direct financial costs but mostly the damage is increased time to market. That's a great incentive for the maker to get their act together and comply with the standards like everyone else as quickly as possible. If you screw up too many times your product might be obsolete before you're ever allowed to sell it.
Completely disagree. Privacy is a 4th ammendment right, so the government has a duty to support privacy first browsers. How am I "secure in my ... papers and effects" if I must use a privacy destroying browser to interact with the Government? If anything, chrome support is what should be questionable.
Maybe you can make this argument - that the government should support technologies that emphasize privacy. That could possibly lead to some funding. Creating a policy to support a single vendor, however, is something that I think would be a bit odd for the government. Government spending is supposed to be devoid of bias where possible - you can't just give a contract to someone you like or think is cool, you need to show that it's in the taxpayer's interest (ie: they are cheaper, usually).
To say "we are going to support a browser with 2% market share because we like it more" would therefor be a really big deal. I think a far better avenue would be for the government to provide funding for privacy technologies directly, in an effort to increase their marketshare, and thereby making support of those technologies trivial to justify without any potential issues of bias.
The thing is, the government already does this. The majority of TOR's funding comes from the USG, for example. I'd suggest that maybe the government could fund Mozilla's non profit, to a degree.
This is all based on a premise that Mozilla is worthy of that funding. Is Mozilla really the privacy champion that it touts itself as? Would funding be contingent on anything else? If the government is so determined to prioritize privacy, why not Brave? Or some other entity? Or a new entity?
> The supreme court ruled there is no right to privacy in the same ruling that overturned roe v wade.
My understanding is that the consequence is denial of the right to privacy is limited to women while they are pregnant. Not a categorical denial of the right to privacy.
> The final decision was little changed from the leaked draft. Writing for the five-justice majority (with Chief Justice Roberts concurring only in the judgment), Justice Samuel Alito argued that the right to privacy is not specifically guaranteed anywhere in the Constitution. When unenumerated liberty rights exist — the right to raise your child as you see fit, for example — those rights must be “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition.” Reviewing the history of abortion restrictions in the early United States, Alito concluded that the right to abortion is not.
> The opinion ignited a firestorm of controversy. Predictably so: Dobbs is arguably the first case to formally rescind a fundamental constitutional right. The opinion also failed to explain how its logic would not also result in the overturning of Griswold’s right to contraception or a series of other cases that rely on the same logic as Roe. These include Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which invalidated laws criminalizing same-sex intimate sexual conduct, and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), which recognized the right to marriage for same-sex couples.
Well, that’s what you get when you’re a Public Service. There’s an idiot living on the top of a mountain that needs some basic infrastructure? You got to get your truck out and build that supply line. You won’t do it? Then the government that granted you that Public Service status has renounced sovereignty on that part of the country
USDS aren’t idiots, and if they haven’t realised this yet then maybe this post will focus attention. They want to support every citizen it’s reasonable to support (or at least I did when I was working for GOV.UK) and dropping support from a lack of knowledge shouldn’t be on the agenda.
Sure, but the government HAS to make that determination in a data-driven way. It cannot be based on anything subjective, for what should be obvious reasons.
On top of that, said lack of knowledge is a stated goal of all privacy-focused browsers. GA-blindness is an implementation detail of these policies. Any method the government could use to accurately track that information is effectively a bug in need of fixing from the POV of the browser's developers.
The most practical answer is, as was posted by someone else here, the government spec'ing to a standard instead of a set of browsers, which it really should be doing in the first place. The mere fact that the current setup means that the government accidentally makes and/or breaks winners in that space is justification enough.
There is no standard that you can use instead of a set of browsers. There is no way of making sure that a website works with a browser other then testing it with that browser. The reason people test with different browsers is not that they want to use non-standard features, it's that even standard features often do not work in certain browsers.
Sort of agreed as of today, but this is not something that we just have to accept, especially considering the government doesn't really have a need to make use of the full suite of tools provided by the various existing standards. There are safe subsets to be picked in 2023.
The government doesn't design roads to conform to the top brands of cars and trucks. It specs them to a standard and any manufacturer can have their product certified as compliant. This both protects the public and gives anyone an opportunity to provide products no matter how small their market share is. Doing it the other way around would be madness, and I don't see why the same principle shouldn't apply here.
> The reason people test with different browsers is not that they want to use non-standard features, it's that even standard features often do not work in certain browsers.
This is exactly why sites should be tested for their conformance with the standard rather than with specific browsers. Testing against specific browsers just encourages browser-makers to continue to avoid fixing their shit.
If you want to make money or reach constituents, this isn't actually a viable option for anyone.
When people complain that they can't submit their DMV forms (or whatever) and you say, "well we followed all the standards, go find another browser" and they say "which one" and you say "I don't know, we didn't test with any browsers, we just test against the standard" who do you think they'll blame?
Given the history of standardisation for promoting interoperability includes numerous success stories and a pattern of resistance fading over time I don't see why we should expect web standards to be any different. The level of functionality needed by a typical government site has worked close to 100% correctly in literally every major browser for literally decades.
Then perhaps we should look at how we ended up in this state of affairs where testing against the standard doesn't actually ensure that your website works in the most popular web browsers out there, and do something about it? Like, say, mandatory standard conformance testing for browsers with >X% market share?
Is it really a standard if no one implements it in a way that everyone agrees on?
Is it really a standard if the dominant vendor just ignores the standard and does what it wants because then it becomes the "actual standard" ?
As a (terrible) example, look at FIPS. The government has the power to mandate a standard that everyone needs to implement. If instead of "supporting specific browser vendors" they "support a specific standard" then all vendors have a target that works with an agreed upon common ground.
> Is it really a standard if no one implements it in a way that everyone agrees on?
Plenty of standards are guidelines. The point is the website’s purpose trumps dogmatic adherence to a standard. If the site works against standards but not in the browser, it’s a failure.
But we can still have websites that work against existing browsers while also being strictly conforming to the standard, surely?
Basically, no proprietary features whatsoever. No draft features. No optionally-supported standard features without a fallback that fully covers the same underlying use case.
They're the government. They can create a spec or standard for browsers to be able to use government supplied digital services. It's done all the time.
This would be beneficial guidance for browser developers, but also for anyone developing government sites. Saying "whatever chrome is doing is our standard" is a cop out.
Sure there is a standard, are you saying the w3 doesn't exist? The issue is that somehow people here are arguing that it is sufficient to test that you are adhering to a standard by only testing against chrome, edge and safari (two of which are the same engine).
If you want test that you are adhering to a standard (if there is no testsuite available) you need to test against more than 2 independent implementations.
Firefox is not IE8, which declared lot of CSS3 and HTML5 standards as "won't be supported" in 2009, paving the way for its own extinction.
USDS serves basic pages and applets which work fine on Firefox. It is only a handful of very complex web apps like Photopea where the developer will say "run this on Chrome for best results".
Yeah, I think the root comment of this thread is talking out of his ass. Third-party trackers are not needed, and wouldn't make sense to use, to discern browser market share; browsers self-report their identity and operating system unless specifically configured not to. For example, my User-Agent string in my GET request to retrieve Hacker News is: "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:120.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/120.0".
Except we should be pushing for the elimination of user agent strings, too. They just end up being used as a lazy way for lazy developers to not test for capabilities.
The most recent example I've run into is Snapchat's web client: It reject's Firefox purely by user agent string, but then works perfectly in Firefox if you just have your browser lie.
I strongly agree. I don't think a website is going to do anything with my user agent string that benefits me. I'd much prefer a web where websites can't do things outside of the standard. We ne er needed webmidi, but a company that makes a browser/is hybrid definitely wanted it.
Speaking of Google, won't this interfere with their "look we're not a monopoly" payments to Mozilla Corp?
> Sure, but the government HAS to make that determination in a data-driven way.
They really should be hiring a pollster to ask people which browser they use. It might be a bit difficult for those who use the default, but it wouldn't be that difficult to ask a couple of followup questions (e.g. which device) to determine which default browser that is.
GOV.UK is dramatically more competent than USDS, are they not? I admit I'm not terribly familiar, but I wouldn't want to depend on the agency behind the Department of Education and VA websites for anything. I've seen the VA site, in particular, do serious harm to the people it's meant to serve.
Can you elaborate on what in particular on the VA site that causes serious harm to the people it's meant to serve? I'm happy to bring it to the team or if you don't feel comfortable with stating it here, please bring it up to the open source website for va.gov.
https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/vets-websi...
USDS certainly does not. The guiding principle at the time from what I remembered is to try to set "some standard" for all federal government websites to strive to because there were none.
We also helped with design and infrastructure support for ssa.gov (launched earlier this year) with a contractor team to try to boil down 60,000 pages to ~30 pages that people tend to use.
// opinions of a former USDS, no longer with the team
the va site is vast, to say any one team created the VA site would not be even close to correct.
They did help change over the old va.gov to the new va.gov (which was built as vets.gov), which imo has been a huge improvement.
(There are still many, many problems with the VA and its website. Just saying that 1. the new va.gov is a big improvement and 2. the USDS is far from being a single point of responsibility for it, or even _the_ major point of responsibility)
The 2% rule USDS use is taken directly from GDS (gov.uk), so that isn't what your old employer's policy is at all. They have to define reasonable, after all.
That part of the article was just wrong, to be fair (I used to be head of the front-end community at GDS and helped set things like browser support schedules). Our default approach was to add up all browser share (yes, based on GA, but this was a while ago) until we got to 99%, then removed the browsers that were left over. So typically we wouldn’t consider dropping a browser version until it was less than 0.4% usage. You can use a colleague’s client-side tool to test this approach: http://edds.github.io/browser-matrix/ (assuming it still works).
Per the article, this is irrelevant. The case being made is that the figure seen by the government falling under 2%, which it is getting close to
So, the default position of the government is, "If we can't surveil you, we can't help you?" (Or taken the other way, you want us to help you? Let us surveil you!) This seems to be how it works out in practice, just because of favorable economics in mass surveillance. Example: RFID and license plate readers for toll collection. Various registrations with government agencies are another example.
Well, if the world including whatever governments, institutions, groups, interests, companies, FOSS projects, OS distros, etc... all want to depend only on Chromium, then fine.
If Mozilla can't even play this card, then they should really just shut down.
Or, maybe, like Wikpedia, they should stop begging for more-more-more, and spend what they get wisely.
Not to mention, they could simply start bug bounties and/or crowdfunding for actual deliverables and/or services (ie. a security team).
And if all this fails, then it fails. Maybe we'll simply get a Firemium or Chromefox/fix whatever the name. A fork where adblock works.
“Enhanced Tracking Protection” is a poor name: it’s not just one thing, but has two modes: Standard and Strict. (There’s also Custom, which lets you go somewhere between the two, or restrict cookies even more tightly.)
The default is Standard. It doesn’t block GA. The cynic in me suggests they decided making Firefox disappear altogether from popular stats by default would have harmed them more than not doing it harms their users, or that the backlash would be too great for their liking.
Sources like Google Analytics and Statcounter are still chronically undercounting minority browsers and platforms, which are much more likely to block these sorts of things, and Firefox and Linux will be particularly heavily hit, but I’m sure the difference it makes isn’t as large as I’d like it to be.
The US government's page it uses to track web browser usage uses an analytics engine made by a company that makes its own web browser? That sounds like a pretty big issue!
I would guess lots of people no longer have access to the log files -- because the cloud is somebody else's computer (GitHub pages, etc) or because you're web scale and run your web server in docker so log files are ephemeral or maybe you're web scale so the only logging is dumping status messages to a background screen session.
What stood out to me was that they didn't break out mobile from PC. The mobile landscape dominates usage these days and extremely few people make an active choice in browser there. The presented stats to me reads more like Android vs iPhone than it does Chrome vs everyone else.
FirefoxOS was not stopped by Mozilla leadership due to a lack of hardware partners. The distribution model - mostly through carriers - failed because a key app was not available (WhatsApp) which caused a chicken and egg situation: no sales because no app, no official app because not enough users.
That's pretty interesting. I was around back then and hadn't recalled that there was such a lynchpin issue, but that makes a lot of sense as to why it suddenly hit such a hard stop. Were you able to support WhatsApp with KaiOS, or did the feature-phone target make it moot?
At the time, I had a FirefoxOS device made by ZTE in my hands.
It was so slow, it was unusable; even the first Android devices running on underpowered hardware were speed champions in comparison. Looking for an Whatsapp launcher was beyond the patience of even dedicated fans.
The rendering engine doesn't really matter - nothing is stopping Mozilla from implementing a better browser app than Safari.
Safari is _really_ good and a very high bar to catchup to, even if you don't have to implement the rendering engine and Mozilla is not exactly known for their friendly and refined UIs. Vivaldi on iOS is much younger by comparison and looks a lot better than Firefox.
I disagree. For the purposes of this conversation, I feel like it's the only thing that matters. The web doesn't benefit at all from a WebKit-based browser by Mozilla capturing some of the iOS marketshare. Websites will still have to cater to WebKit. Not Gecko or something new
> Mozilla is not exactly known for their friendly and refined UIs
I actually strongly prefer the Firefox app's UI to safari
> For the purposes of this conversation, I feel like it's the only thing that matters. The web doesn't benefit at all from a WebKit-based browser by Mozilla capturing some of the iOS marketshare.
I believe it matters because it shows Mozilla's ability to market their product (Firefox). If they continuously fail to capture user base on any platform, then what powers Firefox is of little consequence.
As an experiment, I just installed Firefox on iOS just to see what's up and honestly 4 screens of things to confirm before I even get to the browsing part? As a tech person I understood each of them of course, but no sane person would put 4 screens in a row blocking users from using an app they normally already know how top use. So no, I don't believe Mozilla has the required UI/UX skills.
Mobile browsers aren't sufficiently differentiated enough for a significant amount of people to bother changing the default. Does anyone really think Samsung Browser would get close to 1.6% if it were a free and unbiased choice?
Apple sets the rules, gets special access (new releases, features, platform changes, countless other things), and relentlessly captures their users into the Apple ecosystem/moat. You seem to think swapping the rendering engine is a trivial task but you're asking them to practically create a new browser. And for all that effort, you're still competing with an opponent that's basically cheating. I'm not sure why Firefox/iOS even exists, frankly.
It does, actually. For example, the reason why no other browser has the equivalent of Firefox containers is because they are the only ones with an architecture that allows for such isolation. Users of Vivaldi have been asking for containers for years now, and every time the dev team explains that they'd love to do it, but it can't be done without forking Blink and doing some massive surgery on it - at which point you again end up with your own thing, and have to play catch-up every time Google pushes yet another "standard" onto the web.
If that's the case there would be a sudden decrease in the market share graph around 2019 (although that graph is from Statscounter which has Firefox currently sitting at around 3.2%).
The decline has already been happening since around 2010 without any drastic ups or downs.
Do you anticipate the losses are due to people with aging machines upgrading and using a different browser? As a very happy Firefox user, I have a very hard time believing it's because people find the experience to be poor. I feel as if the losses you are describing have to be losses to defaults on new devices and people that fairly don't care enough to change them.
The desktop is virtually dead for any "normal" user, and their Android or Apple tablet/phone don't prompt them with a choice (other vendor constraints notwithstanding). It's not remotely a fair fight. You are guaranteed to lose users for reasons totally outside your control.
Do you have a source for a more accurate picture of Firefox' market share? Every single report I've seen shows the same thing: long downward trend and a tiny fraction of the usage of Chrome and Safari.
Yes I realized too late the term might be confusing. It's a radios streaming website/app, so not nerdy.
There is an Android app that uses a webview so that even favours Chrome. Also GoAccess doesn't unfortunately filter all scrappers/bots and most of them declare themselves as Chrome.
A sizeable part of the traffic is (non-app) Android and I don't think Firefox is huge there so maybe on desktop Firefox market-share is actually not as bad as we think?
Just to add some anecdata, we have both Google Analytics (if you accept the GDPR tracking request…) and our own internal statistics based purely on useragents. Here are some percentages for November (this is Germany, generally far higher FF usage)
Ours:
Chrome 37.4%
Firefox 24.7%
Safari 21.1%
Edge 7.5%
Opera 2.6%
Also GA requires opt-in in the EU (even if some sites try to be clever and illegally make it harder to refuse than to accept) whereas presumably their first-party tracking is done in such a way consent is not necessary (e.g. sufficient anonymization that a data point can not be correlated with the user it originated from). Presumably FF users are more likely not to consent by default to begin with.
My programming blog (https://thecodist.com) sees Chrome 52%, Safari 27%, Firefox 9%, over six months covering a fair amount of the world. I use Plausible. I never found GA to be very reliable.
If this is the case, it seems that they need to recode the Enhanced Tracking Protection for GA to ensure that they get flagged as FFox.
Might also be useful to have a plug-in to make a daily 'ping'/check-in from FFox to any govt sites used by their users. E.g., I use USPS and SBA/SBIR sites, but only occasionally or monthly, but if most FFox users who did so got logged more like daily instead of ~fortnightly or ~monthly, it'd improve the numbers. (Obviously, also must be done carefully so as to not get wholesale discounted).
The cascade effect of the US Govt abandoning support would be catastrophic, likely terminal, which would be bad for everyone.
I switched over after the Manifest v3 debacle, and after a couple of months, I wonder if the implications of using a browser with a lower market share are overblown.
I haven't encountered any site that misbehaves, and the only missing feature so far is within the Google Drive web app because it uses a Chrome-only extension [1].
Maybe the ongoing standardization of the web shows its effects here, and using a standard-conform niche browser is not that bad anymore.
In my experience there are almost never issues. Standardization has gotten much better, and as a web developer I appreciate all the effort the various browser teams have put into ensuring common behavior.
The effort of "supporting Firefox" as a developer is basically opening the app in Firefox and confirming that it works, which it basically always does because the app is built on standardized web features. (Other types of support might be different. e.g maybe you have help doc that tells your users how to clear the site cookies. Do you also want to write instructions for Firefox, Safari, Opera etc?)
The bigger concern is that some day Google might not need web standards. If developers target Chrome rather than the web platform, Google has free reign and no longer needs to compromise with Apple and Mozilla. For example, Mozilla's veto of the controversial Topics API would hold little weight if nobody cares about Firefox support. If Chrome gets to a dominant enough position it could move from embracing to extending quite quickly.
People have different opinions on Google, but even those who believe Google has no ill intentions still feel better if there are some checks and balances. Were Firefox to become obsolete, Apple would be the last one standing. And with the DMA, some are predicting that Safari could soon follow Firefox's decline.
The concern is that the standardization process for the web stack these days consists mostly of the big guys (Google especially) throwing out a draft standard, which then slowly undergoes standardization process even as it is already getting used on the web because devs like new & shiny and/or because the added features genuinely do make something simpler. There aren't that many sites that actively break on Firefox because of this, and when they do, it's usually a temporary thing until they catch up, but as you rightly note, this is largely because devs are still forced to contend with users of other browsers. And the more popular Chrome is, the less of a forcing function that becomes, and the more whatever "draft standard" proposals are in Blink become the de facto standard.
I have had several sites refuse to work properly (American Airlines maybe? It was some airline) with every single add-in disabled and with every security feature I could find disabled.
I am with you that it's super rare, I have only had to open chrome due to it being that bad a few times, usually I just need to disable javascript blocking or enable more cookies. But there are legitimately sites that are just so badly written that they won't take your money if you use Firefox.
I guess Google meet has frozen video for me on Firefox, but I expect Google to intentionally break their website for people not using Chrome after the "DRM Website" thing struck them as a great idea. Using Google products at this point is just asking for more lockin when we should really all know better. At least Zoom is a different company from Google...
But overblown for sure, if I disable javascript blocking and cookie autodelete and temporary containers that keep the site from realizing I already logged in -- pretty reasonable issues -- 99.99% of the issues I have vanish.
It was selecting seats that was too broken to continue, though I mean, I already "worked around" the issue. I tried until it was less work to redo all the manual data entry in Chromium, I usually try pretty hard to avoid using it.
I don't doubt that it works for a bunch of people, others have stated things that don't work and had others say they do work, so something is up. Maybe we're using different versions or operating systems or installation dates with old configuration data.
Same for me! I have been always using Firefox as my main browser for at least 15 years and never had any problems. Actually, I don't really understand why so many tech-savvy people continue to use Chrome... Just switch to Firefox, for foxs sake!
Part of it is that there are some genuine technical advantages to be had from Blink-based browsers. Most notably, tab process isolation: one tab crashing (and they do crash) generally doesn't bring the whole process down.
There's also UX. Right now I can have proper vertical tabs in Edge by changing a single prominent option in settings, but Firefox is still dragging their feet (yes, I know there are extensions for this, but they add a vertical tab bar in addition to the standard horizontal one, because you can't hide the latter without hacks).
OTOH Firefox has containers, which is arguably a lot more important if you care about online privacy in any serious way. But people don't like to trade away their convenience, especially once they already got used to it.
What we desperately need is a browser based around Firefox implementation of web standards and with all the privacy bells and whistles, but also UI that doesn't constantly tell users that they are "holding it wrong".
Over the last year or so various websites have mysteriously walled me off with 403s and 5xxs only when I use Firefox. I suspect that merely using a less popular browser is tripping some attempted security measure.
I agree it seems overblown. I haven't encountered a site that doesn't work. Even google meet and zoom's web client work great.
Not sure what all the fuss is about. It's a great browser. Chrome got very, very aggravating and I've had no problems since switching maybe 4 years ago. Even FF mobile works well.
One problem I have is that screen-sharing doesn't work in Messenger video chat. I have to switch to Chromium for that to work, so I have to remember to start the chat in Chromium instead of FF where I have a Messenger tab pinned.
Not sure how so many in the thread are using FF problem-free? In the past few years I've encountered more and more sites that don't work properly with FF. Most of the issues are around modals that won't dismiss or even display at all. Other issues I can't identify, but the site becomes unresponsive or some content won't load. I think the Ticketmaster ticket selection page was the last one I couldn't use at all with FF. My cable company's site became Chromium only sometime this year and it still is.
Sometimes the cause is uBlock Origin, so I always try turning it off and refreshing. Rarely it's due to enhanced tracking protection. A few times I restarted FF in safe mode to rule out add-ins. It's always just FF.
I had a problem with a shopping web-site the other day. I disabled uBlock origin, and then all extensions, but it still refused to work. I thought I'd finally found one of these mythical "Chrome-only" sites, but no - exactly the same broken site in Chrome, so the site was just totally broken. Nothing to do with FF.
Same here. I used to have more FF problems with .gov sites but in the past 2-3 years, rarely. Now & then I have to manipulate NoScript or uBlock to get some feature working on most sites.
But most of the time, I'd rather ignore those sites anyway. After I have a look at them ... which I tend to do after NoScript show me the huge list of crap they expect me to load just for the 'privilege'. Good developers/orgs just don't do that. Most go into a 'Block list' I mostly use to remind myself not to bother trying. I take my business elsewhere.
Speaking as a library developer, Firefox is expensive for us to support in https://replicache.dev and https://reflect.net due to lots of long-open bugs, particularly in the storage system. Firefox also generally has the slowest performance which affects us.
I'm not bagging on the team, it's frankly amazing they've been able to mostly keep up, it's just a fact that maintaining a competitive web browser is a gargantuan task that requires a large team and investment.
When people say firefox is more performant than other browsers, they mean to say you can use actual powerful adblockers like ublock origin that then make it a totally rigged race against other browsers in terms of real world performance.
Which is a good thing. Running ads is triple pollution. On the servers, on the browser, and by the manipulated comsumers buying crap they don't need in the first place.
I think there's a strong argument to be made here that governments should be actively subsidizing (if not directly managing) some implementation of the web standards that is guaranteed to actually be fully conforming to them, accessible etc. The web stack is such a fundamental part of our infrastructure these days that it feels irresponsible to leave it entirely to the whims of the private market - especially one that is dominated by large oligopolies which said governments are already actively investigating.
I have been using FF as my primary browser for a few years now. I have not found any site that does not work but sometimes I have to turn off uBlock Origin.
Some Xero products don’t work properly no matter what your browser is.
For me, Mozilla has bugs or weaknesses in Linux. YouTube chews my cpu (hardware acceleration is broken, at least for me). Tabs ‘freeze’ due to a bug in an X11 lib. Pop up bubbles (do you want to enable gps to this site type bubbles) if visible before switching workspaces appear on all workspaces but cannot be actioned and appear on top.
Mozilla as a company appears to be attempting poor monetisation models like attempting to build social networks etc. I would consider paying them a yearly fee if I thought they’d use money wisely, but at the moment executive appear more interested in vanity projects.
I run Firefox with uBlock Origin enabled and set the Firefox enhanced privacy settings to the strictest settings. I haven't done anything special to get Xero working - never had any issues.
This is also a double edge sword in that if it's just a user-agent check the site tends to lack a well coded fallback for any functionality that is actually not supported and the page can silently break during usage. Not necessarily a problem for those that already know how to switch, but even just installing an extension for other people doesn't mean the sites are suddenly actually compatible. Sometimes even big sites like Microsoft Teams have this kind of problem for years at a time.
I've been using Firefox as my primary browser since 2005-2006ish. A site misbehaving because of it is a rare enough occurrence that offhand I can't remember any time that it has happened.
One issue I do come across occasionally, and I'm not sure if it's Firefox alone or the combination of add-ons I use in Firefox, is sites being overzealous with captchas. I find myself doing 3-5 captchas occasionally just to use a site.
Agreed. Even if Firefox makes up a small part of the market share, any website that serves millions of people will want to support it. Imagine if you have a website with 1,000,000 monthly visitors, and 2% of them use Firefox. Dropping support will mean 20,000 less monthly visitors. This gives us an idea of how much you should spend on support. If you make an average of $0.10 a month per user, you should be okay with spending at least $2000 a month on Firefox. That's a pretty big budget, and it's reasonable to go much higher than that if your website is rapidly growing. The big players like Google and Facebook will also be comfortable supporting Firefox at a loss, since you don't want to bleed users and create market space for a competitor. At most, you lose a few small websites that you probably weren't going to visit anyways.
> Imagine if you have a website with 1,000,000 monthly visitors, and 2% of them use Firefox. Dropping support will mean 20,000 less monthly visitors.
It will always be 2% which will always be, at maximum, 2% more revenue. That's probably negligible if you have to support them and there's an opportunity cost to that money. You'd probably be better off spending that money on advertising than Firefox support, especially since Firefox users typically know when a page isn't working, it's probably them and they have a backup solution available.
I used Firefox for a long time but switched because I just got tired of switching all the time and I started regularly using a site that didn't work in Firefox (I don't remember now but I think it was my credit card).
Im a decade+ daily driver of Firefox. If a website doesnt support it, I make a mental note that I hate this company now, close the tab, and move on. I don't open it in a V8 browser, i look for an alternative.
I was exactly the same way, even to the point of doing the same thing if adblock or privacy extensions broke the site, but there are sites where you can't just move on where you really just have to use another browser.
I've gone back and forth between chrome and firefox for the what has to be close to 20 years. I want to use Firefox but ever since Chrome came out and blew it out of the water with javascript performance, it's always felt a bit clunky even as they've made their own performance improvements. I suspect my future lies with a chromium based browser eventually.
> At most, you lose a few small websites that you probably weren't going to visit anyways.
I think this is wrong. It starts with a website to look up train departures that no longer works on Ff. Then the site to buy movie or concert tickets fails on FF. Booking a restaurant, again, requires you to take out chrome.
Which has two concequences. People stop using FF all together because switching all the time is work. And people ensure they always have a copy of chrome around, while fewer and fewer need to keep a copy of FF around.
And so FF spirals exponentially into insignificance.
A handful of Google services are buggy and slow in FireFox. Stackdriver in particular is an absolute shambles. Thankfully I'm an embedded guy so most of the stuff in Stackdriver is hieroglyphics to me anyway.
I can't prove that Google is doing that intentionally, but I wouldn't put it past them.
webusb is another missing feature, and AFAIK Mozilla has a strong stance against enabling it because of the security implications. This is one of the only reasons I keep a chrome-ish browser installed.
1. Firefox blocks various analytics and tracking quite aggressively by default. Additionally, users of Firefox are, by and large, privacy minded and will have further mitigations. Any count of Firefox users is likely to be undercounting.
2. For the kind of basic web stuff(simple pages, forms etc) that USWDS supports it shouldn't matter greatly if Firefox is not supported. Theses standards are mature and Firefox supports them well, most thing should just work. Now, if websites go out of their way to block Firefox users that's a different problem.
But i doubt that will drive the numbers.
On a side note, I think percentages will overstate firfox's decline. The number of devices with browsers per person will influence it heavily and that number is ever increasing.
I think the average person in my circle has more than 3 and many have more than 4 devices with they use to visit .gov sites (i.e. ipads, phones, laptops, but not including the fridge, car, tv, etc)
Instead of government leaving it up to "market share", in an industry with decades of documented history of underhanded anti-competitive behavior, how about:
1. All government Web frontends must be compliant with one of the government-defined profiles of browser features, which are defined in terms of W3C (not WHAT, not Chrome) open standards. With sufficient penalties to motivate compliance.
2. As a practical matter, developers of government Web-based systems -- in addition to developing to documented open standards, and using open standards-based libraries/frameworks -- will be motivated to test with multiple browsers, including Firefox, because that's the most likely way that end users will discover and report noncompliance with the standards and profiles.
3. Government "apps" for non-Web platforms, such as Apple iOS and Google Android, are strongly discouraged. Furthermore, such non-Web apps by default are not compliant unless complete comparable functionality is available via compliant government Web frontends/apps. (To get permission for exceptions in extraordinary circumstances, there will be an onerous and uncertain process, and thus the motivation is to invest in the open standard Web platform for any "extraordinary" platform facilities that might be needed.)
(Also there would be regulations about backend implementations; that's just about browsers.)
Nos. 1 and 3 will win you the developer pico-vote while royally pissing everyone else off.
No. 2 is the matter at hand. You need a cut-off for the multiple browsers requirement. If you don’t, you’ll find contracts to CronyCorp for testing every site against the CronyCorp browser.
I don't think the government wants to (or possibly is even able to) get involved in defining web standards. Tracking market share seems like the least hands-on way to determine support as it's purely "pull based" - they follow everyone else's lead, they aren't trying to dictate what a "good" browser is.
The government is generally very slow and deliberate about technology recommendations let alone requirements when it comes to generally available software.
There's been credible international standards since early on. The government can say "use that international standard for government systems, not these (more) proprietary and unstable things".
Something has to change. Firefox is a GREAT browser. I think a lot of these things boil down to poor marketing. Things like these have to appear 'cool' and appeal to people. There has to be a reason for people to go out and actively want to download Firefox. Something akin to Apple's privacy adverts is how I'd go about it.
They've been trying that and it just pushes people away. I stopped using Firefox when Mozilla tried to score social brownie points. And the numbers seem to collaborate with shrinking and shrinking marketshare, especially after these campaigns. Since on the flip side of what you said, why would people swap from Firefox to chrome, Chrome doesn't bring anything shiny.
I agree with some of what you said about social brownie points. Advertising can be really off putting (I'm very anti-advertisement but I'm not really their target audience since I mostly use Firefox these days). However, they have to do something to get the word out. There needs to be a reason for people to care to install Firefox.
For one, Ubuntu should stop breaking Firefox with Snap, even though I think that is a relatively small user base. (There are some suggested fixes but I think the simplest is to bypass Ubuntu's packages and just download FF directly from Mozilla).
I'm always surprised to read claims that Firefox is the same or better than Chrome.
I switched to Firefox recently and many sites don't quite work: for example the pull request popup menu on GitHub appears off screen so can't be clicked on; the "new post" panel in Discourse is obstructed by the keyboard; FastMail alert box buttons don't work, and many other such annoyances.
It can be used as a main browser but it does have problems. I wouldn't bother with it if it wasn't for the manifest v3 situation
I use GitHub frequently and have never came across that issue; can't speak for the other sites though. If you're sure it's not the website's fault I'd encourage you to submit feedback: https://webcompat.com/issues/new
Firefox mobile is its own beast. I experience a whole host of issues on it, but have never had issues with Firefox on desktop. Only reason I use FF for Android is for uBlock, but it's so unreliable I'm dying for a better option...
These days desktop and mobile is kinda joined at the hip because users expect things like tabs and history to sync. So if Firefox has many problems on mobile to the point where users are actively deterred from using it, that hurts Firefox on the desktop as well.
I am regular and long time user of Fastmail in Firefox and I'm surprised at your report of issues in Firefox. Can you describe the steps to reproduce the issues you found?
Using the Android mobile app, create a Fastmail link and add it to your home screen. Open the app, try to block a sender - it asks you to confirm and it's not possible to press either buttons.
Yep I can confirm that certainty doesn't seem to work in a reliable way in Firefox on Android. I could only get it to work by tapping the button several times. Either it's not responding quickly enough, or the input field only works if you tap in a specific spot. The general performance of Fastmail in Firefox on Android is quite poor as well -- despite it being fairly snappy in desktop Firefox on Linux/Windows. I use the native Fastmail app on Android which performs much better -- I presume it uses a version of Chrome under the hood.
My experience is that Chrome winds up being consistently slower than Firefox, and I’ve gotten multiple friends (who aren’t techies) to switch because they’ve tried it out and agreed that it was more performant.
When Google Chrome came out, what made it stand out for me was their impressive developer console.
This lead developers to switch from IE/Firefox where you had to install a plugin for developers, into using Google Chrome that had a native and more advanced tool for debugging.
*For me this is the key*.
If you provide a browser that greatly improve the developer's experience, they (the developers) will move to use it, making it the best compatible browser to use, which will then make the rest of the crowd to use it because the overall experience is better there.
I just hope the team at Firefox will realize this before Google ...
I've been using both Firefox and Brave as my browsers, and Firefox is eating my memory way more than Brave (I have around 60+ tabs open at Brave, and just a few at Firefox). (I'm on Linux Fedora 36 with the latest versions available in the repository).
This is why I'm not using it much, but it saddens me.
Firefox was already statistically irrelevant 5 years ago. On our dashboard, a global e-commerce site with billions of views per year, it's not even in the top 10. Even regional browsers sometimes surpass it.
Firefox is also no longer a developer-default browser. This too has been true for years now.
There's very little Mozilla can do about it. Chrome and Safari are big because they're shipped as a default to platforms with billions of users. And the web works well on both of those browsers. It's not an engineering problem. You can't improve Firefox and expect market share to rise.
It's pretty much a done deal, and Microsoft (as well as Brave) using Chromium cemented that deal.
Sorry, nothing personal. But as a 100% Firefox user I would very likely avoid to visit any global ecommerce site. It's the same world I want to avoid by not using Google products.
I know I am a small minority, but you don't even see that minority.
Even if you assume that 50% of Firefox users are falling into "they wouldn't visit those sites to begin with" or "they run a user-agent spoofer" you're basically going from 2-4% to 4-8%, and the trend is clearly negative.
Late to the party, but these are the things people were saying about Apple in 1999/2000. Apple was sitting with a < 4% marketshare and also (luckily) $5 billion. They turned it around. There are massive differences between Apple and Mozilla clearly, but it does indicate that there's hope for Mozilla.
According to https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/browser-market-share-20..., Firefox still has 4.7 % global market share, 4.9 % in the US, and significantly more in some relevant countries, like Germany with 15 %. So this may be a bit premature. It’s still a significant-enough market share to support. Of course, if it continues to decline further, Firefox will eventually become irrelevant. Let’s hope this won’t happen.
Firefox needs to focus all their effort on making a good web browser first. If the browser is slow, has a clunky interface, or lags behind on features, then people won't use it. Mozilla focus way too much of their attention on privacy and non-browser related projects.
Look at how much attention that The Browser Company has gotten for their Arc browser on Mac. Their primary focus is great UI and making an excellent browser for their users. What has Firefox been doing with all their money and time?
I always see comments like this on HN, and I struggle to understand why. Firefox is plenty fast. Its interface is extremely similar to most of its competitors. It works well. What special sauce do you expect Mozilla to implement that'll suddenly change their fortunes? It's a browser, after all. And why do you think that such features aren't being implemented due to lack of resources or muddled priorities - surely Mozilla can walk and chew gum?
"What special sauce do you expect Mozilla to implement that'll suddenly change their fortunes?"
XUL extensions maybe? The reason I gave up on Firefox after literally decades of using it was because they kept removing features I was actively using without fixing any of the problems. What's the point of using a niche browser if it is exactly like the non-niche browser, but with more compatibility issues?
For a long time it was absolutely awful on Android as well. Not sure about Android, but at least on macOS Firefox has about identical performance as of this year now. They did a lot of work, some macOS specific, in recent times.
That said your average person isn't trying out every browser multiple times per year to see how fast it is today.
Put yourself in the shoes of someone that wants a more polished experience and a longer battery life and you'd be asking "How does that help when the UI is a mix of old and new UIs and it drains battery twice as fast as Safari?"
I don't use Safari because of the extensions and overall it's too basic for me, but not everyone is like you or me.
I'm typing this on Firefox. It works, I'm not going to stop using it, but it's not as polished as other browsers.
I'll give you an example that annoys me because I look at it every day: the bookmarks bar still uses the same margins as it did in Firefox 3, even after 2 major UI redesigns. Then we have things like windows from Firefox 3 for some stuff with pages that open on tabs and have a different UI. Like, pick one and stick with it.
CTRL/CMD+Click on a bookmark has a different behaviour than CTRL/CMD+Click on a link. No other browser does this.
Profiles are there, but there's no user friendly UI... and no, containers can't do the same things as profiles.
Then you have things like battery use on platforms like macOS, which is still worse for me than Chrome or Safari.
So yeah... it works, but it's not the best browser. I tolerate it mostly because of extensions like uBlock Origin.
It is quite slow on android IMHO. At least for me, in comparison with Chrome.
I also use ublock origin in android which should make loading page faster I guess but unless the page is absolutely awful, chrome remains faster even with ads on.
Every time I launch Firefox (rare) it gives me a popup telling me it needs to install an update and to please relaunch. Come on man. It's not 2006 anymore, that kind of update prompt doesn't fly anymore.
>Firefox needs to focus all their effort on making a good web browser first. If the browser is slow, has a clunky interface, or lags behind on features, then people won't use it.
People don't use one browser over another because of performance, full stop. Certainly not over 10% to 20% differences. Even years ago when Chrome did have an advantage, they would never have gained marketshare so quickly if they hadn't spammed Firefox users visiting google.com with Chrome ads.
Even features don't matter. People use Safari, Safari is severely lacking in "features". 99% of users aren't power users.
I don't really get what you're on about. I switched from Chrome to Firefox a couple months ago and... it's great. I don't notice any differences in performance (if anything, snappier) and the only thing that's "missing" that I had in Chrome is that Chrome had all my credit-card and password data associated with my Google account, which, well, that's not something I want Firefox to have.
TLDR: Firefox is a good web browser. It's not failing in the market because it's not a good browser. It's failing because consumers don't seem to actually care one way or the other.
I'd like to believe this, but what percentage of Chrome users actually use an ad blocker? My general feeling is that we on HN think ad blocking is a lot more common than it actually is.
It can't be that niche, or else why would they spend so much effort fighting ad blockers? They've surely done some research that uncovers a decent userbase of people who do use an ad blocker but will turn it off at a prompt.
Privacy must be a tier 1 feature of a web browser.
The fact the market leader goes out of their way to shit all over privacy concerns says more about their marketing pull than the quality of their browser.
Nobody has a right to research you or your behavior. We shouldn't be leaving holes in our software because the methods chosen rely on leaky and chatty protocols to gleam info.
The user agent string shouldn't exist to begin with. It was a boneheaded decision to allow that sort of easy discrimination baked right into the protocol.
Yeah. Although I'm not trying to discount what others experience, I'm always confused to hear that Firefox is slow, because it seems just as fast as Chromium on my computer.
YouTube works fine in all my Firefox browsers on mobile amd desktop. And despite reported difficulty by others UBO continues to ensure I see no ads there.
A little obscure, but Firefox still does not support HDR video playback on Windows and Linux. I understand they very recently introduced support on Mac finally, which is a good sign.
When MS tried this shit, there weren't companies that were selling you locked-down hardware running a locked-down OS running a locked-down App Store, while taking a 30% cut of every economic transaction on that store...
When cell phones were first getting off-the-ground, they were more like garage door openers - specialized tools for specialized settings. There is a lot of academic debate that the FSF and the EFF can spill on the subject of interop and software freedom for garage door openers, but practically, it wasn't a big social problem.
Nowadays, cellphones are primary computing devices for a lot of people, with a large number of supporting and symbiotic industries around them. The various platform owners have drawn particular lines around their products, and have largely defended them in anti-trust courts - but there's no reason that those lines should be allowed to be where they are, or won't expand in the future.
What stops a platform from, in addition to exerting full control over the software that runs on it, also choosing to exert similar control over the packets that are sent or received by it?
In my opinion, Firefox has been at war with its own users for years. I finally had enough a few years ago, and switched to Vivaldi. Every Firefox upgrade was a gamble on what feature or functionality they'd remove or change this time, or what bone-headed UI design change they'd make. And every time there'd be a Bugzilla bug with a of horde users who just had their favorite feature removed, and every time, without fail, it would get arrogantly WONTFIXed and eventually locked. This cycle has repeated for most of Firefox's existence, but it has accelerated.
Vivaldi can customise damn near every aspect of its user interface. I can set up every menu how I want it. Remove things I done use, and move the most used item to the top. I can dock my tab-bar wherever I want. I can have a proper status bar. The list goes on. It's what Firefox should have been.
Users are just different, I’ve been a happy Firefox (and pocket) user for many years, and wouldn’t be happy with these so called improvements. I don’t need customizability, just need it to work good enough out of the box. Definitely don’t feel that Firefox is at war with me.
> Every Firefox upgrade was a gamble on what feature or functionality they'd remove or change this time
Every upgrade?
I've been using firefox since forever (as long as it has existed) and while I was very annoyed when they removed the customizable UI support a few years ago, that's really the one and only time when they broke functionality as far as I've ever been able to notice.
Feature-wise, Vivaldi is great indeed. But every time I actually try to switch to it as a primary for any prolonged amount of time, I inevitably run into major perf issues and/or deal-breaking bugs. In fact, my most recent attempt was just about a week ago, and vertical tabs w/grouping had numerous visual glitches for me, with tab buttons occasionally becoming taller than the screen, white rectangles that are supposed to go around tab groups having half the width that the tabs inside do etc. I "solved" this by using the Windows pane instead, and all was fine, until the browser just started randomly lagging to the point where everything slowed to the crawl.
And yes, I did report it to their bug tracker - which is private, by the way, so there's no way to know who else is having those problems, or how work on them is proceeding. I will say that the bugs I reported on the last attempt are fixed, but it's little consolation when new equally bad bugs show up in their place. And as for perf issues, there are numerous active threads on Vivaldi forums about them.
I'd love to use Vivaldi as my primary, esp. now that they also have an iOS offering, so tab & history sync across all of my devices is possible. But it really needs to be more stable.
Indeed, the level of customization in Vivaldi is awesome and what Firefox should've done instead of going the other way (that would counter the lame excuse you link to elsewhere that "view image" makes the menu too long - just make the menu editable, duh!), even though their UI is unfortunately not very petformant
This has been my exact journey, been using Firefox since before it was called Firefox, finally got fed up a couple of years ago and switched to Vivaldi. It's such a breath of fresh air not having to dread update notifications anymore.
Seriously dude, it's an opinion and he provides some rationale behind it. Feel free to disagree, but then just say you disagree. This isn't a factual claim that can be proven or disproven.
Mozilla removes "View Image" from the context menu for no reason at all, and a developer (he/him) explains why That's A Good Thing, and eventually shuts it down after almost 100 comments disagrees with it. There was a Reddit thread about it as well at the time, but I'm not digging through that trash heap.
As mentioned, this has been a repeating occurrence. "View Image" was a tiny thing, but I happened to use it many times per day. And many MANY such tiny things just wears you down eventually.
And 99% of the time it's not what I want. I'm sure there's an extension that fixes it, but why remove it in the first place? It's a pointless change. There are probably extensions that "fix" all the other myriad things Mozilla broke or removed, but now I have to rely on the good will of a third party to develop it and keep it up to date. There are only so many times I'll tolerate Mozilla breaking my workflow, so I have to spend time on either fixing the problems or adapt to their nonsensical changes.
well knock yourself out. Turns out things change that we personally do not like all the time. Some of those things are worth caring about, some of them are not. I salute you for dieing on the hill of 'one more click'. To me this falls well elow the ar of user hostile in a world where google chrome farms you and prevents you from using ad blockers.
Firefox on my Macs is more feature-complete and faster than Chrome for me. And the Aweseomebar is truly a replacement for bookmarks for me (full text search showing URLs and titles from years ago with a few keywords is truly amazing).
Once manifestv3 starts really making waves, Firefox will be the best place to go for ublock origin and other adblockers.
That would be my personal preference, laser focus on their browser, but Perhaps they didn't because it's already good and the reason they're falling is combating monopolies. Safari/Edge are defaults in their space and have OS's that can nudge.
Google owns huge swaths of the internet and can nudge people as well and break other OS's on whim.
Mozilla probably felt the need to have other offerings and leadership to winback something when "being a great browser" wasn't enough in the past 14 years.
Firefox is the only browser that has reliable ad-blocking. Chrome allows ads by default because you know, it's from Google. Edge is no better the last I used it. Websites are simply faster on Firefox. But I guess people like me are fast becoming a minority.
The main issue is every startup and small business ties themselves to the gsuite apps and ultimately falls down the path of using and then requiring gsuite auth and often chrome as a whole for all work browsing. It is quintessentially the new IE. almost all my browsing during the day has to be chrome whether I like it or not and that has been true at my last 4 organizations. Three of which are multi billion dollar companies and two with tens of thousands of employees
If your organization uses beyondcorp for zero trust among several other Google products, they only work in Chrome. Many MDM solutions also only do hardware verification through chrome during the auth loop for gsuite and not other browsers. My current organization blocks the installation of other browsers in their jamf configuration as well, so it wouldn’t matter even if beyondcorp did work in another browser
> I am personally unaware of any serious reason to believe that Firefox’s numbers will improve soon.
Is it possible that Manifest V3 will help Firefox?
Of course most people don't know or care about Manifest V3, but if uBlock Origin or other effective ad blockers cease to work satisfactorily on Chrome, won't that make some users switch?
I'd rather go back to fetching web pages from a terminal than suffering the insanity of modern web ads. I can't be the only one.
Most users don't care abt mv3. My parents would continue to use the browser without adblocking if I don't install it, just because they don't have the skills to do this. They don't even think about this. Just extrapolate for the entire world
Can those extensions adapt to new methods of adblocker avoidance/detection and update their lists as fast as they can do now? I'm not sure if they can.
Possibly not, but multiple Chromium-based browsers have already built their own adblocking solutions as part of the browser itself, so they certainly don't have to care. Brave's especially is about as strong as uBO, Vivaldi has a decent adblocking system and the people making Arc are looking to build their own as well.
A lot of people around me are switching back to firefox as chrome is showing signs of cracks, especially with the Youtube/ad-blocking saga on chrome.
Also, I don't think the US govt guidelines are going to have a dramatic worldwide impact on firefox numbers, the US is no longer the major online player it once was.
Yes, people that believe that Google will forever own the web are the same people that used to believe that Microsoft would forever own it. MS got arrogant and lost. Google looks like they are repeating that mistake.
A few things that could go against this:
- If enough people use Firefox, no commercial business in their right mind will tell these people to "please leave, we don't serve your kind". Seems to be true for obscure versions of internet explorer still in use. Definitely true for Firefox for some time to come.
- Legislation might force the market to open up on mobile. Right now Apple is blocking the Chrome and Firefox rendering engines (well they allow similarly named shells around safari). And Google of course "owns" the search and browsing experience on Android by default and twists every OEM into signing a restrictive licensing deal. At least you can install firefox on Android. There are some signs this might start changing. A lot of outrage around privacy and ad blockers might speed this up.
- People can still vote with their feet. If you watch Youtube on a laptop and you don't have an effective ad blocker, Firefox is blocking them very nicely. I watch a lot of youtube and 100% ad free, just saying.
> Yes, people that believe that Google will forever own the web are the same people that used to believe that Microsoft would forever own it. MS got arrogant and lost. Google looks like they are repeating that mistake.
I don't believe Google will forever own the web. But, like Microsoft did, I believe they will cause us a lot of pain before they're through.
I am afraid to say in my world if Google degrades Firefox for YouTube most people I know will switch to Chrome
I have had success persuading people to switch to FF (I am one of those people) but a degraded YouTube- even the outright criminality that involves - would be a deal breaker
The ad blocking blocking will work the other way.....
The problem Firefox has as far as I can tell is that the people in charge of the Mozilla organization would rather it be a social justice philanthropic foundation than a web browser and mail client maker and thus neglect their main product. And those they do have working on Firefox seem to want to remove features and play with UI.
For whatever the reason, Firefox does seem to enjoy playing with colors of the season more than trying to figure out where to take their rendering engine.
The thing that gets me about Mozilla is they were doing thing with xulrunner years ago that WebKit is being used for now with electron apps. But Mozilla didn't develop it. There were crossplatform apps being built with gecko.
I recall that Xulrunner, similar to the Firefox UI back in the day, hesitates just a little bit before responding to events. Perhaps xulrunner was too early in relations to computer performance back in the day, or they simply made a technical error when designing Gecko.
I can't be alone in my view that open source won. Just not the original Mozilla open source browser. Instead the re-invented one spear headed by Google - Chrome. Chrome is like the 2.0 of everything the IE6 team and Mozilla team learned the hard way. It was built by many of the original founding members of those teams. It's not a bad thing when Microsoft now uses the open source Blink rendering engine. It's not a bad thing that Apple uses the open source Webkit engine. My feeling is "we won". The web is so much better today thanks in part to the amazing teams that came together sponsored by Google to build Chrome. Time marches forward and there are plenty of interesting problems to overcome for the web as a platform. I just think we can move on from M$ bad, Mozilla good... Mozilla showed us we could have a better browser and helped break the web free from the shackles of Microsoft. There's new problems to solve new fights to win just this one, is IMO, over.
Open source won the browser battle versus proprietary browsers, but it feels like FSF style "free software" is losing the war. Chrome is certainly open source but product development is completely dominated by Google. Google drives the web standards; they design the "reference" browser; as Google shifts to maintain ad-driven profit margins they're positioned to displace ad blockers.
It doesn't matter if they Manifest V3 implementation is open sourced; If Web Environment Integrity is ultimately implemented then having access to the source doesn't really buy you anything. In a future where WEI is mandatory then being able to build Chromium without WEI empowers you to run a browser that's summarily locked out of services that demand WEI.
Open source mattered much more when simple access to source code gave users meaningful freedom but we're transitioning away from that era. Google is on the path to make open source irrelevant by providing an open source browser that must be built with the Google-specified set of features in order to operate correctly.
We can't claim a victory when open source software implements embrace-extend-extingush semantics.
That would be great, if Chrome was actually open source, and if the Chromium and Chrome projects weren't run by a company with perverse incentives (see: Manifest v3).
That's just splitting hairs. Chrome is not holding back features from Chromium, so Chromium has everything that Chrome has. The only things it's missing are things that literally don't matter to Chromium users (like google sync, what are you going to do, make your own google corporation?) or things that literally can't be open-sourced (non-free codecs).
The point here is that open-source "won" because nobody is trying to push features on the W3 Consortium without providing a reference implementation that is also the live, production code in the flagship browser of the largest browser company.
Well the closed source bit is that you also cannot reproduce the binary yourself (so we don't actually know if there is other code in Chrome), and Chrome presumably adds a load of (non open-source) code around sending your browsing data and history to Google servers.
The open source version also doesn't include any way to do automatic updates, sync with your google account, or have access to the extensions store. None of this is inherent to the open source version, but presumably it benefits Google to push their closed-source version which includes all their secret-tracking-sauce and allows them to avoid people forking the project entirely to remove ads.
Firefox manages to support all different video types while having reproducible builds (see: OpenH264) :)
Why is the US government even supporting specific browsers? It should support a standard like HTML 4 with no CSS or JS required. i.e. make the actual functionality on their sites simple to reduce the chance it doesn't work somewhere.
They're not Spotify. They're not trying to growth hack. They don't need to look pretty and have fancy animations and match some designer's dream down to the pixel. They can add CSS etc. to make things a bit nicer, but government sites should work with as simple of a browser as possible.
Highly regulated critical infrastructure like banks should be required to do this too.
> It should support a standard like HTML 4 with no CSS or JS required. i.e. make the actual functionality on their sites simple to reduce the chance it doesn't work somewhere.
You're right of course.
It's not really a case of 'supporting' browsers, it's a case of testing their sites against other browsers in case developers have accidentally written some non-portable Chrome only code.
This was very much the case in the IE6 era. Developers wrote and tested their sites for and with IE6, and were then surprised they rendered (in)correctly on Firefox and looked wrong. At least these days there are shim libraries, rather than having to explicitly rely on things like the box-model hack.
> Developers wrote and tested their sites for and with IE6, and were then surprised they rendered (in)correctly on Firefox and looked wrong
But that's the point: rendering shouldn't really matter. For things that are important like government systems, we should treat web "apps" much like TeX encourages: you specify the semantics, and let the rendering engine do what it will. Don't try to precisely control it. You can and should assume that users can totally override rendering with a custom agent, that browsers will disagree on default rendering, and that they may ignore your CSS instructions.
Like if someone wants to use a browser that always renders h1, h2, p, etc. with specific fonts and colors, totally ignores any CSS, and adds buttons to each table column header to sort on that column, that should all just work. Or if you want to use a braille output or screen reader.
For important tools and information, not entertainment/shopping, functionality should trump all other concerns.
My bank and now my power company have issues where I need to use chromium to fill out a form, and I don't understand it. I know Firefox supports forms. For whatever reason, javascript is loading the thing and screwing up somehow. I don't see why js is even involved, but frankly it screams incompetence to me. The easiest thing in the world to build, and they've broken it trying to make it look nice.
I don't go to my power company website for fun. I'm there to pay a bill. I need a form with 5 inputs and a submit button, and that's it. The rest of the screen can be plain white for all I care. Literally something I could put together in 2 minutes when I was 11, and it does not work. Paper should not have a better UI than a website.
Incidentally, this is why I'm not too worried about AI. If companies wanted cheap/easy/reliable systems, that's been doable on the web the whole time. People can't resist making things difficult for themselves, and they'll pay very good money to do it.
You're asking government websites to run differently from 99.9% of commercial websites out there.
First of all, that's just not going to happen for all sorts of practical reasons.
But secondly, you're totally ignoring UX and design. "Specifying semantics, and let the rendering engine do what it will" might work for developers who are used to interacting with API's. It will not work for regular users.
Regular users need to understand which button is the primary action. They need to understand which part of the content is the main body, versus a sidebar versus a header. They want columns that are correctly sized for their content. They don't want to have to scroll horizontally. They want responsive design that works on mobile too. They want something that looks trustworthy and familiar.
Websites are apps now. Asking to go back from presentation to semantics is like asking people to use the command line instead of GUI's. It's not going to happen, nor should it, because it's not user-friendly.
The only people it's friendly to are a niche set of developers with certain ideological beliefs that most web technologies shouldn't be used.
The things you describe aren't prevented by focusing on semantics, and are in fact enabled by it. Every modern app looks different for branding purposes, so users don't know what the buttons do. Things are complicated because we abandoned standard UIs that used to use the same widgets across every application.
And government stuff should work differently from 99.9% of commercial websites. Again, the goal should be for it to work. The government does not need to do marketing and make you feel like they are trustworthy. If you want to interact with social security, you go to ssa.gov. If you want to interact with the IRS, you go to irs.gov. End of story. They don't need to act like commercial entities because they do not have to worry about market share. Their share is always 100%. They need to just make their stuff reliably work, easy to figure out, and should make it cheap and easy to build. Basic HTML with minimal optional styles checks all of those boxes.
If you view the computer as a tool instead of a toy, you see that you really just need most websites to be a more convenient version of paper forms. It doesn't need to look fancy. It needs some boxes to type information, it needs to always work, and ideally every form on every website would stick to the same 5 or so types of input (rendered consistently by your OS) with no surprises. Government sites should take the tool approach. Commercial sites can sell toys.
Filling out your 1040 is "hard" because people don't understand what the words mean, there's a 100 page instruction manual that defines the terms, and it might require filling out other forms too (which you might just need to know somehow that you need to fill them out too). Other than that, the actual UI design is straightforward. You write/type numbers into numbered boxes, top to bottom, occasionally referring back to numbers you've already completed. You could progressively enhance with automatic calculations for relevant fields, but hand calculations work as a fallback.
Reliability is unrelated from UI, except insofar as simple UIs are easy to build, and therefore less likely to break. A paper form 1040 is perfectly reliable; it's not going to burst into flames when you're filling it out. As I said above, I couldn't even fill out my payment form on a modern site. It did not work at all. The form did not appear. That is not reliable. It also makes no sense if you know the page is ultimately using HTML, and that HTML has forms built directly in, and they always work fine.
And yeah, when I'm doing something like making a payment, setting up a transfer, doing my taxes, or even ordering a pizza, something like a slightly advanced paper form (e.g. with drop downs for options) would work great on my phone or desktop. Have a special request for your pizza that's not on the form? Put it in the free-form instructions box.
The "progress" we've made in the last few years is that I can't do bank transfers without switching browsers, which requires selecting a "to" account from a drop-down, a "from" account from a drop-down, and typing an amount. I don't see how something so basic can be so hard to do correctly. There's literally no need for any javascript at all. I don't see the usability gain from whatever they're doing.
Would an address lookup service be acceptable? One of those where you start typing your address into a box and it fills in all of the address fields based on which address you select.
If a new version of this is created, shouldn't it be tested on browsers? Which browsers should it be tested on?
What compatibility? If Firefox breaks forms, then Firefox broke forms and needs to fix it. Not your bug. If Chrome renders differently from edge because they decided the default color on .gov sites will be pink on white and all padding will be multiplied by 1.5, then that's fine. Not a bug. Chrome just decided to present a different look.
If it's even possible for basic functionality to break in a way where you wouldn't obviously say the browser is broken, then you've built it wrong. That means you need to test that TLS/HTTP protocols are implemented correctly and that your documents conform to a schema.
You are assuming that your developers were perfect and write sites exactly to the standard every time. In the real world they don't and XHTML lost, so all browsers tolerate and mask non-compliant pages to various degrees and in various ways, and will surface different bugs in your work. So it behooves you to test with the browsers your users are using to find those bugs before they do.
I am assuming that a professional can do their job, yes.
The whole XHTML thing where allegedly it never caught on because people can't write valid markup has never made sense to me. They're able to get typescript to compile now, right? If a dev couldn't write react code that compiles, we would fire them, right?
We have tools to check that your document parses and conforms a schema. We've had them for 20 years. It's easy enough to have that be part of your CI pipeline. The tooling is 1000x simpler than modern frameworks, and the thing that was allegedly difficult was that if you enabled conformance mode (which was opt-in based on DTD and/or MIME type), you had to open and close your tags instead of just opening them. Surely any middle schooler understands when you open a parenthesis, you need to close it?
US government websites, as they exist, are often ancient, decrepit, and poorly funded. This will make them all worse and it will cost more. It will get in the way of people actually trying to interact with the government, and the leaders in the government will crap all over the project due to the angry calls they'll get from their constituents.
If we try to stick to pure ideals without any consideration for reality, reality will ignore us and move on. Or, to borrow an example from another field: in infosec, the most secure computer is the one that's never turned on.
They're not decrepit; they're unfashionable. Programs and websites that were somewhat decently written 20 years ago should and pretty much do run exactly the same today as they did then. It's not until "web 2.0" and SaaS that you find things that stop working after a few years/months.
That's exactly what you need for "poorly funded" sites, and I don't see why a site that's meant to be functional needs a Hollywood budget.
> then Firefox broke forms and needs to fix it. Not your bug.
Not in the real world. In the real world, you've delivered a site that doesn't work and contractually, you can be sued or not paid for not fulfilling your contract.
That's the whole point of a standard (note that I said for .gov): the government says what standard they interop with. They either conform or don't. If other implementations don't conform, they are wrong. If the site doesn't conform, it is wrong. If it's not in scope for the standard (e.g. layout/font), it's out of scope. If the standard is underspecified or wrong somehow, you fix that and .gov now targets the new revision.
The government doesn't need to worry about market share. They can just dictate that this is what your browser needs to do to work with government systems. This is both more fair and easier for everyone; you don't have a moving target to aim for, and can just refer to the standard for what to do.
Governments exist to serve their citizens -- their users.
It's extremely user/citizen-hostile to say, "well our site works but no commercial browsers do, so I guess you can't register for a health plan this year over the web."
And I don't know about you, but I sure don't want the government building its own standards-based browser required for accessing government websites...
The government should set or adopt standards, not serve them. And they can and should provide a reference implementation.
We could easily and reliably do forms on mainframes. This is not complicated. And de facto, every browser supports HTML 4 forms anyway, so that's a non-concern.
They already set standards for things like needing to support TLS 1.3 with specific cipher suites. There's no reason they can't say HTML 4 forms and links are required for browsers to work on their sites.
No -- I don't want the US government (or any other) involved in setting web standards. The W3C is not going to be helped by being run by governments instead.
No -- I don't want the US government providing a reference implementation of web browsers.
No -- I don't want to log into a mainframe computer to fill out my taxes or sign up for Medicaid or a health plan.
The government should simply build services that work, in practical ways that are familiar and friendly to their citizens, according to the tools and habits their citizens are already accustomed to.
That means websites and apps for popular OS'es and browsers. It means phone numbers that work with existing telephones. It means offices in population centers.
Good governments come to where users/citizens already are. The shouldn't make users/citizens jump through hurdles to come to it, any more than necessary.
Like I said, the US government should just adopt the existing W3C standard.
It's crazy to me that 10 years ago people were against the standard for government documents being essentially "whatever Microsoft office does", but in 2023, we've decided it makes sense for the standard for government web sites to be "whatever Chrome and Safari do".
And as I've pointed out, for historical reasons, we already have an adequate standard that the major browsers already support. So just target that standard. It happens that this is also the cheapest, simplest, most reliable way to do things anyway.
But you're saying that the government should create websites according to those standards, and if it breaks in Chrome or Safari, the government shouldn't test and fix it. Rather, the browsers should fix it.
That's a position I just can't get behind. These are all just tools. The point isn't to follow some ideology, the point is to function.
And no, the government shouldn't formally "adopt" any specific W3C standard either, because standards evolve, and we don't want the government to get stuck in time. It should just write and maintain websites that work.
This isn't complicated. Businesses all seem to manage it just fine. The government doesn't need to do it any differently.
If a browser breaks forms somehow, then yeah I don't think it's reasonable for anyone to try to fix their website to somehow work (if it's even possible). Same as if they break links, or TLS, or HTTP. The government should just say "chrome 287 doesn't work".
The "evolving" standards of browsers mostly add a bunch of useless toys that create security vulnerabilities. There's no reason for serious sites to target them. The old standards do everything you need to quickly and easily make a functional tool that will require no maintenance for years or decades, which is exactly what you want from tools.
I worked on fibre channel networks at IBM. They were all about high touch customer service, and had great data gathering and would debug issues that ultimately were caused by some other vendor breaking the standard. After proving we were doing the right thing, our answer would always be to tell the customer to turn off the broken feature on their other vendor's device (other vendors would do things like inject fake ACKs for large transfers to reduce latency ("acceleration"), which is kind of a no-no in reliable networks. We lowered latency in a standard compliant way by using multiple concurrent exchanges that we put together at the application level).
We did test with some other vendors, but IIRC only at a fairly basic level, and didn't support any of their non-standard behavior. We just used them to validate our own compliance to standards.
To clarify, I think it would be very bad if the government merely "targeted a standard" and did not test its websites on various browsers. I would consider it irresponsible professional behavior.
Exactly this -- it's about testing and ensuring something works.
And no matter how "standardized" things get, there are always going to be implementation differences (whether due to mistakes or underspecified specs or partial implementation) and also just straight-up bugs between browsers.
At least these days there are shim libraries, rather than having to explicitly rely on things like the box-model hack.
Are people actually now using the older term, "shim," and not the newer "polyfill?" I was a grumpy old man when people started to tout the new terminology, when there were perfectly good terms already.
What should Firefox do for you to select it as your default browser?
(It’s my default browser, I’m pretty happy with it, also use the pocket functionality quite bit)
Come up with their own privacy-focused computer and mobile OS, and mobile devices, really. I don’t think that browsers can survive as standalone software anymore. We’ve come to a point where default browsers are so tightly integrated with smartphone or computer OSes that a browser by itself offers too little value without integration. It’s going to be expensive, but they can compete with Linux distros that try to do the same but which all cannot gain any traction, polish, and long-term support.
It is my default, but keep a Brave install around just for the ability to "fake" a site into being an app. ie, it gets a separate launcher shortcut, a separate icon, etc. Very useful for sites I use constantly so they're not trapped in the same window as random surfing.
Features. Vertical tabs, PWA support. More technically solid browser on Android. Primarily though they should just focus on making a browser. The organization seems interested in doing anything and everything but building a tool for the user.
Why not use Brave, or Vivaldi, or Arc, which actually add features and where the organizations are focused primarily on toolmaking?
The UI on this page is rough, but once you have more than one profile you will get a popup at launch to select from your list or to create more.
I have dozens of profiles, custom launchers etc. I run four or five simultaneously most of the time. If you only need a couple profiles, the standard launch UI will do.
...
But, see also "Multi-Account Containers" which segregate cookies between sites so you can have multiple simultaneous logins to various services in a single profile.
Containers share preferences and browser config (and window), but segregate cookies. Profiles are completely independent.
I use both, extensively. E.g. my work profile has containers for user, admin, owner, and machine accounts at GitHub. My personal profile has my private personal GitHub account only.
Firefox has multiple profiles, I have used them every day for years. The UI is poor, particularly in terms of discovering that they exist, but they do.
I'm not sure what your use case is, but Firefox has Containers [1], allowing you to isolate different online identities into containers. It separates the cookies and storage for each container.
An example of where I use this is for separating my personal Gmail from my uni's Google's Workspace account. It's annoying clicking on a uni Google Doc link only for it to block me because it chose my default login which is my personal Gmail. I have to switch between Google accounts (which I believe wasn't possible until recently?). With Containers however, I just open the link in my "Uni" container and I'm good to go. No fuss.
I have seen classmates use Chrome profiles for the same example above, but from what they showed me they couldn't have their personal profile and their school profile open at the same time - they had to switch between profiles each time. With Containers, I can access tabs from all containers at the same time. Containers are colour coded so you know which is which.
There are additional containers available. If you don't like Meta snooping on you outside of their websites, there's a Facebook container by Mozilla [2] that isolates your web activity from Facebook.
Other than that, Firefox does appear to support profiles, but it appears to be a bit clunky. [3] I've never used it and until @dralley's comment didn't even know it existed.
Mozilla has been a horrible steward for their project. They receive hundreds of millions of dollars a year and I have no idea where this money goes. It also doesn't help that their organization is full of purity testing and social activism nonsense that has nothing to do with making a good web browser. At this point I'm convinced that the reason that google is paying them so much is because they actually know that firefox is a failed project and keeping it alive as a zombie project actively protects them from anti-trust violations.
True. What are you going to do about it? I wish 1% of the effort denouncing FF because of the poor management were put towards forking it with better management.
MS is investing hundreds of millions of dollars in Windows as well and yet I have no idea where that money goes. It's not like you can see all of the investments in mature products...
I've worked with a ton of start-ups and digital agencies on countless projects by now in my career, and I can honestly say supporting Firefox has never been a priority. I've tried to push for cross-browser testing many times, but according to the stats (which management makes these decisions with) Firefox users are such a tiny, insignificant amount of most websites and products that it doesn't make a lot of sense, which I'm sure even further adds to abysmal Firefox usage when sites work badly or don't work at all because nobody tests anything with it. Ce'st la vie, I guess.
"I am personally unaware of any serious reason to believe that Firefox’s numbers will improve soon."
There is a serious reason: Youtube ad-blocking. The combination of Firefox and Ublock Origin (or perhaps other ad-blockers) allows you to watch Youtube while blocking ads. Increasingly (and definitely in 2024) you will not be able to do this with Chrome.
>Firefox peaked at 31.82% in November, 2009 — and then began its long slide in almost direct proportion to the rise of Chrome.
It will be a sad day when Firefox is truly dead. But what did Mozilla expect? They spent so much time and energy on activist bullshit that doesn't really matter for THE BROWSER.
I think there are plenty of decisions worth consideration, but this is nothing to do with why Firefox is declining. It's because if I buy an iPad it comes with Safari and doesn't really let me use anything else (only a skinned version of Safari). If I buy a PC it's Edge. If it's an Android device it's Chrome. A Mac? Safari. Firefox is the default nowhere, and in this world because Google has almost limitless marketing power and owns one of the world's most popular websites they can push Chrome to mean that on PCs and Macs there is a strong push for people to move from the defaults to Chrome.
Firefox works great for me. It's just incredibly hard to get anyone to use it.
Maybe it was never really about the browser, but the platform. Safari dominates all Apple devices. Imagine if all computing was truly open and we could run any app anywhere. Would Chrome have had a reason to exist to begin with, or would Firefox have become truly ubiquitous?
> Imagine if all computing was truly open and we could run any app anywhere.
This was accomplished in the 1990s by Bell Labs with Plan9 and later, at the application layer, with Inferno.
It was additionally accomplished in the 1990s at the application layer by Sun Microsystems with Java and its applets.
Frankly, the history of computing is littered with well-engineered solutions to this problem and many of its variants.
The fundamental issue here is that businesses are involved and giving a business a monopoly over something so fundamental is usually a bad idea. The WWW succeeded because it grew somewhat organically.
The financial statements are also currently on the front page. That's a nice hot take, but the number that really stands out is 25% of revenue on management, a full 50% of salaries.
Although it would be a shame to not have a company behind it, couldn't a derivative of Firefox continue to exist with community support? It's not like Firefox is so lacking today that a lot needs to be done to compete with Chrome. If I didn't update my Firefox installation for a year, I likely wouldn't notice or care. It's a really good browser no matter what other people say, IMO. Mozilla either giving up on Firefox or kicking the bucket might even be a good thing for the Firefox codebase because it could open up opportunities for new companies to own a derivative and work on it.
Well, yes and no. It does matter because if they had spent that money and effort on the browser and made it possible to donate directly to the browser project then there is a fair chance that those numbers would be better.
What could get people to move to firefox? Is the only way really to have have your browser be popular is to have it either be installed by default, or being advertised on a page that people use daily? Would be crazy if facebook had a banner stating "switch to firefox now" suddenly
There is another way: make your browser THE browser for power users. Add crazy features that appeal to 0.1% of the userbase. Allow a free extension system that allows developers to come up with features you haven't even imagined and see what gets mindshare.
Once you have committed power users who love your product, they will be more than happy to evangelize it to everyone they know. While their friends may not use any of the advanced functionality, they'll still use it if it works okay for them and their friends insist on it.
Mozilla had something like this, and chose to throw it all away to make a browser for Idealized Grandma that more closely resembled Chrome - because Chrome was successful, so they figured they'd copy what they did. But while Chrome was a fine browser, and maybe even better than Firefox in some ways, what this mindset missed is that the main reason for Chrome's dominance was a) being shilled on all the largest web properties, even with popup bars, b) being installed as the default on Android and c), being bundled in installers. Also, if I remember rightly, an advertising campaign. Mozilla was not in a position to do any of this. They should have - and still could - stick to their strength.
Now the only reason to use Firefox is ideological (privacy) and habit. I still use it at home. But I don't bother installing it anywhere else anymore. What's the point?
For me it's the Firefox sync feature. I install Firefox everywhere so I can instantly be up and running anywhere with all the settings, bookmarks, open tabs, logins, and addons ready to go on any new computer. It's a huge convenience and time-saver.
I have switched to Firefox in 2022 as I was tired of Google acting like assholes. I didnt see a single broken website since then. I believe more and more people will do that in the future, maybe not switching to firefox but something less ad-focused and more privacy focused. I'd rather use netscape communicator and only be able to visit 0.000000001% websites than going back to google products.
I think I'm finally okay with this. Firefox/Mozilla cannot handle their responsibility. With the death of their dominance, we can hope a new player comes forward.
I'm sick of cheerleading Firefox when it is slower than Chromium, heavier, and buggier. The only benefit is less creepy google.
I'm sorry Mozilla, when FOSS teams that are unfunded can make browsers, I expect much much much more.
My rebuttal is that a lot of web devs have already moved on from actively supporting Firefox (although most websites still work just fine), and if anything the USDS is a laggard.
The laggards all moving away from Firefox might actually be a big problem though, the enterprise laggards kept Internet Explorer on life support way past its best before date, but FF won't get that.
The organization that gave the world Rust, Web Assembly, and countless other useful technologies is in a probable death spiral, and most of the blame goes to Mitchell Baker. If Mozilla was not primarily driven by greed and laziness, smart people that still exist in around Firefox would have made the difficult technical decisions needed to continue to ship a useful product that protects user privacy while still being easy to support in a world dominated by Chrome and Safari.
Understated but true. Or I might modify to say if you care about the web, you don't run Chrome. For us to have a nice web, we need interoperability. And for that to happen, we need multiple players implementing a single standard.
I'd say, "if you care about the web, don't use a Chromium-based browser, but also Safari does not need your help w.r.t. marketshare" so.... yeah. Use FF basically.
The decline is exacerbated by mobile. It's become the dominant form of using the web, but almost everyone uses the default that comes with the phone and Firefox is nowhere to be seen. Additionally it's been on the decline even with the developer population, my guess is because Chrome and the team around it has been much better in explaining how to e.g. write better performing code and critically how to actually use devtools to measure.
Anyway, I think Firefox is toast mostly because of its leadership which seems less interested in actually doing something interesting, and more interested in draining what's left until they can stick a fork in it.
Shout out to Firefox Mobile. I have it as the default browser on my android phone and the experience is great. I don't miss chrome at all. Once you get used to the minor UI differences you won't even notice you are not on chrome.
Is this bad for Google too? I thought Chrome needs Firefox to be somewhat successful so competition exists and the browser space doesn’t become a monopoly. Does the rising popularity of Safari and Edge negate this?
This discounts the number of people who see manifest v3 and the neutering of adblockers as a dealbreaker, forcing them to switch away from Chrome. Now, when they try Firefox it’s as fast and stable as Chrome (which was not the case a few years ago, they’ve made great strides)
I’m hopeful that yields a nice bump in user ship. I was a diehard Firefox fan in the beginning, switched to chrome because it was just better on Mac for years, and now have switched back to running Firefox for 2 years without a hitch. The only thing I keep chrome around for is a dedicated Google Meet app
Web Developers shouldn't need to "support" particular browsers at all, that's what standards are for. Nobody should be "supporting" any non-standard functionality at all.
> Web Developers shouldn't need to "support" particular browsers at all, that's what standards are for.
I agree. But different standards get adopted by different browsers at different rates. Case in point: Firefox still has not released support for declarative shadow DOM.
As a side note, although related to standards: I thought Firefox insisted several years ago that they were not going to support File System Access API. But now MDN lists it among supporting browsers.
In this case, though, a government website should be aiming to support the lowest common denominator in web standards. They shouldn't be writing websites that require something like the shadow DOM or the File System Access API. Standards low enough that actually testing against different browsers is an afterthought.
Are all those overall market share numbers aggregated over device types? In the 2000s most internet users were sitting in front of a desktop PC, while nowadays most web surfers are doing it from the palm of their hand. Of course, in that case people primarily choose their platform‘s native browser i.e. either Chrome or Safari. The latter is even forced onto its users (not that it is a really bad browser). So the decline of Firefox’s market share really tells us a story of the rise of the mobile web.
My anecdata shows that Google's recent decisions on the direction of Chrome and changes at Youtube have technically savvy users abandoning Chrome for Firefox,
Yes, every day Google seems to be doing things to drive people away, but it's not really moving the kinds of numbers that are going to make a difference. Also, some of those users will move to Chromium-based alternatives like Brave and Vivaldi, which might blunt some of the worst abuses but doesn't help ecosystem on the whole if you want a browser engine to exist that isn't controlled by Apple and Google.
Alternately, the technically savvy users understand that allowing Google's control of Blink to replace open standards with whatever implementation details Google prefers is to be avoided at all costs.
Yes, which took years and years to resolve. And only because in the end developers refused to play along. If the people creating web sites decide collectively to support only open standards, then Google has less leverage. It kinda worked with Amp, so it's not impossible.
> In fact, because the iPhone is so popular in the U.S. — which is obvious from what you see on that aforementioned government analytics page — Safari pulls large numbers that also hurt Firefox.
This makes me dislike smartphones more than I already did. Not only has iOS Safari overtaken Firefox in terms of market share, it has also overshadowed macOS Safari, a much better browser than iOS Safari for a much better operating system than iOS.
The government should really have a requirement to support at least one fully open option. I don’t care about the secondary effects; I’m happy not to use sites by lazy devs who can’t support two JavaScript engines. But there aren’t many alternative providers for government services.
I recently installed the STM32 Cube IDE from ST [1] and discovered that it contains a stealth binary of Google's Chrome in my home directory. The fans started spinning and I found the culprit pretty fast, but if you delete the Chrome executable in the double-hidden directory it just gets installed again at the next run of the IDE.
I wonder what percentage of market share can be attributed to this kind of clients that are used not for browsing but for lazily loading some web interface or product page.
That's a great point. Both Chrome and Edge are widely used as WebView drivers by some applications, and whether the user likes it or not they end up using one of the browsers that's dubbed market leader. Does Firefox even provide any webview-capable deployment option? If they managed to put together one that didn't weight around 100MB or phoned home, I'm sure it would be widely adopted once it's out.
> I surely hope I’m wrong about this, but I fear I’m not.
I suspect that the remaining Firefox users are likely to be quite "sticky". If there are websites that don't work in Firefox (but work in Chrome and Safari), I haven't yet blundered into one. My guess is that those would be mainly corporate intranet sites/apps, which I don't have to deal with.
No platform deploys Firefox by default; you have to deliberately choose it. That is NOT true of Chrome or Edge. I doubt anyone has ever deliberately chosen Edge; you can only get Edge on Windows, where it's the default anyway. And the only people I know that have deliberately chosen Chrome over the OS default are developers.
The main reason for using this is to run edge on windows subsystem for Linux on windows and wonder if anyone would have predicted that in the year 2000.
(I actually have edge installed on some Linux machines as well, but it isn't my main browser except when I need to teams).
We can thank mozilla mgmt for consistently making "great" decisions, with UX changes, making it worse and worse over time. Introducing "features" not many really need or want. And of course making it less and less configurable, taking away options from power users "for sake of users", which of course are long gone and not coming back. They pretty much alienated their user base with every release more infuriating than previous. I've "upgraded" laptop to one with 16G ram, only to find firefox consistently eating up all my ram to the point when it's either killed by OOM (speaking of which - in-kernel oom killer got enshitified so bad it takes 1.5h+ to decide what to kill, unless you spend days researching how to setup your system) or by other precautionary means. For past few months I'm launching this browser in memory-restricted cgroup, it gets 7gigs. And you know what? It gets killed about 15-25 times a day because it eats more. The ram upgrade did not help. At all. They even took away option to limit process count, so now it spawns whatever amount it wants. As if the browser was the only thing running on computer.
This is the primary reason folks left. The browser got maddeningly bad in terms of resource usage, UI and configurability. The rest 2.2% users have to suffer this. I suspect this is not going to change at all and I feel there is strong ($500M+) incentive from google for stuff to not improve at all.
A better guidance would be to count based on engines (Chrome, Edge, and Safari are all variations on WebKit) and have a device preventing an engine monopoly.
> All the browsers are probably counted as Firefox.
Firefox for iOS uses WebKit as the rendering engine, and the others are significantly divergent from Firefox proper and take significant development resources away from the core product, so I disagree with counting the products as a single browser.
Those browsers are part of the product. It's just functionality that's not in the most popular version. Still, for all purposes, they should be counted as one (with the exception of the iOS version, of course, because it behaves like Safari for the web-page side).
It continues to boggle my mind how Chrome - partly closed source, questionable goals related to advertising - has almost 50% market share; while Firefox is declining.
I had the same concern until recently. But the switch to FF, keeping my bookmarks/passwords etc, was quick and entirely painless. I use FF on all my devices and it syncs just as well as chrome.
If Firefox stops being a supported codebase, would Rust popularity be another domino to fall? Since it is the largest (and probably best known) Rust project in the world.
It's worth nothing perhaps that Firefox is widely used outside the US. Monthly active users worldwide are about 200 million, of which about 10% are in the US. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
I am always suspect of these surveys. I saw one the other day that claimed C# was the top language being used. I'll continue to donate to Firefox and Thunderbird.
I don't visit any US government sites ever, and very few corporate sites. The ones that I have problems with (Microsoft O365 in particular!!) are easily faked by setting the user agent to Edge on Windows. That magically solves everything (proving that Microsoft is deliberately breaking the experience on Firefox!).
But "Supporting" a browser doesn't really mean very much. As long as the browser is standards compliant it will still work.
> But "Supporting" a browser doesn't really mean very much. As long as the browser is standards compliant and websites continue to build to the standard it will still work.
FTFY
"This website is best viewed in IE" was not just a misguided suggestion from the webmasters. It was a statement that the site may rely on nonstandard IE-specific features.
How confident are you that Apple and Google will never agree to add some matching non-standard "extension APIs" to Safari and Chrome?
I have been using Firefox for many years in Windows and in Linux. Indeed it is much slower than Chrome, but I cannot ditch it because:
- I need tab scrolling;
- I need a separate search box, where I can install and use different search engines. Google search started being crap about 5 years ago.
I can only recommend to give Firefox another go, if you don't use it by default. It really has improved the last years, it also had made much progress in privacy features, and doesn't want to kill ad-blocker like Google wants. Also, Firefox on Android finally started supporting extensions.
Another thing: Because no other browser engines are allowed to be installed on iOS, those numbers should be subtracted from the total.
I hear this everytime a thread on HN pops up. Everyone talks about the major improvements, how it performs well nowadays etc. after a few years of perf. issues. But it runs like shit on my Macbook Pro 2019 (Intel) 32GB RAM. Videos freeze, it takes ages to cold start. Every interaction feels slow to me compared to chrome.
If Firefox goes away, we need serious anti-trust scrutiny on Google/Chrome.
To me they are in a similar place that MS was when IE got them into trouble.
They dominate PIM/Office tools with the google suite and design them to work best in Chrome. The only major difference is that Chrome is open sourced, but their software we need Chrome for isn't so that doesn't affect their moat at all.
Lately I've been using Firefox as a primary browser again, mostly to get used to it before ad blockers stop working in Chrome. Mostly it's good, though some things I'm still adjusting to: Firefox wants to claim the ESC key to get out of full-screen, resulting in a number of sites with different behavior (namely, many sites use ESC to close modals)
Every time I see these articles, I feel like I have to reiterate this: Firefox contains tracking protection that blocks a lot of analytics websites, like Statcounter. 2% of Statcounter's visitors being Firefox doesn't say much about the actual Firefox visitors on the websites themselves.
If you're deciding to drop Firefox, ignore Statcounter or any other data mining sources. Use passive analytics and your website's actual visitors (GDPR/CCPA restrictions may apply).
People who should know better keep on using chrome just as people
who should know better keep on using vscode. I guess that's the zeitgeist, accepting the corporate trojan gift. Let's just hope alternatives like Firefox don't completely vanish.
I don't think browser compatibility testing matters so much anymore. It's not like we're going back to the IE-only days. If an application works in both Chrome and Safari, its almost certainly going to work in Firefox without any special care.
seems like if FF leadership is smart they will figure out some way to tweak their product so that it is compliant or they will start spending money on advertising. I have never once in my entire life (I'm 36) seen an ad for FF. Personally I like FF but find the browser to be TOO tight in terms of things like needing 2FA to sync. My number one browser is Vivaldi, which is Chromium-based (obviously) but does have enhanced tracking protection.
Examples that I could find. Not sure that the browser itself is a political tool (yet). But the leadership has been strongly in favour of implementing some dystopic ideas. Crazy ultra far left weirdos.
"MOZILLA CEO CALLS FOR INCREASED CENSORSHIP: ‘WE NEED MORE THAN DEPLATFORMING’"
Having your rules based on % of marketplace usage is terrible... just one reason (out of many) is that is a moving target. Unbelievable (believable?) shortsightedness. I guess we're back to IE5 days. Everything is circular ehhh?
Oh, so we’re back to square 1 with IE6 (it’s just called Chrome this time) and marginalities. Thank god this time we already have jquery so we don’t throw it out of our projects too aggressively it may save a day once again.
I use Firefox. I started using it because I liked the Multi-Account Containers and I've just stuck with it. I am absolutely shocked that FF's market share is ~2%. I had no idea it was that low, wow!
I wish they had been working on an endowment like Wikipedia, that would be a better model in terms of the importance of an independent, open source browser. Maybe Wiki and take them under their wing.
Please oh dear god just let me pay for Firefox. This isn’t the nineties. I can and will afford it. I pay for Bitwarden, Fastmail, NordVPN, ElementaryOS. Just give me a paid version, Mozilla.
I’m pretty sure the billions of marketing budget (for a while there was a Chrome billboard on every other bus stop in my city), aggressively installing it as part of Windows freeware etc. has at least as much to do with its popularity.
Maybe Chrome got the first 10% of its user base on its merits (that’s how I installed it at least); the next 30% definitely include a lot of people that don’t know what a browser is and got it via some other deal.
... on the brink of being awesome. Every time i see someone using chrome I shudder. I wonder how much the youtube adblock bullshit debacle is going to effect these numbers and how.
Just because gov. websites might discontinue support for Firefox doesn't mean that is going to impact the browser's, lots of use cases are outside of that industry.
I wont use firefox because it doesn't do saving my shit in the cloud. I would switch at a heartbeat if they stopped with the stupid sync on another device thing. Fu
Mozilla should develop a rudimentary Blink or Webkit mode for FF that allows it to fallback to a better supported engine (with obvious limitations wrt extensions, privacy policy) for select websites. I think once the user has opened Chrome/Safari because something rendered all fucked up in FF, they're likely to keep using it. The telemetry from fallbacks could be used to prioritize compatibility issues and drive down the number of sites that require it. Oh and replace its own netstack with something better like the one from chrome.
I’m not sure if the specifics but I think embedding an alternative rendering engine within a browser already built around a different one would be a significant chunk of work.
I could imagine a sort of quirks mode though, just a few hand selected chrome bugs/features implemented in gecko to make it behave just a little more like chrome. What a horrible future but it’s a possibility.
I think Firefox no longer has memory leaks.
I just which they'd follow Brave's BAT idea, or something along those lines.
Brave's BAT, while feeling kludgeful, is the only innovative idea in terms of funding sites nowadays.
Micropayments => dead
Coil => dead (sorry, on a open stewardship)
Flattr => unknown, guessing dead
So I want to block ads but I ain't depriving the websites of a way of earning money. If they want they can get my money -- but usually only that which was earned by wasting time to look at an ad.
I want there to be a proper micropayments system (hopefully something supporting fiat money instead of just cryptocurrency) but this functionality doesn't belong in the base browser, browser extensions are a much more appropriate place to put this functionality.
Then you'll have to use Firefox because it's the only currently supporting extensions on mobile.
Still, I disagree. Extensions can be bought and sold. It's difficult to track those things.
I believe micropayments mechanisms should be integrated in the browser -- even if the provider can be changed.
Unfortunately the Visa/MC duopoly isn't incentivized to create a micropayments system, so using a third party technology aka cryptocurrency seems to be the only way forwards for now.
I'm one of those who rarely uses Firefox. I have it installed, but Google is just to integrated in my life. Gmail, Drive, YouTube, Android, etc.
Now, I just launched Firefox (on Windows), and the fonts look absolutely atrocious compared to Chrome. What's up with that?
Edit:
"gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.enhanced_contrast 0" made it a lot better, but not quite as nice a Chrome. Still a whole lot better than the default setting.
Google is just to integrated in my life. Gmail, Drive, YouTube
I use these all day too and they work perfectly on FF for me.
I know there was the recent "5 second YT delay on FF" debacle. But, I actually have a paid YT subscription, so I never saw/see it.
Now, I just launched Firefox (on Windows), and the fonts look
absolutely atrocious compared to Chrome.
Something I've noticed is that when you spend enough time looking at one style of font rendering, the others look "wrong" and I think that's what you're experiencing.
Used to see this a lot with Mac and Windows in the pre retina/hidpi days. Users switching from one to the other would be shocked at how "wrong" the fonts were. In reality, neither one was "right" or "wrong" but they sure were different.
FWIW FF and Chrome's fonts both look fine to me on Windows 10 but again, that's just my purely subjective view.
Firefox went from focusing on browser technology and privacy to strange political theatrics on divisive social issues. Think the company needs new leadership and streamlined and simplified focus on building the best browser.
Way too much wasted resources on strange side projects … that never resonated and seemed to come out of nowhere.
no. web interoperability is a thing that's happening and the major players (including ff) mostly all behave/look the same. a project officially dropping ff support should have no impact on ppl using ff.
A bunch of smart idiots fell into Google's convenient embrace, just like everybody falling into Microsoft's arms 15-20 years ago, because this industry learns absolutely nothing, perhaps because we age out most of our competent engineers after 10 years or less.
What's sad about this time around is that Firefox was fine this whole time. It has been my daily driver for 8+ hours per day since like 2001.
I have spent many thousands of hours with Chrome as well for various jobs. I literally never felt a perceivable overall performance gap. I've always had pretty well-specced machines; maybe there were points when Chrome was noticeably better on low-spec machines.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that we sold out.
Mozilla also just posted their State of Mozilla 2022 (this includes financial statements). From what I've read, it seems that expenses are up and revenue from search deals is down.
They made a profit of roughly 150 Million dollars last year.
They have 1.2 Billion dollars in assets.
They have increased revenue from non-search deals significantly (56M -> 75M, up one third).
Despite all the gnashing of teeth in this comment section about woke Mozilla, they spent only 5 Million on grants last year. The vast majority goes towards developing Firefox and building up assets.
I had always just taken the statements that she is absurdly overpaid at face value and never looked into this myself. But Baker has overseen the rise of revenue and net income from almost zero to current numbers. If that doesn't look like a successfully run NGO, what does?
Not a big fan of CEO compensation in general, but I feel the one-sided focus on market share, which I feel is somewhat out of Mozillas control (can't even compete on the dominant mobile computing platform, anti-competitive Google leveraging its search monopoloy and advertising Chrome extremely aggresively, etc... ), while ignoring the actual financial health of the organisation is really biased.
If this was a for profit company I could agree with your focus on profit. Their mission statement is: "Mozilla is a global nonprofit dedicated to keeping the Internet a global public resource that is open and accessible to all.". You could argue the importance of market share at some percentages but below ~5% has to be considered a priority one emergency, if your goal is to keep the internet accessible for all. If their market share fell below 1% they would have effectively almost zero ability to steer standards.
> If this was a for profit company I could agree with your focus on profit.
There are two parts to Mozilla: a for-profit company and a non-profit company. They are separate. You are reading the mission statement of mozilla.org, not mozilla.com. Mitchell Baker is the CEO of the for-profit company, not the non-profit.
No. Mark Surman is the executive director of the non-profit (executive director is the term used for CEO at non-profits). She is the chair of the non-profit board, which is probably not a paid position (or paid very small token amount).
A non-profit company is not a zero-revenue company. It's a company that reinvests all profits into its designated cause. A non-profit org with a billion-dollar revenue is a great non-profit org as it can finance the work on its cause really well.
> They have increased revenue from non-search deals significantly (56M -> 75M, up one third).
I'd love to feel optimistic about an increase in non-Google revenue, but 19M when the CEO alone is paying herself 7M of that alongside a 85M increase in expenses... it's still pretty hard to see it as a net positive here.
& of course the headline of this HN post is declining usage - that trumps profit either way imo
So that means instead of investing money into making the browser better and clawing back some market share, Mozilla Corporation is sending money up to the owning Mozilla Foundation, in the form of profits, to spend on non-browser initiatives.
The only amount of money that can claw back market share is a number big enough to buy Google. Google controls the leading web properties and pushes its browsers through there.
That's absurd. Firefox has been at parity with Chrome for a long time, both are extremely mature technologies. Sometimes one is ahead of the other in one way or the other, but they are largely identical. The exception is when Google or Microsoft "accidentally" break their websites on Firefox.
It's pure fantasy to insist that the market share of Firefox is primarily driven by technical merit. Otherwise, you couldn't explain why Firefox is still at 20% in Germany, for example.
Firefox also has containers which (AFAIK) Chrome lacks. The UI for Profiles is probably worse, but Containers dramatically reduced the need for them for many (but by no means all) use cases.
It's definitely not the case that Firefox is behind here. I would say they are slightly ahead overall, but which of the Browsers is ahead depends on your specific use case.
It should be fairly obvious that this has nothing to do with the reason that Chrome has 10 times more users.
I've tried containers, maybe something got better, but I just simple, one window with everything in my work profile, another window, everything in personal, it's so easy to use in chrome. I can close the work window at the end of the day, and open it again the next morning, carry on
true. but it is much harder to switch between profiles in firefox, and containers don't really work for all the use cases you might want to use multiple profiles for (like, say having different bookmarks, and settings for different profiles).
MAUs are down though and a non profit is supposed to be mission driven not revenue driven. The focus on market share is the belief that a better internet (Mozilla’s mission) starts by having a non profit browser leading the way. There might be some other metric but the financial health of Mozilla can only be one factor. Besides, at some point they get down to 0 market share and then the search deal revenue will go down (not sure again the next time they will be negotiating the deal)
i assume instead of google outright purchasing the company due to monopoly issues and internet outrage, they instead are just doing what they are doing now. thought i read they are up to 90% funded by google.. so its a little silly how these browser warriors champion their precious firefox or whatever other browser and condemn the evil chrome. but if you think about it they are all basically chrome developers. building ontop of chromium or working on firefox where those devs and chromes collab.
but in my opinion that isnt the reason google keeps firefox funded. i just think they do it for goodness sakes and not to cannibalize the only "competition". it really wasnt too long ago when it was chrome and firefox the two sleek awesome browsers saving the internet from nasty slow internet explorer.
> Genuine question. What is justifying Mozilla Corporation CEO Mitchell Baker's salary?
This question is why I don't expect Mozilla to last at its current course. I like their work, but the endless increases in CEO salary while their most important money maker is fledgling is not justifiable.
The increases look reasonable to me, but not when you consider their declining market share. I guess she only returned to the role of CEO in 2020, but she's been in leadership for a long time, and the org's performance has been poor.
In what world is DOUBLING one's salary within two years while the company overall and, most importantly, the company's absolute flagship product are in continuous decline "reasonable"?
>>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."
So I bet it's something like:
Baker: "If you don't pay me market rates for comparable work, I'll leave and go mess up a different organization."
Google: "No, wait, stop, we'll get you the money!"
Considering all the unforced errors on Mozilla's part, I'm only half joking there (i.e. that Google is influencing the decision, via their search placement deals, to keep Firefox bad).
I expect it to last as a Zombie company in some sorts. Not a true, government subsidized zombie company, but a way for Google to pretend they don't decide the internet.
Google says 'Don't spend your money on bug fixes and you can get 400M for default search, and you get your 3M bonus.'
Oops, we arent allowed to speculate on HN? I'm just jaded...
So what do you care about more? Mozilla CEO making too much or Chrome getting to dictate the web?
Unfortunately there will always be things to complain about and no system is perfect. But we have to make choices like this and these are the results. You cannot complain about Google's control/dominance over the web and refuse to turn away from their products to use reasonable alternatives (when they exist). Firefox is by no means a bad browser and it is easy to switch over. You can also still use firefox and complain about Baker's salary but is this really a killer issue?
I want Firefox to continue existing and I want it to become a major player again. If not Firefox, maybe a newcomer, just anyone other than Apple and Google.
I use Firefox on every device and I recommend others to do the same. That doesn't mean I agree with Mozilla, though, and their misplacement of funds make me worry about the future of Mozilla and Firefox as a browser. After firing the Rust team working on Servo, you'd expect austerity measures across the board, as Servo was clearly too expensive to continue investing in, yet Mozilla saw fit to continue rising Baker's wages, despite having just laid off 25% of its workforce.
I wonder about how much longer Mozilla will be able to exist. It's oriented around activism first, Firefox second, yet most of its income comes from its browser, and only because Google is scared of being branded a monopoly. If any other platform rises to popularity (and there are a few rising browser engines in the works, mostly as hobbies, but still) and Google switches to funding that project rather than Mozilla, I don't see how Firefox can survive.
I can imagine that the CEO, or maybe a few other top officers, may say: "This is me who is bringing in all the search deals, which means all the money. Come on and try to oust me."
Mozilla is an open-source project. When an open-source project somehow loses its way, it's often forked by a new team of contributors who have a better idea. This happened several times: Open Office / Libre Office, MySQL / MariaDB, X86 / X11.org, hell, even GCC / egcs in the 1990s.
But this likely cannot happen to Mozilla, which is basically kept afloat by Google handing it some money for keeping it as a default search engine, about $400M a year currently [1]. There is little chance that an alternative "Better Mozilla" organization would collect as much, or at least half as much, to support a fork. It would e.g. take 33M users who agree to pay $5/mo for a Mozilla "support subscription" to collect $400M a year.
Maybe a web browser can be maintained for less than 400M, but likely not much less. The modern web is fiendishly complex, and you need both a desktop version (three platforms) and a mobile version.
Most people don't want to pay for anything. Look at all of the workarounds for news sites. I try to pay or donate for most of what I use but there seem to be a lot of people who want to get everything for free.
I totally won't mind paying for the occasional article I open, if micropayments were a thing! Pay a quarter, read something worthy.
The problem is that micropayments are not interesting for most news outlets: the friction of current solutions is high, the resulting revenue stream, unsteady. Monthly / yearly subscriptions bring a better revenue stream, and cost way less.
If micropayments were indeed zero-friction, and effectively zero-cost, maybe they'd be (reluctantly) integrated.
My experience w/ most news outlets is that they have a random article I'm linked to. That's not worth a subscription in my mind. A news service you have an ongoing relationship with is.
I'm deeply disturbed of this normalization of software as a subscription service. I want the return of good old days when people could pay once for their software and use it in perpetuity.
This is not a subscription to use the browser. You can always build it from source and use for free, as designed.
This is a commitment to support the development, because the development should be oingoing. Not Netflix-style, but Patreon-style.
(Also see how JetBrains handles "subscriptions" to their closed-source software. Once you've paid, the version is forever yours. Updates are bought with some additional sums if desired.)
I hate the "subscriptionification" of everything as much as anybody, but there is a cost to ongoing updates to software. Especially on something like a browser, where both standards and exceptional behavior contrary to the standards change rapidly.
Maybe we could go back to where people paid once and could pay separately for support?
subscription is a significantly fairer revenue model for software which undergoes regular upgrades and has support, which is most software nowadays.
It makes sure that people who continue to use continue to pay. Upfront charges are often either too low with long term users free-riding or too high, in case the project is abandoned. Subscription makes it much more likely to price products correctly.
Leaving nonpaying users on old versions on browsers with security issues and who will no longer support the latest web standards will be bad for the web.
If users want to stay on an old version, why shouldn't they be allowed to? Sure, there may be additional security considerations or missing functionality, but there's nothing wrong with a user making that choice.
This model gets implemented, and then the comments section is littered with "I prefer when I didn't need to pay for software upgrades and backward compatibility!"
Yeah, people can get irrational about such things (like ignoring that they're only paying when they choose to rather than paying every month automatically).
But the solution to this is to offer both forms, as several companies do.
Of all the types of software where you should be ok paying a subscription, browsers are the ones where should be most ok with it. Browsers, more than anything else, need constant updates because they're by far the biggest and juiciest attack surface for hackers, and also web devs will just stop supporting you if you're not on top of the treadmill of browser standard updates.
It's not feasible at all to call a browser "done" and leave it alone, so if you want one that's independent from adtech, a subscription is kind of your only option.
I remember the forced obsolescence. There were a few good software packages but many would frequently force you to upgrade from version 12.31 to 13.0 which isn't backward compatible i.e., "This software doesn't run on Windows XP"
At least with Microsoft, they are fanatics about backwards compatibility. It is pretty
rare for something designed for an OS prior to Windows XP
to not run on current Windows OS versions.
That would be a no from me. Considering the recent headlines from the EU wanting to scan every private message on the phones of it's citizens in order to "protect the children".
If not this time then the next. Just the fact that the commission was allowed to propose such a blatant privacy invading law is enough for me to know that privacy is not a something that the EU is serious about.
I don't think this is what being argued here. We know that privacy is an after thought of most companies even in the EU.
But to think that the EU would be the guarantor of everyone's privacy on the web, is completely ridiculous.
Also your argument is not valid. When Google detects that you break their rules they ban your account. When the government has this kind power, then they have the power to do worse things to you, like imprisonment, fines, putting you on a blacklist and much more...
I, for one, won't trust a government to ensure my privacy.
The EU does better than the US for consumer-related privacy issues. But I don't think the same can be said when the government wants to slap a label of "national security" onto something. That puts us into a whole different world of "anything goes".
> Perhaps ironically, this was also the genesis of Firefox
That's not entirely accurate (or at least, while accurate, is missing a lot of significant context) Mozilla was creating within Netscape, not in opposition to it, as a steward org for the open-sourcing of Navigator & Communicator. Even when Netscape was acquired by AOL, AOL continued to fund[0] Mozilla for years after the acquisition.
That is the case, but even then Firefox really was a fork, within Mozilla.
Mozilla was created in 1998 to open-source Netscape Communicator suite. Mozilla released its own suite, also called "Mozilla" (e.g. "Mozilla 1.0" [0])
Independently of that effort, Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross made an experimenal, cut-down version of just the browser part of the suite, which they called "Phoenix", as in a Phoenix rising from the ashes. That's a fork. That's a fork by any metric.
They later rebranded Phoenix as Firefox, and eventually the Mozilla suite was abandoned. Mozilla changed tack in 2003 and switched to developing Firefox and Thunderbird as independent products [1]
Firefox, however, was not. It was created because people didn't use most of the tools built into the Mozilla suite, and they were difficult to port (because they had a Motif frontend AND a GTK frontend).
>Firefox's market share has been on the decline since 2010.
Its decline is also visible in Mozilla's own data [1], 252M users in January 2019 down to 188M in November 2023.
MAU has remained at around 188M since October, I would like to believe this is because of MV3 and the YouTube drama, but that would be naive.
Going forward I think there should be a position on the foundation [2] and corporation board [3] held by a community representative. At least then the community would have some say in the direction Mozilla is taking.
I did, went from working for a small non profit in the sustainable transport/urbanism sector to management in the telco industry. Sallary jumped almost 10x.
> What is justifying Mozilla Corporation CEO Mitchell Baker's salary?
The same thing that is justifying obscene salaries in general. A circle of greed where obscenely paid people decide what obscenely paid people should be paid.
I will say in their defense, they have a legitimate argument.
Offering a low-paying CEO role means you'll attract lower quality CEOs. The best CEOs have personal incentive to take the highest paying jobs. This element of competition does exist.
However, this ignores a few factors.
1. Mozilla don't seem to have a great CEO despite the pay.
2. Self-interest and CEO skills are not necessarily tightly coupled. They could be orthogonal. So a great CEO might be willing to take lower pay, especially a CEO that might be great for a company that is itself forgoing disgusting amounts of (ad) revenue in the interest of ethics.
3. (Not Mozilla specific but it's important to mention when this comes up) Decent regulations capping CEO pay would in fact remove this entire element of competition, freeing up companies from having to decide how much profit to sacrifice on the altar of business gods.
I think it's a pretty reasonable question when the salary is so incredibly out of line with what developers make. Is the CEO singlehandedly responsible for productivity equal to that of sixty or so developers?
> Salary has nothing to do with productivity at this level of an org.
That's nonsense. The difference at this level is you're not looking at personal productivity, you should be looking at a much broader interpretation. Except Mozilla doesn't. They've seen flailing commercial performance and have rewarded the CEO and laid off developers. It feels like madness because it is.
I love Firefox but Mozilla deserves to burn to the ground for this mismanagement.
It should always be personal productivity but as a CEO your productivity is how much better you're doing than someone else in that role would. In the modern world too often executive compensation is viewed as "How valuable is this company" instead of "How much is this particular executive adding to the value of this company" - that's why we're seeing it spiral into simply ludicrous numbers.
You always have to /s here. I figure there are enough people reading HN who have different backgrounds in how they understand English that it's necessary.
Carry on. I for one laughed at the obviousness of the iceberg jumping out. We definitely should be encouraging more careful reading than hinting and reading everything as if they are words only. Your comment is about as obvious as it gets. Unless... the icebergs are alive. But then we have a bigger problem. Global warming is their revenge!
Unfortunately, nowadays, unless you're among a group of people who already know your general opinions on things, it's nearly impossible to state an absurd position on some issue that a nontrivial number of people would actually, unironically, advocate for, until you get into the absolutely batshit stuff like "we should literally sacrifice poor people to the devil, then eat their flesh, to keep the rest of us from getting poor."
Honestly yeah I had to read it a couple times, I didn't notice the joke right away, cause there are people out there who justify CEO salaries, I just can't remember the justification offhand.
Maybe if you'd referenced Chernobyl I would have picked it up sooner. Or THERAC, that's a classic.
CEO salaries aren’t, and never have been, relative to the rank and file salaries.
The question is how much you need to be to get a competent executive relative to the open market.
You can argue whether they’re getting what they’re paying for but this doesn’t seem to be out of line relative to the leaders of other, similarly sized organizations. Also a non profit has to have higher salaries as there’s not a lot of room to offload that to bonuses or equity.
True, Hiring a CEO is basically buying into an old boys network. It's like legalised corruption. With them you buy the goodwill of all of their buddies in other CEO positions.
However in this case it doesn't actually seem to be paying off.
the benchmark of what other CEOs make is a horrible metric. There is an entire industry of « Consultants » who will justify a higher CEO salary by claiming that other CEOs make the higher salary and then work with those other CEOs by point to your now higher salary.
Note, I didn’t say that it had to be relative to other CEO salaries. It has to be competitive to any other position that a candidate has available to them.
What would Mitchell make as an SVP at a FAANG company? What could they make as a startup founder?
> The question is how much you need to be to get a competent executive relative to the open market.
No! The real question is what happens without an executive, but some cheaper leadership structure instead?
I mean, maybe a cheaper leadership structure (whatever it may be) would run the company into the ground, but, well, at least they would achieve the same outcome for cheaper.
Don’t know, as a shareholder I would be very happy with a capable CEO that is able to extract profits from a doomed product. As long as she’s bringing in more than she costs the ROI is positive.
This is true at most tech companies though - the CEO making a multiple of a typical dev salary. The large increases year over year, however, while Firefox loses market share, is a bigger red flag IMHO.
It’s simple math: how much revenue does she bring in, versus the costs. And how likely is it for the organization to find someone else that brings in equal or more, for reduced salary.
No, the CEO(and board) are completely responsible. That is the point of leadership, to move the boat before it hits the iceburg or at least have a way of dealing with it.
Firefox is buggy but heavily advertised(or astroturfed, I dont know) on social media. Everyone knows about firefox, we don't need the ad. We need firefox not to suck.
Firefox being “heavily advertised (or astroturfed)” on social media isn’t something I personally have ever seen in the last decade. (Unless one includes Mastodon as social media, even though its userbase is nowhere near representative of the general public.) And today a substantial number of internet users are mainly using smartphones, and the default browser on that smartphone, and the very idea that one can use a different browser has faded from the culture compared to the early millennium.
Maybe this is sarcasm, but the chief captain of the Titanic (Edward Smith) was not responsible for the iceberg jumping at the boat but was responsible for steering the ship at high speed through water known to have icebergs. He even said in an interview that he could not "imagine any condition which would cause a ship to founder. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that".
What a ridiculous analogy. What’s the iceberg here? Google Chrome? The originally underdog competitor they’ve known and battled for well over a decade?
The relevant quote is "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."
In other words, there's an assumption every corporation is required to have a CEO/Lawyer from the Technorati class who acts as a drain on the finances of the corporation, why should Mozilla be any different? Since the Mozilla Foundation is not a widely held corporation (and is a 501c3) there are only a few institutional directors ( from https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/#boards ): Baker (AOL), Chambers (McKinsey), Cooper (Walmart), Lakhani (MIT/Harvard), Lisbonne (Stanford GSB), Molotsi (Intuit) and Lund.
If you think Baker's pay should be cut, Lakhani is probably the person to talk to, he's chair of the compensation committee.
After watching VCs from the 70s to the current time (yes, I'm that old) I have a theory about tech startups. Their primary concern is to pump money from old school monied interests to old school monied interests' children. So if you have cash you want to give to your kids more or less tax free (or tax reduced), you send them to Stanford or MIT, then you arrange a meeting for them w/ your old school chum who's now a VC in San Jose or Palo Alto. You give the VC cash which is treated as an investment by the IRS, and then the VC gives the money to whatever bizarre tech startup is being run by their old school chum's kids. If you're lucky, you get a return on your investment and you pay whatever capital gains tax you need to pay (which is most often taxed at a rate considerably below that for earned income.) Your kids get a decent salary for a few years, and if they're lucky and smart, they git bought out by a big firm that makes them a VP or something. The VC should be lucky enough over time to make enough money on the 10% of deals that make it to acquisition to pay for the 90% that fail completely or get acquired on bad terms.
Mozilla always seemed to me to demonstrate this also works for non-profits.
Also... the story of "using money to transfer generational wealth in the upper class" is clearly not a universal. There are clearly startups that are innovative. They may be helmed by a handsome 20-something from Stanford, but that's just an historical accident. I am sure YOUR startup is in this category. But the "using VC investment as a money laundering scheme to evade generational tax" happens often enough my inner marxian shouts every time I drive down El Camino in Palo Alto.
And this part is purely opinion. I appreciate you probably have a different opinion and absolutely do not think less of you for having a unique perspective:
And besides, the goal of tech money is now just to keep the party going. The web is shit, intended to distribute content from major content producers or to be festooned with ads (twitch and youtube). iProducts are there to look sleek and provide just enough functionality to convince you to buy another iProduct. Though you're probably not in the target demographic anymore since China and India are at the beginning of the growth curve. Protocols and programs we used to use: SMTP/IMAP/eMail, (S)FTP/File Transfer, Veronica/Archie/WAIS/Search, etc. are pretty much dead or owned by Google, Microsoft or Yahoo's corpse.
I think the reason olds are nostalgic for Commodore 64's, Atari 800's and even TI 99/4A's (and that there are a few kids who like leenucks and BSD) is they're systems that could operate without being attached to the dystopian cyberspace Carmen Hermosillo described in Pandora's Vox. The only "infrastructure" I needed for my 99/4 was a power outlet and a factory somewhere cranking out cassette tapes, 5.25" floppies and ribbons for my MX-80.
</opinion>
But I have digressed. If the resolution is that Mozilla has lost it's way, I would argue for the affirmative. Or rather argue it was sort of set up to fail. And heck, I didn't even once mention the management fiasco that was Boot to Gecko.
I doubt this. Maintaining and developing a competitive browser is serious work, and needs skilled professionals working on it full time, as well as getting stuck in to the web standards process. That requires a level of funding that most community projects only dream of. I can't see any incentive for industry to put money behind it in the way that they do with Linux.
I have very few complaints about Firefox as software. I only wish more people would use it. (That includes you, dear reader!) It is actually great, and if you've ever complained about AMP, WEI or anything like that, using a non-Google derived browser is one of the few things you can actually do to reduce Google's power here.
Firefox are up against the power of OS defaults and dirty tricks in an age where most people don't really know what a web browser is. But if you have any awareness or concern about the health of the open web, you are absolutely educated enough to use Firefox. Of course there will be the odd minor workflow thing to get used to. But Firefox is great. All you really need is the motivation to choose something other than the default.
I'm sadly almost in this camp. Firefox is incredibly important to me and is critical for the open web to survive.
Mozilla has proven to be really bad stewards, and as long as they exist nobody is going to pick up firefox. They've had many years to wake and up correct the course but choose not to, so it may be time to die. If Mozilla disappeared, a new organization could pick it up and run with it. If it weren't so overloaded in tech already, I might even call it "Phoenix" as it arose from the ashes of Firefox.
Since implementing EME, I'm not sure Firefox is critical for an open web, since by almost definition, EME isn't open. As a practical matter I can understand why they chose to implement it (though that was not without controversy), but let's not fool ourselves here.
that's an interesting point to consider. I wonder what would have happened had they not done it? Would it have accelerated the decline? Or would it have been enough to get services not to use DRM? I'm not sure, but I think FF may have just dropped to irrelevancy faster had they not done it.
Interesting that only 1 out of 17 people in the senior management group is a technologist, and she's a senior director. No VPE, no CTO. Says a lot about the organization's priorities.
The "planning" term should be read the same way as "estate planning" or "financial planning." They're a charity, so they have employees dedicated to ensuring a continuous stream of donations. For example, someone might pledge to give $X over the next 10 years, or to give a percentage of their estate to the foundation when they die.
This branch of the company is often called "development," but R&D organizations sometimes need to come up with different names because that term gets overloaded.
After Microsoft giving up on their rendering engine and joining the Chromium train I think the internet is in a perilous place. We're down to Blink, Gecko, and WebKit. Apple's monopoly on iOS browsers (soon to be undone) is unfortunately one of the last things keeping us from recreating the dark ages of IE's near monopoly on the market. I'd recommend at least supporting a non-Blink based browser like:
* Lunascape (actually has all 3 major engines built in. Great for web dev)
* Pale Moon - uses Goanna, a fork of Gecko
* Waterfox - focused on speed and privacy and compatible with Firefox addons
This sounds very much like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
The Mozilla board might be largely incompetent and/or corrupt, but they aren't actively trying to steal your data to profit from, and Firefox is still genuinely a less user-hostile product than Chrome.
Despite all this nonsense about the board, Firefox remains the best browser in my experience. It isn’t cramming an AI chatbot and coupon codes during checkout into my browser experience or working to eliminate ad blocking.
They also don't ban and lie about anti-tracking extensions like AdNausium (a data poisoning adblocker[0]). Chrome banned it from their store. As well as other extensions like Bypass Paywalls Clean. Ultimately the Firefox addon ecosystem is simply freer
AdNauseum situation was funny, you had Firefox endorsing it as a high quality ad blocker in a Mozilla press release, then Google bans it because they consider it malware.
Folks have raised concerns about Mozilla's funding from Google Search, but it's pretty clear from their past actions that they see supporting ad blocking as non-negotiable. Their diverging implementation of Manifest v3, while still incomplete (it's rapidly improving in 120, most of the remaining issues are related to Fenix support and Chrome parity), is thoughtfully designed to continue to provide familiar APIs for ad blocking.
The board of any startupy tech company focused on "innovation and changing the world" seem to be carbon copies of the fictional boards on the Silicon Valley satire show.
No. Instead of being a board with a critical interest in Firefox, and who will continually challenge management to do what's best for FF, you've got a rubber stamp board who, let's be real, couldn't care less about FF.
It's either that or they are referring to the board being useless against the CEO. Usually the board is the only group keeping a CEO in check. Honestly don't know from the tone of the comment though
While I have no idea about any of the aspects of Mitchell Baker's salary, I don't see this questioning of corporate CEO's. A generous reading might be that this is the salary required to avoid losing the CEO to some random VC selling useless widgets.
Looking at results since she got the job, maybe they should pay the money to such useless-widget company to poach her. I'm all for social enterprises but FF lost the plot.
I feel like it's not that high for a CEO salary at a mature compnay. Staff-level engineers are routinely paid upwards of 1M these days (yay inflation). 6M for a CEO doesn't sound unreasonable.
If these numbers sound high ... $1M today was $500K in 1996.
> Staff-level engineers are routinely paid upwards of 1M these days
Yeah, at successful high performing trillion dolar tech companies like Nvidia or Apple, not broke*ss underperforming companies like Mozilla.
>6M for a CEO doesn't sound unreasonable.
It's unreasonable when you take into account Mozilla's lack of performance over the years. Where is their success, other than being kept on life support by being bankrolled by Google who's doing it solely to avoid anti-trust litigations over their monopoly on the browser market.
In a way, this is actually harming Firefox, knowing that they'll always be funded no matter how their product performs, just so that Alphabet has a legal David to their Goliath, gives them little incentive to try to be competitive.
Performance of Firefox has steadily gotten worse lately. My bank's website has massive lag when scrolling (1 second to redraw? Great!), but it works perfectly fine in Chrome. Firefox also gets into a state where screen updates in Streeview are laggy after anywhere from a few hours to a couple of days, but I can't figure out a way to predictably reproduce it on demand. Meanwhile, Chrome is snappy all the time. I also have to manually enable one of the acceleration settings under Linux. The end result is that I'm forced to use Chrome more and more as the Firefox user experience just plain sucks in these scenarios.
This is probably much more your bank's fault than it is FF. I think Mozilla has badly neglected FF to the point they probably deserve to die so a new org can take their place, but the blame for that most likely falls at the feet of the bank for not testing on FF.
These websites also keep adding bloat on top of bloat, hell, a goddamn button is 56 layers of nested divs these days instead of just styling the shit out of <button>.
Or they do some batshit insane "polyfill" nonsense that turns the <button> into 56 layers of nested divs behind the hood.
HTML hasn't caught up either, there's no <toggle_switch> that invokes the native toggle switch that every OS already has, devs are forced to mimic the toggle with 85 layers of nested divs.
The point is that less and less people use Firefox, so there seems to be a problem with success in that area, even if you are someone who still uses it (as am I).
Even if it were "not that high" for a CEO, what would justify a 7x increase while things have been looking downhill for years?
If anything, the board should have gotten rid of her at this point and hired someone else, even if at this higher salary it would make more sense than sticking with someone who obviously hasn't been leading the company to growth or sustainability (since they are trending downards).
I want Firefox to not be on the brink. I have had no problems with it on Linux over the last few years since I switched from Chrome. I do not wish to touch Chrome with a ten-foot pole.
The one thing I miss from Chrome is the `thisisunsafe` feature to ignore whatever misconfiguration the webpage you're trying to access uses.
Recently, one of the dev servers that I tried to access misconfigured HSTS, which made it really difficult for Firefox to access the web UI. I fired up chromium, simply typed the magic word, and accessed it no problem.
Of course, ideally, there'd be no misconfigurations, but sometimes, I just need to access whatever dev server and I don't want to waste time on learning how to disable that particular security feature in Firefox temporarily.
While not recommended, and I would run firefox developer edition for that, you can disable (make the value false) `security.ssl.enable_ocsp_stapling` in `about:config`. You will be able to view sites with invalid certs/config. But will still prompt you that that something is invalid, and you have the choice to proceed forward.
Again, I would not recommend doing that on vanilla Firefox, they have Firefox developer edition version for these reasons. And you can run both side by side.
That's exactly the problem though. I know it's somehow possible, but the fact that I have to search for what's the internal boolean name for whatever feature I want to disable is simply a bad dev UX.
If there's a Firefox developer edition (I had no idea), they should enable all "I want to continue anyways" buttons by default. I mean, it's a developer edition!
> That's exactly the problem though. I know it's somehow possible, but the fact that I have to search for what's the internal boolean name for whatever feature I want to disable is simply a bad dev UX.
I think as a developer, searching for things are just part of the job, so if you have a niche need to debug or work with sites with invalid certs/configs, then it is not that hard to look on how to allow that. Firefox's docs are one of the best docs you can read to be fair.
> If there's a Firefox developer edition (I had no idea), they should enable all "I want to continue anyways" buttons by default. I mean, it's a developer edition!
To be honest, I use developer edition as my main browser and my profile is optimized and highly customized, so I don't remember is that was the default, or I changed it at some time (I keep it true).
But for vanilla Firefox which most of the users or potential users are not developers, I think this is reasonable default.
Compared to typing a nonstandard string in a nonstandard place? Going to about:config where all the deep settings are and searching for "ocsp" is downright obvious.
Not really... I don't even remember `about:config`. I know of its existence, but is it `config`, `:config`, or `about`, or ...?
So what I do is, I google, right? First page that comes up references how to fix the problem on both Firefox and Chromium-based browsers.
So on Firefox, I have to type the config page, then search for ocsp, then disable it. Then, I can finally access the webpage, but of course, I should remember to re-enable it after I'm done on the misconfigured server.
On Chrome, I can fire up an incognito window, type a magic keyword, do what I need, close the incognito window and go back to default.
Honestly, the latter is a vastly better experience in my world (I do backend/integration dev, mostly Python nowadays, probably a FE engineer will not care either way).
It might be this, it might be that, it might be all sorts of things. The point is you have to know what it is for each scenario, then you have to know where to go change it, then you have to know what the variable name is. Or you can know "thisisunsafe" which, while not being something you'll find using the settings for your saturday reading material, is something easily found and universally applicable to all situations without simultaneously turning every other connection you make into a security risk.
It's a great hidden feature just like Firefox has shift+right click/double right click opening the native context. No amount of "well you can just put this in the console in these cases or this in the console in those cases" makes these kinds of features any less useful.
Is it? The default options are for default users. Default users are dumb. It sounds like you have a non-standard case and the capacity to know the difference between misconfiguration and actual threats. It also makes sense that you are able to turn off certain features for default users when you want to do non-standard (default) tasks.
The biggest difference is a catch-all phrase vs feature-specific booleans. So rather than have one place for everything, you have multiple of booleans.
I agree that if there was at least one boolean to always show the "continue anyways" button, that'd be acceptable to me as well.
This drives me up a wall. I know the site. I trust the site. Yes, they screwed up something with their configuration or it's just ancient. I STILL WANT TO GO THERE!
Google finally beat my hands with a stick firmly enough to get me off Firefox.
It was youtube. Not the ads -- I pay for premium -- but the fact that on FF they added an artificial 5s page load delay on firefox plus a bug has lingered for months where it always loads the last video, so you have to load every video twice. 12s/video is too much delay.
Even besides the compromised morals, just the fact that they know and understand that Google is intentionally doing nefarious shit to make us switch to Chrome and they just went along with it.
I must just be a naturally defiant person, but in that situation, I would go far, FAR, out of my way to make sure I never let them "win" with that kind of bullshit tactic.
Compromised morals? WTF is the CEO of the Mozilla Foundation doing to earn $7M per year in salary? What about the Mozilla Foundation forcing out Brandon Eich because of a personal donation he made to a cause they didn't like?
Morals my ass!
I stopped using Firefox the day they kicked Brandon out and here's the kicker: I don't agree with the cause Brandon supported but I agree his employment shouldn't be affected by donations he made to support a ballot issue.
So yeah, the Mozilla Foundation can go straight to hell with that shit.
Brendan Eich was not forced out. He made the donation, he couldn't stand the heat of defending it, he left.
Also, personal donations can make you unfit for some positions. Significant parts of the community felt his donation was not in line with the values they wanted to see represented. And since you didn't agree with them you decided to leave.
Just to make sure I'm following along, we were talking about how youtube includes a delay of several seconds if it detects a certain ad blocking browser extension. Firefox has that browser extension, and therefore Mozilla is a "compromised organization."
You violated YouTube's T's & C's and you're complaining about Google putting you in timeout for doing so. You steal from YouTube's content creators yet present Mozilla as the good guys. Have I summed that up accurately?
Gecko being a mess for embedded use pre-dates the Eich affair and Baker's payday.
As for Mozilla being compromised - maybe, but it's still less compromised than advertisement companies, crypto companies, tax evaders, and their likes.
> Why do you support a crooked company like Google?
Get back with me when the Mozilla Foundation has done a fraction of what Google has done in furthering our knowledge of computer science. Other companies making significant contributions to our knowledge of computer science are AT&T, IBM, and Microsoft. Would you prefer them to Google?
Also, the Firefox against the world meme is juvenile.
Like I said, get back with me when the Mozilla Foundation has done a fraction of what Google has done in furthering our knowledge of computer science.
I would also consider which Big Tech company you're fighting. Last I looked, Google wasn't cited as the cause of a significant uptick in US teenagers committing suicide and being plagued with mental health issues. I could go on, but in the realm of Bad Actors in the land of Big Tech, Google is actually one of the least problematic entities.
What really moved me away from Firefox was using Brave search. I had been using DuckDuckGo since the Snowden leaks. When DuckDuckGo announced they would derank results if they thought it was Russian propaganda or disinformation, I moved to Brave search. A week or so later, I decided that Mozilla was too woke for my liking, and started using Brave's browser, too.
You seem to value integrity, are you aware that Brave browser replaced affiliate URLs with their own? So if you wanted to support someone and use their affiliate link they took the liberty to replace that. I wouldn't touch that spyware if I got paid.
Don't know, the pro LGBT stance of Mozilla/ Mozilla Foundation was not new in 2014 I believe.
So not having leadership with opposing view does not seem strange to me; donation was done privately but it end-up being public enough. There's enough hypocrisy and pink-washing ...
Might at times be at the detriment of Firefox but it's not like there is any alternative imo. So I don´t mind, it's not like if they remove their LGBT manifesto they suddenly will become relevant again and people will start to care about privacy.
Might be that LGBT people care more about privacy and that this manifesto will help them stay relevant.
And it's not like 2% is not a lot of people, TOR browser is certainly even less and it does not change the fact that I believe it's an highly important piece of software.
Hmm. Maybe I should try uBlock. I usually don't like adblockers -- both on principle, because I believe in paying for what I consume, and because they tend to subtly break a website and cause hours of headaches at least once a year -- but I don't like feeding the beast either. I'll look into this.
Adblockers are highly configurable, you can simply disable them selectively in cases where you want to “support” those that sell your data to the highest bidder, if that’s your jam..
Your former comment indicates that you care about page load times, in which case an adblocker will typically reduce both UI yank and certainly network usage, in case you’re constrained.
Last time an ad-blocker caused a multi-hour debugging debacle, that turned out to not be the case. It was preventing me from logging into my bank even when it was supposedly disabled.
I use Chrome for Google's sites (Gmail, Youtube, etc) and Firefox for everything else. On Chrome you can install Youtube as an "app". That makes it easy for me to keep YT up and running while using Firefox for general browsing. Definitely recommend trying this approach out!
It slows down my whole system when it tries to load a page in first boot (but librewolf doesn’t for some reason) the HID and webgl/webgpu support is bad…
It’s just not a very good browser compared to chrome forks or webkit based ones.
Same. About the only thing that's stable on F37. Updates to the kernel and other things have been giving me headaches, but FF and Steam are still solid.
I have been using Sway and Firefox for the last three years at least, and have never experienced crashes. Sway and Firefox as packaged by Debian Stable. I really wish people on HN threads complaining about Firefox bugs clearly stated 1) their environment, and 2) who packaged the Firefox, because those are what could make all the difference.
The bug depends on a few factors that aren't really packaging-specific.
A) the default socket buffer size B) the polling rate of your mouse C) whether there's anything on your system or in your firefox profile that can cause enough lag that the buffer overflows D) whether your compositor has any workarounds for that protocol limitation
Well, I suppose a packager could have disabled wayland in firefox...
I haven't used it super extensively with Wayland, but so far I've not experienced any crashes. To clarify, I've been using Firefox on Debian virtualized with QEMU on aarch64, and the compositor is Weston, so maybe there are quirks on other setups. Overall, it runs impressively.
I had the same after forcing Firefox to do hardware acceleration on my Nvidia GPU. Firefox wanted to disable it, but I wanted to use my GPU anyway. Perhaps try resetting the GPU acceleration configuration?
Firefox isn't as stable as I would like it to be, but it's much better than any Webkit alternative I can find on Linux.
I was running Firefox in Wayland just fine with my AMD Radeon 6650 XT but recently switched to an Nvidia 4060 Ti (16GB) and suddenly I started having crashes. I don't blame Firefox for this since other applications started giving me issues too (e.g. Dolphin and Discord). I place the blame squarely on Nvidia.
Nvidia's drivers suck but if you want to do AI stuff their cards are basically the only option until Intel and AMD complete ramping up their support for AI stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if two years from now AMD takes the crown with Intel being a close second (providing the best bang-for-the-buck) but for that to happen AMD needs to focus more on making actual implementations faster (e.g. PyTorch) and not just making minor incremental improvements to ROCm (and also make it so you don't need to use `amdgpu-install` to use it!).
Huh... I've exclusively used Firefox on Wayland for a long time now due to good fractional scaling support (unlike Chrome which took ages to stop using x11 by default). I agree that the webgl/webgpu support is bad but haven't seen the whole-system slowdown.
They know their average user in 2023 is not the type to be cognizant that they're even using a "web browser" when opening an app like Chrome. I think it's really up to geeks like we to install Firefox on our moms' computers and inform them on why they should try it. That's how I got my mom to try Firefox with ad blocking around 15 years ago; otherwise she either wouldn't have known about it or she might have thought ad blocking was something nefarious. We just can't act as if we build it then they will come.
I don't know if that's still true. I have no data, but just anecdotally, I'm pretty sure almost everyone knows what a web browser is and what an ad-blocker extension does nowadays.
Google cripples adblocker extensions because of high interest rate and investor unease over the stock. If FF's market share was 50%, they'd still try to cripple adblockers.
Once people start hitting two 30s unskippable ads on every song they want to listen to on YT, they'll start searching on how to fix that. FF could capitalize on this trend.
That's one of the side effects of aging engineers out of the industry so quickly. We've lost so many of the engineers who just lived through a crippling browser monoculture not much more than ten years ago.
And you see this all over the place, like microservices (The Network is the Computer, SOA, WebServices), WebAssembly (TIMI, P-Code, JVM, MSIL, PNaCL,...).
Lots of stuff that keeps happening because newer folks just don't have any clue of what came before, or why that fence is in the middle of the field.
Internet Explorer references are overall just stale. Most uses of the catchphrase "X is the new IE" are basically shorthand for "I personally don't like browser X".
Only because of iOS, I assume. But it looks like Apple might be forced to open things up and allow other browsers to run on iOS. If that happened, I'd expect Safari to drop like a stone.
And I hope Apple doesn't manipulate the "power usage" data that always claims Safari is the lowest-power best-battery-saver browser on their platform.
I run Safari on MacOS for only that reason, that it allegedly gives me an extra hour or so out of my laptop vs. Chrome or Firefox. Of course, I should actually benchmark myself and find out.
In my experience it depends somewhat on the sites/web apps one uses (some are not well optimized for WebKit), but Safari definitely tends to be easier on the battery. It seems to try harder to get to an idle state and keep CPU usage down where Chrome and Firefox are happy to keep the CPU spun up, perhaps due to a “speed and bells and whistles at all costs” mentality in development (traditionally browsers have been marketed on speed and features rather than efficiency).
Fixing weird bugs like not loading cookies for a ~minute whenever the app needs to launch (as opposed to restore from background) would be a win too [1]
I switched to Safari on iPhone because I was always logged out of stuff on first load, super annoying. I miss the syncing, but not that much.
No, that's not going to happen. Chrome replacing IE could happen only because of MSFT's strategical abandonment of their browser for sabotaging the web in favor of the Windows platform. Apple actually is well aware of this mistake and began to invest into Safari when it's clear that they cannot prevent 3rd party rendering engines forever.
Crazy thing is that I know a few Linux users that would love to have safari on our Linux machines for syncing.
Firefox on iOS is a horrible experience. My desktop I have switched to Vivaldi so I can easily sync tabs between desktop and phone. I don’t love Vivaldi but the overall experience is superior to Firefox on both.
Would prefer safari on my Linux desktop and use it on my phone
What's "only" about it? Smartphones gave everybody convenient internet access and thus increased the customer/user base enormously for everybody who publishes online. It's perfectly natural that the frontrunner in smartphones will have a huge chunk of the browser market.
If iOS allowed other browsers on the device (and I mean allow other browsers to run their own engines and not have to use Safari's engine under the hood - be first class citizens, just like Safari) then I doubt Safari would have such high numbers.
Maybe, maybe not. But there's nothing "only" about creating a massively popular way to browse the web. That Safari chunk will still be an iOS chunk. Device matters much more than browser for making web interfaces.
I always get downvoted for that, so it seems that Firefox supporters are subjective about their beloved browser, … and it doesn’t matter anymore whether I phrase it properly, since it will be shunned anyway, preventing Mozilla from actually recognizing their culture problem…
But Firefox has ads. It also has a lot of obnoxious browsing-interrupting interceptions saying that they care about our privacy. Which isn’t possibly true, because they also encourage, sometimes in the same page, to create a Mozilla profile… which gives them all required information to track us better - no matter whether they do it, gaining the ability to do it is pretty much a blank card to the NSA.
So thanks NSA and their Mozilla front and their downvoters on HN, have a safe imaginary trip to privacy!
Do you think that Google (part of PRISM, remember?) protects your privacy better by automatically linking your browsing data with your Google profile if you ever have the idea of logging in on a Google website before tweaking the settings?
And as far as I know, Mozilla can't access the key that encrypt Firefox profiles (as long as your profile password is not 123456). Didn't check the source code, but I guess that if they weren't doing that for real, someone would have spotted it already.
I don’t think Google does it better. But switching from Chrome to Firefox makes much less sense if Mozilla still performs advertising. And, least be said, fires a CEO for having made a private political donation one day, so it is not politically agnostic either.
You are correct that Mozilla has implemented profile encryption and it is believable. However, NSA has backdoors at every level, so having an account online isn’t really a good practice.
This article is like 6 years too late. The drop has happened, there's not really anything to base an "continuing free-fall" on. Even the articles own data show that Firefox usage has flatlined.
I know. That doesn't change that there is no basis for claiming that there is a "continuing free-fall" for firafox usage. I might fall further, under 2%. But free-fall is misrepresenting the usage data.
But their chart shows Firefox reaching above 3% usage in the past 12 months. It’s pretty consistent in the past few years being above that government support cut off. And that’s really just support. If people follow web standards Firefox will continue work.
I mean it has been a steady decline but parent comment was suggesting that Firefox is probably near the floor of their market share.
Every time I open Firefox on Linux, it does disk I/O for about two minutes before it is usable. No idea why.
On current Ubuntu, about once a day, Firefox stops accepting keyboard input. Sometimes right in the middle of a text box. Other windows still accept input. Restarting Firefox is usually necessary.
I've used Firefox on Debian for years. Boot time is perceptibly zero. Performance is on par with Chrome. And I can't remember it ever crashing except for maybe a tab crashing every now and then due to some errant Javascript.
I'm not sure anymore that "The Web" is worth saving anymore. I find myself browsing less and less original content. The content that dominates is polarized between Internet Hate Machines on one extreme and Corporate Astroturfing on the other.
A lot of the interesting people I follow are already using Gemini (though I remain unconvinced that that's a way forward).
Here's an idea on how to turn this ship in the right direction: get Musk interested in funding a project which will fork the code base, clean up the cruft - pocket etc. - and relaunch Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox. That is what a Phoenix is supposed to do after all, when the time has come to die it will burn to ashes from which it arises all new and fresh.
Why Musk? The choice seems clear as are the tangents to his other activities. He is one of the few "tech zillionaires" who does not kowtow to the demands of the censorious identity politics crowd which has instantly turned him from one of the darlings of "progressives" to "undesired person #1". He seems to have the drive to keep that crowd from dominating the 'net. Having all major browsers - Chrome, Safari, Edge and Firefox - under the control of that same crowd in one way or another is not conducive to the diversity of opinion on the 'net, the only type of diversity which really matters and yet the one type of diversity which is shunned by the aforementioned I.P. crowd.
What is needed is developers ("developers, developers, developers!" [1]), funding and mindshare. The latter is probably fairly easy to get given that there are many who are more than tired of all that identity politicking. Funding should not be that hard to arrange either given the way money is being thrown around. Developers who are versed in the Gecko code base and are willing to work for a project which explicitly states to be politically neutral - as in 'does not push any narrative' - is more of a question. If there is anyone here who works/worked at Mozilla who can shine a light on that it would be helpful. Do those who work/worked there actually support Baker's push towards politicising the Mozilla project while the flagship product - Firefox - is heading towards oblivion?
To the downvoters: tell us what you think instead of trying to get an opinion contrary to your own greyed out. Is it just that I mention undesirable person #1 which caught your ire, is it that you do not think a fork would be a good idea, is it because you do not agree that Mozilla has been abused by Baker? Discuss, do not just click that down-vote button.
People are probably turned off to the comment because of all the complaining about “identity politics”.
There also exists several forks of Firefox already. Suggesting the nth idealogical fork that will be funded out of the kindness of a billionaire’s heart doesn’t sound productive. Why not donate to Librewolf? Why must Musk actually have any involvement besides funding?
The "complaining about identity politics" is part of the core reason for creating a non-politicised fork which can take over where Firefox left at a ~32% market share, i.e. it can attempt to regain part of the market lost to Chrome and its many descendants. The reason for Musk to get involved (apart from funding) is to make sure the project remains politically neutral as that would be one of selling points when compared to the rest of the field. It would mean that this fork - let's call it Techiya, Hebrew for 'resurrection' and thus a fitting name for this project - explicitly stays out of the political quagmire which has swallowed Mozilla and deeply affects the way companies like Google (Chrome), Microsoft (Edge) and Apple (Safari) (re)act. It would focus on creating a competitive browser which can host a fully functional content blocker, which does not send oodles of tracking information to some mothership, which does not waste time promoting things like "racial justice" [1] but focuses on its core task of developing a solid alternative to the current Blink/Webkit-based almost-monoculture. Leave the politicking to others, not everything needs to be politicised.
Librewolf and Palemoon and Waterfox and the Tor Browser and the other Firefox forks do not have enough impact to survive by themselves without Firefox itself. They are projects focused on specific aspects - privacy, XPCOM/XUL extensions, plugins etc. If Firefox goes down so do these projects - maybe apart from Palemoon but that is only because that project already depends on a lot of older code which is no longer supported by Mozilla to enable it to run pre-Quantum extensions and plugins. What I'm philosophising about is a project which can take over where Mozilla left off, focused on creating and maintaining a viable alternative to the current Blink/WebKit hegemony and intent on gaining a sizeable market share.
No offense but nothing that Mozilla says about politics has had an effect on my experience with Firefox. Perhaps the Trillion dollar companies behind the phone duopoly, the Desktop OS with 80+% market share, and the search engine the world uses, leveraged their positions to advertise and promote their browsers to squeeze Firefox out of their 32% market share.
Like Linux, so what if Firefox only has a 5% market share? It does what I need to without having to deal with the nonsense of Google and Microsoft.
And frankly being “politically neutral” is itself a political stance. And Musk is far from impartial too. He too kowtows to dictators and bad faith politicians all the time. He takes strong explicit political positions that are not neutral. He doesn’t do the things that you would want him to do with this Firefox fork.
> nothing that Mozilla says about politics has had an effect on my experience with Firefox
It does, though. It may not be directly (apart from a few annoyances with their 'colours of change' propaganda) but the fact that Mozilla now spends a large fraction of its lavish funds on CEO remuneration and activism while the main product languishes on the back burner certainly has an effect.
With the funding Mozilla gets through mostly search engine deals - more than $600 million in 2021 [1], about $1.1 billion in assets - it has the financial wherewithal to push development much harder than it does. Instead of using these funds where it matters they have divested themselves off a large fraction of the development base and are still reducing their development budget while earnings are going up.
And despite that Firefox remains far and away the best browser experience. It’s almost like none of that actually matters because Chrome and Blink based browsers have taken over the world and both Google and Microsoft engage in similar activism and have 1,000 times the resources.
I can’t argue against a counterfactual. We might as well play what if games about Firefox having doubled market share instead and what that would look like with everyone complaining about browser engine monoculture with Brave and Edge using Gecko instead of Blink.
Complaining that diversity and inclusion initiatives and other political activism is holding Firefox back when Apple, Google, and Microsoft all do the same and have significantly higher market share and several orders of magnitude more money is silly. Firefox is the least bad browser and there is no evidence that promoting diversity and inclusion is harmful to its development. We can make a case that Firefox isn’t spending enough resources on political activism and that’s why it’s falling behind. Otherwise the reason Chrome is popular and Firefox isn’t is that sticking to the principles of privacy and security on the Internet holds back performance. And users have overwhelmingly voted that slightly better performance in loading websites is more important than any notion of browsing the web privately and securely.
> And despite that Firefox remains far and away the best browser experience
In many ways I agree and this is also why I use FF on both Linux as well as Android as my main browser.
As to the problem related to the low market share I suspect you already know the answer, no what-if games needed. Many developers no longer test their creations with Firefox because they deem its market share to be insignificant. I do not know if you were around in the dark days of yore when Internet Explorer was the main development target but that is where we're going. As it stands Blink is a capable and relatively flexible browser engine but that can change, e.g. with the introduction of Manifest 3 and later incarnations.
> Complaining that diversity and inclusion initiatives and other political activism is holding Firefox back when Apple, Google, and Microsoft all do the same and have significantly higher market share and several orders of magnitude more money is silly
It is exactly for this reason that a non-activist project is needed as I also referred to in my initial posting:
Having all major browsers - Chrome, Safari, Edge and Firefox - under the control of that same crowd in one way or another is not conducive to the diversity of opinion on the 'net
and
mindshare [...] is probably fairly easy to get given that there are many who are more than tired of all that identity politicking
> users have overwhelmingly voted that slightly better performance in loading websites is more important than any notion of browsing the web privately and securely
This sets a target for this hypothetical Techiya project: make the thing at least as fast as the competition while remaining at least as secure and privacy-respecting as current FF.
Seventy-one upvotes in the first 18 minutes for a story about a browser with < 10% usage. My fellow Mozillians (I worked there for four years) are wildly overrepresented among HN voters, which suggests that HN voters have a large contingent of tech veterans as opposed to startup coders. Meanwhile the other 30 stories most recently submitted, several of them excellent and on important topics, are getting 0, 1, or 2 upvotes.
So you really can’t rely on usage figures that don’t represent the truth of your situation.
[1] https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/blob/413b88689f3ca2a30b...
[2] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-now-ava...