Basically you can't create a revolution in tech by failing once and then trying harder the second time and it looks like Mozilla failed even while being better. The only way for Mozilla to win is (like linked article suggests) is to dominate somewhere else and then leverage that to push web browser. They won't do this and don't want to really.
PS: maybe they could buy/merge with other privacy oriented players in tech and create end-to-end privacy services that are usable, seemingly secure and integrated and then push this offering. But I can't see a big market today for this offer if it would exist.
PPS: also to add to less known evil moves by Google - their U2F websites refuse to work in Firefox, despite it supporting U2F for a long time.
Do people actually like AMP?
I hate it and strongly wish I could disable it for all Google search results. It's supposed to make pages load in more quickly, but for some reason they always seem to be slower for me.
Which makes me think it's just confirmation bias. They expect it to be faster, and so perceive it as faster. Just like when Windows Vista was presented to users as the new Windows 7 (only the branding was changed for the experiment), and they openly stated it was noticeably better/faster than Windows Vista.
Google is certainly capable of making mistakes, but I find it hard to believe they would invest so much into AMP without strong metrics to indicate that AMP pages load faster overall. And on a theoretical level, the explanations of why AMP should be faster also make sense.
The one that still sticks in my craw is that they never bothered to add support for Hangouts in Firefox. Hangouts was modified to use WebRTC in Chrome, but relied on a plugin in Firefox--despite Firefox actually implementing the relevant WebRTC features first.
I've maintained a timeline of Hangouts' WebRTC support (as part of my work to track the sunsetting of NPAPI plugins, other than Flash, in Firefox that blocked Win64):
I had to bookmark a Hangouts room URL though, which I think I opened from within GMail some time ago. If I try to just load hangouts.google.com, it won't work.
I won't even link to the discussion in Chrome's bugtracker, Chrome team didn't even test the change, apparently.
They also actively build "Chrome-only" websites.
The change broke a ton of neat, interesting games that are never going to be updated. And given Google's aggressive autoupdates, running an older version of Chrome to experience a specific old website is non-trivial.
The change signals a blatant disregard for preserving pieces of art, culture, and shared history.
Not by promoting google as better but by simply promoting a view of google-web and other-web.
This is one of Mozilla's problems: they constantly advertise privacy, etc. and while I agree their views in general, most users don't care. If you position yourself as the privacy respecting web browser, you will only ever get the tiny niche of people who care and everyone else who sees your marketing will just roll their eyes and makes jokes about tinfoil hats. That's not to say that Mozilla should do all the anti-competitive things Google does, just that they need to stop advertising themselves this way if they ever want to get any reasonable market share back (unless they want to be a niche browser for people who don't like Google, which is fine if that's all they want to do).
That being said, I don't see how any amount of marketing can fix Mozilla's problem for the same reasons the article pointed out.
I could see a similar approach working again. Mozilla could focus on user-centric features, while Chrome has to also serve the needs of Google's business interests.
I believe it was originally called Phoenix. Though you're right it was then called Firebird and renamed again to Firefox afterwards.
I think each time was due to trademark disputes?
Going to your point though, I hope you're right but I'm a bit more sceptical. Chromium, being open source, means anyone who doesn't like the stagnation of Chrome would just fork Blink and create their own modern browser while still enforcing the Chrome mono-culture.
I'd love to see Gecko take off in the same way kHTML, webkit and blink have done. In fact I'm surprised it hasn't. I don't suppose anyone more familiarity with the code base of these rendering engines are able to offer possible reasons why?
Not familiar with the code base of the engines, but one factor that distinguishes Gecko vs. the other engines is that Mozilla killed the ability to embed Gecko in other applications in 2011. Read about the detailed reasoning in this mailing list thread. [1] This effectively tied Gecko solely to Firefox, and has made using it with other applications or browser chrome (lowercase, not Chrome the browser) impossible (AFAIK). So it cannot take off like the other engines unless Mozilla puts in work to allow that to happen.
[1]: https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/mozilla.dev.embedd...
When Firefox decided to attack the problem of market share with engineering, 2 things were happening (almost) at the same time[1]: 1) the deprecation of the old add-on engine and 2) the introduction of the new Quantum engine.
For the 1), while I understand there are some reasons in doing so (it was not a stable API as it was always breaking the extensions and security-wise), I think these problems could be managed. On the other hand, there were lots of good add-on depended on this API.
Particularly, even when Firefox was behind technically-speaking, that was the main reason I used it. Firefox replaced the old API without offering all the new interfaces with the new API. So, I lost what made Firefox really unique.
For the 2), I think it was a consequence for the 1). Firefox was finally "better" with Quantum. Of course everyone likes a responsible browser, but I actually didn't see that much difference. And there was another browser which was already really good: Chrome.
Suddenly, there was no real advantage in using Firefox anymore. Someone my say privacy. But in some corners of the Internet, it's already impossible to navigate without some privacy-wise add-on/extension, which usually work on both browsers.
Added to these, if you go deep down, security-wise there are some real technical advantages in running Chrome instead of Firefox in some OSs. For instance:
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=152872551609819&w=2
[1] I'm pretty sure a lot of other things were happening, but I'm in the perspective of the user here.
Same here. The only difference I noticed was startup speed when restoring 200+ tabs; that was indeed far faster in Quantum, but I never noticed any other speed improvements. And it was something I only encountered once every couple of weeks anyway.
But the majority of users rarely open more than a few.
Firefox will need to continue iterate, until it is as fast or even faster in every corner.
(I do use The Great Discarder, but did so before switching to Firefox, too.)
One big aspect of traditional web is searching, and that's where Google built their empire originally. Why not invert that equation and build search and discoverability into federated platforms. Perhaps extend ActivityPub, or create a sister protocol that focuses on searching. This approach would address the problem of discoverability much better than an external search engine. Perhaps Mozilla could help come up with such a standard.
Looking at the Financial Report for 2017 https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-fdn-201...
it seems that the the vast majority of Mozilla revenue is from Royalties ($539M out of $562M). In addition in the report there is a statement to the effect that 93% of Royalties were from search engine deals. We know that Mozilla entered into a search engine deal with Google at the end of 2017.
It looks like that the vast majority of Mozilla's revenue is from Google and will be for the next several years at least. It will be interesting to see Mozilla positioning themselves in opposition to Google when Google provides the vast majority of their revenue.
Thanks for commenting in the open from Mozilla's perspective, even if its just one voice, it's much appreciated.
I agree that Firefox will remain an attraction to the group of people caring about openness, standards, and their privacy. My deepest concern is on how small that group is going to be. Will it settle at the current ~10%, or will it be as low as 5%, which I consider very dangerous grounds to be in.
As for Google's abuse of market power, I strongly believe it has already happened, in plain view. There's no doubt in my mind that dominance in one market has been used to capture another market. We don't have to wait for that "mistake", it has already happened.
These abuses are already under investigation, but I'm afraid it won't change the outcome. They'll pay some fine in a few years, but none of the browsers will be uninstalled.
It won't matter much, but added an update to the top of the article suggesting people to install Firefox.
> When that happens, Mozilla will be well-positioned as an alternative.
I hope you're right, but my main concern is that this could be a war of attrition: Google has such deep pockets that they can simply play nice, all the while testing the limits of what users will accept, until Mozilla taps out. And once that happens, all bets are off.
However, that made me think about Brave (https://brave.com/). What are your thoughts about it? It's also privacy oriented, but it's actually built on top of Chromium. What is even more interesting, Brave was founded by Brendan Eich (the co-founder of Mozilla).
Is this what you're against, or has Brave done something else that deserves being dismissive of them?
Without hitting a paywall that can't be worked around, hell will freeze over before that happens ;-)
Brave adds wealth by pricing users back in from the start (via a genesis block of tokens we give to users and referring creators), and by blocking inefficient, dangerous intermediaries (cut out the middlemen, as Marx said) for a much more efficient market.
Those intermediaries are the _grands rentiers_ today, and yet all but Google, Facebook, Criteo, Amazon, and a few others are dying. Ad/tracker-blocking is a user right but it alone cannot explain the walking death of most intermediaries in the Lumascape.
Rather, too many intermediaries arbitrage and abuse data. This induces not only the ongoing rise of ad/tracker blocking by users -- it cuts off residual revenue to publishers (who make <40% off of programmatic ads in practice, sometimes <20%), who also want fewer hands in the till. Arbitrage always goes away (till next opportunity). The data misuse causes ongoing rifts and scandals. GDPR and laws like it are icing on the cake.
If you are party to the existing Lumascape of ad-tech vendors, your post is projection and I suggest looking honestly in a mirror to see "rent-seeking". If you're calling Brave rent-seeking out of some irrational animus, take a closer look at the product itself, and let's reason together.
I don’t really love the browser and wish the Brave protocol was available for Firefox, but hopefully we can get there sometime in the future.
In the end though, I don't think we'll see a shift to people paying for their content. Societal problems arising from lack of privacy is one of those high-impact-low-probability-or-slow-to-come risks that the public is so bad at handling for their greater aggregate benefit.
To really see a change, if Brave has done their part, what'd be missing would be a general public education program that would better inform the public of what the risks are and what can be done about it. Something like Smokey Bear.
This feels like a false dilemma to me. Many, if not most, of the corners of the web that are devoted to disseminating knowledge are funded by means that don't involve tracking ads.
It's the entertainment corner of the web - social media, yes, but I include listicle-oriented versions of journalism here, too - that seems to be the primary engine of all this surveillance capitalism.
It's no coincidence that they also have a tendency to actively exploit the parts of human psychology that make us susceptible to addiction. Which means that, while it's true that they don't charge an up-front fee, their products do still come at a price.
EDIT: Thought of one: YouTube. I wonder, though, if the content providers I've learned most from in YouTube would have chosen not to provide if there weren't advertising options. Maybe they activate advertising because it's easy and would have uploaded regardless?
EDIT 2: The real question, though, would be if someone would be willing to make a YouTube alternative and eat the cost of development and maintenance of the site and hosting of those videos for altruistic reasons... It's a lot more costly than hosting a site that serves lightweight text.
I'll even click on those ads if I'm interested (crazy, right?), which is something I scrupulously avoid doing for ads that I suspect are fueled by tracking.
Yeah, but I get the feeling that it didn't start with the purpose of advertising. Haven't really looked into its history to know for sure, though.
> I'm not really opposed to topical advertising. And I'm not even particularly opposed to targeting. Showing ads for Databricks alongside a Stack Overflow question about Apache Spark is fine by me (just so long as it isn't a popup or an auto-playing video). That's no creepier than advertising car stuff in a car magazine.
I wouldn't be opposed to tracking if that's all it ever amounted to, either. In fact, your example doesn't seem to involve tracking. Deciding what to show based on the content of the page doesn't imply using any knowledge of you from other sources.
EDIT: Anyway, what's worrying of tracking is that it makes the buying and selling of personal information a viable and profitable business. It's not worrying if you think that such a business can only be used for showing ads you're interested in everywhere you go. In fact, that's a benefit to anybody, and that's what makes it a good public justification for it by the companies that do this tracking.
However, that's not the only way people can apply your personal information. For example, businesses can also use it to personalize the prices for the products and services they offer based on indicators they bought of your purchasing power. Insurance companies can use a lot more than indicators of your purchasing power to know how to quote you, probably getting their hands on knowledge that by law they probably shouldn't be able to get their hands on to avoid unfair discrimination. There's regulations of what businesses can ask of employee candidates to avoid unfair discrimination, but they won't need to ask anymore if they can just buy the info online.
If not, how can be anything based on webkit considered to be safe, privacy oriented etc?
Anyway, in general my line is that all "modern browsers" must die, because browsers should be browsers, not "platforms" and websites should be hypertext, not application... I really dream a modern Plan9 even if I know nobody with enough competence, time and money to develop something like that exists today. I only can hope that a scandal and a disaster at a time we start to be tired, damaged and threatened enough that we support something like GNU/FSF to a level that produce free software and open hardware can be done by a community for the community itself... Well... A bit utopic...
Do you know the history of Blink? It was forked from Webkit, which was forked from KDE's KHTML and remained open source all the way. So you argument also explains to Blink.
At that time, there was still a hot three-way race between Chrome, Firefox, and IE. But Mozilla made a misstep: they decided that, to compete with Chrome, they would adopt a new "Rapid Release" model. This resulted in a massively pissed-off base of former supporters and articles like "Rapid-release Firefox meets corporate backlash" [1] and "Understanding the Corporate Impact" [2]. There were multiple discussions with titles like, "Mozilla Executive: We're Not Interested In Enterprise Level Users", and it was still going on a year later with, "Everybody Hates Firefox Updates" [3].
People have been conditioned now to accept frequent updates, and -- years later -- the browser vendors have mostly stopped reskinning their interface every other release. But that wasn't the situation at the time, and so Firefox gave up their one competitive advantage over Chrome, and leveled the playing field in Chrome's favor.
Mozilla could have instead embraced that big, loyal enterprise base, and found a sane middle road for updates that allowed them to keep a healthy release schedule for DOM, JS, and CSS support. But, they didn't.
So all of that good will that Mozilla had fostered over the years just evaporated, and Mozilla never looked back.
(It didn't help that, just after alienating their enterprise user base, Mozilla also kicked off some drama with a developer [5].)
This falls into that category of mistakes-that-kill-your-business-years-later, alongside other case studies like Sears and RadioShack.
[1]: https://www.cnet.com/news/rapid-release-firefox-meets-corpor...
[2]: https://mike.kaply.com/2011/06/23/understanding-the-corporat...
[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2692205
They did recently. They force signed and associated every user to the Chrome identity, thereby linking everything users do in the web to their Google ID. Nobody seems to have bothered.
Honestly, the only reason I use Firefox is because it supports vertical tabs and Chrome doesn't. Maybe you should start advertising features that are more immediately visible than privacy.
I don’t like Chrome’s dominance either, but what do you want me to do if your browser does not support a feature I use everyday, multiple times a day (and that was there but was removed, back in version 3)? You’re giving me a browser that is useless for my needs, so I can’t use it.
You bet I’m thinking of leaving Chrome behind (and will likely do so once I make a clean install to Mojave, that should happen soon) but my only real alternative is Safari. I’d rather that alternative be Firefox, but it isn’t. I rely on browser AppleScript control so heavily, I’d sooner stop using a web browser than switch to Firefox.
And if you think I’m alone in that, there’s a chunk of the macOS automators community you’re not visiting. We build our tools with support for major browsers (and some minor) but never Firefox, because it can’t do it. We don’t even mention it anymore. If someone asks why our tools don’t work on Firefox, we answer that it’s because you don’t support the necessary feature. The number of people asking is lower every year.
Every time there’s a Firefox thread on HN, you see the same complaints from macOS users: poor performance, missing features (I’ve seen lackluster Keychain support also mentioned).
Give me a browser I can use, and I will.
P.S.: Even if I could code enough to add what I need, it’s not even clear to me from your bug tracker if you’d take the addition. Last I looked, I couldn’t even decipher if AppleScript support is something desirable or not.
Servo/Quantum is cool, but it seems to be too late for that. I'm worried that Mozilla is simply in denial about this and when reality sets in course correction will be significantly more painful.
This matters because, on-the-whole, Mozilla's dev teams tend to be much better at writing standards than Google's are; partially because many of the standards Chromium focuses on are prioritized and developed with the intention of being helpful to Google's long-term strategies. There have been multiple instances (html imports spring to mind) where bad decisions were averted purely because Mozilla had the guts to say, "we're not putting that in Firefox, come back when you have a better proposal."
Yes, Chromium is Open Source, but Open Source isn't magic. It's still very much a Google product, designed to increase Google's overall influence over the direction of the web. Unless Mozilla's plan is to literally fork Blink, then having a primarily for-profit mono-culture in charge of what features get fast-tracked and prioritized for browsers is still incredibly harmful.
Would it be worthwhile to make a fork over HTML imports? Suppose that in a mono-engine world Google decides to build AMP directly into the browser rather than on top of Javascript -- would that be a big enough issue to make a fork? I was (like many people) fairly disappointed about Web DRM, but I was happy that Firefox was at least planning to put some additional sandboxing above what Chromium was doing. Would they have forked a codebase just to introduce that extra sandboxing?
You're right that Open Source does allow us to reverse course and fork Blink later if something terrible happens. Remember though, the moment that someone like Mozilla or Microsoft makes a fork, at that point they're back to the same situation that they're in right now -- even worse, because they're stuck using a codebase that wasn't architectured specifically to meet their goals. That provides a big incentive to wait as long as possible before deciding, "heck it, we'll build our own engine."
What I would suggest is that there are at this moment already at least minor organizational issues within Chromium, and there are currently benefits to having multiple browser engines. We could give up those benefits and get them back later if stuff got really bad. But it would mean waiting until things got really bad; and ignoring all of the tiny, daily decisions before that point that go in to setting the direction of the web.
Remember that the web isn't supposed to break backwards compatibility. If you don't get things right the first time, there isn't a second chance to change them.
And actually it is better for innovation not to use to Blink. WebRender is potentially much more performant than any other engine and it would never had existed if Mozilla were just aligning with Blink
It's not like the other Blink or Chrome based browsers are doing great, sure Brave and Vivaldi is getting some press, but they have even less users than Firefox.
Sadly Firefox isn't peoples mind anymore when they think browser. It's IE all over again, but with Chrome, Only Chrome is moving forward. I don't know if there's anything Firefox can do, other than marketing. It's currently the best browser out there, but that was the case when IE6 dominated the web as well.
Firefox doesn't need to dominate, but hitting some like 20% market share would be fantastic.
This isn't directly relevant in the larger context of this thread, but Firefox's sharp drop—even after the introduction of Quantum, which I've found to be a big improvement—is what makes their situation much more scary to me.
Perhaps if it ever comes to that, people will look to an alternative means (than the web) of accessing documents and code.
Eventually, Google will do something that is an abuse of their monopoly power. Either there will eventually be a privacy/creepiness fiasco, or Google will attempt to use Chrome as leverage to squeeze a competitor out of a market.
When that happens, Mozilla will be well-positioned as an alternative. The path forward in this view would look more like Mozilla as a constellation of disaffected companies and users attempting to free themselves from Google. It won't look like Mozilla on the side doing something by itself. We will largely be defined in opposition to Google.
The article correctly points out that a wiser Microsoft could have gotten a head-start on this inevitability by partnering with us early.