Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

Re:Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years by lavabiopsy on Saturday September 11, 2021 @11:57PM (#28498527)

If you cared about this change a lot, to the point where if you didn't have it then it was going to lose you a lot of money, then yes, I would expect you to do all that. Am I wrong? It just seems in a lot of ways to be a sad case where no one wants to shelter the cost for this, it's either a money losing proposition for Mozilla, or it's a money losing proposition for the users, and nobody wants to be the first to pay it.

I'll also mention that only one person needs to create the build, once you do that then anyone else can run that build. That's usually how development works, and in fact this is already the gist of how Mozilla tests their unstable builds.

>the customisability is decreasing, more features are being removed than added

I can't agree with this, maybe the amount of visible settings in the preferences has been reduced, but currently there are a few thousand about:config options, and the number seems to keep growing.

>But they are also bleeding users, so something is clearly not working for them. And maybe, as the OP suggests it is because of changes that anger a minority of their users.

For many years I asked people why they were switching to Chrome and I got various answers, very few of them were because of something negative about another browser, and most of them were about what they liked about Chrome. That's just my personal anecdote. It also just seems to me that Mozilla is in a bad place where people say they drop Firefox because they like Chrome, so Mozilla switches gears to make it more like Chrome, and then people complain it's not unique enough anymore and it's missing some old non-Chrome feature. How could they possibly win here?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years by thayne on Sunday September 12, 2021 @12:41AM (#28498672)

Well I don't think it is possible to beat chrome by becoming chrome. They need something that chrome doesn't have. They seem to be focusing on privacy, but I don't think that is compelling enough for the general population, though I'll grant you customizability probably isn't either.

> but currently there are a few thousand about:config options, and the number seems to keep growing.

But those configurations are not very discoverable, not well documented, are in constant flux, and if you set them incorrectly can really mess up your browser (I speak from experience).

> I'll also mention that only one person needs to create the build, once you do that then anyone else can run that build

From my understanding, if I were to distribute my custom build I would also need to change all the firefox branding, since Mozilla has trademarks on it, which increases the effort even more.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years by lavabiopsy on Sunday September 12, 2021 @12:55AM (#28498728)

The problem with saying they need something Chrome doesn't have is that a lot of others seem to expect them to have feature parity with Chrome, both in the GUI, and in the backend rendering engine. I don't think it's economically feasible, it seems you can have one or the other but not both. Unless of course you're willing to outspend Google, which not even the very wealthy Microsoft wants to try to do (they dropped their own browsing engine and switched to Blink). To be clear what is on the table here: not keeping pace with Chrome means that some websites will just stop working in Firefox because some new web API is missing. So that's what you would be trading.

I think the huge number of about:config options is actually a major problem for Firefox, there is no possible way to test all those options and ensure they stay working forever and have zero regressions. You won't like this, but a lot of them probably need to be removed.

You would need to change the branding but I think some of the other Firefox modifications have systems in place to deal with that. If you ever need to do it, maybe it would be worth asking them.

[ Parent | on HN ]