> 1. In many ways Apple's anti-competitive behaviour on iOS/iPadOS is a blessing. It's one of the few things that keep Chromium's dominance in check. Of course, it's not great that Apple are stifling innovation like this, but consider the alternative: Chromium dominance on all platforms.
Whether they do have ulterior motives or not, the effect is that innovation is stifled.
Yes, I know the circumstances are different, but I do think it's ironic.
or it was just the typical double speak from Jobs until they were able to launch their walled garden. Anyone else remember when iPhone users were told they were holding the iPhone wrong during Antennagate? [0]
[0] https://www.engadget.com/2010-06-24-apple-responds-over-ipho...
>the effect is that innovation is stifled.
There's no such thing as PWA. There are several dozen of standards, and any combination of them is called PWAs by various people. And quite a few of those combinations work perfectly fine on Apple devices.
What's worse is that too many of those standards are extremely badly designed (service workers) or are pure Chrome-only "standards" rammed through standards bodies (Bluetooth, HID etc.).
They just don't get their cut from it, so, not a priority.
--- start quote ---
Talking about mobile phones and tablets, a Progressive Web App is installable with offline capabilities using the following browsers and app stores:
- iOS and iPadOS
Safari (since iOS 11.3), AppStore (since iOS/iPadOS 14, with some limitations), Mobile Configuration for enterprise distribution.
--- end quote ---
Sounds like you're setting a double standard when Apple also runs ads on their devices[0] as well as selling their user's private data[1]
[0] https://stevestreza.com/2020/02/17/ios-adware/
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2021/11/26/apple-italy-fine-user-d...
Anyone who claims those are equivalent to what is going on on the web is being dishonest.
Neither of the articles even claims that Apple was “selling user data”, so that’s a straight up lie.
I can’t help you if you are going to post links that don’t say what you claim they are saying.
Why did Spotify and Pax Labs make PWAs again?
Spotify creates native apps for everything. "PWA" aka the web player is there for devices that don't have a native app yet, and for embedding.
Remember that Apple doesn't allow other web browser engines in any application. Imagine if an Electron application on iOS just decided to ship with it's entire, own browser engine. We would have super-bloated apps like our desktops, and if a security flaw was found, good luck getting all those apps to update.
In a way, Apple knows that allowing other browser engines means:
1. Chromium-based browsers just increase their monopoly, Firefox continues stagnation by almost all odds
2. The Electron mess on our desktops will claim new territory on our phones and bring security problems with it
Not very appealing. Limiting competition? When your only realistic competition is Chrome with it's 80%+ dominance, I don't think a regulator would have a problem with that.
I'll admit, though, I'm in the "I really want native Mac apps" minority :)
People only really get active about bad divergence from expectations.
People do voice very positive opinions, but nobody really voices indifference.
Further, even extremely opinionated people are usually only opinionated about a few things. Most people are indifferent to most things.
Plus, security is somewhat less of a concern when the application only accesses a limited site and isn’t for general purpose browsing for untrusted sites.
But they can put those updates out whenever they want, so that doesn't go against the security argument at all.
It started as a Konqueror fork mostly because Jobs wanted a browser on OS X and Ken was initially tasked with it (back then the mac had IE for mac). One person writing a browser from scratch even back then seemed an impossible challenge so he took a look to see if he could use most of Konqueror as an initial starting base.
[0]: The book has some interesting stories, but I find it hard to recommend because it's weirdly written for an extremely non-technical audience (using grandma like analogies to explain basic concepts, the analogies are so basic they do more to obscure than explain - e.g. the filesystem is like a 'cabinet for files'). It doesn't often get into the weeds of the interesting technical details - which is disappointing since 90% of readers are probably technical. The stories in it are still good though and Ken has a lot of insight into the iPhone development story since he was there.
I disagree with this word gymnastics, it is Apple-ogism. It takes just a brief look at other decisions they've made to easily see that it is about user lock-in which fits in with their general philosophy. It is not great that they are stifling innovation at all, conflating it with browser dominance is a separate thing.
Apple sets the rules for its own products. Why didn't "open" win? Why for whatever reason is Apple still #1 in the mobile space?
Perhaps users agree with Apple.
I can write a browser using WXWebView that wastes battery outside the rendering code, and Apple won't stop me. I can write a maps application that wastes battery, and Apple won't stop me. But if I write a web rendering engine that wastes battery, I have crossed a line? A line that is so important not to cross that Apple won't even let me try to write a rendering engine that uses less battery than WXWebView? I cannot believe that anybody would buy that argument without marketing distorting their thoughts.
Ah yes. Everything can be explained by marketing, and marketing alone. Poor, poor Google, and Samsung, and so on, who are struggling to find the money and the power to make people buy Android phones through the power of marketing.
Perhaps, just perhaps, I'm going on a limb here, Apple actually makes a phone that people want?
Apple has been a marketing-driven company for decades now and is better at it than any other tech company by a country mile. It's why they bought Beats, not for their technology, but for their marketing prowess. The other companies you listed pick features that are better on their devices to market. Apple's marketing department figured out long ago that no such restriction is necessary.
Right now, in this very thread I see no such discussion.
> They are also worse for privacy
> They are worse for security
Worse than what?
> The shoe fits.
It doesn't fit, not really. It's gross incompetence and ignorance to explain everything by marketing and people being stupid.
Because what you're saying, is that a good chunk of people on HN are stupid and are "duped by marketing". That I am stupid and am duped by marketing. However, I've seen and tried the alternatives, and I found them lacking.
Look at the first comment you replied to. It's about how Apple restricts how you can browse the web for user lock in but has convinced people it is for the sake of their battery.
> Worse than what?
Worse than Pixels, Android One devices, and ChromeOS devices currently. There are several open source focused devices in the pipeline that have better security design than iOS devices as well but are not yet ready.
> That I am stupid and am duped by marketing.
I did not say you are stupid. I said that people are duped by marketing, and I gave examples. I even pointed out that technologists can be duped, and they are smart in the field they were duped in. Apple's marketing department is smart, and Apple's other employees are smart for supporting their efforts, though when they get caught parroting marketing talking points that are clearly false, it can be embarrassing.
Ah yes. That comment is obviously wrong, and your comment is obviously correct because you are right, and the other person is wrong. Is that how this works?
> Worse than Pixels, ... and ChromeOS devices currently.
So. Pixels and ChromeOS are made by Google. You know,
- 80% of Google's money comes from online advertising. And this advertising relies on far-reaching privacy invasive tracking
- Google's own employees admitted that they have no idea how to turn the various methods of tracking off. Among others location tracking is so intertwined in Google's products that it's impossible to turn it off at all
Yup. These devices are surely worse for privacy than iPhones which go as far as limit tracking at the OS level.
Can't attest to the devices current security. Given Android's spotty track record of updates, I wouldn't hold my breath for AndroidOne. Oh. And Pixel 3 which was released in the ancient times of exactly three years ago will no longer receive any updates. So yeah.
Meanwhile the iOS 15 which was released this September is available on iPhone SE from 5 years ago.
> There are several open source focused devices in the pipeline that have better ... but are not yet ready.
I yes. Imaginary non-existent phones. In that case I have a phone that's better than any of those, and better than iPhone, and better than Pixel 6. Care to buy one?
> I said that people are duped by marketing, and I gave examples.
No, you didn't. What you did, was make overly broad statements that are either pure speculation, or can be easily refuted.
Read my comment in the context of what it was responding to. You seem to have grossly misunderstood it.
> Yup. These devices are surely worse for privacy than iPhones which go as far as limit tracking at the OS level.
iOS devices do not support end-to-end encryption of message backups, do not support allowing a user to run apps on the device without telling Apple, and do not support getting a user's location without telling Apple. Despite what you may infer about each company's motives, each company's actual actions show a very clear difference in privacy on their devices. Apple is motivated to make money by any means it has available. If it can make money by charging users more for devices and violating their privacy by marketing their devices as being better for privacy, it will do so, and we can see that this is happening right now.
> Meanwhile the iOS 15 which was released this September is available on iPhone SE from 5 years ago.
So you admit an iPhone from 6 years ago is insecure. The fact that only recent devices from either vendor are secure is the same for both, so a user who cares about security will only use a recent device. The difference is that recent devices from Google are far more secure than recent devices from Apple.
> Imaginary non-existent phones.
I was just illustrating that there will be more options in the future. Apple knows about the security features offered by current and future devices but despite that hasn't tried to match those security features and instead contents itself with merely marketing security.
> No, you didn't.
Read my first post. You still haven't refuted it.
I've read the comment an the context. It says "that person is wrong, only my opinion on what Apple does its right"
> Despite what you may infer about each company's motives, each company's actual actions show a very clear difference in privacy on their devices.
Indeed it does. And Google is many magnitudes more invasive than Apple. Including, but not limited to "applications which have location tracking disabled can use location tracking information from another Google application" https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...
> So you admit an iPhone from 6 years ago is insecure. The fact that only recent devices from either vendor are secure is the same for both
It's emphatically not the same for both:
- Apple: support phones for up to five years.
- Google: supports its own "flagship phones" only for three years.
HN poster: see, they are the same.
> I was just illustrating that there will be more options in the future.
Once again: I'm not interested in fantasies and comparisons against non-existent phones.
> Read my first post. You still haven't refuted it.
I mean, your approach to argument is "I'm right just because I say is right", so nothing will dissuade you.
This is pointless. So, adieu.
Where does it say that? I'll repeat the context right here:
"> Right now, in this very thread I see no such discussion."
The context is that I was pointing out that there is a discussion about what you claimed there was no discussion about. Nowhere did I say that I'm right and they're wrong (though it remains the case that none of my points have been refuted).
> applications which have location tracking disabled can use location tracking information from another Google application
Google does this on iOS as well. In respect to what information applications can share on the server, there is no difference between iOS and Android. The privacy differences that do exist between the platforms are the ones I listed, where iOS does a lot of data collection that cannot be disabled, while Android has no such problem.
> HN poster: see, they are the same.
A user who cares about security only cares about which device provides usable security. None of the Apple devices do. All the Pixels that are receiving security updates do. The choice for a user who cares about security isn't between some five year old iOS devices that provide limited security and other five year old Android devices that provide limited security (worse system updates but better application updates) but between any iOS device (including recent ones) that provide limited security and recent Pixel devices that provide superior security. How long they continue to receive system updates (or application updates) beyond replacement time is meaningless.
> I mean, your approach to argument is "I'm right just because I say is right",
I provided reasons why the battery excuse doesn't make sense. Why do you keep pretending I haven't given any reasons?
Why would this be a believable excuse? you can install a Firefox skin of WebKit on iOS and this skin could maybe be terrible on battery usage. A good default browser like on laptops is good enough for battery, people who care about it will use Safari, the obvious reason Apple is doing this is to prevent competition, so if Apple fucks with WebGL then you can't have say a WebGL based mobile game that would go around the Apple Store.
I wish all phone manufacturers actually understood that
/me glances at my Pixel 3XL with 3430 mAh batt
I switched to a used iPhone and was bummed my 8+ had a "small" ~2400mah battery compared to my Android phone, which was 3100. Then I actually started using it. Even though the Android phone had an OLED screen, it would absolutely melt the battery.
I have so little "battery charge anxiety" now it's not even funny. I don't even bother to charge it above 80-85% most of the time...and the battery life estimator says the battery is down to 82% capacity.
If apple actually went up on their battery sizing they could easily achieve Monday to Friday battery life on something like the iPhone SE.
Current phone has 12GB of RAM which is a bit extreme given I rarely seem to use more than 6GB. More Sub $250 phones are creeping up to 6GB which makes for a nicer experience for those on tight budgets.
Now if only we could solve the lack of updates most Android phones experience.
Why people think Android=Pixel is beyond me.
So I don't buy any of the Apple's excuses when they actively cause anti-competitive harm.
The difference between the resources Google and Apple contribute to their respective open source browser engines is night and day, and as any web developer will know - it shows.
In an ideal world two things would change at the same time: Apple is forced to allow other browsers, and webkit gets some genuine love and decent resources to make it a legitimate competitor again, instead of being used as a pawn in a game between Apple and Google.
Google pushes out yet another half-baked, poorly considered new feature in Chrome and overnight has mobs chanting about Safari purportedly holding everyone back because of some close to irrelevant fringe thing.
Safari might just be the fastest browser, and it supports a ridiculous, awe-inspiring array of features and standards.
And the greatest indictment of the ridiculous anti-Safari smear is that no platform uses the browser more than iOS users do. iOS users always are over-represented in web usage compared to marketshare.
It's not necessary to talk about chromiums bleeding edge non-standard features, webkit easily has the least support for unopinionated standards released over the last decade and adopted by the other two.
> no platform uses the browser more than iOS users do. iOS users always are over-represented in web usage compared to marketshare.
What point are you trying to make here? iOS users have no choice but to use Safari. If you install firefox or chrome or anything that is a "browser" on an iOS device, it's forced to use Safari webengine underneath, so it's essentially safari with different UI, and this is apparent in the useragent string so any decent stats will show that essentially every iOS user == Safari user.
"What point are you trying to make here? iOS users have no choice but to use Safari."
Android users use the browser on their device -- any browser -- less than iOS users use their browser(s).
Read the Google corporate propaganda repeated on here, and other platforms provide a web bliss of PWAs, freed from app subservience. Only, not at all.
Can't harass users with notifications.
Safari can open a pdf up like a native webpage in a tab. Until one of the Android browsers can do this out of the box (without having to use a ridiculous fork of Firefox so I can install extensions Mozilla doesn't want me to and installing pdf.js extension to use their own project), it will always be the superior browser.
I have not seen such a great community on the internet before, so if you have any recommendations of forums like HN, it would be great!
Arguably it’s a result of having no competition on iOS.
From idb, webrtc, to scroll to viewheight, to performance issues Safari is the worst to deal with and this is reflected in all the developer surveys.
This is a bit like saying India has the smallest number of people in countries named China or India.
It's still an enormous number of features, and it is simply extraordinary what is capable in the browser.
"this is reflected in all the developer surveys"
Remember "Made for IE"? IE was dogshit, yet there were loads of devs who thought ActiveX was the bee's knees and having to deal with other browsers and platforms was just an annoyance in their lives.
Developer surveys on this are worthless, and if we listened to developers as a group it would be an entirely Windows world.
It breaks in every major version that’s been released. Simply talk to any developer who has to do a significant amount of work building apps in Safari and they will tell you the same thing.
The webkit team is talented and do great work but this is simply a result of a decade of underfunding and it’s just not possible for them to maintain a modern browser with their current resources.
"misguided impression that it’s a good browser"..."Simply talk to any developer"
Your experience as a developer, and you dealing with utterly trivial regressions or handicaps, has shockingly little bearing on whether it is a "good browser" or not.
Don't build "apps" in the browser. Period. It's shitty, underperforming, and breaks all user expectations, regardless of the browser it's running on.
I've yet to see a single app, PWA or not, that wasn't so. Unless it's just a re-skin of a simple website with text and images, and a few forms, but then it's just a website, and if you can't make it run on Safari, go find a different job.
I don't think that's true.
There were loads of devs that thought that ActiveX was the quickest route to the best experiences for the largest market segment and having to deal with other browsers and platforms was something the people signing paychecks cared less about, if at all.
Many developers would prefer a single, universal browser. A single platform. A single input mechanism (a single development language, compiler, RDBMS, filesystem, cloud provider, backup system, etc). All for obvious, practical reasons, at least in the short term.
That would be devastating for the future, but if it makes projects easier today, many developers are entirely onboard.
That was very much a dominant position among developers in the IE days. Other browsers were a nuisance, and maybe they should just be cut out entirely.
If Safari weren't such an important part of the market, Firefox would have been cut out long ago and we'd be awash in "Made For Chrome (and skinned Chrome)" badges. It is only the economic necessity of supporting iOS users that keeps cross browser development alive.
I don't usually resort to personalised dissection of post, but to be frank, you've taken a giant shit all over this subthread so I think it deserves it... this notion of yours seems to be the underlying theme of most all of your comments - that everyone here criticising webkit or Apple must be against browser diversity, be Google proponents, or not value stability, performance and privacy... We are not this caricature... It might be worth your while to take a second to reflect on that assumption and binary view of reality.
Thanks
I also support the stance that certain features should remain focused where they belong e.g. natively installed apps. But who can decide what should be a web standard and what shouldn't... it's hard to say. I think having a healthy governance and enforcement body is a prerequisite before we look at technical specifics.
https://developer.apple.com/safari/technology-preview/releas...
The vocal minority is a very tiny percentage of web developers who believe that whatever Chrome spits out is the bees knees, the modern standard, and all browsers must immediately have that.
If webkit was liberated from Apple I think it would ultimately benefit chromium as well.
Both Firefox and Safari consider them harmful in their current state and will not implement them.
They have not been declared standards by any standards body.
And yet, Chrome goes through a superficial standards-track-like process:
- implements them behind a feature flag
- publishes a draft of the standard
- asks other browser vendors for their position on "emerging standard". Example, https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/459
- ignores feedback, and enables by default (see link above)
- advertises as fait accompli (example, https://web.dev/hid-examples/)
- includes these APIs in standard web API counts https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence
- proceeds to gaslight other browser vendors as being too slow, holding back the web, holding back innovation etc. through dozens of talking heads with outsized influence (Alex Russel, Justin Fagnani, ... to many to list)
Apple's investment in safari/webkit goes up and down. They've actually made a lot of investments since 2019 or so. Probably less so for the previous 6 years before that. But again, webkit was very innovative in the early 2010s
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/
I’m a huge proponent of platforms aiming to be stable and largely not messing with shit but it has to be feature complete first.
for better or worse, Apple has been the single biggest driver towards privacy enhancement.
There's new headlines about this every few months.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/privacy-security/privacy-analysi...
https://www.howtogeek.com/756338/mozilla-says-chromes-latest...
There's also this:
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/04/latest-firefox-roll...
https://twitter.com/__jakub_g/status/1365400306767581185
And the top comment of the hacker news thread associated with that last link?
>My friend who works in an adtech company:
>"Protip: Use Firefox instead of Chrome. We get very little data from Firefox users"
Having your main competitor as your main customer is not a good position to be in for any company.
It's also fun to watch people complain about the Google situation and then, 10 seconds later, complain about "side projects" which are actual independent sources of revenue.
I don't envy the market dynamics of their situation. Selling FOSS is hard to begin with, and it's even harder in a market that is utterly commoditized by players 1000x larger than yourself, and it's even harder if your niche (privacy) rules out nearly every funding option apart from the search deals with Google.
Mozilla has had five fold increases in CEO compensation over the last fifteen years, as Firefox market share has gone down six fold. Firefox had ~30% market share in the mid 2000's, and now it has less than five percent market share. Safari has twice the market share Firefox does, by some metrics.
Mozilla has literally paid its CEOs fantastical salaries for driving the company into the ground.
Mitchell Baker made $2.5M in 2018 and now in 2021 she's making over $3M.
Mozilla laid of nearly 300 employees post pandemic because of declining revenue.
Being a browser company and seeing declining revenue during a period when damn near every tech company was printing money because everyone hopped online...that's a real special kind of incompetence.
Then there's the fact that Mozilla insists on having multiple offices in probably the most expensive real estate markets in the world. San Fran, Paris, Toronto, Portland? Not just that, but look at where the offices are. I'm not suggesting Mozilla move out to the burbs, but...the offices are dead-center downtown.
If Mozilla moved those offices about a mile or two from the city centers (or shut most of them down - there's no reason to have THREE west-coast offices, especially post-pandemic), and adjusted C-suite salaries to be indexed to growth, I think that would be a great "funding model."
I'm not sure this would go quite the way you think. The quick numbers I could find are $104 million in revenue for 2009 [1], $828 million in revenue for 2019 [2]. Your market share percentages sound about right, though (and is more relevant to the success of the mission.)
> Being a browser company and seeing declining revenue during a period when damn near every tech company was printing money because everyone hopped online...that's a real special kind of incompetence.
I would agree, if I were to completely ignore the existence of competition and all other forms of external reality. I mean, look at the size of the computer market these days. What were Cray, SGI, DEC, Commodore, etc thinking? They must have all been unbelievably incompetent!
Sure, the results are not good. It is perhaps true that you personally could have done far better. Maybe you should give it a try, in some other market where a little company called Google decides to move in on your territory.
> Mitchell Baker made $2.5M in 2018 and now in 2021 she's making over $3M.
She's CEO of a company with a revenue of $800M USD. What should the CEO's compensation be? Is $3M too high or too low? Personally, I honestly don't know. My perception is that CEOs are generally paid large sums of money until they're fired. Perhaps that's not the way it should be in an ideal world.
> Mozilla laid of nearly 300 employees post pandemic because of declining revenue.
Yeah, that sucks. It really sucks. (I work at Mozilla.) Though for the record, we're not post pandemic.
Still, when your burn rate is too high for your income, you have to do something. In some markets, it might make sense to go for broke: borrow to fund scaling, and pray a lot. In the browser market, that would be incredibly stupid. You can't crush your competitors with a $0 product and a compatibility moat that it is your mission to minimize, especially when your main competitor is many times your size.
> ...office rant...
Thanks to COVID, the offices are indeed getting pruned down. But you seem to place a lot of faith in your ability to armchair quarterback. Those offices provided value (partly as a result of their locations), they incurred costs, and people did the math on them. You can assume rank incompetence, but why?
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2009/f... [2] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2019/
By definition, Firefox is not a $0 product - it is a $500M product, the product name is called primary search engine placement and it has exactly one customer, that also happens to be its main competitor and archrival.
The very fact that user != customer is where most of Firefox problems stem from (IMO). Turning users into customers is a correct (and only) way for Firefox to become independent and achieve a position from which it can really deliver on its mission.
I may have been confused because I know some surprising things about how search ad revenue did at different points in the pandemic, so I overthought things. (I don't know if those numbers are public or not, so I won't be more specific.)
2) Invest your saved Google bucks,
3) After a few years you can drop Google for a decade or two and coast entirely on savings + investment income while being beholden to no-one. Maybe indefinitely, depending on how well it goes and how lean you keep your spending.
The alternative would have been putting all that extra staff to work on paid products that didn't suck and were in demand. Firefox could have built an open-source Slack alternative with optional, slick, easy-onboarding paid hosting, for instance. Not that big a stretch. And that's on the boring-and-safe side of things they might have done. Truly, they might have done anything worthwhile with the time and huge amounts of money they had, to gain future independence. Instead, they did... the stuff they did.
But then there would be no money for Mozilla's social justice initiatives.
10M Firefox users paying $50/year would yield same amount of revenue as 200M users monetized with a Google deal. Now, would 5% Firefox users convert to paid users is a different question. If not, then perhaps Firefox as a product (or as an idea) may not be as good. But I think they would, and even if the percentage is lower, it would at least set Firefox free. And that is a good position to be in for any company.
Opera was paid at one point, they lost the competition with free alternatives.
Paid browsers are a concept that has been and gone, and if Mozilla attempted to bring the idea back, it would probably be the stupidest decision Mozilla had ever made. They have made plenty of stupid decisions, but nothing so far has utterly destroyed their market share instantly, this would.
In the end, the funding model alone doesn't define how a company acts. It matters, and is certainly a threat to Mozilla's neutrality, but Mozilla tends to hire developers who care about thier mission, they tend towards openness in their processes. Both these things protect Mozilla from becoming a Google shill despite their funding process.
If Mozilla ever backed Google on the wrong decision, I trust that many Mozilla devs would push back - either internally or by going to the press, even if it cost their jobs. Being a particularly successful open source project tends to select for a certain kind of employee.
Apple devs don't have this advantage - Apple has a culture of secrecy (for prefectly understandable buisness reasons, they don't like leaks), this means Apple's decisions are much harder to monitor, and Apple devs are much less likely to fight internal decisions that hurt the web as a whole.
That said, Apple does have its own incentives to fight Google which are also legitimate - a more independent funding model, and an intense dislike within their internal culture of relying on external vendors for their software and apis. There's a reason Apple develop their own browser, their own compiler, their own dev environment, their own everything. There's a history to that, Apple have been bitten by externally controlled systems, so they are very unlikely to jump to Chrome, probably even moreso than Mozilla.
The point is, both Mozilla and Apple have good and bad elements to their continued position providing alternative browser engines, both are strong in their own ways, and we're vastly better off with the benefits of both than with just 1 of them, either would be a major loss.
The only way that works is if they abandoned the entire Firefox codebase and made another Chrome clone.
Even in their diminished state they still have 220 million monthly-active-users. With only 10 million, they'd have no leverage in the web standards groups, and no leverage with web developers. The Blink monoculture would be well and truly complete.
Plus I'd bet hard cash that even most HN readers wouldn't pay $50 a year for a web browser. Good luck finding 10 million.
I disagree. 50M people (including myself) already pay $12/mo ($144/year) for YouTube Premium [1], basically so they do not see the ads even though a completely free alternative is available. (this also tells us you need just one 'killer' feature)
And a browser, executed right, is arguably a much more valuable product. It is where we spend most of our day in. It is what we use to work and create value for companies we work at. So 10M people at $5/mo should not require such a stretch of imagination. The only question is is Firefox that good as a browser right now, and what would need to change?
Besides what is the alternative for Firefox? What good does its leverage in web standards group bring it? Even at the price of free, it is losing tens of millions of users every year and the death spiral of user attrition will drive its market share to the ground eventually. It clearly signals a need for a radical turn.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/2/22654318/youtube-50-millio...
This is a competitive market. There are reasonable alternatives. Cost to switch is low. Economics 101 (literally that class!) says that the price in that situation is going to be based on competition (for the companies/producers that survive), and the price of the competition is $0.
(It's actually not, you're paying with slightly less personal data for Firefox than the alternatives, and there are substantial externalities like the effects of monoculture, but none of that is going to change the big picture.)
Not only are you not going to get a critical mass of people willing to pay, but also those who are willing to pay will feel massively entitled, and will abandon your product when it changes in any way they don't like.
The only way to make it work would be to provide some value that cannot be replicated by competitors, in order to add switching costs and reduce the fidelity of alternatives. And for that to be relevant to Mozilla, it must also be compatible with the mission of an open web.
Good luck with that.
I believe I am arguing that we underestimate the willingness of people to part with their money when there is a right product.
> Cost to switch is low. Economics 101 (literally that class!) says that the price in that situation is going to be based on competition (for the companies/producers that survive), and the price of the competition is $0.
Not sure whether we live in different times, but isn't the same with YouTube? The cost to watch is $0, and you can even watch it ad-free for $0 with a free ad-blocker, yet 50 million people still choose to pay $12/mo for YouTube Premium.
>Not only are you not going to get a critical mass of people willing to pay,
I think you are speculating, so let me speculate as well. If Firefox does not make a radical turn, it will become irrelevant in 3-5 years.
> but also those who are willing to pay will feel massively entitled
With YT Premium, the one thing I request is that the one killer feature that I pay for (no ads) works reliably. So yes, I can agree that users will feel massively entitled to get what they paid for, but that is up to Firefox to define and control.
> The only way to make it work would be to provide some value that cannot be replicated by competitors
I agree! Firefox lost a lot of the product innovation and leadership mindset it had until roughly 2010-2011. Bringing that back would help (and the right business model could do it).
> And for that to be relevant to Mozilla, it must also be compatible with the mission of an open web.
How does making Google a default search engine in Firefox help that mission? Firefox should do it because it believes Google is the best default choice for their users and the open web, not because it gets paid to do it (if compatibility with its mission is what Firefox is striving for).
Yes, because de facto YouTube has no viable competitors, so I am not feeling that analogy.
If I want to watch YouTube videos specifically, I have to go to YouTube. People don't use YouTube because they necessarily like the experience of how YT does things, they use it because it has the content users want. Browsers aren't like that. Both Firefox and Chrome on a high level provide the exact same content.
Sidenote: adblockers and such are nice, but, as others have pointed out alread, non-tech savvy users won't bother. And the situation on mobile devices and smart TVs (which account for a growing percentage of YT consumption) have a pretty non-simple adblocker story (or non-existent, if we are talking about using native YT app on a mobile network).
Isn't that more about information asymmetry than value proposition?
Blocking YouTube ads with the appropriate add-ons for free isn't necessarily that well known, except among the tech savvy.
While some tech savvy folks may choose to pay rather than use such add-ons is one thing, but the "great unwashed masses" don't have information about such add-ons, perhaps encouraging them to purchase something they wouldn't purchase if there was more perfect information availability in the market.
I'm not claiming that's the case, but it seems a reasonable supposition.
An excellent point. I mostly watch YouTube on a computer with ad blockers, and I also have a DNS-based ad blocker (Pi-hole). And the combination does block many ads, but other add-ons are required to block the video window ads as well.
I don't use YouTube enough on non-general purpose computer devices enough to care about that. As such, I didn't consider that as a reason to pay for Premium.
Thanks for expanding my view on this!
That said, apparently ~42% of global users[0] block some ads.
Given that there are ~4.6Bn users[1], of which ~1.9Bn sometimes use ad blockers, some 2.7Bn users don't use ad blockers at all.
50 million (although that includes YouTube Music subscribers as well as YouTube Premium) subscribers is a little more than 1% of total users and ~2% of users who don't use ad blockers.
I'd also point out that nations with higher per-capita incomes tend to use ad blockers less, which implies (again, I'm not claiming this to be true) that they may be less knowledgeable about ad blocking technologies.
It's not clear what the global distribution of YouTube Premium subscribers looks like, but it's reasonable to think that those with higher (and presumably more disposable) incomes would be more likely to pay for such a subscription.
I don't have any data to back up my hypothesis, as I can't find any published research into the tech savvy of those who pay for YouTube Premium vs. those who don't.
Even more, just because the absolute numbers (50,000,00 subscribers which includes 30,000,000 YouTube Music, and 2+ or 7+ billion in revenue, depending on if you count the 30,000,000 YouTube Music subscribers) are large, given the total population, they are a tiny group.
How many people use add-ons to block youtube ads? Who knows? Possibly Google/Alphabet, but they certainly aren't going to talk about that.
I want to be crystal clear that I'm not saying you're wrong, but the idea that there's a lack of information driving subscriptions to get ad-free youtube is certainly a reasonable one.
Perhaps that's a good topic for a master's thesis in psychology? Since I'm not a marketer or a grad student in Psychology, that wouldn't be something I'd do. Hopefully someone will.
[0] https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users
[1] https://www.oberlo.com/blog/internet-statistics
Edit: Added the missing link.
A reasonable point. And I don't necessarily disagree.
Although "Video of stuff I want to look at" may be more compelling than "some icon I click to view the intarwebz," when they see essentially the same thing unless they take specific steps to block ads/tracking.
And that goes double for Android phone users.
My hypothesis was orthogonal to your thesis, but I agree that the data I outlined certainly supports yours.
They could build themselves to be the independent alternative to conglomerates.
They could be the alternative, offering services above and beyond the browser. I think their VPN service has been a modest success for them. I'd love for them to have moved into the same space as say, 1Password and other cloud based services of that nature. They are the independent 3rd party that works on all platforms. That is what I think their position could be. They're a trusted entity with known good track record of caring about privacy and their users, why wouldn't they move into markets where its a natural extension of this is a win?
And what does the world look like if Brave "wins" (meaning becoming Google size)? Still ads everywhere, just Brave gets to pick them.
Worth noting is that people would run ad-blockers even if all ads in the world are privacy-respecting. Users simply do not want ads on the web pages and eating the bandwidth.
> if Brave "wins" […] Still ads everywhere, just Brave gets to pick them
No, Google’s business model is gathering humanity’s largest hoard of data and monetizing that through targeted advertizing. Brave doesn’t show any of their most traditional ads unless the user explicitly opts in, and then it doesn’t come with comparable tracking.
I have what looks like a promotion for Crypto.com, Binance, Gemini and FTX.us in Brave browser, on default settings even though I never turned them on. For few of these I never heard and I certainly do not have any interest in crypto. Not sure why these would even belong in a web browser on default settings unless there is some kind of a deal/partnership going on?
Both Google and Brave have the same business model. They make money when a user clicks on an ad.
The execution may differ and maybe only because Brave is still new and relatively small and did not feel the same kind of shareholder pressure Google withstood for the last 20 years. That is why I said, imagine a world in which Brave "won". It would not be the same company it is now (compare Google from 2000 to Google today).
Brave Talk and Brave News are ad-funded as well but I haven't tried them so it's hard to say.
The referral code thing was a bug that got fixed - the intended function was Firefox Suggest-esque sponsored links from a local directory when you typed a word but not a complete url, eg. "binance". The bug was that it gave you a suggestion for complete, legit urls too (eg. "binance.us") and put the suggestion at the top. The bug was fixed to make the feature work as intended, and the feature is turned off by default.
I don't totally understand how people think Brave is against ad-tech, when it is very much an ad-tech company making money primarily from ads, and secondly from its crypto ownership in BAT.
Brave does a lot of user tracking, but it says it anonymizes it, which hopefully it does, but it still tracks all your behavior.
It is still a cool model, but very much ad-tech and ad-based.
As far as web ads go, a lot of people's objection to them is not seeing ads (though the ads themselves can obviously be very invasive and bothersome), but to things like tracking and fingerprinting, which the company is adamantly against. The attempt is to have ads, but also have privacy, which IMO is the correct move. It's not like we can run everything on subscriptions.
> Brave replaces the ads from the website with its own ads.
This is not exactly true. They have separate functions for an adblocker, an ad delivery system that's entirely separate from the websites you visit, and a tipping system for sending BAT to creators.
I'm not terribly fond of crypto, so I use Brave as essentially a degoogled Chromium with a built-in adblocker that won't get fucked over by Manifest v3 (since it's not an extension) and is available on mobile, and who run an independent end to end encrypted sync service. It's pretty nice.
An even better "funding model" would be a non-profit entity with no additional agenda beyond providing an anti-adtech browser to the world. I'm guessing that there are a lot of people who would donate their time and money to thwarting the overreach of adtech.
Also worth noting is that Firefox is not in the business of selling FOSS, it is (currently) in the business of selling primary search engine placement.
https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/components/t...
Or maybe it's because you can toss some money at Mozilla and they'll silently install a browser extension on behalf of an advertising company for a shitty TV show about a l33t haxx0r d00d?
By the way, the bugzilla report about that particular incident was locked, then made employee-only, then made public again...then restricted beyond employee-only...by a project manager...who used to work for advertising companies before she came over to Mozilla.
Or how about the fact that flipping on some of the anti-tracking features include munging the timezone, which means times in almost any website are wrong - which seems to be a poison pill to keep people from turning it on?
Edit with details regarding the extension controversy: https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robo...
Please point out how to personally identify a telemetry user.
I am a Firefox engineer who uses telemetry data, and know of no way to personally identify any of my users. Well, one way -- you can voluntarily put your email or other info into a crash report, though I know there was some talk of stripping that text field out because it's so rarely useful and touching any potential PII is like touching hot lava.
It shouldn't have happened in the first place so no one gets any points for taking it down immediately. The fact it doesn't seem to have happened again also earns no points because again it should never have happened in the first place. At no point should your web browser silently install an addon/extension without your permission. That this same web browser wants to trot around afterwards and prattle on about how secure and open they are makes it even worse.
about:telemetry shows you all that is collected and none of it is PII, a unique fingerprint maybe...
"Let's support a company that abuses its customers, developers and refuses to implement web standards just so a company that makes a far superior product doesn't gain more market share..."
I think their tone makes it relatively clear that this is not a healthy state to be in!
The Black Plague was terrible; but it lead to increased social mobility in the aftermath. Likewise, Apple's "one browser" policy is bad, but ironically it's the main thing stopping the other browser, Chrome, from becoming the one browser that dominates everything. I'm still against the one browser policy, as I am against the Black Plague, but a reasonable person can make these distinctions.
Apple customers are generally pretty happy with their hardware and software.
Brave also deserves a mention. As long as Brave exists in its current form, there will be a version of Chromium without Google’s “bad” stuff.
Ultimately they're inserting themselves in as the attention reseller - it's still an engagement/ad play dressed up a bit.
I really like what they've built, but I don't like how they're trying to monetize it. I think the ad/attention model is a corrupting influence on content quality generally, I can see what they're trying to do but I'd rather ad supported models just die. A browser completely focused on the user would just block ads and be done with it (imo).
Just let me pay for software that doesn't suck so our incentives are aligned. If you want a free ad-supported version for people unwilling to pay then fine.
It sure would, but here just as in many areas of tech, developer convenience is diametrically opposed to what's good for users.
A new one I found out is their supposedly open-source initiative called 'Cloud Information Model' [1]. Along with others such as Salesforce, Genesys and AWS (companies that I personally don't trust), they promise 'you can create seamless and tailored personal experiences across cloud-native applications'. It's all a bit vague and fancy and sufficiently "tech-y" to impress the marketing folks but colour me suspicious.
EDIT: forgot the link,
For WebKit that's the case.
[1] https://groups.google.com/g/mozilla.dev.embedding/c/c_NMcO-N...
That's what embedding a browser engine means.
> That doesn't mean Gecko can be used without all the extra parts in your app.
What extra parts?
Mozilla existing (and shipping spyware, just like Chrome) doesn't really do anything to stop any of that.
1% of german users had anonymised data sent over.
Edit: 1% is 1% too many if you have a company which claims to care about the privacy of their users. Especially since browsing history is very sensitive and easy to deanonymize.
That said Google and Microft both keep collecting your data despite backlash while Mozilla stopped once caught.
It could happen, but even if it were to happen, there would be a split from Blink in a very short time period because Google’s values and mission do not align with Apple’s values and mission.
Two things that I think are worth calling out:
1. In many ways Apple's anti-competitive behaviour on iOS/iPadOS is a blessing. It's one of the few things that keep Chromium's dominance in check. Of course, it's not great that Apple are stifling innovation like this, but consider the alternative: Chromium dominance on all platforms.
2. Why it's worth caring about this at all? So what if Chromium is the only engine, it would make things easier for developers after all. To this I say, go read some of the discussions in standard bodies(for example about FLoC). Engineers from Apple and Mozilla are largely our bastion against Google's harmful proposals for the web. Pushback from Apple and Mozilla are only relevant as long as they have market share to speak of. The recent lawsuit against Google(summary[0]) by many US states should be extremely worrying to anyone that cares about the open web and it should make handing over any more control to Google a terrifying prospect.
Mozilla maintains a list[1] of their positions on various standard suggestions that is also a useful resource.
0: https://twitter.com/fasterthanlime/status/145205393819534131...
1: https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/