https://itdm.com/mozilla-firefox-usage-down-85-but-why-are-e...

> In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to." [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker

I'm a firefox user for over 10 years. I think I'm now convinced there is no future, I'll have to start to adapt to another browser now. I'll give Vivaldi a try.

Its going to sound harsh, but they are loosing market share to browsers that didn't have to invent a new language to write a browser in.

So, getting rid of those people was probably a positive impact for firefox since they were mostly just yak shaving instead of actually improving the end product. The users don't care if you wrote it in C++ or fortran as long as it performs well, doesn't eat all their ram, or create giant backdoors.

Letting "the lets rewrite our core product in $COOL_TECH_OF_MONTH" people run a product is a sure sign of something that will fail if its not already. Lets invent our own computer language to do it is even worse.

Firefox keeps losing on technical merit because it is fundamentally impossible to keep up with Webkit and Blink, which are all backed by massive corporations and are throwing money at the engineering and project resources to actually move things forward.

Although they are experimenting with Rust, it doesn't seem they will ever adopt it.

In the short term, yes. In the long term however, this strategy could have been crucial. And the long term is precisely where open source software usually has the upper hand.

Web site users don't care if a site's written with NodeJS or assembly; but that would make a huge difference to bugginess, development speed, feature set, etc.

Firefox is getting bogged-down in some areas due to its C++ codebase; especially trying to introduce concurrency (in a way which doesn't break everything, or cause unforeseen security implications, which is often the case in C/C++)

Using memory safe languages is a big step towards this goal.

Seat of the pants, I would say getting something like rust on par with g++/clang code generation, and 3rd party tools is probably in the same ballpark engineering wise as actually maintaining the browser.

And if you spend a little time looking at firefox, there is/was a lot of low hanging fruit. I've mentioned elsewhere the difficultly building it, but even more than that, is that pretty much every single version of gcc that came out for a while would break firefox in some fundamental ways. And overwhelmingly these breaks were caused by crappy C++ programming where people were doing things that were known not to be syntactically correct but no one bothered to fix them. Then frequently instead of actually fixing them they did things like switch from building with an old GCC to a newer clang because it threw fewer errors. Then they claimed that the result was "faster" than gcc, despite the fact they were comparing an old version of GCC with a newer version clang. When the work was done to actually get it to build with gcc, it turned out to be even faster. (not that gcc is better than clang, only that ideally a project like firefox would compile cleanly with a wide range of compilers). Said compiler warnings are frequently valid, and analyzing them at least to know if its true is a worthwhile code quality exercise.

Or XUL wasn’t packaged as cross platform GUI framework.

And then of course the Firefox mobile fiasco.

My guess is that the engineering and management don’t interact. Two different companies within the same company, no coherent vision.

Switch apps? Tabs get reloaded when you're back.

Lock & unlock phone with Firefox in focus? Tabs get reloaded

Switch tabs in Firefox? Tabs get reloaded...

I wish I was just ranting, but all of the above happens with a single active tab loaded...

Here's the issue itself on GitHub: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/12731

The one thing I really miss in FF mobile is the opposite.. Pull to refresh or another gesture that accomplishes that. The current two tap option is too slow.

I agree they probably didn't need to invent rust: that was an happy accident, the kind of things that happen when you have really smart people around. If they had a money making accident we would be talking about something else, but I guess they would need a different type of culture for that to happen.

This is not how you run a company and it shows. It's impressive Mozilla is still around if you ask me - but I suspect it has to do with Google, M$ needing someone easily controllable to keep the anti monopoly government people away from browsers.

Firefox is owned by the Mozilla foundation, the corp is only there to help develop it since having developers work directly for the foundation is apparently complicated. Non-profit foundations don't need to find ways to make money with their core product and they should not try to - instead they can seek funding elsewhere, for example from donations and government grants.

But it did push them over the edge IMO. They're behaving like a corporation now, with a CEO pulling as much money as they can, too much PR etc. Through the Google deal they have become what they were fighting. But they're not very good at it, hence the low marketshare.

Focusing on the mainstream user at this point will not help as they're already so far gone they don't even remember the name Firefox anymore.

They should focus first on making it and excellent browser for the users that still care. Then word of mouth will bring it back to the mainstream as it did the first time.

It's more that they're removing not-Chromey bits, not adding the Chromey bits, and removing Firefoxy bits like search keywords via bookmarks and the like.

In place of "We're listening", users that complained got a "Works fine on my machine" bundled with a few rude words in places like Reddit. Not the core teams fault, of course.

Someone with more time can probably set up a scientific test of the performance claim even today - set up a bunch of Selenium tests to open JS-heavy sites in multiple tabs on older versions of FF upto current version using BrowserStack or SauceLabs.

I mean to this day (and i just tossed off a firefox build yesterday to see if most of what I was saying is still true), the firefox maintainers can't even be bothered to fix the tens of thousands of warnings that appear when built certain ways. That is a really low bar to cross with a C++ project, and they haven't even bothered. I've worked on projects where we had a recommended compiler, but we always spent some time assuring that the project appeared to work with the latest gcc/icc/whatever, because at some point those newer compilers would become the defaults, and also because they frequently pointed out issues in the code. Its just a cheap way to fix undefined behavior bugs.

So, I think the only answer to that is yes, that long stretch before they dropped the rust code was wasted time/effort.

Seems silly, I see no valid reason to switch browsers. What technical or functional limitations are you running into that didnt exist earlier?

If Firefox goes the rest of the way down the tubes, I'll try Edge before I go Vivaldi again.

Any replacement CEO is going to be thinking, I'm trying to beat Google, Apple and Microsoft on a tiny budget and if I dont succeed people will blame me personally for it all, complain about me online and claim that no one else should employ me. That's a gamble for anyone coming in who has better options and so attacks on the CEO for being a failure only help to create a moat and increase her bargaining power.

Maybe Brendan Eich can come back? Do a Steve Jobs, take back the project and make it into what it was meant to be, primus inter pares among browsers.

And if we want to get conspiratorial, If she thinks her main job is getting the most money out of the Google deal, then Google would be more than happy to pretend shes doing great in the negotiations and pay 5m extra.

The sooner Mozilla loses its dev culture and talent the more power Google has.

> By 2020, her salary had risen to over $3 million. In the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic.

Yikes, makes me also consider just switching off it again

Brave is the most non-google chromium variant, kind of like a Firefox based on chromium, and safari is still a good browser on Mac

I don't trust Vivaldi either to be honest

I can't do much worse than losing 85% market share.

If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.

The passion they need is a lot harder.

Japanese CEO salaries in general seem to be below USD1m on average.

I'm genuinely curious: Do you not see how insane it is that you believe this is low? Earning even a tenth of that would be stratospherically high.

Paying more doesn't get rid of the risk, so yes do the version that has risk but without the bonfire of cash.

This is not arrogance. This is simply the pay of a CEO, regardless of their performance.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/31/ibm-was-worst-performing-lar...

[2] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-01-31/ginni-rome...

[3] https://www.silicon.co.uk/workspace/ibm-ginni-rometty-20m-33...

There are hundreds of thousands of individuals capable of doing these jobs making nowhere near as much - plenty of them would do it better.

The difference between 0.2 million and 2 million for a board of directors is literally a rounding error.

You have a social responsibility to take care of the people working below you, which as a CEO is everyone. If you fire them and give yourself a raise, perhaps it is not arrogance but it definitely is gross negligence. No amount of "this is simply the market value" corporate doublespeak is going to change the fact that doing so takes you further and further from being an actual human being. Perhaps this is okay with you, but I think it should be questioned and mocked.

CEOs of smaller companies typically don't command that level of compensation, and when they do, it's generally because the company performed well and their pay was heavily perforamnce-based.

What market value? Firefox's market share is down 85%. It's hard to believe there's not someone cheaper and more capable available. This sort of extravagant CEO pay might be excusable if the company is actually booming, but in this case, it really looks like it's just plain greed: loot the company while running it into the ground.

Then go work somewhere else!

If you can make 5 times as much somewhere else, and that's all you care about, quit Mozilla and go work somewhere else. Her attitude and greed are unbelievably infuriating.

> Baker was trained as a lawyer. She coordinates business and policy issues.

I don't know of any lawyers running a successful tech company.

PS: By success I don't just mean economic...

It used to be a 50% haircut every ~10 years, now its closer to a 50% haircut every ~5 years.

Also: as part of my job I can check prices in a major sector of the retail industry as far back as 2015, and I absolutely do not see such major inflation as you're arguing. Inflation is bad right now, but hasn't been that way for several decades.

Completely disagree.

>Also: as part of my job I can check prices in a major sector of the retail industry

That is probably the problem.

>clothes and software

Clothes = imported from countries we export inflation to. Software = ~0 cost to duplicate.

Inflation doesnt hit the whole population equally or at the same time, and it doesnt hit all products uniformly.

The items/services we all want/need, that are scarce, and can't be imported from our foreign "slaves", are where you will find it concentrated. Healthcare, housing, university, etc...

My earlier observation 50%/10y, 50%/5y is closer to reality for the vast majority of the population.

How much did housing go up in price in the last 10-12 years (300%? 400%?)?

Remember when house prices went up 20-30% in a 6 month period of 2021? Not inflation?

How is that a problem? Let's say I work in the grocery industry. Everyone has to buy groceries at some point, whether wealthy or impoverished, and for those on lower incomes groceries are a fairly major share of total consumption. I can check those prices and they haven't gone up nearly as much as you're saying. Ipso facto you're just wrong.

> Remember when house prices went up 20-30% in a 6 month period of 2021? Not inflation?

Inflation is more than just home prices, and just because something is more expensive than it used to be doesn't mean that inflation is the culprit. Supply and demand are still factors. Regardless, rent is accounted for in the CPI (though not assets like home purchases).

Got anything besides home prices? Car prices haven't gone up that much, at least. I can hardly think of anything besides houses and GPUs that (a) impact me and (b) have gone up fairly drastically in price. (Though around here, the suburbs of greater Cincinnati, home prices haven't generally doubled in ten years; my home's valuation is maybe 15% higher than it was when I bought it five years ago.)

>Inflation is more than just home prices

>The items/services we all want/need, that are scarce, and can't be imported from our foreign "slaves", are where you will find it concentrated. Healthcare, housing, university, etc...

It seems you didnt read anything I wrote since you avoided my earlier point and are still ignorantly talking about retail goods that are, for the most part, subsidized, imported from countries we export inflation to, or experience heavy shrinkflation.

I also mentioned inflation is not evenly distributed. Different areas/segments of the population experience different rates. The Ohio housing market may not have been hit as hard, probably parts of Michigan fall in that same boat (these are not desirable markets), but most houses did 3-4x in the past 12 years.

I will move on... Everyone will understand the hurdle rate is higher than 7.5% after enough time has elapsed (just like they did with the BS 2.5% CPI number we used to use) and the standard of living decline is significant enough that it cant be ignored anymore. The investor class generally understands the new yearly hurdle rate is 20%-30% (must earn atleast ~120% of last year's return just to break even). Saylor and a few others makes this point often...

I'll leave those that disagree or aren't interested in learning to figure this out the harder way.

That's not how this country will ever work but it's a nice fantasy.

Not with that marketshare! Assuming you're right, it seems she's failing at that too; there is no appearance of worthwhile competition from Firefox, which fighting for a distant #3 spot

That is not going to happen again and I don't even like Firefox so much anymore because of it.

High salary and a golden parachute would be required to attract anyone good enough to succeed.

I'm not sure if the best way to get someone to save a dying product is a golden parachute which rewards them for running it straight into the ground. You have to make sure they're not risking everything to keep Firefox going, but ideally they'd have some skin in the game so they don't have an incentive to just loot whatever they can until it dies before sailing away from the burning wreak with even more money.

Here's a CEO job offer: take on a nearly impossible task, for a salary that is far below the market rate. If you fail (and you probably will!) it might damage your career and make it harder for you to find another job. If you succeed, you will get prestige, but you still won't get a lot of money.

What kind of executive would accept an offer like that?

A golden parachute is the insurance policy: it says to the candidate, we know this is a nearly impossible task, and it might damage your career if you fail, so we will guarantee you some money if you fail in order to compensate you for taking on that risk.

Meanwhile, people for whom income is literally making the difference between getting food on the table and not get 2 weeks at best, often nothing at all.

I mean, I'm actually sympathetic to the idea that no one should take a job unless it has absolutely zero risk of ruining them financially if they fail at it, but it's pretty clear that this is a benefit only extended to very few people who don't really need it.

Keeping in mind that "below market rate" is still "retirement within a few years at the Mozilla CEO's rate.

So even if your career were damaged, and it's easy to not have it damaged, you can retire after like 3 years. That's a fine insurance policy.

> If you succeed, you will get prestige, but you still won't get a lot of money.

Of course you'll get a lot of money.

1. You can give yourself a raise. If the Moz CEO had come in and we saw market share increasing do you think anyone would give a shit about increasing their pay? The issue is it's tanking and they laid off a ton of people at the same time they took a huge pay raise.

2. Executives are compensated with stock. Company does well, your stock goes up.

Ideally, FF would need a developer or another seasoned IT person at the helm, but let's be real most of our profession find management borderline disgusting at best.

The MBA/beancounter/finance-type execs have no fucking idea about the business or the spirit behind a project like FF, all they care about is financial numbers - and the ones you might want from that group can earn ten times the compensation outside of the NGO sector.

And the NGO execs... most of them have absolutely no experience leading a project as large and international as FF and the ones that do (e.g. Greenpeace) don't have any idea about technology either.

One that cares about Firefox more than about making insane amounts of money that are so far past what you need to live a comfortable live.

Most people cheered when Pat Gelsinger came back to Intel and I bet he even believes in Intel's mission, but he likely wouldn't have accepted an 80% pay cut relative to other industry CEOs. And Intel's prospects are infinitely better than Mozilla's.

But I think if given a choice, most of those people would prioritize the survival of a viable competitive web browser. The name of the product and the sponsor of the product are less important.

So a related question might be, "What would it take for a Firefox fork to succeed?"

If you think the CEO of Mozilla is a cancer, a fork solves that issue. Obviously, there are a lot more concerns than just the CEO. So, what else would a viable fork need?

In the end, Mozilla could implement any measures that would work for the fork, and probably do so easier. So answer the question for the fork, and you've answered the question for Mozilla.

Then like chrome, i'm betting most people can't actually built it in reasonable time on their laptops since it burns a good 64 core machine with 128G of ram for a hour or two. Screw up said configuration, and your in for another rebuild loop. It can take days just to get a working development environment.

I've been known to waste a weekend or two a year working on open source projects. These though generally are small things that scratch and itch for fix a bug. I don't work on projects where it takes a month+ of weekends just to get a working dev environment. I don't think that's unusual, you have to pay people to put up with that kind of pain.

Next?

Anyone who is capable of succeeding as the CEO of Mozilla would be giving up millions of dollars they could easily make elsewhere in the valley if they took only $1m as their comp.

I also bet that for the type of challenges facing Firefox and with my proposed reforms, a motivated senior engineer who knows what they are doing would be just as good or better compared to a standard CEO.

There is a wide spectrum of CEOs skills and compensation. A SVP, VP, or even director level person at Apple (and the like) could be CEO of Mozilla (and would be happy to take a CEO title and steer their own ship).

I'd bet there are couple internal people at Mozilla that could be promoted to CEO and be happy with CEO pay and be successful too.

Does Mozilla need to be "in the valley"?

That has to be the first on the list, because that is the prerequisite for everything else.

Unfortunately there is no mechanism to achieve this within Mozilla. The people that need to go won't; they've got their trophy titles and they've feathered their nest as they want it. Thus Mozilla and Firefox with it are doomed.

Solving that would take a fork, just like it did with Netscape. It would also require an endowment of capital to fund a core of developers for years just to catch up with blink/webkit/etc. At this point the best plan might be to adopt the latter.

Thing is the market is producing this without Mozilla. Brave and others are delivering real alternatives to Chrome, Safari and Edge.

So at this point what is the value proposition of saving Firefox? That's a rhetorical question; I get it. I just don't know if it's enough to attract the developers and funding to do it. It's conceivable; one could imagine a leader with the passion to inspire people and attract the funding and developers.

Maybe that person exists. If so they won't be doing it under Mozilla.

And in the end, it's all WebKit derivatives under the hood. That is the danger. There used to be three major distinct engines (Firefox, IE/Trident, WebKit) plus a boatload of specialized ones (Opera)... and that competition bred improvements and features. These days it's all about walled gardens, which is what the "market" (aka a bunch of ultra rich companies) wants, and Firefox is the last truly independent fighter standing.

Sadly, Firefox has been mismanaged for almost a decade now.

As I said, I get it. Getting it doesn't fund stuff, however.

If Mozilla is just Firefox then why to they need a CEO at all? Why does a web browser need an executive team? It doesn't make any sense to me. Linux doesn't have a CEO. Python doesn't have a CEO. Postgres doesn't have a CEO.

But all those projects have commercial support in some way because other companies rely on them and provide resources. It's unclear to me how Firefox achieves the same. Maybe that's a question a CEO can answer.

If you think you need a CEO then it makes perfect sense to me to pay them a competitive salary. For the same reason you should pay your devs a competitive salary. You can't just say "they should work for less". That's unfair and unrealistic. Either you need one and should pay for a good one, or you don't need one at all.

> Donate the major money drains that aren't Firefox to the Apache Foundation or another worthy custodian.

Or how about they donate Firefox to Apache?

It doesn't matter what the top position is called: CEO, the Grand Warlock of Yendor, or Benevolent Dictator For Life. CEO ≈ whoever is in charge and entrusted with enough authority that they can elevate or kill whatever they are managing, and that was probably the intended meaning.

> Or how about they donate Firefox to Apache?

Apache has a reputation as the graveyard of open source software. If Firefox gets donated to them, it's curtains. Maybe if they went elsewhere it could work.

Or, they could create a Totally-Not-Mozilla Foundation and bring trustworthy old-timers with the right vision on board. Then they could either do a hostile takeover aka LibreOffice, or coax the original Mozilla Foundation into handing over the brand peacefully.

And perhaps restart servo development?

Interesting. I did not seem to know that. I always thought that Apache was a leader in open source since a lot of the notable tools (i.e. Spark, Airflow, Kafta) are maintained by Apache.

Are there any articles that I can learn more about this?

Spark is central to Databricks, the company started by the original creator of Spark.

So at least for a couple high-profile Apache projects there are for-profit organizations with an interest in furthering development.

I assume Databricks pays devs to contribute to Spark, I actually don't know.

So maybe Apache Firefox with a Mozilla corporate sponsor isn't such a terrible idea. Although again, I have no idea what the commercial motivation would be behind supporting Firefox development.

[1]: https://projects.apache.org/projects.html?category#big-data

In a conversation about salary I think it is clearly CEO-the-corporate-leadership-position, not a euphemism for BDFL.

> Apache has a reputation as the graveyard of open source software.

Except for httpd, Spark, Airflow, Kafka, Hadoop, etc.

https://projects.apache.org/projects.html?number

Except that's not what users care about when picking a browser. Google has too much money, tech, marketing and too big an existing user and device base to make any kind of direct competition feasible. Giving Mozilla a few hundred million dollars extra isn't going to make a difference.

My answer is an attempt at addressing these two questions. My goal wasn't to make Mozilla more profitable, but to ensure that it's focused on what should be its core mission, rather than the mire of sideshows that they engage in at the moment.

Also, I don't care how Mozilla the amorphous blob of a corporation is doing. I care about how Mozilla the vehicle for the survival, promotion and development of Firefox is doing, and that one seems to be on the brink of death if nothing is done to change the current course.

As long as these large companies continue to put effort into their browsers (which Microsoft didn't do with IE), users are simply never going to switch, the same way no one is using desktop Linux or LibreOffice or DuckDuckGo.

I want to use a browser that does not sabotage my ability to make it work how I want in order to protect the main business of its parent corporation.

Not a snazzy headline I know.

Firefox used to be much less user-hostile. Now it draws too much attention to itself, like it's trying to be a lifestyle brand.

Using Firefox feels like walking through a busy shopping mall, and I worry that the folks making Firefox don't know any other way that life can be.

Post-update pages (if they must exist in the first place) should look like:

> You're using the latest version of Firefox! (Need a VPN? Try ours!)

> You're using the latest version of Firefox! (Discover the best of the web with Pocket from Firefox)

…but instead it feels more like:

> YOU HAVEN'T FINISHED SIGNING IN TO POCKET YET! SIGN IN NOW! (btw firefox updated)

> Buy our VPN Buy our VPN Buy our VPN Buy our VPN Buy our VPN (btw firefox updated)

I wish Firefox would focus on being a useful tool (like the rest of the software I use). Compare Firefox's first-run experience with that of GNOME Web: Firefox is obnoxious; GNOME Web just gets out of the way.

I believe in Mozilla's mission circa 2004, but I'm not convinced that Firefox does any more.

Oddly, I did not.

Pocket is pretty much invisible, especially if you remove the button from the toolbar. The only time I see mentions of the mozilla VPN is when I go to the configuration of an existing container and I see the option to integrate it to mozilla VPN.

Yes. I use Firefox pretty much exclusively.

I'm saying that the first-run experience, and the amount of setting up it takes to make Firefox less intrusive, illustrate that Firefox is not as focused on being a useful tool as I would like.

I mean, the fact we're even discussing whether or not Firefox is more or less user-hostile than Google and Microsoft illustrates my point perfectly :)

Better ad blocking.

I'm not sure how critical this is in practice; but the way this evolved may be a symptom of the fact that Blink's authors' motivations align less well with those of an ad-block user than Firefox's authors' motivations do.

The worry of course is that once there truly are no competing rendering engines, that google will no longer feel the pressure to put user's interests before those of sites of even itself. And because blink and webkit don't really compete (still nice to have two, but on virtually no devices are both engines serious alternatives), that day is pretty close; it's likely already having an impact.

When Firefox overtook IE6, Microsoft had been colossally mismanaging IE for years, which meant that IE had become a rusted husk of what it was in its glory days. This made for incredibly strong incentive for web developers to support an alternative, because having to develop for an utterly broken browser for an indefinite period of time was intensely unappealing. On the end user side of the equation, Firefox’s incredible speed, UX improvements, and robust support for extensions did a lot to win people over.

Fast forward to today. Google is infinitely more savvy with web developer relations than late-IE-era MS could’ve ever been — they keep devs “fed” well enough with a steady stream of new shiny features that it’s unlikely that they’d ever revolt. For users, the difference in speed and UX between Firefox is negligible or even works in Chrome’s favor (which is tilting further in Chrome’s direction with every site that’s developed and tested only against Chrome).

Additionally, the barrier to entry for new web engines is so high now that anybody trying to build a browser that is to Chrome what Firefox was to IE is almost certainly doomed to fail unless backed by a company with deep pockets and no expectation of return on investment for many years.

If Google is treating devs and users well, there is no reason to switch. It's when they falter on one, migrations can and will occur (given past history as experience).

Additionally, even in the situation that Google is a “good steward”, their total dominance means that there is no room for meaningfully different visions of the web to compete, which is very bad.

</analogy>

Bootstrapping competitors is hard. Driving your competitors under and then cranking up the heat when the field is clear is a classic strategy.

The DRM industry's answer to the previous waves of DRM and DRM-breaking was Denuvo.

The copyright cartel's answer to copying via digital bypassing and the analogue hole was to make it all but mandatory to cryptographically secure every single element in the chain between their own servers and the pixels on our displays, and refuse to serve HD content if your hardware and software won't implement that. Not to mention, DMCA.

Just because Firefox was the liberation from IE6, doesn't mean it will be proportionally as easy to liberate ourselves from Chromium if it does become the only browser engine.

Even in the Denuvo case, there is still pirate activity on games that employ it (albeit no 0 days).

These aren't the weak little monopolies of times past, stuff like standard oil - these new setups are much more clever, and much more pervasive, and much more powerful.

Oh hey, as it turns out tech companies are making obscene profits (so much for economic efficiency!), and we've given them little legal monopolies by implementing copyrights, patents and contract law in just the right way to make competition almost impossible. Startups competing with them need great luck, huge pockets, a brilliantly found niche - and even then they'll probably just get bought or simply fail.

I mean I get that browsers are just one small element of the whole puzzle. But on the other hand, it's also one of the few where avoiding lock-in might still be fairly easy. I don't blame anybody for using chrome - use it myself on occasion - but I'll avoid it as long as it's at least easy to do so.

Browser complexity is an issue in a more direct, plainly technical way too. Even from a purely technical perspective it's just nice to see alternatives, and the world is a big place; the extra investment spread over the now huge online economy is surely worth simply the extra reliability that such reproducibility brings to design of the web fundamentals and discovering new, useful platform features.

If you only have one implementation, it's very easy to accidentally have oversights in the spec that in effect render the true spec "whatever the browser does"; and while I applaud the pragmatism in that approach, I don't applaud the design-by-coincidence that then results in some pretty bad api's being permanent gotcha's in new webdev. Some of the API's that resulted from MS + apples more... "innovative" moments are pretty terrible, and here to stay.

Basically: having a bit of competition is just a good idea for all kinds of reasons, especially when the downsides are... well what exactly? Why would you want a blink monoculture?

As a strategy, it would be reckless in the extreme.

Security, privacy, and customization are why I use it. It takes a lot of work to do it, but you can lock down firefox very effectively and you have more freedom to decide what your browser is and isn't allowed to do with firefox than anyone else.

In the end, what we're missing in browsers is a browser that works for you instead of exploiting you to make money. Out of the box, firefox doesn't hit that mark today, but at least it can be beaten into submission. No other browser gives users that kind of control.

I have many reasons for using Firefox.

However the one reason that instantly pops into my mind is containers. I can easily have multiple "accounts" without mucking around with multiple browser profiles. This alone is worth it switching from Chrome to Firefox for me.

Because f*ck monopolies?

2005 called, they want their Google-enthusiasm back.

Why choose Chrome? I can't think of a single reason to prefer it over FF, but have just provided 2 reasons to prefer the opposite

I think the major problem with a privacy focus from a business perspective is that not enough people care. So you have to spend both a lot of time and effort _being_ better at privacy and then also a bunch of time and effort trying to convince people that it matters.

For a minute there Firefox was running significant advertising against Chrome along these lines, and touting its improved speed, but I don't think it really moved the needle for them.

The good news for Mozilla is that the task of trying to inform the public on privacy issues doesn't fall to browser makers alone. Many businesses spanning multiple industries are offering services for people looking for better privacy and they're working to convince more people of the need. There are also several non-profits and online communities which are spreading the message about the importance of privacy and security. The news media also often reports on abuses of our data as they are discovered. As more and more people become aware of how they're being screwed over as a result of handing out the intimate details of their lives like candy the market will grow.

The bad news is that the largest and most powerful companies are making money hand over fist exploiting our private and personal data and they're working hard to normalize it and shield themselves from legal responsibility. The influence and money they possess, along with support from the state which also benefits by taking copies of that data for themselves is no small hurdle to overcome, but the entire system isn't sustainable if we really want freedom and equality so at a certain point the tide has to turn or we fall into total oppression.

- Better tab organization. Vertical, tree-style tabs are an improvement possible with extensions, but surely we can do even better, especially if with direct support from the browser.

- Better bookmarking. All bookmarks should take a snapshot of the website in case it disappears or changes and should have fast full-text search. And those are only the obvious parts that are missing.

- Integrated ad-blocking and user scripts/styles to enhance and fix user-hostile websites. Make it easy to share these with non-technical users. Really anything that puts the user in control. This includes the Browser UI too - firefox has been going backwards con customizability.

- Ability to keep up with websites directly through the browser. Aka bring back RSS support and actually make it useful.

- Anything that works against the centralization of the web. Allow users to comment and share websites with their friends or community right from the browser in a way that is resistant to censorship.

And this is just what I could think of right away.

Have you seen how bad Google results are these days?

It used to be that IE etc was actually quite bad, and Firefox was substantially faster while adding important features like tabs. That’s when the nerds installed Firefox on their parents computers. Then FF languished, Chrome came out and was much faster and used less resources. So the nerds replaced everyone’s browsers with Chrome.

Now everyone is using their default browser from their phones, or apps, or inline system browsers in apps. All the browsers are roughly equivalent now, so the nerds don’t have a lot of reason to go around and change their parents browsers. Plus you don’t have any real advantage to changing the mobile browser from Chrome (Android) or Safari (iOS). Thus the market has shifted away from desktops, FF lost there, hasn’t regained, and has made almost no inroads on mobile.

They need a reason for the nerds en masse to go and change everything, while inertia and incompatible built-in password managers will make this painful.

It's a stance.

And tbh I don't see much difference with Firefox when using Chrome (besides all the data that I can see leaving my computer to go to google servers even when I'm not on any website)

For me, it started back when "sponsored tiles" were first announced in 2014. On the surface it was obviously advertisements, but many defenders tried to argue that it was a "good thing"

Then there was the proprietary Pocket extension baked into the browser with no easy removal. Again, many defenders tried to argue it was a "good thing"

Then the "studies" channel was used to push a Mr Robot ad. It's unclear how it was aligned with the values, but defenders tried to argue it was a "good thing".

They partnered with Cliqz to collect data and make recommendations. Again, defenders tried to argue it was a "good thing"

They partnered with Booking.com to push advertisements, going so far as to argue that they didn't receive any monetary compensation and that it was just a "social experiment". Again, defenders tried to argue it was a "good thing"

This is just a sampling of the events in the last 8 years (sponsored tiles was 2014). Every single time, they may have received some sort of benefit, but a number of users who bought into firefox for the security and privacy aspects ... felt betrayed and left. Because if it isn't about the privacy, what is the USP of firefox? "Not google" is only a small part of the user base.

I expect it's downvoted because it's laughable. 99% of browser users don't give a shit about those things. If a poll were to be taken of the HN users who switched to Chrome, I doubt even a quarter would cite that as the reason.

It was indeed a death by a thousand cuts, but the thousand cuts were

* popup advertisements for Chrome on the frontpage of the most visited website on the planet

* Google paying off Adobe, AVG, Avast and others to make their installers include Chrome using disgusting dark patterns

* Android, the collapse of desktop browsing in comparsion to mobile browsing, and people that will just default to using the same browser on their laptop/desktop as on their phone

* Netflix DRM that didn't work on Firefox for a few months

* Youtube, Google Meet and Google Docs refusing to work properly on Firefox

* The word "Google" becoming as synonymous with simply using the internet as the internet explorer icon was in the 2000s

* Chrome was and to some extent still is legitimately snappier than Firefox

Those things will have disillusioned people who used Firefox because their goals were aligned. I agree that Google being Google will have lost people who used Firefox simply because it was a good tool.

One vote for Google Meet being the reason. I didn't want me dropping out of meetings and rejoining in a different browser to become a regular thing.

By the way, I'm on linux. Searching "firefox google meet linux site:reddit.com" suggests it wasn't just me.

You should do that math again.

>And I suspect that the FF users of old care very much

But do they? Firefox's rise was largely due to IE6 being pure trash, and the average user of a web browser in 2008 being a lot more knowledgeable than the average user today.

Marketshare, by definition, is the share of the market. The market has expanded dramatically, but desktop browsing itself has plummeted, and a lot of users are just going to default to whatever they're using on their primary device (their phone), which is Google. "Google" is synonomous with using the internet in the same way that the internet explorer logo used to be in the mid 2000s.

No, I don't.

Even if it is one percent (which I highly doubt) and that one percent is committed enough then that's enough of a core to guarantee the success of the project. It doesn't need a team of 1000 to build a browser, much less to keep an existing one patched and rolling along.

A non-Chromium browser needs to maintain a critical mass of users to be sufficiently large to ensure that the world wants to stay compatible with it, and having 1% of marketshare is not sufficient for that, no matter how committed these users are - if firefox drops to 1%, then it becomes irrelevant and the project has failed at its goals as the "web standards" become equivalent to whatever chromium does.

Browsers get influence to keep the web as we want it to be mostly based on the quantity of browser users which websites want to attract and keep; without that all the best code in the world is useless and doesn't even give you a seat at the table, much less a strong say for how the de-facto standard web practices will change.

As a browser maker your "concerns" should really be web/internet standards. If websites and webapp builders aren't complying with standards and are building their stuff to only work in non-standard compliant browsers that's a separate problem that no web browser can solve.

I recall a few people defending the sponsored titles (or half-hearted defenses about how it's bad but not that bad since you can turn them off) but those defenses seemed to be largely drowned out by the overwhelmingly negative response.

The only of those that I recall having anything close to "many defenders" was the Pocket integration.

As far as I can see their revenue peaked around FY 2017 at $562 million. In 2018 that number was about $450 million and short of expenses, they were short of expenses again for 2019 but for a $338 million settlement from Yahoo/Verizon.

The most recent reported year, 2020, saw a slight drop in their search income but a sharper cut to expenses (mostly by cutting about $60 million in "software development" expenses), putting them back on track, in a way.

They've had a steady increase in subscription income, but it's still dwarfed by the current search deal (in 2020, just shy of $25 million in subscriptions vs. over $440 million from search).

Provide their own suite of integrated tools, search engines, communication platforms, and so on. But with a privacy-focused and ad-free approach.

DuckDuckGo already proved there is an appetite for something like this.

They could go further, and remain relevant and viable in the way that DDG is, even if they never again are the most popular browser.

Now they're about the same performance-wise, but the mind share lost was brutal. there was a period that the only advantages Firefox had over Chrome were memory use and extensions, and they had to get rid of the NPAPI extensions for security reasons.

An appetite, yes. But not a major one. A privacy-focused, ad-free approach would be hugely appealing to the HN crowd. But I’m less convinced about the public at large.

schools, local/regional/state governments, non-profits - types of orgs that have some long-term interest in privacy.

The same schools that went all in with Chromebooks?

And I'm not even talking about on a technical basis, Bing is pretty OK. The marketing required to displace Google would be inconceivably large.

Google paying Apple massive amounts of money to keep Google Search the default search engine on their devices doesn't seem to be affected by the fact that Pixel phones (or Android as a whole) and iPhones are competing. Though I gotta admit that it could be because Google doesn't have the overwhelming winner position in that market, as opposed to the web browser market.

However, I still find Google pulling the funding unlikely, given (afaik) the reason for Google "financially supporting" Mozilla is exactly because Google is afraid of being legally called out as a monopoly in the web browser market. The only point at which I can see Google pulling that funding is if Mozilla ends up on the same level as Chrome in terms of posing a danger to Google's dominance. At which point, Mozilla has already won and doesn't need Google that much to sustain itself, so I wouldn't pose it as a strong concern.

But if they can garner 5% market share via this new approach then they save themselves from destruction long term.

And they are growing. The big thing there is just positioning, and being aggressive in the right places.

That's the fundamental problem with Mozilla: MS, Google and Apple can leverage web footprint and physical platforms to market their products and generate revenue for browser development. Plus Apple's happy to take money from Google. Brave's building some kind of revenue-generating platform that stands on its own.

I don't know if Mozilla has a vision in that kind of way.

Hell, Firefox OS? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS

This rant is pertinent: http://dpldocs.info/this-week-in-d/Blog.Posted_2021_09_06.ht...

There are a lot of people oh HN who agree with that but then use a different browser for whatever reason. I feel like these people are being very hypocritical and should use what they want to succeed. Firefox is very usable and increasing its market share starts with you. Or to use another cliche - be the change you wish to see.

That's not to say Mozilla doesn't need to get their shit together, but if market share drops too low they will not be able to get money to do the things they need to do.

I use Firefox despite long standing bugs. Somehow a browser that aggressively throttles background tabs is still able to leak memory to background tabs. For the longest time Firefox messed with my wireless headset, they finally added proper support for web audio APIs and things are better now.

CPU usage is still all over the place. Some inactive tab will cause FF to spin CPU usage up to 100%.

Firefox still leaks resources, I can shut down all tabs and still have the media playback process using up tons of CPU and RAM.

WebGL performance is worse than Chrome.

TBF it has been getting steadily better over the last year, I have noticed a marked improvement. I'd say a year or so ago it was noticeably bad on a regular basis, now it is an occasional annoyance. But it should never have gotten that bad.

More to the point of the question, Google spent a LONG time pushing Chrome, hard. They paid lots of # to bundle it with app updates years ago. Visiting Google properties causes banner ads "Download Chrome!" to appear. A few years back YouTube videos would occasionally just stop working in Firefox.

And now days with Node development, well, Node developer tools are built into Chrome. React developer tools run in Chrome.

As far as I know, such lengthy support terms do not exist for any Windows releases.

Firefox on RedHat 8 will stay as it is until 2029.

RedHat has no magic Mozilla sauce, they simply ship Firefox ESR and upgrade it every year. You'll have the same breakage in the end, just yearly instead of monthly.

This happens all the time.

What a fiction indeed.

In other words, you don't need to switch to RHEL to use Firefox ESR. It's the same version you can install on any other distro or Windows.

When it first came out, Firefox was faster, lighter and offered way better function than the alternatives at the time. Since then, competition has been fierce in the browser market and they’ve done little to distinguish themselves in any major way from their competitive set.

Until they do something so vastly incomparable in the market, they gonna continue to falter.

It really comes down to two things.

- Do you want to encourage more privacy across the web?

- Do you want the web to be more decentralized?

If you want more privacy and less centralization, you should use FF. I don't think it is just about the services that they offer. I think we can go deeper and talk about the future of the web in general and how our choices affect that.

Edge vertical tabs is your best choice if you must use a chromium browser, however it is a weak imitation of TST.

How is that possible? Do you never compare things? Or do you only compare things for which there are fewer than 10 alternatives?

What makes it weak?

I'm not going to tell anybody else what their reasons are or should be, but for me voting against the browser monoculture was a reason to switch.

Most people won't care enough, of course, but to me it's not that different than voting for a candidate in an election who might not be the absolute best fit for my personal interests but who seems better for an overall political culture, or some other similar compromise.

It crashes sometimes but if that's the price for not having coercive software controlling my life, so be it.

If you install Firefox from Mozilla's site, it won't have these update problems. What's happening is that your package manager is swapping Firefox's bits out from under it while it's running. Firefox's built-in update system doesn't do that.

Which is not to say that I think you shouldn't be using a packaged version of Firefox. Personally I'm running Nightly so I don't have the option anyway. Generally speaking, I vastly prefer sticking to my package manager's stuff.

I just wish the package managers would fix their Firefox updates. (I don't know what the right fix would be, and I imagine it could be hard.)

Joke aside, Firefox is aware that it's been updated and the new tab states that I have to restart my browser. I'm not familiar with the inner workings of Firefox, I just expect it to have everything it needs to function, in working memory. I've been using Fedora for close to 14 years now, Firefox always installed from system packages, and the updates always replaced the existing files on disk without it affecting my application experience. No other desktop app I use has this behavior after updates while they where running.

A big fuss? No, got used to it already. But I still consider it a soft crash state that I encounter with Firefox.

Hm... though now I wonder... I also had a cron job that ran me out of disk space. I wonder if that contributed to make it more like the external file replacement situation?

An alternative that might be smoother in this regard: use a flatpak version of Firefox instead. (Firefox is in Fedora's flatpak repo, and on Flathub.) GNOME Software updates flatpak apps in the background, and you just get the new version the next time you open the app.

Sure, distribution upgrades nowadays are just like Windows update requiring a system reboot and a black screen with a useless progress bar to stare at (that's also a pretty annoying relatively recent addition).

GNOME is not my cup of tea. And until flatpak delivers tangible finegrained software sandboxing (at least Android level sandboxing), I'm not really interested in using it for software that's already packaged in the dnf repositories.

I use Fedora because it has newer software, pretty stable in my experience, and my knowledge is transferable to RedHat/Enterprise Linux. But I stopped buying into most of Redhat's desktop innovations a while ago.

Fedora doesn't recommend doing updates that way :) See https://fedoramagazine.org/offline-updates-and-fedora-35/

> Sure, distribution upgrades nowadays are just like Windows update requiring a system reboot and a black screen with a useless progress bar to stare at (that's also a pretty annoying relatively recent addition).

Silverblue doesn't have a black screen with a progress bar — it just boots straight into the updated version. I assume Kinoite (like Silverblue but with Plasma instead of GNOME) is the same.

> And until flatpak delivers tangible finegrained software sandboxing (at least Android level sandboxing)

Flatseal may provide what you want here: https://github.com/tchx84/Flatseal

> I'm not really interested in using it for software that's already packaged in the dnf repositories.

Fair enough. I mentioned it because it removes this problem:

> every time I update Firefox in my OS, and it won't allow me to spawn new tabs until I restart Firefox.

Those tools are not teaching me how to fish, but how to carve out and build a fish rod, fish anatomy, and anything in between. When all I want is the proverbial fish.

Things got dicier in the server space since the IBM acquisition, e.g. RedHat 8 experience was anything but good, and their entry into the container space with UBIs. A pile of things breaking, when switching the Dockerfile from CentOS to RedHat. Even more ridiculous things, like RedHat 8 offering a license that allows X install for free, but then the ISO wasn't even distributed by torrent file and the download speed for me in EU was under 100KBps.

But anyway, here I am ranting about RedHat, when I didn't want to. My main complaint is still with Firefox, it wants me to restart the browser but I can use the existing tabs just fine for any web browsing. Nothing is bricked by the update, just Firefox deciding when I should restart my browser, just like the very vague Windows experience I left so long ago.

I have to use macOS at work, and it makes Firefox much more janky than it is on this 10-year-old Linux laptop.

(Though I rarely use other browsers on macOS, so maybe they're even worse.)

Many websites are just designed with the 80% of most frequent configurations. And when autoplay is disabled, the browser window is too narrow, a special font isn't loaded or a cookie is blocked all bets are off.

I would call it usable, but not "very usable". For normal people, Chrome(ium) UX is better. For power users, Vivaldi is a far better choice despite the Chromium browser engine. And for both of these groups, Firefox UX worsens and improves seemingly at random.

Quite frankly, I'm conflicted whether I should recommend Firefox at all. If I say "look, here's Firefox! It's more private than Chrome, and almost as fast and error-free!", and then Mozilla goes on to ruin that perception 6 months later (as they are wont to do), then it's my reputation and credibility at stake. Not only is that an unnecessary ego hit, but also makes me look like a liar (or at best, like an ivory tower dweller divorced from reality).

I can't imagine why you would say this. Could you point out some concrete examples of better UX?

Besides that, the UI is just sluggish a lot of the time. It feels that Chrome(ium) has a far better latency response.

Firefox: 1. Hamburger menu > 2. Bookmarks > 3. Manage bookmarks Chrome(ium): 1. Three-dot menu > 2. Bookmarks > 3. Bookmark manager

In both cases you get a list of bookmarks on step 2 and you get a full, searchable, editable view in step 3. The global shortcut for the third step is the same in both (ctrl + shift + o).

Are you intentionally underselling it or is this what I can expect of Firefox? Because it's not a super awe-inspiring endorsement.

Firefox did not save my marriage nor did it make me a million dollars, no.

Don’t tell me it’s “very usable” because I’m going to interpret it as the latter which may or may not be correct.

I think it's the best way to browse the web.

Chrome on Android, at least, doesn't allow ad blocking. Who the fuck in The Year of Our Lord 2022 doesn't use ad blocking?

I also like buying things that I might like, so seeing ads (and ads that are targeted to me) isn't necessarily a bad thing to me.

Like...

> - Donate the major money drains that aren't Firefox to the Apache Foundation or another worthy custodian

> - Fire all inessential staff that don't want to work on Firefox.

> - Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money, and cut their salaries (bonuses tied directly to increase in Firefox market share).

> - Make sure that all donations from now on are redirected to things that support Firefox development and nothing else, period.

All of these are good suggestions if the problem is that Firefox is running out of money or has too few resources. But that's not my impression at all!

Google's strategy with Chrome demonstrates how valuable it is to develop other compelling services that use cutting-edge standards supported by your browser. Google does it in a way where they freeze out other compatible browsers, but Mozilla does not have to. I would say that the number one thing that Mozilla can do to support the web is to make web standards meaningful again - and the best way to do that is to develop things aside from web browsers to demonstrate the value of those standards.

> We as a community, cannot afford to let Firefox languish until the only browsers in the world are Chromium derivatives.

I don't think Mozilla having non-Firefox projects harms Firefox. I think there is every reason to believe that a healthy Mozilla has Firefox at the center, with many other ongoing projects.

It seems evident to me that if they made Firefox into a power user browser again, somehow, then power users would flock to it again and bring in some of their peers and family, putting it back in a safe 10-15% range of market share where it can't be picked off or ignored by Google. And I know that power users are leaving en masse - I stuck with them through thick and thin for nearly 15 years, and I'm finally getting ready to leave if the situation doesn't improve.

> I think there is every reason to believe that a healthy Mozilla has Firefox at the center

Neither Mozilla not Firefox are healthy, in my assessment. And this is exactly because they are getting sidetracked instead of centering on Firefox.

In my experience many things come to be in horrifying shape because of focus as well, so I don't agree with your logic.

> which is why they should jettison everything that isn't Firefox or doesn't serve Firefox.

I mean, 4 / 6 of the products on their product pages have Firefox in the name[1]? Really begs the question on what you mean by "doesn't serve firefox." I guess you mean you don't like the VPN or Pocket?

> if they made Firefox into a power user browser again, somehow, then power users would flock to it again and bring in some of their peers and family

I think maybe the reason we have different views on this is that we might view the user base differently. I'm not sure how you mean "power users" - it's a fuzzy term - but I suggest we start at the number of people in the worldwide IT industry[2]. Probably not all super users, but likely more technically savvy. It seems there are about 55,000,000 of us, but that's in an internet user population of 4.66 billion[3]. That puts the power user population at about 1.4% of the people represented in the market share statistics. So if global relevance is your goal, I'm not sure that the power users are gonna do it. Even if Firefox dominated the market they would need to bring a lot of friends and family along to get the people needed to push Firefox up ~6%.

The web is just way, way bigger than it used to be and is serving way more people. I totally agree that Firefox is failing to find a convincing foothold in the modern web, but I'm unconvinced that appealing to power users would benefit the browser or the web more than any other group. I also think that, if Firefox caters to a particular demographic with unusually deep expertise, that they risk moving the browser in a direction that's less appealing to users who lack that deep expertise.

[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/products/

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1126677/it-employment-wo...

[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/617136/digital-populatio...

I really don’t think that most of us would have any meaningful knowledge on this without having first hand experience, so I don’t think these opinions are of any use.

Its bad enough ISO certification boards and official positions of the W3C can be bought or corrupted. Let there be only one engine, controlled by Google? And even the pretense of a open and fair playing field goes away.

Open source and open protocols were not resistant enough to for profit corporations.

Now our standards are dwindling, open source projects and standards boards re completely co-opted, and the conversation on mailing lists and forums sounds like the never ending squabbling and finger wagging from your Fortune 500 HR department.

Foss and open standards have been captured by capital. And it shows in the culture.

Hell, it shows in the conversations around places like this.

Well, we've already done that. Google a) dominates the standards bodies and b) releases "standard" features that are only standard because Chrome says so

However, I think they need to answer the question, why should Firefox exist? If there is no compelling reason, well, there you go. If there is, double down on that make that reason shine. They have wasted so much money on the wrong things, IMO.

Google is either actively malicious to the open web, or doesn't care about it other than as something they can strip-mine as a revenue source. They sufficiently diversified into mobile and Android that the death of the open web would be but a blip to them.

IMO, Firefox should consciously be that alternate source of authority. How they accomplish that organisationally is irrelevant, what is relevant that their browser as a whole is competitive and focused enough that it stops haemorrhaging market share, and can start to slowly rebuild it as people look for a way out of Google's ecosystem.

Firefox used to at least directly target segments of the population with its more comprehensive developer platform, but they have slowly been tearing that out for many years and now Chrome is converging to the same place.

At best I would say "the reason for Firefox to exist is because we need it to exist" argues we would have to prop it up using some kind of government intervention--to deal with the "it is at least slightly worse for every given user"--but the problem is we need people to actually use it, not for it to merely continue to be developed, and "require some random percentage of people to draw lots and be forced to use Firefox" is probably a dystopia for other reasons.

I don't think there's a good case to be made for Safari outside of Apple devices.

> Apple's offering, Safari, currently holds 18.34% of the internet browser market, with an estimated 844 million people using it in 2021. Safari also makes up 23.78% of all mobile device browsers worldwide, which is high considering Apple holds 26.35% of the mobile vendor market. https://backlinko.com/browser-market-share

Those numbers seem relevant to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_(web_browser)

I mean nobody super exciting, but Steam uses it for their software, Adobe CSS uses some of it, etc.

It's more than an Apple thing.

[Edit]: Sorry, nobody outside Apple uses Safari, but a lot of people outside of Apple use WebKit, Safari's engine.

It is also primarily there to render Steam and steampowered.com so not very relevant to keeping web standards in check.

So that's why.

Unfortunately, that reason (browser engine diversity)is compelling to people who understand the situation, but not general consumers - and it's impossible to make general consumers care, unless maybe Firefox went for an edgy "rebel against the man" vibe.

(In case it's not clear, I'm asking in earnest. I'm not trolling.)

- - - -

edit: Okay, pull requests alone are not enough, but the objections y'all are raising seem like they could all be answered by forking, no? If Google upsets their users then a different browser has a chance to gain users:

- Ad-blocking

- Better extension API

- Maintaining backwards compatibility

- No Manifest V3

- Better vision of the web than Google

In other words, effort expended on duplicate functionality for it's own sake is wasted. Why not let Google do the heavy lifting and then improve on their work, rather than trying to compete head-to-head on the whole enchilada (of a complete browser engine)?

Right now, backwards compatibility is protected by competing browsers. If one breaks backwards compatibility too often, it risks becoming known for having sites not work on it.

In a monoculture, Google could take aggressive moves to prevent ad-blocking. In a monoculture, Google could push more ad focused features like FloC. Google could integrate more ways to allow browser fingerprint (not saying they would, but there would be no recourse).

With competition Google knows that people could balk at any point so they must balance their interests with their users' interests. In a monoculture, they wouldn't have to.

In what scenario is maintaining a fork not way easier than a whole separate engine?

So far I think I like how they handle Chromium more than I like what Mozilla is trying to do.

The possibility of forks does little to prevent a Chromium monoculture from embracing, extending, and extinguishing the web. (Something like Brave, with an independent revenue model, does help some with the bad maintainer problem. But it doesn't help with the constant stream of everyday bugs in the underlying engine, ones that would get set in stone with a monoculture.)

For example, see Manifest V3 (and the deprecation/removal of old versions). Almost everybody that hears about it disagrees - users, extension developers, etc. However, despite it's popularity being as low as could be, Google is still putting it in.

Today, if I see an article about FLOC (or whatever they're calling it now) and don't like it I can go and download Firefox. In a Chromium-only world I'm SOL.

A good example of what happens if you only have one implementation is Flash Player. People programmed to the implementation and not the (non-existant) spec. So any reimplementation of Flash Player is largely an exercise in chasing after implementation bugs in the Player that badly-developed movies rely upon. Even Adobe's official internal documentation on SWF and AVM2 is woefully incomplete, because the actual "spec" is the proprietary source code of the player and whatever tribal knowledge had been accrued from decades of maintaining it.

The sole implementation in this case (Chromium) being Free Software does alleviate this a little, but the spec is still more of a suggestion than a reality.

For example, Chromium won't be accepting pull requests to un-break the extension API (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/chrome-users-beware-ma...).

It's a legitimate question, in a realm that many people including in HN's general demographic don't consider.

If someone wants to learn something, why not help them instead of downvoting into oblivion because they don't know or disagree with something you know/believe?

Edit to respond to edit:

The biggest reason I think is that there's no way a fork would survive - the only way that it could would be if Microsoft/Apple/Facebook/$SOMEBODY_WITH_MONEY threw their weight behind it, which is unlikely, because any change which harms users will either help or be neutral to any of these companies.

I would rather educate than downvote, but downvoting has gotten to be more emotional than based on the site guidelines, so not everyone sticks to that.

Back in the day when it was FF vs. Microsoft Internet Explorer the need for a competing FOSS browser seemed very compelling, but I don't think FF won marketshare on that, rather it won on merits: FF was better than IE.

Today the situation seems different. To me it seems to make sense to let the engine become a standardized component (developed FOSS-style) incorporating work by Google for speed, security, and reliability, and let the diversity and competition happen on a higher, more user-facing level, in terms of policy and politics and UI/UX and so on.

I think the real issue is that the vast majority of users don't really care about browser features beyond a certain point, a point which all modern browsers have easily covered. You could sit a person in front of Chrome, Firefox, Edge, or Safari and they'd barely notice. If there's attachment to a certain brand, it's mostly emotional. Arguing that people should use X over Y is like arguing that they should drink Pepsi over Coca Cola..

It's hard to differentiate a browser in such a market. It's just a window to the web, with tabs and bookmarks and a handful of features. And an adblocker extension, for some 30% of users. Beyond that, it just needs to work and be fast.

If the fork offers something compelling to entice users then it would presumably survive, otherwise not, but would they save FF then?

The whole problem under discussion here is that FF is losing marketshare. The things that differentiate FF in the minds of the mass consumers aren't directly related to the browser engine. Chrome/Chromium is arguably better on the fundamentals (speed, security, reliability) so why not take their core and implement user-attracting features on top of it?

I think the idea of having competing FOSS browser engines is largely a holdover from the bad old days of Internet Explorer. The main reason that browser engine diversity might be useful is that it makes for a certain robustness in the face of errors and crashes. If everyone is using the same browser then everyone is vulnerable to the same zero-days, for example.

you've ansewered yourself: as long as chromium accepts pull requests. the day firefox dies, chromium stops accepting pull requests.

Forking is an uphill battle starting at 0% market share, which is less than Firefox has now.

However, I do agree that their leadership has made terrible decisions and they've absolutely focused on the wrong products.

As good as Thunderbird is, I wouldn't want it to be anywhere near the top of Mozilla's priorities list right now.

They shouldn't be trying to build thunderbird for its own sake, they should be demonstrating their equivalent for electron and feel pressured to make it no worse for users than the current Thunderbird, but attractive/stable enough for outside developers to choose over electron/etc.

Electron clients cannot compete on deep technically obscure feature sets, simply because they didn't have 20 years to accumulate them. They cannot compete on latency. Thunderbird should remain native.

Er, you do realise that Thunderbird isn't exactly native, either, what with it being based on XUL (or whatever's still left of that these days) and Gecko?

Something that competes with electron is not electron. Non-native includes RLBox which is now going to secure Firefox according to Mozilla. Mozilla is on record regretting thunderbird's poor Integration with the Firefox stack as a trial for thunderbird devs and a tax slowing Firefox engineering.

This holding pattern has gone on and on because no one wants to establish the correct API layer to maintain as an inherent tax for Firefox engineering that enables all F/OSS to reuse the NS* stack correctly with good documentation.

In the long term this means chromium has an ecosystem and Mozilla's stable ecosystem consists of just one browser. However flawed chromium is, it has no competition for most developers and competition with WebKit for a handful.

Thus she cut the thing most likely to provide a real threat to chrome.

I don’t know if Firefox is currently harder to integrate than Chromium, or if they would just need to gain some sort of edge (no pun intended). But they could for example:

- Provide first-class documentation for integrating

- Provide some kind of stripped-down version that’s optimized for Electron-type scenarios; perhaps they could make it more resource-light for this usecase than Chromium is

Gaining marketshare this way could garner better support from websites and/or libraries, and might also prompt corporate support from invested companies

They fired the CEO that knew what he was doing. Personally, I think Mozilla is getting what they asked for.

A continuously increasing revenue seems to be what they're getting currently.

I feel they should start trying to out “out innovate” the other browser developers. Stop playing politics, which Google will always win, and just start making new “cool shit” that developers want to use! Hire the best innovative thinkers in the industry and set them free to invent browser apis for developers to use.

Also, they should be attacking things like electron, and “hybrid” mobile app development. Build a toolkit based on Gecko for cross platform development that addresses the problems with electron.

I think they should be doing the opposite: Adding features the users want to use and keeping the web as simple as they can get away with. Google is already busy giving web developers whatever APIs they want, that is not a fight Firefox can win.

Microsoft, with their resource and their ability to bundle Microsoft Edge in with Windows, couldn't get any appreciable amount of marketshare. Firefox, with less resource than Microsoft, won't fare any better.

Rebuilding Firefox with Chronium would salvage whatever the mindshare/marketshare left. Then Firefox could still wield some influence with their marketshare and the threat of forking Chronium.

Really, all I want from a browser is Chromium, full features without disabled APIs, with a few extras like Sync, P2P stuff, and codecs, fully open.

Right now, I think anyone with name recognition and marketing ability could probably develop a winning browser for 50k or so. Just... take chromium, add sync, and an ad blocker for high bandwidth video ads. Done. You have made the world's best browser, the rest is business stuff.

After Mozilla laid off all Servo developers in 2020, the future doesn't look bright for Gecko or Firefox.

Like it or not, unless Mozilla does what Google sees as acceptable, Firefox can't continue. The only way to turn Firefox around and continue development would be to find an alternative benefactor.

Not only that, but this creates perverse incentives for Mozilla. Google funds Mozilla to avoid charges of monopoly, and that disincentives Mozilla to compete with Google and make Firefox a competitive browser to Chromium.

Would Mozilla be able to get as much without Google as they get from Google? Probably not, but if they do follow the suggestions of the OP then hopefully they would not need as much.

Use all/most of the money from the Google deal to build a fund. Even doing this for a couple years will build a huge backup plan for Firefox and they can look at not relying on the deal for survival. Instead work off the interest earned on the fund.

This might be a perverse incentive depending on if your goal is to make Firefox a good browser or just a popular one.

You know, that's the real question we should make before going on this entire exercise. Are the usage statistics any reliable?

Firefox is the one browser that blocks the things those sites use to measure market share. Why would we expect their results to be real?

Despite my constant advocacy for Firefox for over a decade, a family member whom I respect greatly told me directly and in no uncertain terms that they do not wish to use Firefox and wish to switch to Chrome instead because of numerous issues they have observed. And the worst part is that as much as I wanted it to, Firefox wasn't up to it. I cannot help but think that this is a microcosm of what's happening more broadly.

Do you mean WebKit derivatives? Or are you predicting that Apple would switch to Chromium? (No way)

Why stop there? Why not get developers who are "in it for the passion"?

Look at Google. It is a late-stage, post-IPO business that’s now, frankly, ran by the CFO with a CEO who cares only about the board and an ever-increasing stock number.

The people who have passion left for the most part. Replaced by those who only seek to enrich themselves and climb the perf ladder.

Would those who have passion stuck around if Google was ran by people who still had passion? I’d imagine a much greater number of them would still be there.

> Would those who have passion stuck around if Google was ran by people who still had passion? I’d imagine a much greater number of them would still be there.

Why not just lower compensation for software engineers? Then all the dispassionate perf-chasing engineers will leave for greener pastures and you'll only be left with people who are passionate about the products Google builds, no?

Are you talking about the same sacrifices? I haven't seen anyone here asking the CEO to not be paid at all, only those questioning the absurd amount. I don't think going from 1 000 000 to 100 000 (which would be a lot lower than what it was before, just to show the extreme) is even remotely the same "sacrifice" as going from 100 000 to 10 000 per year.

But to answer you original question, yes, Mozilla should also be looking for developers that believe in the mission instead of just trying to maximize their wealth. That should probably include moving the company somewhere cheaper.

Aren't they? Do Mozilla developers work there just to get rich, or because they care about open source?

on a more serious note, what if mozilla fires ALL execs? will it just crumble under its own weight or will that "industry linked remuneration" be replaced with more money for actual developers who get things done and are not in for the quick buck like address bar ads?

Look at what happened to youtube-dl - even before the DMCA takedown, nobody was doing anything about the leadership being AWOL despite the huge PR backlog. Then, when it was taken down, various forks popped up, including yt-dlp which became a natural potential successor. They injected lots of potential, because the main authority was absent and they seized initiative.

Even after youtube-dl came back, they eventually went under a new management. The entire space of YouTube/video downloaders is better off for the DMCA incident, even if taken by itself it was a harmful event.

Mozilla falling might just reenergise Firefox, though I'd obviously much rather they undergo a priority shift instead, so we can keep continuity.

And people wonder why non-profits and NGOs don’t attract the best talent. This entitled mindset is the why.

That people who want to do good work should earn less. Perfect! Let them pay for their vacation with goodwill and air.

This is especially rich coming from the HN crowd. Everybody wants a revolutionary but in the neighbour’s house.

And there is no "the HN crowd" - don't fall into the trap of assinging to collective consciousness for groups and then complaining that it does not behave rationally.

https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/i8nuyb/firefox_de...

It was from an earlier era where they innovated instead of just campaigned against powerful web features and tried to be a FOSS version of Apple.

Donating money isn't going to help them. It might help them look good to some techies that follow that information, but otherwise most wont care.

Mozilla needs to focus on other products to use in tandem w FF. Email service that is private, VPN (i think they have a partnership), Thunderbird, zoom like platform. They need office/business solutions most likely. Devtools, dev services, etc.

I'm not saying forget FF, but they can't just focus on 1 product or they are doomed.