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...
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.