People seem to always confuse Mozilla Foundation (non-profit) and Mozilla (for-profit) entities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation

What metric are you measuring this individual against?

Because Revenues went from $441M (2020), to $527M (2021), that's a 20% YoY increase in topline revenue growth. That's huge for a company of this size.

https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202...

That annual report can be tl;dr-ed as "we're like years away from closing shop but we sampled data at juuust the right moment to make you wonder why". That's a huge for a company of this size, but it's also largely accidental.

The mechanisms behind the revenue growth are fragile and tied to the browser (if not directly, like Pocket, at least in the initial stages of the funnel and through branding, like Mozilla VPN). And the browser is bleeding users. There are plenty of alternatives for all these services which will be there if users decide to switch browsers. The only way it'll still look like growth next year is if adoption of paid services will be slow enough that it'll take more than an year to reach the declining user cap.

Mozilla can secure secure its position through attractive software and services, not bean counting bullshit -- paying customers pay for software and services, not numerology. Failing to deliver attractive software and services is a core failure, and the capital underperformance: unless it's rectified, annual reports won't look as pretty.

So yeah, my metric here is increasing paid service adoption base. $441M -> $527M is an attractive looking feature, but that's because it only contains the initial adoption uptick in a shrinking potential customer base.

It's baffling to me that this is legal.

The board and managers of Mozilla Foundation being unethical does not have anything to do with the existence of Mozilla Corporation or not, that is just minor administrative details and they could be just as unethical either way.

I’m using Firefox and not switching anytime soon, but the Mozilla situation is making me angry and sad at the same time.

Interacting with the UI on Firefox for iOS incurs several seconds of waiting:

Clicking the tab icon, opening a new tab, clicking back. ANYTHING, really.

Often it just dies.

If I close all tabs, it gets better. So I basically have to choose between tabs or any acceptable UI speed.

They literally went from "browser is slow with many tabs" to "now tabs are super lightweight" to "this is a shitshow".

I'm not sure how they can be so deliberate and so accidental at the same time.

I wish the board would fire those incompetent leaders and regain market value, but I'm afraid it's a collusion where everyone in power is just ripping Mozilla for what it's got before the ship sinks.

Sure feels that way.

This is because an inside apple policy dictates that all apps on iOS must use the Safari web engine and can't ship their own. As a result all browsers on iOS are just glorified Safari skins & Web application support continues to lag as a result among other things & Apple has complete control over what that one true web engine of iOS supports and what not.

And I haven't run a lot of mobile browsers recently for comparison.

But I find it hard to believe that most browsers that are more popular than Firefox on mobile are doing worse at basic memory management when the number of tabs grow.

Mozilla's so-called mission statement in a privacy focused browser is a complete failure. This cult around Mozilla needs to stop.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...

For places like Mozilla, there _is_ a solution to this though:

Altruistic organisations like Mozilla (which they at the very least are on the surface) would do their best work with altruistic individuals. Those kinds of people would sacrifice an unreasonably high salary, just so they can work for an organisation they believe does good.

So it's a win-win. You get the types of people you need, and you pay less.

Why this isn't happening, I don't know. My guess is that one dumb fuck infiltrated the organisation, and he's hiring more dumb fucks.

They shouldn't bring one a regular market CEO, and what their CEO has to do to win users and promote the FOSS engine has nothing or little to do with what Apple and Google's CEO has to do to pad stocks.

In fact, it's precisely of the BS focus they have, doing what any corporate spiky-haired boss CEO would do, that they lose users...

If you want to install any other not in the blessed list you need to jump through a horrendous sequence of hoops every time:

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...

It's by far the most annoying aspect of Mozilla yet the organization has never taken steps to prevent the practice.

Mozilla programmers are a law unto themselves—users bedamned.

And yes, Google is a huge company with a ton of developers, but teams are not. In my experience, these kind of fixes are sometimes even done by individuals in their "spare" time, to contribute a bit back (even if it's for a competing browser).

And I just discovered this week that zooming in chrome affects ALL tabs not just the one you’re on. And they marked the bug as won’t fix so you need a bloody plugin to zoom a single tab.

I don't have this issue in ALL tabs, but only the tabs sharing the same origin which makes sense if you ask me, doesn't seem a bug.

As someone who uses the browser a lot for work, I cannot have randomn lock ups happening for seconds at a time and not have this treated as a priority 1 bugfix by mozilla.

You mean all tabs sharing the same origin? eg I zoom in on the HN front page then I open a comment section on another tab that will be zommed in too. Make sense imo

> browser.zoom.siteSpecific

Set that to false and it will apply to only the tab you're on.

The setting in Chrome exists but cannot be modified.

Given this, what would cause someone to just stop using it and switch to Chrome?

- Aggressive misuse of incompatibilities, such as video calling for Chrome and Edge (e.g. Teams)

- Loss of websites optimizing for standards and instead optimizing for the monopolist (Chrome). Same as with IE.

I would guess many users whose niece/nephew/grandma installed Firefox for them on their old computer won’t even know they switched products.

Edge sync works. That was my last straw, since I'm sending tabs to another device all the time.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...

Firefox has only gotten better in recent years, but it also has no advertising, while Chrome just dominates by being a Google product heavily pushed everywhere (I still remember when software bundled Chrome in).

It's still baffling to me how bad the Google add-ons page is comparatively to the Firefox ones. Firefox organizes all their add-ons so neatly.

Every new update made Firefox more chrome-like, what little money they make seems to be going everywhere except making the browser engine better, it keeps bleeding market share and getting more and more issues with website compatibility.

Why would I use Firefox when it is worse than Chrome in every way? To avoid Google? Google funds Mozilla, Firefox would be dead without Google money.

A good article about why the redesigned Safari tabs are bad:

https://daringfireball.net/2021/10/the_tragedy_of_safari_15_...

I guess the problem with the browser is that it is a market to everyone in the world. You either try and optimise for one market and accept losing the rest or you try and make it the best of all worlds. I think FF never quite knew where it belonged.

Yep. I switched to chrome on mobile when Firefox gave me issues while developing for it. Just buggy and unintuitive behavior like cancelling drag events or not handling PWAs well.

I still use it on desktop though. I've never had issues with it there and the style changes don't bug me.

I also use it on mobile for YouTube, but it pisses me off that it won't play in the background anymore when it used to.

Of course for new users you can try new stuff but don't bother existing, happy users with your experimentation.

Yes, to avoid Google. There is a huge difference between using Chrome and signing away all of your information to Google, and using Firefox which is insulated from Google even if it is funded by them.

Plus if you change your default search engine in Firefox, Google isn't exactly getting their money's worth.

2. Firefox isn't doing that well on mobile devices (sadly), and people want passwords, bookmarks, Google logins etc to be shared between mobile and desktop browsers. Even for ex-Firefox desktop users (especially non-technical users), Chrome's it-just-works sync is quite compelling.

If you're on Android, please try Firefox mobile. You'll get extensions as well (such as adblock).

• Response to an OS-based prompt to 'try' or 'default to' their 'recommended' browser (Looking at you, Windows), intended, accidental or purely from a position of ignorance

• Response to a search-based prompt to use their 'suggested' browser (looking at you, Google), intended, accidental or purely from a position of ignorance

• Similar as above from Google, where some really basic feature of their suite is hampered (intentionally or otherwise) from '100% intended' compatibility (even if that just means entirely inconsequential aesthetic features)

• Family/friend/neghbour acting in an IT support role just swapping it out because that's what they use (as happened to my father's computer, I was irritated to see last time I was in that role...)

Basically, I don't think many in our domain have a strong reason to change FROM Firefox, although I'd like to believe they should have good reasons to change FROM Chrome... .

They

break muscle memory every few releases: order of entries in the right-click context menu, change design of frequently used functionality, remove keyboard shourtcuts or replace their action on already pre-existing installations

promised unforking Tor

promised adding chromecast casting on mobile

promote "unplatforming" people globally for views they don't agree with

As for desktop I went from Firefox to Edge, then got tired being scared of every update MS making UI more and more hostile with each update and switched to customizable Vivaldi. Firefox was always slower and more memory hungry than Chromium and years of optimizations didn't change that.

Btw. what happened with Latest version chart in bottom of page?

Switched to Edge, it works. Tried for some weeks, every time still stuck.

Now not trying anymore, starts Edge and watches.

But I also observed that in some occasions when some videos are to be changed (one played, then another to appear) even in that different setup Firefox becomes completely non responsive.

The issues started abruptly to appear, so I'm quite sure it's some update with some (I hope) unintended consequences.

The title at the moment is "editorialized" so for the case it becomes more neutral I'm preserving it for the context here:

"Firefox lost ~16M users since last year"

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1536482

For instance, AdGuard on iOS doesn’t protect me from “popunders”. Also, no filters protect me from reddit nudges for using their app. Whereas when I had an android(firefox+ublock) I never saw a popunder or reddit nags.

I wonder how much of this can be explained by people using desktops and laptops less and cell phones more.

sounds like they got that covered!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34367662

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34367690

That said, Firefox iOS is still mediocre. Tab management is still bad compared to Safari. But at least we got Colorways (and every time it updates it I get the Colorways popup screen)

Can you give some examples of bad things they've done to Firefox, to someone who thinks Firefox is pretty good?

Here's something done badly - Firefox View's Tab Pickup. Because as we know, no one ever opens more than 3 tabs. So that isn't used by many because of that and unless it's implemented into a proper list with actions against it then it will die a death of underuse.

I'd absolutely love to see Mitchell Baker do a Reddit AMA and actually answer inconvenient questions because there would be plenty of them.

Yup, I remember this coming out and playing around with it. The fact that I disabled it / never saw it again, probably re-enforces your argument that it was done badly. But when you say "So that isn't used by many because of that", do you mean because it was implemented poorly?

Hmm, now that I've looked at it again to see what it was, I'm wondering why I opted not to use it :/ Might give it another spin.

EDIT: Now I remember. It can't be set as the default page for new tabs or windows. Which is ... a strange decision?

Degrading Uglybar (address bar), some functionality was cut, last searches are not displayed and replaced with pinned sites. UI of Uglybar was changed a lot and made gigantic and also just a little bit moving so that cursor selected text by 2-3 characters to the side. After a year of shouting and FF team demonstrating exemplary asshole attitude on r/firefox some of the UI only changes were toned down, not completely though. And functional changes remained.

Removal of some compatibility with older extensions.

URL trimming in Uglybar, thankfully that's can be re-enabled for now. (I consider this anti-consumer, just like Google's attempts to push centralized AMP on us).

At this point Google should just spin out the Chromium engine as a separate non-profit organization and allowing others to freely make their own browsers based on a standard browser engine like Brave, Edge, Opera, Vivaldi etc to use it but done freely without Google's complete control.

Exactly just like what the Linux Kernel has done with 'distros' with the kernel as the central standard for anyone to freely make their own Linux distro, the same can be done for browser engines.

This will never happen. In fact, Google's intention is to sabotage every other browser, and shove ads everywhere.

https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338

The thing to consider here is, do you consider yourself an average user? Most of us here would not care if they didn't have firefox or chrome as their default browser, to myself it's practically meaningless apart from win98 days setting some near useless lump as the default to catch auto activating BS, but to ordinary folk they can get weird ideas they have to use it ... IIRC M$ went to a little bit of trouble to stop people easily making firefox the default browser, and some internal links are edge only without a really good work around. I don't see them going to all that trouble unless there's a slight benefit.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1542189

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/shortcut-for-different-...

Even if it's a highly requested feature, minimal effort, high impact, and something users expect to Just Work™, just like it does in Chrome; it's still getting ignored.

And all they have to do is copy what Chrome does 100% exactly the same, no effort to design something new. They have all the functionality already in place, under about:profiles, it just needs a nice UI on top, and to open new links in the "last active profile".

When a user sees this does not work like it does in Chrome, and they have to struggle to achieve the same functionality with a worse workflow and a hideous UI, they will simply claim the functionality does not exist and carry on with their life using Chrome. They will not bother to search and install the extension that does this for them, that's simply not a realistic expectation to have.

I can work around this because I appreciate the other things Firefox has more than the effort I put into profile management. But I'm tech, and highly tolerant of things like this. Normal users aren't, the simplest inconvenience will throw them off for good.

If something Just Work™ in Chrome then it has to Just Work™ in Firefox as well.

This was just one example, probably the most obvious example of them all.

I'd add that to store the Firefox search engines, they developed a custom file format. This is to make it more difficult to configure search engines (and make you more likely to keep the default ones).

https://www.jeffersonscher.com/ffu/searchjson.html

Never thought of that, perhaps showering Mozilla with money had two goals, getting search users and corrupting Firefox for Chrome to take over.

Logging in to the browser and not a website? And then your account is indelibly imprinted on the browser? In what universe is that a good idea?

And then Google saw that people weren't using this so they made it that if I just go to Gmail and sign in, the browser casually slurps up the login anyway and anyone else who uses the computer later can see that my email address exists.

Profiles are entire separate namespaces at the browser level. The login functionality Chrome has is an extra piece on top, that ties your profile to your Google Login.

I too obviously hate that functionality, but it's unrelated.

Thing is, they used them in Chrome, because that's where it was easy and obvious to do. And since Firefox does not have an equivalently easy and obvious workflow, they keep using Chrome, and teach others as well to use Chrome. Reason why the drop in numbers happen.

It's not the only issue Firefox has, but it's the highest impact, lowest effort one they have. Performance improvements are hard, PWA is hard to implement. Putting a better UI on existing functionality is simple by comparison. They could score an easy win here, but they choose not to.

* My personal usage.

* My professional usage.

* Each individual client I contract for.

* Testing out extensions.

* Local development playground.

It's extremely convenient to have all of this be just 2 clicks away the way Chrome has it, simple and intuitive to use.

I have all of this in Firefox as well, but it's not as easy to set up and use, difficult to navigate and hard to look at. Plus links always open in the default profile instead of the last active one so I always have to copy things around and shuffle windows. I can deal with this, other people don't and won't. It has to Just Work™ like it does in Chrome. They use Chrome because that's where it's easy. And because of that Firefox looses potential users.

https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338

Honestly if FF wants to win this battle (?) then adblocking is a worthy crusade. Brave is already there, curious what they will do with Manifest v3

"We believed then, as we do now, that users would be best served by having useful extensions available for as many browsers as possible."

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2022/05/18/manifest-v3-in-fi...

Still plenty of time to fix things. Few suggestions to friends at Mozilla:

- Make a product person in charge

- Drop everything else that isn't Firefox from portfolio; introduce it later when trend reversed

- Listen to users, not telemetry

- Plan to switch business model to freemium; introduce Firefox Pro

Once its share sufficiently drops, Google will pull out of their aggreement and Mozilla will collapse on itself. Unless Google is keeping them around for anti-monopoly purposes, in which case Firefox will just continue deteriorating in a zombie-like state.

If people aren't using the full feature browser today, why would they use it when it's not free?

Andreas has hinted that he is considering pushing the browser project to be a bigger thing, and positioning it as a legitimate and viable alternative to browsers with a corporate influence (which Firefox unfortunately is):

> Hypothetically, would you consider sponsoring a completely new web browser (no big tech companies involved) that refuses to take money from the advertising industry?

https://twitter.com/awesomekling/status/1612856174965129216

This could only be a good thing, and I for one would happily sponsor a browser (and rendering engine) that is independent and only serving users needs. All other open source browsers and engines are backed by corporations with their own agenda.

0: https://awesomekling.github.io/Ladybird-a-new-cross-platform...

1: https://serenityos.org

Stuff like no print support, no keyboard shortcuts or no tab-bar on tablets ?

Not to mention general extensions support being a shit show as well, with basically just a very small curated list of extensions (mainly add blockers) being supported out of the box.

All of these features were supported by Firefox on Android until ~2 years ago, when they did a rewrite and then ignored requests to bring this functionality back ever since.

A couple links to the Android Firefox open issues:

keyboard shortcuts - https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/3729

print support - https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/10217

tab bar in tablet mode - https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/2344

tablet UX improvements - https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/4498

[0]: https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser

Oh and it is written in Kotlin. Maybe I should learn it just to try hacking more features in.

Still, sad that people have to invest their time to do this, instead of Mozilla providing it as default functionality by default. :P

See here [1] for instructions (these were written for Nightly but they work on the stable channel now).

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...

Sorry, I could not resist posting this quote because that's very much what that guide for using custom addons in Firefox reminds me of.

Previously, you would just go to the addons page and install the addon, like on desktop.

Now since the Android Firefox rewrite you need to:

- use nigtly, not normal Android firefox - do some funky clicking on logos to enable a hidden setting - create a Mozilla account - create an addon list for that account - finding the addon list id and manually typing it into my specially configured nigly version of Android Firefox

THEN finally I can run than one addon & I can probably repeat most of that process every time I want to add another addon or enable this on another device. Perfect!

If I really wanted to kill an annoying feature while still technically providing a an almost impossible way for people to use it, that's exactly how I would do it!

This also makes sure the amount of users of any non-blessed extensions (that are on an official list and can be installed easily) will be so small as to brush off any bug reports and feature requests.

Even extension authors will likely not prioritize Android support in their projects due to the horrendous UX preventing users from actually installing their extensions.

As I mentioned, this is not necessary anymore.

But I agree with the rest of your post.

Um, somewhat tangential, but I built a statically generated CV in html, presuming that I could effortlessly print that to a PDF using a browser. Not so. Web page printing is extremely broken in every browser, and I tried them all. And, every browser had different defects. Chromium seemed to have the least horrible print functionality, but it was still really really broken. It's probably ok if you want to have a copy of some article content where presentation doesn't matter, but if it's something that you want to have a specific layout or design, tough luck.

Still using it on android but it takes ages to load the first page when the app just started. It really is bad.

I stopped donating to firefox too considering the hypocrisy of the for profit business parent business that fired a ton of good engineers to pay its CEO more.

Now, I think, maybe things are fixed and working correctly, but the damage is done.

Any, way, I alternate between Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Safari, Brave, etc, acording on the task I need to get done.

Web browsers usage scope is huge and beyond reading liquid and/or formated text. And Firefox was behind in some relevant areas.

I think this is the most probable cause of all the stuff mentioned in this thread.

Another notable point is that roughly 10% of the users have an adblocker, but 35%+ of users are using addons. What is the rest using?

It would be interessing to have older data for this, to see how the different stages of the XUL-addon-drama impacted those numbers.

  - General: Recommend extensions as you browse
  - Home: Pocket, Sponsored {shortcuts,stories}, Tips and news from Mozilla
  - Search: nothing
  - Privacy & Security: Suggestions from Sponsors, Firefox data collection, Dangerous site blocking
  - Sync: (by it's nature)
  - More from Mozilla: (by it's nature)
  - Extensions & Themes: (by it's nature)
  - Firefox Support: (by it's nature)

  - General: Nothing
  - Tabs: Nothing
  - Autofill: Nothing
  - Passwords: Nothing
  - Search: Nothing
  - Security: Fraudulent site warnings
  - Privacy: Apple Pay and Apple Card
  - Websites: Nothing
  - Extensions: (by it's nature)
  - advanced: Nothing

But for me Chrome turns on my laptop fans more compared to FF.

And not just some obscure ones written 10 years ago. On a backup laptop with Linux and Firefox, BBC iplayer and CBBC games(which my son loves) doesnt work at at all.

Even on my Linux/Mac machines, I see weird behaviour sometimes.

So sad, but you do need another Chromium based browser. On Windows, I find Edge pretty good. On my Mac and Linux, I use Vivaldi.

As other people in the thread have complained: Firefox dont help by pushing their other products and changing the UI

1. https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix

I do find the contrast slightly low between active and inactive tabs on macOS in dark mode, using the "original" profile, but I'm sure this is easy to tweak.

For all its faults, Safari in compact mode/dark mode does get the active/inactive tabs contrast right, although it's obviously fairly subjective.

- The default toolbar layout looks really dumb with those spacers, especially when you enable the search bar

- Wizards in the first visible tab when you install the browser, or even a specific new browser version.

- Mozilla the organization in general

Addressing the loss of users, I’ve never met anyone in the real world that uses Firefox in my circles. It’s entirely Chrome and Safari on iPhones / iPads. I’m curious who besides myself actually uses Firefox. I have recommended it to others, but they always revert back to Chrome. The most I’ve seen with someone who was privacy concerned was switching to Brave.

I hope Firefox is able to continue its development long into the future because it’s good to have diversity from Google’s control of the internet in my opinion. It’s unfortunate that Mozilla has to rely on Google’s money to fuel that development however.

Sure you can. Don’t listen to armchair defeatists who never worked on a browser."

-Ladybird FAQ

on desktop i.e linux - firefox keeps leaking memory on many tabs / sites. whereas chromium browsers do it at a slower pace. which means on desktop linux - I have fewer tabs open on firefox than I would with a chromium based browser. my other biggest complaint - firefox forcing me to update itself on desktop by refusing to open a new tab.

I still use firefox though but not gonna deny the pain

But I don't use Gmail anymore and happily run FF everywhere.

But reading the comments here it just sounds like a lot of you are stuck in a relationship with an abusive partner. Keep making excuses why you're staying, etc.

I feel for ya... I hated jumping ship at the time, but honestly looking back all I miss is the dream of what it was supposed to be, not what it actually became.

As I said in several recent posts about the horrible performance of Mozilla Thunderbird, there has to be a Trojan horse in the Mozilla organization.

Why else would such an organization keep constantly shooting itself in the foot? Why else would it seemingly go out of its way to avoid giving its users what they want?

Yeah. Money from Google has to be the Trojan. It ought to put a new perspective on how we view antitrust law.

Nothing stopping someone else from starting a new company and picking up from where Mozilla left off

Yeah it sucks that Mozilla got bought out and now is beholden to Google. I just don't see how it's illegal

The so-called 'free' model undermined all those small companies that were making competitive products and put them out of business.

If competition had been allowed to proceed as normal we'd have much, much better browser and email products today. All the nonsense with Mozilla and others would never have occurred.

The fact was these products weren't actually free as Microsoft costed them into the price of Windows. Unfortunately, until software came along no one assumed that anticompetitive practices could be used in this way to put competitors out of business. Even now, decades later, antitrust/anti-competition law still hasn't outlawed this practice.

Make no mistake about this. What happened should not be forgotten and antitrust/anticompetitive law strengthened to see that there's no such repetition.

—

Edit: don't forget Google is doing the same as Microsoft with Chrome. When behemoth companies can squash competition with 'free' giveaways of key products/essential technologies we've no longer free markets, it not olny distorts the process of competitive capitalism but stifles innovation. Simply, companies like Mozilla wouldn't be forced into devious practices just to survive.

Remember, browsers and email aren't just show bag giveaways, they're crucial products for our modern world. No company should be allowed to dominate them at the expense of other competition.

It is nice to have something a bit more privacy focused on mobile.