Because the leadership is hellbent on copying Chrome but worse and investing in utterly pointless endeavors instead of making a good browser. It's a shame. Giving money to the Mozilla Foundation is the same as throwing it to a black hole.

I hope a new truly FOSS browser shows up and catches on that does not use Blink and isn't owned by a group of human-shaped leeches.

Is this a hypothesis that we can specify and test? Is this how we would approach this problem?

It sounds more like a cynical write-off, not a actual strategy

>I hope a new truly FOSS browser shows up and catches on that does not use Blink and isn't owned by a group of human-shaped leeches

Cool, but that strategy clearly isn't working.

I'm suggesting, instead of writing off Firefox, we (you specifically, and me and whomever else wants to) start engaging with Mozilla to help figure this stuff out

Nothing is perfect, but at least it's got some of the hardest parts right: Organizational momentum and distribution. Technical stuff is easy to change compared to that.

The challenge now is finding competent people who can actually put the effort in, with no compensation, to make it work and that might take convincing the Mozilla folks to do something differently.

Having done this kind of thing a few times, that sounds way easier than trying to totally start over from scratch though.

There is nothing to test, it's why I stopped using Firefox. Check the Mozilla foundation page for all the crap they fund instead of the browser. Look how much the UI looks like Chrome, even little things like clicking the searchbar expanding it outside its bounds.

> I'm suggesting, instead of writing off Firefox, we (you specifically, and me and whomever else wants to) start engaging with Mozilla to help figure this stuff out

They don't listen to feedback. When Apple (the company known for telling people they were holding their phones wrong) introduced the safari tab-redesign that merged tabs with the searchbar, it was nearly universally disliked and they backtracked on the change. Apple of all companies backtracked on a bad design. Mozilla? They just keep on going.

When Nintendo was struggling due to the failure of the Wii U, Satoru Iwata took on a massive pay cut to avoid firing people. Mozilla? Fired the Servo team and raised executive compensation.

> In 2020 Mozilla announced it would cut 25% of its worldwide staff of nearly 1,000 to reduce costs. Firefox has fallen from 30% market share to 4% in 10 years. Despite this, executive pay increased 400%, with Mitchell Baker, Mozilla’s top executive, receiving $2.4m in 2018.

[1]: https://static.mozilla.com/foundation/documents/mf-bylaws.pd...

[2]: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/who-we-are/leadership/

Notwithstanding that, they still put out firefox. And Firefox is a far superior browser to any of the alternatives if you care about user-centric control and privacy. So to anyone who cares even a little about being able about these things, supporting Firefox is the way to go.

If a mythical even-better browser shows up, great. But here and now, it's Firefox, or completely surrender the web to commercial interests.

Firefox was created by pre-Baker Mozilla which was an organisation focused mostly on - to coopt the terminology used by those who coopted Mozilla later - "software justice". When Eich was ousted (for voicing an opinion he shared with people like Barack Obama [1]) and Baker took his place she set a course towards different goals: Mozilla was going to focus more on social justice because it was not enough to only build software. She clearly did not realise - or did not care - that it was through creating viable open alternatives to proprietary browsers and related software that Mozilla was in fact doing the best it could towards achieving the aim of a more just world.

Baker needs to be ousted, she can go lead some NGO somewhere if she wants to fly social justice flags. Let Mozilla be led by those who understand that software freedom is an integral part of freedom of information access and an open internet which are essential to counteract the tendency towards authoritarianism which has plagued society since the dawn of time.

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/33750...

Yes, I'm familiar with the history (fun: I even have an original signed CD of the initial Netscape open source release, handed out at the release party in San Francisco which I attended).

Mozilla of today could perhaps be more focused on the browser.

Nevertheless, they continue to support it, maintain it and release it. If you want a browser today in 2023 that puts out user control and privacy first, this is it, Firefox.

Baker's organisation continues to release the browser which pulls in several hundreds of millions from Google. This money is for the largest part not used to improve the browser or the software ecosystem surrounding it - Firefox sync is withering on the vine, Thunderbird has been spun off, Seamonkey has been spun off a long time ago, Servo has been terminated (the project is continued by volunteers), the Rust team has been let go, etc. The money is used for political activism and to fund Baker (who again raised her own remuneration, from $2.5 million to $3 million) [1] and her organisation.

That Firefox still is being released is more despite of Baker's managerial decisions than thanks to them. Mozilla is kept alive by Google because the presence of Firefox on the market is an insurance against claims of a monopoly. That insurance is getting less effective now that Firefox has dropped to a low single digit market share so it remains to be seen whether Google will continue to shore up Mozilla for much longer.

> If you want a browser today in 2023 that puts out user control and privacy first, this is it, Firefox.

Yes, that is still true because of the work done by Mozilla developers and volunteers. Now imagine how much further the browser and related projects could have been had Mozilla been led by someone who would use the proceeds of the Google deal to further software and ecosystem development instead of what largely amounts to political virtue signalling, "color of change" and other PACs and similar activities.

Baker is not the right person to lead this organisation, she is a political activist [2] better suited for an NGO or PAC.

[1] https://techrights.org/o/2022/02/17/mozilla-salaries/

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

Step 1 is get rid of the for-profit corporation that pays its CEO 2.4 million dollars a year to lose market share. That's 24 well-paid developers, or double that from lower-income countries.

The foundation had a revenue of $441 million in 2020. We know that in 2014 ~90% of their revenue come from its search-engine deal with Google. That means that without Google they'd have ~44 million to work with these days (or more).

That's a lot of devs, before even considering non-search-engine sources of revenue. Personally I don't mind ideas like the VPN. I do mind the stupid grants the foundation does unrelated to a web-browser or acquisitions like pocket.

That's a stretch even if we don't count the additional overhead.

How many years of Google money would it take to support ~500 staff purely for making Firefox in perpetuity? That's maybe ~$50 million/year?

This[1] says endowments target ~7.5% annualized returns. So a very conservative 5% return could pay for ~500 staff with ~$1 billion in Google bucks.

[1] https://www.nacubo.org/Press-Releases/2023/Higher-Education-...

Try > 5.6 million. https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-990...

Any suggestion that Firefox do support Tab Groups will be met with ridicule. It just doesn't.

While firefox still uses google, allows google ads and tracking, and just talks about doing something but does nothing

Also chromium is just a superior engine, in security and speed, using firefox won't change Chromium dominance at all.

That’s bad, but not nearly as bad as what the parent commenter described.

They didn't do this either. There was an omnibox site suggestion that included an affiliate id. Nothing got appended and people were able to see the affiliate id before hitting enter to visit the site. These site suggestions could also be disabled in the settings.

That isn't really what is happening. It shows a preview for news.ycombinator.com and hitting enter confirms that option. The distinction is one is clear to the user and the other is a modification that happens behind the scenes.

[disclaimer: former Servo team member]

Mozilla had a chance to advance browser tech with Servo and fumbled it.

Chrome, when it came, was stupidly faster than any other competitor, including Mozilla Firefox.

What would Servo bring to make web a big jump forward for us users, beyond ideology and fun work for its developers? (Ideology doesn't sell software, as opensource efforts have proven repeatedly over last 3 decades).

The biggest advantage would be having a memory-safe browser engine.

Only social initiatives get feel good money to waste on nice to haves. This "Servo" thing does not sound like it.

Even granting that some of them come from dependent libraries, if the world's arguably best funded software engineering organization can't keep C++ footguns out of an application that runs untrusted code on the regular ... one may want to have a think about whether C++ is the best tool for that purpose

I'm delighted to hear that you (and I) were not personally impacted by those but to say "I didn't get in a crash, who cares about seat belts working" is comically misguided

Also your "for Chrome to autoupdate" perspective makes me wish I could search for every single red Update screenshot I've seen in presentations or Zoom meetings

So what feature would full memory-safety actually enable? I suspect that's the bit that the Servo folks couldn't articulate well enough.

Servo was a much more modular effort.

1. we would get a lightweight (modular) electron alternative. This would have helped rust gui ecosystem a lot, just like wgpu helps rust gamedev scene.

2. Probably have more variety in browsers as everyone can now reuse servo components to make their custom version of firefox. Imagine all the linux distros which reuse gnu/linux, but have their own philosophy of package management, updates, mutability etc.. We could have had the same sort of varieties in browsers for different usecases.

Wasn't it just using WebKit initially? IIRC you could actually use Safari on Windows back then.

Although I think I agree with you, if your “so that” is so you can visit a particular website, those features you are specifying may demonetize and eliminate the website you want to go to causing it not to exist.

There are many non-aligned efforts with various directions, some focused on privacy, some on UI config, etc. maybe getting these people together to create something common where something can be integrated into one.

Just to keep rambling, I'd add that maybe a online conference independently run to get some important conversion going in the community, with the various firefox-fork maintainers and other important contributor, and try to layout some common roadmap, outline the main issues and get people exited again about the product would be a relatively low-hanging fruit to this started.

When the Mozilla Foundation CEO made a blog post ranting about Donald Trump, and said how we need to go even further than just kicking users like him off social media[0], it ensured I will never trust Firefox again. Deplatforming is already odious, used to suppress unpopular voices far more than it's used to combat genuine villains. And the senior leadership at Mozilla wants to go even further? Thanks, but no thanks. I like having a free and open internet, and I don't really trust that the Mozilla people are on board with that any more.

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

- Reveal who is paying for advertisements, how much they are paying and who is being targeted.

I think that would change internet landscape a fair bit.

Try to actually compile that bloody thing, before you write "software to be fully modifiable by any person using tools that are easily, freely available and accessible"

Even Ubuntu team gave up on compiling their software, and are serving mainstream binaries from Mozilla!

Brave has some shady stuff, but that is easy to disable in configuration. And under-hood they follow security patches pretty well, have good security and stuff like 3D acceleration just works!

And you do not need 10 browser extension from some shady authors, that has full access to your browsing data!!!

Mozilla had process based isolation (mainly due old code base). That is far less effective. Some things like GPU access are not sandboxed at all!

>Google remains the default search engine provider inside the Firefox browser until 2023 for an estimated $400 million to $450 million per year.

Mozilla is a multibilion corporation. They DO have resources for proper rewrite in Rust. How they spend their money is another thing!

Old code base was good excuse in 2016! Brave Software Inc is much smaller company, and they do advanced stuff like their own search engine!

Which extension authors are shady? I am mostly sticking to ublock origin, but this is the first time I hear that accusation.

Plus several extensions were just sold to highest bidder!

Ublock Origin installed from Firefox Extension Web Store. I have no idea how this was verified and distributed. I do not trust webstore as a channel. Also user may easily click on "Unblock" or "Unlock" and get something completely different.

If this extension came from my Linux distro package, or bundled into Firefox binary, I would trust it.

With Brave I have no need to use extensions. Everything is bundled and can be enabled via about:flags.

Mozilla has defunded Firefox, allows for no way to directly donate to Firefox development, and now writes activist blogs.

We know what Mozilla will do with it - not ideal but it's the devil we know

We have no idea what Brave will do with it

My personal heuristics around VC backed companies (Having been a CEO with venture backing, an LP in a venture fund, a director in a publicly traded company etc...) is the following:

There do not exist PE backed companies that will take actions that conflict with an even theoretical reduction in potential ROI.

Leaders lose long term control of their companies to VC the moment they sign the term sheet

So I have zero faith that anyone who aligns themselves to profit making, will not harm either the customers or the employees that are involved in favor for the people providing the capital.

Gervase Markham was a dedicated outspoken fundamentalist at Mozilla until his death and was very influential, but he wasn't in a leadership position. Big difference.

ah yes my favorite important improvements that I totally use daily like adding crypto tokens to chrome and crypto spam notifications on android

Mozilla may have forgotten the CTO persona. CTOs can donate engineering hours to Mozilla. Companies can donate money. If companies in the Fortune 500 aren’t using Firefox internally and companies like Netflix aren’t recommending Firefox to users, then Mozilla will continue to struggle to get market share and sustain funding.

One key use case: Firefox used to make it easy to create corporate intranet apps (the apps teams at companies use to do work). However, Firefox security changes started breaking intranet apps by returning the “your connection is not secure” error and giving workers no way to override. This hurts CTOs so CTOs switch their companies to Edge & Chrome.