Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web (opens in new tab)

> Privacy is important, but it's a feature, not a product. You still need to have a great product.

Do you consider Firefox to be a less-than-great product?

I use it as my main browser, from Windows 10. No complaints. I don't experience performance issues or UI issues. Chrome and Firefox are both solid browsers, on Windows at least.

Perhaps Firefox for Mac is a weaker product, and loses to Safari 'fair and square' on quality grounds?

Actually, Apple is giving privacy the product treatment: https://www.apple.com/privacy/

I'm trying to think of a UI difference in chrome or safari that is meaningful, can't come up with one. Can you elaborate?

> According to the first statistics I found, Firefox is only about half as popular on the Mac as it in on Windows

Wich is not much of a surprise. If you educate your customer base to use one browser, many won't switch. See the lawsuits against Microsoft because of IE.

Just curious, why does using “real Firefox” hold so much weight for you? Also, what steps have you taken to secure your device?

One reason I haven’t switched from iPhone is that I’m not confident in my ability to secure an Android, and I’d rather trust Apple than Google.

My guess would be that it's policy-enforced and what Apple really has problems with is not browsers as a concept (dynamically loading and rendering data) but rather the execution engine that websites usually use (JavaScript) and seeing that as a too-large-to-review area where they want to avoid having vulnerabilities in applications published on App Store.

Or it's a anti-competitive move disguised as a "avoid vulnerabilities" but in reality they just really want to make sure iOS users keep using the one and only browser (Safari).

One cannot have writeable executable memory on iOS (apple can, we cannot).

Thus one cannot make a JIT compiler for js and thus pages are slow.

Game engines such as Unity use il2cpp to go from the C# stuff into C++ that can be statically compiled as running the C# as bytecode would be too slow without a jitter.

I don't know the details first hand, so take this with a grain of salt, but this is what I remember from talking to engineers who explored this possibility over the years:

You can't ship a native JIT (execute native code from the heap), I think it's enforced automatically by the App Store. So shipping your own JavaScript engine is out.

You can't download and interpret third-party code, I think this is enforced by human reviews, so shipping your own Web rendering stack is out.

You can use your own network stack with WebKit on top, which would let you offer some value to users like more advanced ad/tracker blocking.

Web content must be rendered through WebKit as per the App Store Review Guidelines (https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/). This is supposed to be enforced by App Store Review by inspection. In addition to this, there are technical reasons why your “browser” will be inferior to Apple’s web view performance-wise, mainly having to do with apps that generate code dynamically in-process needing entitlements that prevent submission to the review process.

Policy-enforced.

Mozilla ported the true Firefox to iOS many, many years ago and Apple just rejected it from the store.

The NFC issue isn't related to antitrust. If they thought they could make an antitrust case against Apple they would. But their market share is so low in Germany, and the EU, that they just passed a law instead (specifically an amendment to an anti-money laundering law). It remains to be seen if it's even constitutional.

Apple is only a monopoly if the market is iOS devices so they're quick to point out the market is all mobile devices.

Google allows sideloading, and allows competitors on the play store

> I think you are free to build have other browser engines on iOS

I believe this is false, see 2.5.6 and 4.7 of https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/

But they do allow Opera Mini, a 'browser' for iOS where rendering is done in the cloud.

But why is JavaScript JIT compilation tied to the rendering engine?

I think you mean that you can have interpreted javascript, just not JIT compilers. They don't allow you to mark memory as executable. That syscall is completely disabled on their systems.

It's not a good thing, only a bad thing with a good side effect ;-)

If these non-public APIs are so useful it feels to me that Apple is acting in an anti-competitive manner. They're allowed to use them for their own applications but deny third-parties the right to sell in the "Store" if they use the APIs. Sounds a lot like MSFT in the 90's...

My point is this gets dramatically worse if every browser engine has low-level access to iOS.

I currently limit its use to an account on my computer that doesn't do the things where I care as much about security (and limit JS use), and the pledge/unveil OBSD stuff prevent it from reading or writing in directories not explicitly named as allowed. Still, you make a good point and I plan to think about it.

Maybe the question is which is more risk: a local and limited compromise to a low-privilege account on OBSD, or sharing more info with Google (sounds like Google is the lower risk maybe -- hard to say...). (On the other hand, it is becoming easier to upgrade packages on OBSD between releases and so if Iridium started releasing more often it could take advantage of that--but that is just speculative.)

Thanks. I have been avoiding extensions & plugins in browsers because of how they increase the attack surface (including some that get new maintainers) with perhaps less code review. That may or may not have a significant risk level in a given case, hard for me to say. But do you know if there is a way to make exeption lists for this things in FF w/o any extensions? (built-in in chrome, so that one aspect is convenient)

> Not sure when you last checked, but about:config is its own tab.

It was last I checked also, but felt awkward to use, and then you have to know what settings to look for, as opposed to having them in the UI (all can be easily overcome, but it is a little more work i think, maybe not enough to matter for some use cases or if I just forced myself to get used to it).

Is it possible to define ongoing exception lists there? How easy? And how many options to they allow for cookies (always, never, save until exit, ...)?

> Anything this offers over Linux containers / AppArmor / SELinux+permissions on a theoretical level, implementation nonwithstanding?

I don't know fully, but for any of those I definitely have to think more, as the user, and there is (probably?) more room for error due to complexity.

> I don't have any citation on hand (one would be welcome) but AFIAK Firefox typically has had less major 0-days than Chrome in the past, due to Chromium team's "move fast, break things, and don't communicate" policy.

Thanks for pointing that out.

I think this is among the best reasons I've heard in this discussion to avoid Chrome. The other reasons to not use firefox (at least for me on OBSD for now, given that pledge/unveil support for FF are still in progress, and no way I know to use exception lists for images/cookies/javascript without an external plugin), might still outweigh it.

More I just saw, haven't read thoroughly yet: http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20191118055603

Good to know; thanks.

Wikipedia is the single greatest website on the Internet. That's what it takes for donations to keep you afloat. $100MM revenue? Google makes that in a day.

That aside, it's not entirely clear that Wikipedia can live off donations forever.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

This. Bear in mind that Mozilla is experimenting with different monetisation models, be it subs, donations, relying on Google for search as well as partnerships with companies such as Scroll (publisher content monetisation platforms).

Also, if you follow the discourse on anything published by Mozilla in the past 2-3 years—there's been a shift when it comes to how they speak about Googe. It's a marketing move, of course, but I think it's also a sign of the direction they are following.

I believe something will change here, for better, in the next couple of years. I'd sign for a Mozilla subscription if it included services such as better VPN, supporting those who cannot afford to pay directly, but pay with they data instead.

The move towards paid vs. non-paid services creates a risk that we'd end up with two types of internet users, with privacy being the currency of those who cannot afford an expensive mobile phone or a browser not trying to sell you things whether you want it or not.

The history of Guardian (in the past 5 years or so) shows that people are happy to pay for a valuable service just to allow the others to have access to it. Maybe I'm just being overly optimistic here, but I shudder every time I think about the alternatives.

Someone else said it already some time ago, but if Mozilla had just put the money they get from Google into a fund, they'd be able to develop browsers till the end of time. But they try to "innovate" and "re-invent the web" with WASM and also other completely unrelated ventures such as Rust, as nice as it may be (Rust not WASM that is).

Another aspect of the Mozilla Foundation is that they're basically acting as a fig leaf for the monopolist web Google has created in this decade, with Google financing them to prevent anti-trust investigations, and Mozilla also playing along with Google-financed WHATWG to white-wash "web standards" and prevent real and obvious innovations such as third-party script blocking, serving only Google's interests.

FF indeed does work against anti-privacy, and I'm applauding them for that, but OTOH FF also enables ad blockers. I've used uBlock just like most of you here, but ad blocking is also a factor turning the web into a privacy minefield. Eg. if you're indiscriminately block all ads whether targetted or not, there is no possible way to finance web content production; yet people also don't want to pay for content. So what people get is polarizing click-bait, propaganda, and low-quality content while content creators (other than some high-profile YouTubers maybe) can't earn a living.

We really should stop with "fighting for the future of the web" articles when the reality is that the web locks people into addictive behaviour, fake social interaction, and crap web frontends for oligopolist cloud-hosted services (completely antithetical to personal computing and site autonomy principles), and results into cultural loss due to the expectation that everything must always be available for free, all the time, a model only creating monopolies.

The reason that they get shouted down is because every time they have tried to make money in other ways it has been done in shady ways. Like giving away the browsing data of their German users to Cliqz (would probably have been illegal post-GDPR) or running guerilla marketing for Mr Robot in Shield Studies (which reduces the trust from people who enabled Shield to help Mozilla with studies).

Almost nobody complains about the them taking money from Yahoo and Google for higher placement in the search engine list. And if their other revenue streams had been as transparent I think people had been fine.

I wouldn't suggest an alternative funding model as much as guess what will it be maybe a year or two from now. Key quote from the article:

> Mozilla has launched Monitor, a data-breach reporting service; Lockwise, a password manager; and Send, a privacy-focused alternative to services such as WeSendit. It’s also beta-testing a VPN (virtual private network) service, which it hopes to market to privacy-conscious users.

Once these web apps mature a bit, I expect to see them in a free tier + a premium behind the subscription (with the core browser of course remaining free). My hunch tells me that's why you'll see this front-and-centered if you open mozilla.org:

> Firefox is more than a browser. Meet our family of privacy-first products

All of the non-research grants were in 2006-2013. Has Mozilla stopped this policy of semi-random funding of external projects?

Some of these grants surprised me. For example, $270,000 for the translation and accessibility of the USA presidential election of 2012.

> What do you suggest Mozilla do instead?

Mozilla should sell two products:

1) Storage a la iCloud

2) Payment processing a la Paypal

And for marketing purposes they should get into discovery of free/open web services, a la old school Yahoo.

As a web site builder, I don't want to have to manage credit cards. As a user, I don't want to have to trust random web sites with my credit card info. I also don't want to be redirected to Paypal, I just want a secure wallet that can be used on web sites with a drop in <paymentframe recipient="foo@bar.com" usd="8999" description="BonsaiThing Pro 1 year subscription" /> or similar.

As a web user, I want to be able to store my photos, downloads, music, documents, etc conveniently in a little cloud-synced folder. I want to be able to quickly give fine-grained access to different web apps to different parts of that space. Photo app wants to access my photos? Great. Github wants to access my repos? Fine. Photo app wants to access my repos? No.

And the discovery thing... There's a ton of free software out there. Mozilla basically has shut the door behind it. "Thanks for the install. Good luck finding other Free tools to use with it." They should be building a directory of other free software that can be used with Firefox. I should be able to use my Mozilla account to post reviews, to discuss new apps that are voted up, etc. That will allow enthusiasts to start engaging socially with the brand in a way that Mozilla (not Twitter or Apple or Facebook) can control the identities.

From there maybe there is some social identity service, but if it's just a way to engage the community—great. Like Hacker News is to YCombinator, Mozilla should provide a place for us to discuss and share web services.

If they want to get into search, that's great. Write a new shitty open source search engine that any web site can federate with. Use Google for now, but use that money to dig us out of the hole Google put us in.

Integrate metamask by default in firefox before facebook pays them to integrate libra.

Integrating chunks of chromium code into gecko should massively reduce their maintenance costs. E.g spidermonkey is sub-par to v8 since so many years. If mozilla invested the money it invest into spidermonkey, into v8, the web would be faster for everyone. Should I repeat? The web would be faster for everyone. Nodejs servers too and also electron apps. We would also get new js features, faster. But mozilla doesn't seems to get the point of open source. They have a reinventing the wheel cognitive disease that is going to stay.

That money means that Firefox and Safari won't ship ad blocking by default because as soon as they do it, their users are worthless to Google, and Google will stop paying. It also means that their tracking prevention doesn't affect usage of first party cookies on other sites, increasing Google's and Facebook's advertising dominance.

It’s very easy to build a new browser on top of Chromium/Blink, which is why there are hundreds of Chromium-based browsers out there. In contrast, building on top of Firefox/Gecko, pretty damn hard. Even Firefox devs have admitted this.

All too often I hear sentiments like “too bad they built... on Chromium instead of Firefox”, as if it’s a moral choice. It’s not. It’s an informed technical choice. If you want to change that, you should contribute to Firefox instead of blaming other browser makers.

> With the work they are doing rewriting Firefox component by component in Rust, Google will have their work cut out keeping up in terms of performance using their C++ implementation.

I would expect Blink’s C++ implementation to perform comparably; wouldn’t the main benefits would be security-related?

> Too bad they built Brave on Chromium instead of Firefox

Weren't the initial versions of Brave based on Firefox? I rem reading it somewhere that they later had to move to Chromium for one reason or the other.

> Firefox is showing that they are more than technically competent to keep up with Chromium and deliver great performance and functionality.

Firefox's performance on android is atrocious.

Nobody would fork Firefox today, as they are just following Google reimplementing Chromium and as a consequence always behind and catching up, just burning resources. While they could fork Chromium themselves and focus instead on features that create an advantage and attract users.

the data stays in your computer though, doesnt travel to their servers. that's very significant

I 'm not sure Brave's model will work, but at least they are giving websites more options , which is more important imho than fighting for who will have the fastest rendering engine.

Chrome seems to have this - that is, you define a domain+query string and a keyword that, when typed, indicated that it should be used on that domain query. Did Brave remove that feature?

From the standpoint of privacy itself, I’m not sure how it’s different. The browser does not transmit any browsing behavior or history to any servers anywhere, which seems consistent with anyone’s vision of privacy.

That they figured out a way to still offer advertising despite this restriction, that’s just an orthogonal feature that doesn’t affect the stance of privacy.

Just use the SQLite implementation and documentation everywhere. SQLite is arguably the most well tested piece of software on the planet.

It would have been the only piece of every browser that 'just works'.

But hey having a "spec" on top to all the available documentation is super necessary so that some bloke on twitter can put it into their bio.

Even HTML doesn't have specs anymore, because they don't matter. They are a means to get all browsers to be compatible not the goal.

And Safari and Chrome still ship with WebSQL, so I don't think that "security issue" is actually there.

On a BSD? It's great for me in Windows or Linux, but it's really choppy scrolling or watching videos in OpenBSD. There was a post on the mailing list somewhere that blamed excessive mallocs. This was with version 69, so not some ancient version either.

It is. I don't use them and recommend uBlock Origin to anyone who asks. But they are correct on this.

The irony they were highlighting was the Guardian's stated position on privacy, "The Guardian view on privacy online: a human right", and their own complete disregard for that position.

That's quite different from what you appear to be making the irony about.

Truth? I can understand 'unpopular', but 'misleading' without probably even looking at it?

1) This can be easilly reproduced.

https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11658588961766604...

2) Over 95% of Mozilla revenue comes from Google for using Google as default search engine https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-fdn-201...

3) https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#health-report - see first item