Judging by the HN and Reddit comments with each Firefox/Signal/Matrix releases, it seems most of the customers of privacy focused products want all the other features of competitors; most of the times without paying any money (or they think donations should cover for everything because they once donated, so all hundreds of thousand users would). And they dislike/have negative sentiments towards any UI changes or breaking functionality for new features. So core userbase for these products becomes hostile towards the product growth by definition. In this environment, either the product stops growing and simply becomes a niche product for those set of users or it dies.
And you made it happen by your choices.
I use it because I like it a little bit more than chrome. And because I don't want google to completely control the browser market. But the more firefox becomes like chrome, the less reason I have to continue using it.
And despite what Mozilla thinks and wants, I don't think most Firefox users care that much about privacy. I suspect most Firefox users use it because their tech saavy friend, relative, or IT administrator installed it for them and/or told them to use it. So losing core users also means using many other users in their sphere of influence.
Except FF market percentage has been decreasing not growing. The technical foundation has gotten better, but it’s like Mozilla execs are completely out of sync with the market share they could have. They want a “shiny” app that in theory people should want, not the app people actually want.
I just hope some group of geeks decides to fork it and change it up.
If they pivot towards "mainstream appeal", it usually comes to the expense of that user community. Their alternative is to be the best Firefox they can possibly be, and wait for users to join their audience organically.
It feels like Vivaldi has done a better job of sticking to a clear user persona model. They are clearly targeting power users and Opera 12 refugees, and it feels like that still informs what they do. Unfortunately, the one thing they can't do is make a browser that doesn't run like cold treacle.
Do most people use Firefox because it's "privacy focused"? I don't - I think people use it because it does the things they want ... and "privacy" is far down that list.
I know I'm an odd-ball, but I haven't upgrading my FF because I want ftp support in my browser. I upgraded the desktop my kids use, and the tabs went all wonky. The only reason I haven't switched is I trust Google less than I do FF, and I want to stave off a technology monoculture.
Yes, my clear desire for ftp support means I don't want technologically perfect security or privacy.
Concerning "privacy" as the article points out in the section "Invading your privacy at the same time as telling us “we value your privacy”
] Telemetry. Hidden telemetry that isn’t disabled when you click “disable telemetry”. Firstrun pings. Forced signing of add-ons. Auto-updates you can’t switch off, pinging every 10 minutes. “Experiments” which require a separate opt out. Now the latest offence is enforcing app based 2FA to login to a Firefox Add-on account just to make a custom theme, which you wouldn’t need in the first place if not for forced add-on signing.
> either the product stops growing and simply becomes a niche product for those set of users or it dies.
FF has dropped a lot of users, so I assume you mean it's decided to be a niche product in the "privacy" space, and not a generally useful tool?
Its marketing doesn't seem that successful, as my first thoughts are to switch to a tool based on FOSS Chromium.
This is a business model question, right? Nothing prevents someone from making a great privacy focused browser and actually charging for it vs being directly (Brave?) or indirectly (Chrome, Firefox?) ad-monetized.
Also in this context, referring to "customers of privacy focus products" is technically incorrect, they are actually users. Definition of a customer is "someone who pays for goods or services" thus Mozilla's main customer is Google (accounting for close to 90% of its revenue). Maybe looking through this lens, relation of Firefox product direction and what its "customers" want becomes more clear.
edit: simplified for clarity
There are always comments and complaints. One need to evaluate the quality of this complains to understand their worth.
> either the product stops growing and simply becomes a niche product for those set of users or it dies.
Successful products prove this wrong. The most successful ones barely change at all, they usually evolve for a decade or two and then adapt to a new generation. Stability is a viable road to success.
Heck, even chrome didn't really change that much since it's first version. Firefox is really absurdly extraordinary in how unstable it is.
I also used to use reader mode once in a while...
You can also switch in built in adblocker in Vivaldi. There's no reason to use Firefox.
In AdGuard, you can add "extensions" that extend the functionality of the browser. Its simple. For example, playing youtube in background or bypassing paywalls. Extensions are little javascripts.
I'm happily on brave mobile, which does block ads.
At least there's a workaround for the bookmark issue. There's no workaround for renamed menu items and changed shortcut keys.
I believe it to be corporate sabotage by Google ... due to the 100's of millions of dollars that Google gives to the Mozilla Foundation, they have a lot of influence over Firefox.
I just hope it's not Nokia level deliberate sabotage.
> That might not go on for much longer, though.
I will use it till the end and will use what ever the FOSS community forks from it or existing forks. Because, I'm guilty that me not using FF and FOSS alternatives for Operating Systems, Browsers, Software has led to rise of the Mono/Duo/Oligopolies in-spite of possessing the skills to understand the outcome, In-spite of having access to the warnings for smart people who said exactly this would happen.
I wish they could find a stronger inner core to work on, something more utilitarian than user-drafting.
There's a lot of people saying chrome wins because websites are better with it, sites with high requirements like zoom IIRC, but in my experience it's not common nor impactful enough (these sites work fine enough on my old laptop)
whoever has the solution i hope it comes fast
Easily explainable
Mozilla been captured by "aspirational" MBA types who think they don't really need that userbase, instead they want to chase "what big boys do", and copy lame features in hopes that monkeying Apple will score them iDevices users — the type of people they psychologically want to associate themselves with.
And most people probably don't make a conscious decision about which browser to use. A lot of Firefox's momentum comes from tech saavy users who recommend it to friends, family, coworkers, etc. So losing "core" users cause a chain effect of losing non "core" users.
Looking at why established users complain about Firefox isn't why billions of people moved to Chrome, from many sources. It was the default on our phone and that makes it an obvious desktop choice.
(Not to mention it does do some things nicely, I just much prefer FF for webdev)
If privacy is the ultimate concern, I can suffer usability.
I think the real issue is we've stopped advocating for privacy loudly and publicly. All the users know is convenience.
But with Firefox, all the UI choices are gone now, intentionally sacrificed on the altair of rewrites, UI changes, branding and some dubious security claims. You used to get the choice of vertical tabs (better on todays widescreen laptops), tree-style tabs, Buttons where you liked them, user-provided CSS customization for pages and the UI. Not anymore, all gone (they paid some lip service to some of the above concerns, but nothing relevant, and overall a massive downturn).
Now you only get the take-it-or-leave-it of one crappy and worsening Chrome clone UI.
I don't use Ff because I can't approve with exactly one of their UI choices: tab closing button on the wrong side. I am on Mac and this just messes with my muscle memory too much. (It used to be that the buttons where on the right side, which is to say the left side.)
However, other than that I see a lot of UI love in both the macOs and iOS Ff interfaces. One can feel the team works from their hearts.
I wish they would use their brains more. Painful irony.
EDIT: Anybody an idea why this got downvoted?
1. Mozilla is competing against Google. Numbers are not public but I would be surprised if Google didn't have 10x more people working on Chrome vs. the number of people working on Firefox.
2. Mozilla is competing against Google. Numbers are again not public but I remember reading estimates that the equivalent ad budget for promoting Chrome during year 1 was about 6x the entire budget of Mozilla for that period (writing "equivalent" because webside, Google is its own ad agency).
3. Mozilla is competing against Google. Google owns countless properties besides Chrome, from Google Docs to Google Translate to Android, and leverages all of these (great products) to lead users towards Chrome. Case in point: many properties that don't/didn't work or work correctly with Firefox could be made to magically work if you changed your user agent to Chrome.
4. Mozilla is competing against Google. While Mozilla was front and center on many things open-source, relying on volunteers, Google employs countless (talented) Tech Evangelists and managed to attract considerable goodwill, much of it at the expense of the army of volunteers who used to help Mozilla.
5. Replace "Google" with "Apple" in the above points, adapt product names and repeat.
6. In 2011, predicting that the only way out of this was to outmaneuver Google and Apple on mobile devices/silos, Mozilla bet the farm on Firefox OS and lost. Mozilla never recovered.
7. During the Brendan Eichgate, Mozilla became a hapless victim of the US culture wars, mostly acccidentally. Mozilla never recovered.
Now, I'm not claiming that Mozilla never made any other mistake wrt technology or UX or PR. We've all seen a number of them. What I'm claiming is that these mistakes have next to no influence in comparison to the points above.
It's easy and fun to point to half a dozen of your favourite Mozilla missteps over more than a decade and say "those are why Mozilla is losing". Maybe if Mozilla had done none of them, they wouldn't be losing. But in reality every vendor makes missteps. It's the unrelenting competition from Google that really made the difference, via the avenues you mention and others.
Pretty damning that Google was never slammed with a huge fine for anti-competitive behavior for that.
I've been saying this for over a decade, and facts like just continue to make this clear.
Defending Eich is a hot take that you only see here on HN. He is a worthless individual who champions the cause of taking away personal freedoms of groups of people he doesn't like, pushes anti-mask conspiracy and smears public workers like Fauci, and his only technical 'achievement' since leaving Mozilla has been to create a fork of chrome that bakes in his companies ads and pushes a scamcoin on the user.
The fact you even have the gall to defend such a person is laughable. It wasn't that long ago the population would summarily execute such people when they revealed their status as societal bad actors.
Fast forward 12 years, and little has changed. I dont keep 1000 tabs open, so chrome has never felt slow. I tried installing the developer edition of FF about 6 years ago on macOS and it refused to open.
Why bother changing?
Check your chronology: I wasn't a Mozilla higher-up when HTML 4.0 replaced 3.2. IE won the first browser war and MS was instrumental along with Dave Raggett in finalizing HTML 4. MS also was all-in on "JScript" by that point, having contributed to the ECMA-262 standard as I describe here:
https://www.pldi21.org/prerecorded_hopl.12.html
I was not a "Mozilla higher-up" during this period, I was not in management. From engineer role doing JS in 1995, I was promoted to Principal Engineer at Netscape by 1997. So your chronology there is bogus.
Also, mozilla.org did not exist until late 1997, and was not launched until April 1, 1998. Once again you are out to lunch on history, out of some bizarre desire to blame me personally for the web standards in full, and consequently browsers that implement them, being so complicated.
I always wonder why Google do this. Sure, they could always have more Chrome users, but at the same time they're going to have to support Firefox forever whatever happens, and Firefox is a nice hedge for Google against being accused of having a browser monopoly.
They merely need to wait for a time when the regulatory environment is more favorable. It's just a roll of the dice every 4 years, sooner or later their number will come up and they can cut all support then and there.
But it's not really necessary. By making Chrome the preferred and optimal way to use any site, and making chrome intrinsics the expected behavior of a web browser, they are creating an environment where all the incentives are towards making your browser more like chrome. Eventually there won't be much difference in the surface between Firefox and Chrome and Mozilla will finally make the decision we all eventually expect, and just change Firefox into a true chromium fork.
Though that may happen sooner anyways. It feels pretty clear that there are parts of the greater Mozilla org that don't benefit at all from all the effort going into Gecko (or a web browser in general) and wouldn't be disappointed in the money going towards other initiatives instead.
An authority with the effective power to cripple the finances and business practices of Google for the purpose of reducing its market share to an arbitrarily lower percentage would be immediately detrimental to furthering the development of Google's products, and consequently detrimental to the utility of its users, while in the longer term it wouldn't be obvious that conceding the lesser competitors to scramble for this stolen market slice would yield better alternative products, nor that users would ultimately benefit from having more lesser competitors.
The idea is that MS, Google, and others really have no reason to donate to a direct competitor. Perhaps they did so because they knew it would give them control. That control was exercised over the years and now Mozilla is more a social justice advocacy organization than a foundation that develops a web browser. The sorry state of FF was the inevitable result.
Whether you buy this narrative or not, the fact is there remains no effective threat whatsoever to the massive data collection that occurs whenever you use Chrome or Edge. 10 years ago, MS/Google had no ability to spy on the web surfing of the vast majority of computer users. Now they do.
I would not be surprised if Google's support for Mozilla is based on similar reasoning.
This is not what happened. Microsoft was involved in a lawsuit after paying one of Apple contractors to steal QuickTime code. "investing" in Apple was part of the settlement.
https://www.theregister.com/1998/10/29/microsoft_paid_apple_...
Monopoly laws care about marketshare and Apple's was tiny at that point, especially in the business market
What sorry state?
The thing I don't get about this narrative is that Firefox works and works very well for me and so when I see people saying things like this it doesn't jive with reality.
However…
> That control was exercised over the years and now Mozilla is more a social justice advocacy organization than a foundation that develops a web browser.
I do think they’re happy to spend too much time/money on their pet projects. Given the layoffs and poor market performance, this has come at the cost of their product. I’m allowed to dislike that despite still using it.
Sorry state of Firefox, I disagree. Sorry state of Mozilla, yes. So I look at M and do expect FF to get worse.
If browsers were all private, and they had power and control, it'd be harder for G and MS to poke through.
So the 'erase' a layer of the value chain by making it all open-source.
One less barrier between them and the customer.
Chrome is as important to Google as many other things, it's just not where the revenue is captured.
The fact Mozilla squandered those "free" money is their management's fault.
Moreover, Mozilla's Firefox is deliberately hostile to the open source movement too - their code is a convulated mess by design, to discourage others from developing competing products with it. (Remember, that Firefox has provided Mozilla with 100's of millions of dollars - so the excuse of legacy code and all is just bullshit). It's no wonder that both Webkit (Safari) and Blink (Chrome / Opera) are more popular than Gecko (the browser engine of Firefox), with developers. (All that money is just wasted on them ... ).
This is total nonsense.
It's a mess because it has 25 years of legacy behind it, and because until a few years ago all of that legacy was considered a "feature" by half of the userbase, who was screaming at them not to remove the "mess" because it would break their addons. Even in this very thread you see people whining about removing XUL addon support. And ironically, most of the "competing projects" are based around preserving that mess.
It's only since 2017 that they've really been able to clean up the architecture at all. And saying that they're "hostile to open source" is practically defamatory. Mozilla has contributed more to open source across a broad swath of organizations than 99.9% of companies that are 100x their size.
What did Firefox do to fix the compatibility e.g. with Teams? That should've been the highest priority. Instead, it took them years to get at least the GPOs right, autoupdate is the same story... so many things in corprote env were or still are PITA to set up in Firefox. So unfortunately no wonder it's Chrom(ium) for every single big company out there.
And don't get me wrong, I try to use exclusively Firefox whenver I can, but this is really frustrating to me as sysadmin.
I think that's the wrong way around. Why would Firefox need to change their browser for a specific web application?
Microsoft chose not to support Firefox, not the other way around. It's still choosing not to support smaller platforms (the Linux application is simply garbage, lacking basic features that have been available on other platforms for months).
When I ran into this problem, Teams didn't work because Firefox didn't allow the application to enumerate the audio devices hooked up to my computer, only exposing a "default" one. I don't even understand why that would be a problem, my browser already asked which input and output to use, why would Teams need to care?
Jitsi and Google Meet worked fine, so the problem was clearly with Microsoft's developers. They managed to fix the problem eventually, so Microsoft should take 100% of the blame here in my opinion.
I don't know about the sysadmin stuff. Honestly, with modern Chrome-clone Edge, I'd expect most business that roll out a browser to now simply stick to the built-in browser.
1: (original Raymond Chen link busted, but quoted here:) https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
Because Firefox has more to lose by not doing so. The blame game is pointless because in the end it helps Firefox in no way.
It inherently makes sense that all those apps would try to understand what devices were available and even allow switching between them. It's often required because that entire stack between the browser, os, and device is very unreliable even on something like macOS.
Yea it's on MS to test and fix their stuff, but FF is the one losing market share and honestly part it sounds like they make their apis more prone to misuse. At least in this case.
1. Google basically controls the web.
2. Whenever a new Web API shows up, browser vendors have to decide between implementing the standard and copying the bugs, exotic behaviors and extensions that are implemented in Chromium.
3. Websites are tested on Chromium, so they start to rely on Chromium's bugs, exotic behaviors and extensions.
4. When a website breaks in Firefox (or Safari), people claim that it's the fault of Firefox devs and switch to Chromium.
The early web got tired of this when it was Microsoft at the wheels, but it feels that few people are particularly interested in fighting the good fight these days. Much easier to blame Mozilla.
Why use a browser for Teams at all?
Also this way you can use add-ons with it.
Why Firefox, why?!
4 1/2 stars with over 4 million reviews. I use it regularly and have no real problems with it.
Initially, Google Play reviews got filled with 1 star reviews from users complaining that a lot of their workflows were broken, things that they liked were removed, extensions not working (unless you used the initial nine excluded extensions).
The rating dropped from 4.7 to 3.9 in less than a month. After that, some one star reviews were removed (maybe google thought it was review bombing or Mozilla used some kind of third party service for that). Ratings started to go up a bit after that.
And suddenly a lot of 5 stars reviews with little to no content (thumbs up emojis, Nice/Great/Good, or just dots) started to appear and the rating almost returned to the previous normal.
Nowadays is just a mix of good and bad reviews, most of them quite lengthy.
What are your main pain points?
I like the new look, I even like the bottom URL bar placement that many reviewers seem to be negative about, and I like the concept of collections that the user base is protesting so much. Those are fine for me.
However, I'm regularly running into bugs ever since I updated from that latest "old" mobile Firefox. It took them months to support the certificate authority installed on my phone, and even now that's a hidden setting somewhere in a debug menu. Using said certificate with a HTTP proxy is still broken.
There's no setting to control DOH, even though there's no reason the browser might not support it. In fact, there's no way to use about:config AND use a stable version of the browser on Android; you need to run Beta or Nightly or the folks at Mozilla don't trust you to touch the settings. The addon library is abysmal, even after all this time, and the hack to get around that requires a Mozilla account and messing with custom addon lists.
I can't view the source of the current page anymore. It's been too long since I last had the option, so I'm not sure if this was an addon or a part of the core browser, but I used to be able to hit the menu button and click "view source". I think the view-source: URI scheme is still supported, but I can't figure out how to make the app respect it anymore.
For the past weeks, I've been running into a bug where using Swiftkey in combination with Firefox sometimes clears the entire text field. On websites that use native text boxes like HN I can correct that by opening another keyboard with a control key (Hacker's Keyboard) and hitting CTRL+Z, but on websites that provide their own rich editing that's impossible. This bug has eaten tens of posts of mine, some not at all short, and from what I can tell from Github the bug should already be fixed (it isn't) or will be fixed in Firefox 94 (which hits Beta in about 20 days, and then stable in November). All other browsers work fine with this keyboard, and it seems like everyone using Swiftkey and Firefox together should be running into this. I'm a little annoyed that this fix wasn't backported to current versions of the browser.
I would've been fine with all of this if this was the first release of Firefox on Android. However, it's simply not; there was a competent version of Firefox before the rewrite and the modern version still hasn't reached feature parity after dropping that version more than a year ago. Being able to hit install on any Firefox addon and being reasonably sure that it'll work was very liberating. Of course, some of the addons simply couldn't work because they relied on UI not present in the mobile apps, but I never saw that as a problem. Those addons got purged with the switch to WebExtensions anyway.
Perhaps people who switched from Chrome to Firefox after the release of the rewrite won't have as many issues because they never used the advanced features Firefox used to support.
All in all, it's a decent mobile browser, but the reasons I started using it in the first place have slowly been eroded away.
This mass feature removal is just one more data point in line with what is discussed on the article.
It was a great browser! I still install it once a month to see if they bring back the critical usability features. No dice yet.
Note: I use Chrome for work to 1/ isolate my work from personal sessions without the hassle of containers or profiles, and 2/ because I work for a web app targeting Chrome (per the market share).
I use Firefox most of the time, out of a desire to support Mozilla and promote a non-Google browser. Admittedly, this is a political motivation, but it comes at pretty much zero practical cost. If you are interested in trying out Firefox, I think the only significant inconvenience is disabling Pocket.
Like the parent, I'll occasionally switch to Chrome for separate profiles, or if I need something specific in DevTools. Chrome has much better multi-profile support, in the sense that it has it at all, but again, the differences between the two are so minor that I don't have any qualms switching back and forth.
But both are just fine. Never have issues with Firefox. But I do have issues with its UI. Too much wasted space, it's only useable in compact mode which they want to get rid of. And I hate that there's no clear visual separation between tabs anymore. Even Chrome and edge have this.
Honestly, Mozilla has lost the big picture. The whole point of it was to have fewer messages that occupy the mind and disrupt tasks, and Chrome does it better, as long as I’m logged in.
Are you exaggerating or does yours work differently?
I find that hard to believe considering no hardware accelerated video playback (although other linux browsers also have the same problem). At the very least, I think that statement needs to be qualified with a "under certain use cases".
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/icloud-bookma...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/icloud-bookmarks/f...
I think it does tabs, too, but I'm not sure.
I tried through the years, and always ended up with a main browser (Safari or now Firefox) and Chrome as a Google dedicated browser, because the experience would be miserable otherwise. At this point I stopped blaming the other browsers.
Funnily enough, moving tabs to the top is actually one of the few UI changes I actually agree with and find more logical. Since the address bar and navigation buttons only control the active tab, they logically belong ‘inside’ the tab: switching to a different tab should also switch to a ‘different’ address bar and buttons. (Internally they may be the same object, but that’s just an implementation detail.)
There's an addon for that, but you no longer can hide the default tab bar! So now it just wastes space up there for me. Mozilla... just one day removed the option to hide it. First from the GUI, then from about:config. And also addons can no longer hide it either.
This assumes a landscape-oriented monitor.
I would suggest trying this out on a portait oriented monitor. Tabs on top make the most sense there.
Also, I would generally suggest trying out a portrait oriented monitor. It's quite useful for coding, reading, etc.
Which is a pity, because, besides the fact that Chrome has almost all of the marketshare, they also basically own Mozilla financially (is this still correct ?) and technologically Firefox uses Skia and Harfbuzz for rendering, both heavily dependent on Google.
So there is basically no competition for Google in the browser market.
This can't be good.
Also there's really only one way to file bugs: bugzilla.mozilla.org.
IIRC, Google Chrome (for Windows) was essentially built by engineers hired from Mozilla back in 2005/6? How tables turn.
For me the main argument to use Firefox is not living in the Google universe which is quite a huge value in itself and the fact that it is open source.
Oh and they finally added proper dark mode on macOS and did quite some work for Firefox to look and feel more at home on macOS in the last versions. This is really nice to see and appreciated.
Btw Firefox has seen a bottom in 2021 June and user numbers have been going up slightly since then: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
The bug says fixed but the nightlies show it hasn't
The bug says fixed but the nightlies show it hasn't
Oh and I had to switch to Safari to edit this comment.
Firefox (née Mozilla) is a terribly mismanaged company. Instead of focusing on their core business, making a great browser, they keep launching weird also-ran side projects that inevitably fail, to name a few:
Firefox VPN, Firefox Notes, Firefox Lockwise, Firefox Monitor, Firefox Send, Firefox Hello, Firefox OS, Mozilla Persona, etc.
It’s one thing to fritter away your fortunes and engineering talent on fun side projects when the main business (and money-maker) is doing well, but to do so when it’s floundering is massively irresponsible.
Baker & co. are making off like bandits, paying themselves lavish salaries while running the company into the ground. Unfortunately, there’s no Firefox stock holders that can sue them for mismanagement.
So as the Google/Apple browser duopoly is slowly cemented, we can only blame Mozilla management for destroying the only truly open and independent browser left.
"Mozilla get 95% of their revenue from Google, that's terrible! They shouldn't be so dependent!"
"How dare Mozilla try to make money from products other than Firefox!"
Chrome just recently turned itself into a password manager on iOS. Agree about all the other projects though.
Mozilla should use their money to improve their browser on desktop and mobile.
Firefox on iOS shows how little Mozilla cares about the platform.
For instance, no real adblock, they only have a tracker blocker which blocks most ads but misses a LOT of web annoyances like cookie banners and YouTube ads.
Example of third party browsers with full featured adblockers: - edge have adblock plus - brave have a built in adblock - iCab
Their reader mode is extremely amateurish compared to safari. Increasing font size makes the title of the article absolutely huge.
I agree, but also aren’t alternative browsers on IOS still just window dressing? Since the backend is always Safari?
There's (IMO) nothing anti-competitive about not allowing other browsers. They all serve the same web pages.
Cynical take: if Mozilla were to start such a law suit, it would be to avoid Google having to disclose how much money they make from Chrome users.
But, with tabs specifically, I very rarely have more than two going at a time. That probably matters.
* Removing "meritocracy" from the governance docs - https://blog.mozilla.org/careers/words-matter-moving-beyond-
* Changing "master password" to "primary password" - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/primary-password-replac
* Removing "crazy" from the codebase - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1675987
* Removing words deemed as reference to mental illness - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1675986
The difference in the project from 15 years ago is stark.
The Mozilla mission 2005:
"Established in July, 2003, with start-up support from America Online's Netscape division, the Mozilla Foundation exists to provide organizational, legal, and financial support for the Mozilla open-source software project."
The Mozilla mission 2021:
"Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent."
Where they once were just supporting a software project they're now a political movement. They spout "equity", "justice", and "advocacy" all over mozilla.org. No thanks, I just want a decent software.
meritocracy - To whom? Who decides? That's right: the kingmaker. And the kingmaker decides on those who share significant amount of the same traits. And most of these "kingmakers" in tech are 20-30 something white male.
master to primary - Again, "master" in US culture has a very very bad connotation that <drumroll> equates with US slavery of black peoples. ""find . -type f -exec sed -i 's/master/primary/g' {} \; "" takes seconds to run, and only infringes on alt-right sensitivities.
crazy - Is a garbage word. Has no real definition, and just really shouldn't be used. If there's a problem with a person and their choices, the issue with that should be stated, not by calling them "Crazy". Same goes for the rest of the words in your mental illness link. Enumerate the problem at hand, not by labeling the problem with a garbage word that equates to crazy.
> Where they once were just supporting a software project they're now a political movement.
FLOSS has always been political. The predominant license (GPL) is a anti-capitalist license that seeks freedoms from creators to make everyone owners. The AGPL was made to challenge cloud operators in using and not sharing their changes. Again, political.
And the whole FLOSS ecosystem itself is and isn't about computers. It's about how humans interact with computers and other humans using computers - and guaranteeing individual rights when using computers. FLOSS is a human rights issue. So yes, it's completely understandable that high profile projects would seek to include everyone.
GPL and RMS is not anti-capitalist, Linus Torvalds and Red Hat for example made lots of money.
So you can have Proprietary license <GPL <BSD and you have dudes that love both proprietary and BSD and hate GPL, my only conclusion that this dudes would like to grab others BSD work and make it proprietary and make tons of money, this is not capitalism ; this is the toxic "How to make XXX$ in 1 month(10 steps) people.
let me explain, I see people selling this idea of you buy this cheap crap from China then do a small change , sell the shit and make tons of money with almost no work(I seen other get rich schems too, with books or other stuff). I think some GPL haters would love to grab GPL stuff, put their cheap shit on top and sell it and make tons of money. GPL allows you to make money though, you have to share code though so others could make money too.
P.S. I would really like to understand why GPL is anti capitalist or communist in some people mind, is it some FUD or some wrong usage of the notions.
Rust, WebRender, Stylo, Pathfinder, wgpu, Dav1d, asm.js (which resulted in WebAssembly) etc.
And they helped bootstrap a lot of efforts that benefited everyone massively. Take the list above and add: LetsEncrypt, Cranelift, AV1, Opus, WebGPU, Wasmtime
Plus tooling like the reverse debugger (https://rr-project.org/) and sccache and Bors
It's been in chrome for more than 10 years already. It's such a basic feature, you earn a lot of time at not filling your address every time and even more with your card number you always forgot the number.
A few month ago they finally add the tab feature for directly researching in a site except it still a lot worse user friendly than chrome and it worked on a few website only
Yes please save all of your personal and payment information in your browser, I don't see how that could be a bad idea.
Very good idea to have mapped the rants that have accumulated over time to the historical evolution of Firefox.
It is often that you hear that a minority of complainers are just adverse to change and that the majority agree with the stupid changes. But, in fact, the majority of person will disagree in silence and just switch to alternative solutions without a vocal complaint.
So, it is important to listen to vocal complainers, even in minority, because most of the time they are your canaries in coal mines. The one in front of new problems, ready to give some of their time and energy to save you.
An additional point not mentioned in the article is the general lost confidence with the Mozilla organisation that more and more looks like to use the Firefox cash cow to fund useless random activities and insipid Management.
Maybe in some cases this is true, but I can't agree with that in terms of taking product direction from social media. In my (anecdotal) experience with areas where I have expertise, the loud and vocal complainers are almost always completely wrong about something or missing some key piece of information. In fact the angrier and more emotional the complaining, the more likely it seems to me that the complaint is based on false information. Maybe I'll have to do a comprehensive study on this at some point.
If you meant "listen" only in terms of hear what they have to say in order to educate them then sure, that can be important for marketing to explain product changes, but it's not a way to drive product changes.
That's an interesting point. The #1 Linux distribution on distrowatch for the last 12 month is now MX Linux, a non-systemd distro. Of course, the next 15 distros use systemd, so maybe that says nothing after all.
1. They still have good brand recognition, for now.
2. They lack the engineering capability to keep Firefox on par with Chromium-based browsers.
The usual objection is "but browser diversity, Chromium browser monoculture, monocultures are bad". To that I say: Why aren't you complaining about the world's most popular operating system kernel, the one with zero forks and also zero serious open-source competitors, you may have heard of it, what was it called, oh yeah Linux.
The whole point of Firefox is that it provides an alternative. What sort of alternative would it be if it's the same as Chrome?
> The whole point of Firefox is that it provides an alternative
Maybe to some people, but I think most people who use FireFox do so out of nostalgia or wanting to get away from FAANG-controlled browsers. Chromium rebranded to "Firefox" would be enough to make them accept it.
At least it's consistent :D
For me it is: I can't copy from the URL-bar to other apps. Inside of firefox works, copying from everywhere else works.
I didn't care to investigate though as I rarely need to do that and I was pretty sure it's my fault for locking it into it's own user namespaces.
Golden era was around 2005-2010 when Mozilla was running product innovation experiments such as Ubiquity or Tab Candy, "Design competitions", sending "Thank you" cards to beta testers, people like Aza Raskin having regular blog posts about development... My oh my, looking at those in archive.org and seeing treasure throve of comments, 100+ on each post, the excitement in the air with each new announcement feels just magical.
Roll forward 15 years and Mozilla Labs is about AR/VR(?), interaction with Firefox is through 3rd party sites like HN and real product innovation stagnates for years.
The real reason Firefox is losing market share is a simple fact that it is inferior to its competitors as a product, which is the direct result of this loss of connection with its userbase that it had and the passion for creating the world's best, most innovative, browser.
Neither the path Firefox took, nor the path described here, would be enough to stop that decline. A bunch of hidden and obscure features that don't make sense in totality is not a great approach.
I personally felt strongly, when I was with Mozilla, that differentiated products would help get out of that quagmire. I never had any influence at a meaningful level - probably my own fault - so the idea never went anywhere. But with multiple products you can provide niche features that are meaningful and attractive. If there are ways to use interacting features to achieve some end that is not a marketable approach: there's no story, there's nothing to attract the user to return after installation. By saying "here's a browser for research" (or studying, watching videos, managing an online store, programming, etc) you come up with an understanding between the user and product maker about purpose.
Chrome had, and still has, a lock on the kind-of-good-enough-for-everyone market. A niche approach like Vivaldi is still less successful than Firefox is today. Firefox needs to find entirely different approaches.
I've been using an older version of Waterfox for years now because it kept the things that made Firefox great for me. However, as more and more websites are unusable with an old browser, I finally reached a tipping point that forced me to switch to something more recent.
I investigated every (as near as I can tell) offering on the market today. Sadly, the modern Firefox was the least bad option after all, so I'm now using that.
I despair for the state of web browsers these days.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firefox-color...
Maybe it will help someone who has the same problem.
I really miss the old and customizable Firefox.
This is really the largest beef I have with Firefox. Firefox had been making poor (IMHO) UI decisions for a very long time -- but it didn't matter, because it was customizable enough that you could fix them.
Now that it's much less customizable, though, there is so much that can no longer be fixed.
Firefox lost because they couldn't keep up and there was little justification for why do you need to use it unless you have sophisticated needs. And the fewer users they had, the less money (coming from the deal with Google) they had to spend on development. This feedback look is what killed Firefox and left it a niche project.
Mozilla's management is also to blame. They expanded into a whole plethora of projects that all have been killed, they bought Pocket and did nothing with it. Yes, it's a non-profit, but there have been discussions on their salaries and bonuses that weren't exactly tied to the one and only metric that mattered – Firefox's share of the total market.
When I first started using Firefox it was Firefox 1.5. Back then it was literally useless without addons and you'd build it yourself, basically. And that made sense because the alternative was to use IE 6 (or Opera). But Google managed to produce a browser that was good enough and every tech person installed it at their parents' computers.
Pocket is one of the few external revenue sources they actually have.
Otherwise I've been really surprised how much better Firefox has gotten in the last two years. Good to see old giant still alive.
Their core business is taking money from large companies and performatively acting like a company to look like 'competition.'
It explains, for instance, the conspicuously overpaid CEO: In this context, that's not only "not a big negative", but an actual positive: it's very "corporate".
The memory issue the post mentioned was a really long time ago, I remember they did Generational GC, Compact GC and the most important project from Mozilla, MemShrink from Nick. That was before e10s and all of that was what made Firefox memory efficient today. ( I think Nick is working at Apple now )
The failure of FirefoxOS, was mostly because of two opposing goal or ideal. They want the OS to be web based and everything to be made with JS or Web Technology. The believe of JS will be good enough and that JS VM will be fast enough runs deep inside Mozilla at the time to be point I remember FirefoxOS engineers were even afraid to speak out on why dont they just code this in C++. The other goal was they want Firefox OS to be running on low cost $50 Smartphone and somehow thinks the Smartphone hardware price will drop while performance continue to improve. I was surprised, and it was only many years later I realise most software developers have absolutely zero understanding of hardware, BOM cost, supply chain, and long term component cost development. And I still think, FirefoxOS was a distraction for Mozilla. Spreading themselves too thin while battling Chrome on PC. They really should have fought Chrome first before their move on Smartphone. And 10 years later we really do need a third OS option in the Smartphone market. Although arguably Firefox OS still lives on as KaiOS.
But again, I say this a lot on HN, and as someone who pushed through hundreds of installation of Firefox in different places, nearly every single response of switching away to Chrome was because Chrome was faster. Way faster.
And I thought it is a good time to remind ourselves, good faith and ideals only last so long. Ultimately you need to have a better product to retain your users.
Edit: And there was another point missing from the article. Mozilla refuse to support DRM and H.264 codec, a lot of users simply wanted their browser to work just left.
I don’t grok that logic. Hard to maintain is about developers, not users.
“Code isn’t a lawn. It doesn’t change if you leave it alone for a few weeks.”
I disagree with that. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_rot
As to the main reason Firefox is losing users, I would say a) increased competition from (mostly) Google and Microsoft and b) lack of (short-term) incentives for Mozilla to listen to its users.
As to b), take a look at https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2019/mozilla-fdn-201....
If I interpret that correctly, contributions and subscriptions bring in less than $20M a year (probably closer to $10M, as $14M of that is labeled “Subscription and advertising revenue”)
Royalties bring in $450M. That’s money they get from search engines. “Other revenue” is $338M (can’t find where that comes from)
=> To me, it appears they have more income from advertising than the $3M they get from user contributions. They certainly get way more memory from search engines.
If you were CEO of the Mozilla Foundation, wouldn’t keeping the royalties flowing in be more important than raising user contributions?
Sure. Because as CEO my multi-million-dollar salary is dependent on money flowing in, more than my "Foundation" actually fulfilling its purpose.
If I were anyone but that multi-million-dollar CEO, though, i.e. if I maybe even gave a shit about what the foundation is supposed to be for in the first place, then perhaps I'd also listen a little to the actual users of the product that is ostensibly the whole raison d'être of the foundation. Idunno, maybe I'm odd that way?
It would appear that Mozilla has become captive to a single person as their personal hustle to enrich themself and a few others to the organization’s detriment.
Maybe you could expand this out a little for people who aren't In The Know. Specifics on why each person on the page isn't qualified to lead a browser company will help a ton. Thanks in advance.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28492732.
They have been outright dismissive, almost hostile - they think they know what's right, they think they "know better", they may even really believe they're doing pro-"privacy" stuff - but in the end, they're wearing blinders.
For example, there's no reason in the world to change things in a way that's actively hostile to those who don't want those changes, yet version after version requires non-trivial amounts of work to figure out how to simply not change.
Then they do things like aggregating all DNS for people in the US to one monopolistic company WITHOUT ASKING, because, they say, people don't know what's good for them. They only relented after lots of negative publicity, not after sitting and considering that not everyone trusts Cloudflare just because they say they're not evil.
So it's the attitude that comes from design-by-fiat that has turned me off completely, and I see no evidence that anything is changing in any way that's good. To the contrary - I see more examples of making decisions without the slightest concern for technical discussion.
I fear that declining market share will only strengthen their resolve to force things on their user base.
It's finally pretty close and surpasses Chrome on many fronts but turning the tides is pretty hard.
I agree that listening to users is important but some users hold you back in a competitive market. Firefox takes cpu in the background because websites have JavaScript code and so do plugins. Chrome does the same thing.
I think core "user base" is a misnomer in Firefox.
My 2 cents. I know there's a ton to the browser world and my view is just a tiny part of the big picture.
It's a known issue for years. After I lost all tabs and bookmarks for a second time, I decided to bite the bullet and go back to Chrome.
I switched to a little known Chromium-based browser and feel happy every moment I'm using it.
Firefox is still okay for its dev tools though.
Firefox never had a true chance to compete on the same level and I'm happy they didn't and still exist.
1. bug [New windows/tabs should inherit current page, back button/go menu history](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18808): `Opened 22 years ago` and `Updated 14 days ago`: they can neither implement nor reject a feature in 22 years?!
2. "We need more than deplatforming" blog post that promotes suppression of Free Speech. Would you trust a _browser_ that wants to _limit_ what you can read?!
That's incredibly naive. Only a tiny fraction of people who don't like it will complain. Others will just switch to another browser. And most will probably put up with it. And if that happens once, it might not hurt you too much. But when you do something like that over and over, you are going to bleed users, including the ones who initially put up with it as the list of things they don't like piles up.
> People don’t use Firefox because of add-ons. Our telemetry shows 80% of users never install any add-ons
Uh huh. You know why I started using Firefox over a decade ago? Because of addons. And as has been mentioned before, a lot of users disable telemetry, especially power users who are likely to install addons. So how reliable is that telemetry? And how many Firefox users are only using it on the recommendation of a friend relative or IT specialist that does use plugins.
I'm not optimistic for the future of browsers. I still prefer Firefox to chrome, but I'm not happy with the direction things are headed.
One final thought. Here's an idea for getting some funding independent of search engines: a Kickstarter like program for users to pay to get some of these features back. Though on second thought, maybe that would give Mozilla even more incentives to rip stuff out...
Use it on Android as well as my Linux machines.
If someone has a better one that’s not AMP, please post it. :)
This closing statement is missing so much context that it's misleading.
When you have more than a handful of users, their wants will eventually conflict, often directly. (Ex: Tabs on top vs Tabs on Bottom). Other times a majority of users will ask for things that provide fleeting short-term benefit but in the long-term could kill your product (ex: We need Flash support on Firefox Mobile). Telemetry and research helps you consider the needs of a silent majority, but it can alienate the vocal minority that proselytize your product. To appease both, you need to come up with a clear vision, validate it's right, and then ruthlessly steer your product toward it.
If there is a vision for Firefox, I don't know what it is. So why, as a user, should accept Firefox's many faults today when Mozilla has failed to paint a clear picture of tomorrow?
And I use Chrome to keep it logged in to my gmail only there, I'm logged out of Google (with blocked cookies) everywhere else.
Firefox only on mobile, and I'm quite happy. I haven't tried the others yet.
There are other means to get usage-numbers of addons, like server-side stats. And those numbers support this claim. Even the most popular addons have just some millions of users at best. Adblocker barely make some ten million, meaning they are used by just 10-20% of the users. And those number did not change much in the last 10 years.
Though, there were IMHO already heavy loses before IMHO. Firefox 3 & 4 (released 2008 & 2011) were heavy damage for addon-communiy, killing many beloved tools. The question is whether usage-numbers before this were significant higher.
The last straw for me was the proton update. I updated on mobile, it was faster, I liked that, the UI was interesting, and then I went to install my usual add ons. No dice. "We are only allowing select add ons, most people don't use add ons anyway." Fuck. That. I raged out and removed Firefox from all of my devices.
They shortly afterward backpedaled and said it was temporary. There was no technical reason for it though.
I now use various chromium forks that have features I need and don't talk to google. Currently that's ungoogled-chromium, Bromite and Kiwi Browser, for it's extension support. If Bromite merges extension support in from Kiwi I'll stop using kiwi.
Switching profiles was unpleasant and confusing.
They already have them implemented, why not give it a good UI like Chrome?
if they got that sorted I would be a Firefox user for life.
a) change the hotkeys (!)
b) export the browser history*
*except by manually getting the needed records from the places.sql file
Did they do 'Tabs on Top' before or after Chrome, and how could that be a problem, given that it seems this is the way everyone does it now?
Only Safari and Chrome will support captioning.
...because they fired Mr.Eich?
...because they are more interested in spending Google's hush money than listening to their users?
