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Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
481–490 of 949 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#482They should focus on saving Firefox. - Cut out all (or at the very least, most) initiatives that don't serve the goal of promoting Firefox's market share or sustainability going forward - Donate the major money drains that aren't Firefox to the Apache Foundation or another worthy custodian - Fire all inessential staff that don't want to work on Firefox. - Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not…
"- Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money"
That has to be the first on the list, because that is the prerequisite for everything else.
Unfortunately there is no mechanism to achieve this within Mozilla. The people that need to go won't; they've got their trophy titles and they've feathered their nest as they want it. Thus Mozilla and Firefox with it are doomed.
Solving that would take a fork, just like it did with Netscape. It would also require an endowment of capital to fund a core of developers for years just to catch up with blink/webkit/etc. At this point the best plan might be to adopt the latter.
Thing is the market is producing this without Mozilla. Brave and others are delivering real alternatives to Chrome, Safari and Edge.
So at this point what is the value proposition of saving Firefox? That's a rhetorical question; I get it. I just don't know if it's enough to attract the developers and funding to do it. It's conceivable; one could imagine a leader with the passion to inspire people and attract the funding and developers.
Maybe that person exists. If so they won't be doing it under Mozilla.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
The arrogance is hard to believe. > In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask peopl…
And she raised her pay while firing essential engineers: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/313658-mozilla-fires-2... I'm a firefox user for over 10 years. I think I'm now convinced there is no future, I'll have to start to adapt to another browser now. I'll give Vivaldi a try.
That was the layoff where they got rid of all the rust people?
Its going to sound harsh, but they are loosing market share to browsers that didn't have to invent a new language to write a browser in.
So, getting rid of those people was probably a positive impact for firefox since they were mostly just yak shaving instead of actually improving the end product. The users don't care if you wrote it in C++ or fortran as long as it performs well, doesn't eat all their ram, or create giant backdoors.
Letting "the lets rewrite our core product in $COOL_TECH_OF_MONTH" people run a product is a sure sign of something that will fail if its not already. Lets invent our own computer language to do it is even worse.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#484People should listen to Dr Robert Epstein [1] and never use a google product again.
Google are an advertising company and master manipulators. They have unprecedented control over people very thoughts and opinions. They should be avoided at all costs by any thinking person.
Of course, none of this helps Firefox. If anything, it suggests that they are pretty much fucked.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#485Earlier quoted context omitted.
>they need to answer the question, why should Firefox exist? If there is no compelling reason, well, there you go. If there is, double down on that make that reason shine. Unfortunately, that reason (browser engine diversity)is compelling to people who understand the situation, but not general consumers - and it's impossible to make general consumers care, unless maybe Firefox went for an edgy "rebel against the man"…
I feel like I understand the situation but I'm doubtful that browser engine diversity is compelling. It seems like duplicate effort. As long as Chromium accepts pull requests, what's the problem with browser monoculture? (In case it's not clear, I'm asking in earnest. I'm not trolling.) - - - - edit: Okay, pull requests alone are not enough, but the objections y'all are raising seem like they could all be answered by…
The problem with browser monoculture is that it will erode the authority of the spec over time. Having multiple independent implementations of the same spec means that developers won't be able to merely code to one browser and treat it's quirks as gospel.
A good example of what happens if you only have one implementation is Flash Player. People programmed to the implementation and not the (non-existant) spec. So any reimplementation of Flash Player is largely an exercise in chasing after implementation bugs in the Player that badly-developed movies rely upon. Even Adobe's official internal documentation on SWF and AVM2 is woefully incomplete, because the actual "spec" is the proprietary source code of the player and whatever tribal knowledge had been accrued from decades of maintaining it.
The sole implementation in this case (Chromium) being Free Software does alleviate this a little, but the spec is still more of a suggestion than a reality.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#486The amount of people in HN who think they can do a better job at being the CEO of every company; or being the president of any country; or being better than whoever is trying to something, astounds me. Dudes, if saving Firefox was so easy that could be described in a single comment like that, it would have been saved already. There are more people at Mozilla than the CEO, she is not responsible for all decisions. She…
> Also, people need to understand that Firefox is not the reason for Mozilla existence, Firefox is one of the tools that Mozilla has (and depends on) to fullfil its mission.
No. This is arguing that the tail is wagging the dog. The only reason why people care about Mozilla at all is not their social projects, not the fact that they released a VPN, or the fact that they maintain Thunderbird (OK, fine, for some it is). The reason they care is because Mozilla is developing Firefox.
Subtract Firefox from Mozilla, and you get zero or less. And yes, we realise that Firefox is the last remaining independent browser - which is why it's alarming that they are focusing on anything else when the market share is so low. Their ship is sinking and they are debating whether the orchestra should play Bach or Mozart on the way down.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#487They should focus on saving Firefox. - Cut out all (or at the very least, most) initiatives that don't serve the goal of promoting Firefox's market share or sustainability going forward - Donate the major money drains that aren't Firefox to the Apache Foundation or another worthy custodian - Fire all inessential staff that don't want to work on Firefox. - Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not…
> Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money, and cut their salaries (bonuses tied directly to increase in Firefox market share).
They fired the CEO that knew what he was doing. Personally, I think Mozilla is getting what they asked for.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#488Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really? This isn't GM -- it's a web browser. An important one, but even a paltry $1M should be enough to draw in the right talent.
$1m is senior engineering manager compensation in the valley at several companies just a short drive away from Mozilla’s offices. It’s far below CEO compensation. Anyone who is capable of succeeding as the CEO of Mozilla would be giving up millions of dollars they could easily make elsewhere in the valley if they took only $1m as their comp.
which companies are paying 1m to managers?
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#489The amount of people in HN who think they can do a better job at being the CEO of every company; or being the president of any country; or being better than whoever is trying to something, astounds me. Dudes, if saving Firefox was so easy that could be described in a single comment like that, it would have been saved already. There are more people at Mozilla than the CEO, she is not responsible for all decisions. She…
>There is a huge intersection between people who are often saying they know how to fix Mozilla and those using non-Firefox browsers. If people here who cares about Mozilla would volunteer, and also use the browser, Mozilla would be in a much better shape
I have to agree with this. You see everyone on HN talking about the importance of Firefox in the fight against Google's monopoly but yet when you read comments about anything web related many (maybe most) commenters say they use Chrome (Someone should do a HN Poll).
There is no excuse to use anything other than Firefox if you claim to care about things the open web, software freedom etc.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#490Earlier quoted context omitted.
A better CEO would not be cheaper, particularly considering that whoever takes the job would be tasked with saving a dying product. High salary and a golden parachute would be required to attract anyone good enough to succeed.
I think Mozilla and Firefox are cherished by a lot of people who would like to see them thrive. But I think if given a choice, most of those people would prioritize the survival of a viable competitive web browser. The name of the product and the sponsor of the product are less important. So a related question might be, "What would it take for a Firefox fork to succeed?" If you think the CEO of Mozilla is a cancer, a…
Well a large part of the problem with a fork is that you don't see a lot of random drive by contributions. As a possible contributor myself a couple times, firefox is a development nightmare because it doesn't have a good autoconfig system that lets one download the code and start being productive quickly.
Then like chrome, i'm betting most people can't actually built it in reasonable time on their laptops since it burns a good 64 core machine with 128G of ram for a hour or two. Screw up said configuration, and your in for another rebuild loop. It can take days just to get a working development environment.