Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Thank you, Chris

blog.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 229 posts

Re: Thank you, Chris

#141

Post by AriaMinaei »

huhtenberg wrote: post #15
spiderfarmer wrote: post #4

Chris was great from what I have seen, but I think Mozilla needs a CEO that knows how to increase market share.

Mozilla is now openly peeing in Google's punch all the while being dependent on piles of money they take from it. At some point Google will get tired of this and will withdraw from the agreement. They won't be the default search provider, but that will play to their advantage - Firefox out-of-the-box user experience will take a sharp nose dive. Say all you want about DDG and alternatives, but they still can't hold a…

> Say all you want about DDG and alternatives, but they still can't hold a candle to Google's search quality

I started using DDG, believing that "it shows me inferior results, but privacy-wise, it is worth it." Yet I've come to learn that DDG's results are often on-par or better than Google, and inferior only a small fraction of the time.

Often when I "!g" a query, I find that I get pretty much the same results with Google too. There are maybe 10% of cases where the results significantly differ.

My perception now is that Google performs better on programming-related queries, and much better on giving me local results (especially results related to my city). But when searching for content that you'd often find on blogs, or looking for reviews of products, DDG almost always beats Google by showing less SEO-heavy, more authentic results.

Edit: typo

Re: Thank you, Chris

#142

Post by jimmaswell »

jsgo wrote: post #69
Vinnl wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox was a lot better than IE, but decimated is not the right word. I think it had about 25% market share at its peak? Chrome might be better than Firefox for some use cases, but the difference is definitely not as big as it used to be between Firefox and IE. Yet its market share is way higher. Which leads me to think it's not (just) about being better. I'd guess lock-in/cross-product marketing is another major fa…

during Chrome's climb, Firefox was a fairly slow mess and in some ways caused by users having tons of addons enabled at any given time. Firefox was a lot better than IE when Firefox came out (and remained that way even during its slow period), but Chrome was a lot better during its initial rise than both of them too. Firefox is way better from a performance standpoint than it was during Chrome's climb, but Chrome gob…

At this point I honestly wish chrome never happened.

Re: Thank you, Chris

#143

Post by thirdtry »

byuu wrote: post #63
saidajigumi wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say all you want about DDG and alternatives, but they still can't hold a candle to Google's search quality. I'm rather torn on this point. On one hand, yes, DDG for example feels some years behind Google in its relevance ranking. On the other, Google itself has been degrading the quality of its own results with ads, etc. so badly that they've seriously degraded their own "above the fold" relevant results.

I've always written off Duck Duck Go in the past, but lately after not being able to find relevant info on Google, I've been giving them a go and have been rather impressed. Especially on image results, which are way nicer to use and give you direct image links. Plus they don't obfuscate all the URLs with tracking redirects, so I can copy a link without visiting a page (that might redirect the URL on me again.) There…

I start with DDG now, and switch to Google if their results are not good enough. 90% of the time its fine. Google intentionally broke image search, and their top search results are getting very bad. Its as if my question was "show me links to as many ads as possible that might be related to my search terms." Do Google advertisers realize I see their ad when it matches only one of my search words? If they read more than one of my words, they know that was a wasted advertisement.

Re: Thank you, Chris

#144

Post by dblohm7 »

eitland wrote: post #81
entropicdrifter wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/?presets=50,30,20,10&amount... There's a monthly option right there

> Contributions go to the Mozilla Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization based in Mountain View, California, to be used in its discretion for its charitable purposes. I've read about this before I think, for some reason donations cannot be used for development and has to be used for outreach etc?

This is correct. The best way to support Mozilla products is to use them.

Re: Thank you, Chris

#145

Post by boomboomsubban »

MegaButts wrote: post #136
stebann wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anybody has some idea why that trend? Firefox is wonderful. I don't understand why more people aren't adopting this amazing browser.

Why would the typical user make the effort to download Firefox when they're already happy with Chrome? The typical user isn't on HN with strong opinions on privacy, has little notion of what constitutes a tech monopoly, covets convenience, and has already configured their one browser extension but doesn't remember how (and it turns out that same browser extension isn't in Firefox). For most people, they can already s…

>Why would the typical user make the effort to download Firefox when they're already happy with Chrome?

Why would more users make the effort in 2018 than in 2019? This doesn't explain the trend though it's probably an accurate assessment.

Re: Thank you, Chris

#146

Post by fauigerzigerk »

eznoonze wrote: post #75
huhtenberg wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla is now openly peeing in Google's punch all the while being dependent on piles of money they take from it. At some point Google will get tired of this and will withdraw from the agreement. They won't be the default search provider, but that will play to their advantage - Firefox out-of-the-box user experience will take a sharp nose dive. Say all you want about DDG and alternatives, but they still can't hold a…

Are you sure the season that G gives you "better" results is not a consequence of them tracking you everywhere and know your preferences and habits?

That's probably true to some degree, but I found that the most effective thing that Google does to improve search results is to connect multiple searches you submit in relatively quick succession.

Googling a paper or article, skimming it, then searching for something that's in the text makes Google appear like magic. When I enter the first word of my follow-up question, Google will often suggest a complex 10 word query exactly like I would have entered it.

Apparently, many people have the exact same follow-up questions that I have after reading the same text.

That doesn't require a whole lot of tracking. It does require a session cookie, but that's not the sort of tracking I'm opposed to at all.

Another thing that Google does well is searching for local content. I think this is very difficult to replicate for DDG.

But for context free and non-local queries, Google is usually no better than DDG in spite of all the wealth of data they have on me. For some niches DDG is actually better than Google and they don't fill half of their result pages with ads.

Sometimes I wonder whether the entire ad targeting thing is a fraud. Maybe Google doesn't actually track us after all ;-)

Re: Thank you, Chris

#147

Post by scoobyyabbadoo »

macspoofing wrote: post #140

Firefox has been losing market share throughout Chris' entire tenure as CEO. I think this blog post is a bit too congratulatory given that reality.

The CEO that founded and grew Mozilla was kicked out of Mozilla for his religious views and the awesome and forward thinking Brave browser.

Re: Thank you, Chris

#148

Post by fzzzy »

jcranmer wrote: post #131
Ididntdothis wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One area where a company like Firefox could do well is embedded browsers. Some years ago I had a need to embed a browser into a windows app and there were really not many good options available. Mozilla had something (XULRunner) that seemed not maintained anymore. Mozilla could build a better competitor to Electron. That would give them developer mindshare and probably also contributions once companies are building p…

In retrospect, it seems that Mozilla's biggest stumble was their decision to ignore embedding. Around 2009-ish, the decision was made to break any compatibility guarantees for embedding, at first temporarily (which was necessary until new APIs that could support multiprocess in the engine), and then the idea was that you wouldn't embed Gecko at all, and instead use XULRunner. Then XULRunner was killed off for Firefox…

XULRunner was killed off for webapps, which was killed off for https://github.com/mozilla/positron, which was killed off for nothing.

On the bright side, Servo is designed for embedding, although it's a lot more work than something like XULRunner or Electron.

Re: Thank you, Chris

#149

Post by boomboomsubban »

huhtenberg wrote: post #15
spiderfarmer wrote: post #4

Chris was great from what I have seen, but I think Mozilla needs a CEO that knows how to increase market share.

Mozilla is now openly peeing in Google's punch all the while being dependent on piles of money they take from it. At some point Google will get tired of this and will withdraw from the agreement. They won't be the default search provider, but that will play to their advantage - Firefox out-of-the-box user experience will take a sharp nose dive. Say all you want about DDG and alternatives, but they still can't hold a…

>They won't be the default search provider, but that will play to their advantage - Firefox out-of-the-box user experience will take a sharp nose dive...So what Mozilla will end up with is (a) a dip in funding and

Right, like from 2014 to 2017 when Google wasn't the default search provider for Firefox. It was such a shame to see their income go from 300 million to 500 million.

Re: Thank you, Chris

#150

Post by smitty1e »

cbsmith wrote: post #115
_noqo wrote: post #112

I understand why this spark conversations about the current Firefox market share situation. But I also believe that Firefox's dominant past plays against when it comes to analyzing the product right now. Firefox is amazing, it works wonderfully, it continues to improve, respects privacy, adopts Mozilla's ethical values. Yes, not many people use it, but criticizing this point so aggressively I think it is also influen…

> Yes, not many people use it It's a good 300 million people. Might be small in the grand scheme of things, but it's that's bigger than all but a handful of countries.

Need to figure out a subscription model to ensure that a non-Google browser continues to flourish.

Also, K. Lars Lohn is the man. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSfe5M_zG2s

Post reply on HN