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Thank you, Chris

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Thank you, Chris

#151

Post by cronix »

_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…

I've seen thousands of Chrome ads in my life. On TV, on FB, on other ads on other websites, etc. I really don't think I've ever seen a FF ad. At least, I really can't recall seeing one. From what I've seen, the public has just not really heard of them. It's mostly just us geeks. It's hard to get market share when your audience doesn't even know you exist. And then you have Android, which comes with Chrome and has a much larger worldwide audience than iOS. I don't know how this is different than windows shipping with IE in the 90s, except Alphabet is allowed to continue while MS was not. Android has about 76% of the world market compared to iOS's ~22%. iOS has been in a slow decline most of this year as well, while Andoid is going up by as much. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide

Re: Thank you, Chris

#152

Post by dhimes »

swyx wrote: post #111

just want to give a shoutout to Firefox Focus and whoever is at Mozilla that made it happen. absolutely fantastic no tracking one tab experience that has made a dent in my browser tab management and privacy defaults like nothing else has. thank you!

I tried, but I can't do it. I need tabs.

Re: Thank you, Chris

#153

Post by Ididntdothis »

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…

Maybe they hired some product managers from Microsoft :). I mean the ones that managed the whole mess with Winforms, WPF, WinRt, silverlight and UWP

Re: Thank you, Chris

#154

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

Vinnl wrote: post #50
angrygoat wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Firefox decimated Internet Explorer in the 2000s, it was just... better. And I think Chrome had some fairly obvious gains over Firefox and IE which led it to gain market share. I was an early adopter of Chrome, but that was in the days before Google seemed so sinister... I use Firefox now because I care about privacy, and I'd rather use a browser developed by a non-profit that cares about that as well. But I sus…

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…

>but decimated is not the right word.

I think decimated is the right word, as it seems it took somewhere around 10% of IE's market share.

Re: Thank you, Chris

#155

Post by liability »

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…

Google's search quality has been on the decline for a while now. If that trend continues and DDG merely manages to stay the same, it will probably only be a few more years until they're as good as Google...

Re: Thank you, Chris

#156

Post by JeremyNT »

swyx wrote: post #111

just want to give a shoutout to Firefox Focus and whoever is at Mozilla that made it happen. absolutely fantastic no tracking one tab experience that has made a dent in my browser tab management and privacy defaults like nothing else has. thank you!

It's worth noting that Firefox Focus is just another chromium-based browser. If things keep moving in the direction they currently are, this may be the sad fate of Firefox proper :(

Re: Thank you, Chris

#157

Post by ryacko »

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…

The interesting thing about Electron was that it was produced by a group independent of Google. If Mozilla spun off XULRunner as a subsidiary and allowed them to make decisions on marketing, there’d be actual competition.

(There’s also not much point to disabling XUL extensions entirely since Firefox now requires extensions to be signed).

Re: Thank you, Chris

#158

Post by magicalhippo »

saidajigumi wrote: post #45
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…

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.

DDG is just so bad. Yesterday I found a website on my desktop. I wanted to view it on my Raspberry Pi so I could copy/paste the commands. So I typed in some keywords from the title and the name of the site. By default the Raspbian image uses DDG apparently.

The page I was after was not to be found.

Well at least on the first page, I didn't bother checking beyond. Did the !g thing and got the page I wanted straight up first hit.

Here are the searches for reference:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=maker+pro+install+tensorflow

https://www.google.com/search?q=maker+pro+install+tensorflow

I've tried DDG so many times, but it just doesn't find relevant stuff. Sad, because I don't want to rely on Google.

Re: Thank you, Chris

#159

Post by jsgo »

jimmaswell wrote: post #142
jsgo wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wish they hadn't maintained dominance as much as they have, but at the same time, IE being a non-standards compliant actor and Chrome at times including non-standard web features have brought out the best in Firefox: with IE, it forced Firefox to become a thing. With Chrome, it forced Firefox to streamline the cruft and become better.

Now at least, users have choice of what they deem the "best browser" to be and I honestly don't think they're inherently wrong for feeling that way. If someone uses Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Edge (though with that last one, I feel for them because it doesn't have the best tab recovery when Edge closes unexpectedly), or some derivative of any of the above, I think they're going to be reasonably okay.

Re: Thank you, Chris

#160

Post by jcranmer »

The_rationalist wrote: post #139
snazz wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, I'll bite. Having two implementations of a browser engine is a good thing. Without competing implementations, we're writing Chrome apps , not web apps . The important difference there is that monopolies are self-sustaining and that competition prevents Google from exercising complete control over the Web without some other player having a say in it. I think you might realize this, although your GitHub post was…

I answer late because I was blocked for "spamm", anyway here's my long answer. Well, first of all thank you . You actually added intellectual value to the thread and help me better understand others. That said, let's analyse what is right and what might be wrong from your comment. First of all, let's name A the hypothetical scenario where Firefox switch to chromium and maitain a soft fork where disagreement might occ…

> But mozilla rewrites like stylo, webrender, etc are examples of competing implementations inside the same browser. [...] This make your implyed point competing implementations are useful and firefox and chromium are total competing implementations vacuous.

But it doesn't. The problem with monoculture is that the bugs in the implementation tend to overrule the standard, and additionally it can make the standard impossible to implement in alternative methodology. The (P)NaCl work was rejected by other browsers because to implement those APIs correctly required you to architect your browser in much the same way as Chrome.

For this reason, the W3C and other standardization forums require at least two independent implementations of a technology to ratify it as a standard: multiple implementations would help clarify where the specification is unclear, but having independent implementations also informs the standardization process on if the architecture is too specific to a particular implementation.

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