FWIW, as a Mozilla employee, I think this is one of the best summaries I've read of the state of Mozilla.
Mozilla’s Uncertain Future
161–170 of 405 posts
Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future
#162Personally and strictly my own ignorant and informal opinion, Firefox and by extension Mozilla Corp. was doomed the moment it decided to compete with Chrome by being more like Chrome. Firefox built its userbase by being different than the dominant browser, then decided the only way to not die was to be exactly like the dominant browser except with less icky behind-the-scenes privacy behavior. That was a fundamental m…
As one of those conservatives who always whined about major changes:
Nah, that's not the moment of doom. The moment of doom came when google chose to spread their browser bundled with freeware and people all around ended up just having it as their major browser. Many not even knowing how that happened because they never remove the check marks on the installers. I'm still pissed that people where I installed Firefox now use Chrome as their main browser without having even realised when that changed....I wish there would be a way to block just google/Chrome installers.
Most of the people don't know/care about where Chrome comes from or that it's good to un-google or whatever. It's just a minority caring about this. This minority is not relevant to the overwhelming dominance of google.
Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future
#163How are the expenses of Mozilla increasing at such a pace without having a sustainable business model? Seems like poor management.
Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The reason Firefox has lost market share in my opinion is because: My opinion is that none of those actually matters. The "one" single reason Chrome won market share was the same playbook how Google Search Engine Started. Speed. I watched hundreds of users, given the choice, or doing so themselves installing / using Chrome by their own selection. It was faster. The user experience was far better. You could advertise…
I actually bothered to load both side-by-side and check. Firefox loads pages faster. Really the parent commenter is right: Chrome is dominant only because of its huge marketing budget. P.S. Chrome is also buggy as hell and crashes pages all the time , which Firefox doesn't do.
> I actually bothered to load both side-by-side and check. Firefox loads pages faster
Are you comparing current Chrome to current Firefox? Relatively recently, compared to the overall trend we're seeing here, Firefox got much faster than it had been: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/14/introducing-firefox...
The discussion above, however, is about how Chrome came to grow so much while Firefox shrank so much, and for that the question is how did Firefox and Chrome compare historically. There was ~10y from Chrome's release until Quantum came out.
(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about Chromium isn't privacy focussed? It was my understanding that all of Google's grubby code isn't present.
Or Brave. It's Chromium with ad-blocking / anti-fingerprinting built in, so even more privacy preserving by default.
Brave's made a big mistake in the past, so I'd hold out on using it until there's no other non-Chrome option: https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-aff...
Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
I left FF several times for being slow, being a memory hog, dropping extensions, not adding power features (vertical tree tabs) and come back from Chrome for ideological reasons. I might not be the core audience or user group, but I have not left because of i.) - iv.).
One of the reasons I'm still on Fox is tree-style tabs (with "Tree Style Tab" extension) and being able to hide top tabs (using userChrome.css).
Same here. If TreeStyleTab existed on Chrome (or, hell, even in Safari), I wouldn't care that much which browser to use.
Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The reason Firefox has lost market share in my opinion is because: My opinion is that none of those actually matters. The "one" single reason Chrome won market share was the same playbook how Google Search Engine Started. Speed. I watched hundreds of users, given the choice, or doing so themselves installing / using Chrome by their own selection. It was faster. The user experience was far better. You could advertise…
> I watched hundreds of users, given the choice, or doing so themselves installing / using Chrome by their own selection. It was faster. The user experience was far better. For the first time or because they were already familiar with it? Once you've established yourself as the "default", it can be ridiculously difficult to convince people to switch to something else. Google has executed this strategy perfectly and t…
> Once you've established yourself as the "default", it can be ridiculously difficult to convince people to switch to something else.
Not very believable as FF actually gained a much bigger market share than default IE over time.
Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Firefox would just be slow as hell" Why is that? The problem is they get into to web standards game which is driven by Google to create pressure everyone else to spend millions on the newest standards. I don't need the newest standards, 2000 web works perfectly fine for me (except HTTPs). Firefox is slow with many tabs open on Win10, Ryzen X3900 with 32gb of RAM (writing this from FF) They broke exetensions several…
> I don't need the newest standards, 2000 web works perfectly fine for me How about layouts being broken because (funnily enough) web developers are desperate to use features such as grids and flexbox that make their jobs less painfully awful? Presuming you're a developer - surely you can sympathise with the desire to get people to upgrade their browsers so that webdev's lives are made more pleasant?
I, for one, think the HTML API (as in, the interface presented to the programmer, not talking about any other API meaning here) couldn't be worse.
How many attributes do you need to enable to place two pictures side by side in vanilla CSS? Is that composable, would the same set of flags work for two paragraphs? What about two tables?
HTML/CSS was never designed for the web we have ended up with, and I don't see how flexbox and any newer standard is making developers lives anything but miserable.
Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or Brave. It's Chromium with ad-blocking / anti-fingerprinting built in, so even more privacy preserving by default.
Brave's made a big mistake in the past, so I'd hold out on using it until there's no other non-Chrome option: https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-aff...
Brave is moving fast (and not doing a perfect job) trying to find a revenue stream that doesn't involve selling out their users. They're trying a lot of new ideas and from what I can tell are learning from their missteps (though I think the linked situation was blown way out of proportion for what it actually was).
Seems like exactly what's needed in the context of the current situation, no?
Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The reason Firefox has lost market share in my opinion is because: My opinion is that none of those actually matters. The "one" single reason Chrome won market share was the same playbook how Google Search Engine Started. Speed. I watched hundreds of users, given the choice, or doing so themselves installing / using Chrome by their own selection. It was faster. The user experience was far better. You could advertise…
I actually bothered to load both side-by-side and check. Firefox loads pages faster. Really the parent commenter is right: Chrome is dominant only because of its huge marketing budget. P.S. Chrome is also buggy as hell and crashes pages all the time , which Firefox doesn't do.
> I actually bothered to load both side-by-side and check. Firefox loads pages faster.
WHo cares? A Ferrari and a Lamborghini in 2020 provide about the same speed experience. What matters is that for the past 10 years Mozilla had the speed of an old Volvo versus the Ferrari that was Chrome/Chromium in comparison. The fact that Mozilla merely caught up in the end is rather a proof that they lost technical leadership a long time ago.