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Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

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Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#171

Post by ekianjo »

outadoc wrote: post #40
causality0 wrote: post #2

Personally 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…

> the constant deprecation of power features and customizability They made ONE switch to a superior and standard extension model, and HN loses its minds. Do you really think you're in the majority here? Making it a more secure, faster and just better browser is just the only way forward. Without that Firefox would just be slow as hell, wouldn't play YouTube or Netflix videos, and not have any extensions left because…

> superior and standard extension model,

Superior as in, that can do less things than XUL extensions? I am at loss, has the meaning of 'superior' changed recently?

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#172

Post by neverminder »

Brakenshire wrote: post #29
causality0 wrote: post #2

Personally 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…

25% seems like much too high a number for the group you’re talking about. I’d be interested to see some data on level of technical engagement and knowledge, but in my experience a large percentage of users don’t even have a clear idea of what a browser is. The reason Firefox has lost market share in my opinion is because: i) Chrome is pushed by Google.com, which has a near monopoly on search ii) Chrome was bundled an…

> I had an untechnical family member say unprompted last week they want to move away from Chrome but couldn’t use Firefox Mobile because it’s too slow. At the same moment Mozilla leadership was sacking its staff working on parallelising the browser engine.

That's because Firefox is slow. I'm saying this as someone who's been using it as the main browser for at least a decade.

My latest personal anecdote. Firefox trackpad scrolling is lagging on my brand new Precision 7750 with vanilla Ubuntu 20.04 installed. Chrome doesn't have the same issue, especially considering Google's unfriendliness towards Linux.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#173

Post by toyg »

mvn9 wrote: post #67
toyg wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would likely require the bulk of Mozilla to be based in Europe. It could be achieved for sure, but it would take years to transfer the relevant knowledge. I don't expect MoFo and MoCo leadership to be willing to entertain such possibilities, considering how "valley" their outlook seems to be.

>but it would take years to transfer the relevant knowledge. A) The people with the knowledge just have been fired and are free to move and to be hired B) Thanks to corona, remote work is a fully accepted option Something new can be running next week or even tomorrow.

People don't move abroad easily, particularly very experienced ones with the historical and institutional knowledge that is really key for a project the size of Firefox - uprooting their families to a foreign (and likely not even English-speaking) country, is a difficult choice. This goes double for Bay Area / SV people used to massive salaries that are hard to justify and achieve elsewhere, and people moving to Europe where immigration bureaucracy is not trivial. Would you take a pay cut and force your family to emigrate just to keep working on a browser, when you've probably plenty of easier and more rewarding options?

As for remote, the political support to fund a project effectively based in the US would be zero.

You also forget that EU institutions don't typically enjoy the freedom to spend a few hundred millions on the spot - they have processes and rules and parliamentary oversight to ensure agreement between 27 governments. It's not like the US president cutting a check, more like the US Congress approving funds - to get any significant amount, it would take some time.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but it would realistically be "next year" (at least) rather than "next week".

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#174

Post by sp332 »

zajio1am wrote: post #115
bmcn2020 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure. I think advocacy is a core part of its USP -- Mozilla is privacy-friendly, and that's an important point, especially as all internet users, even average consumers, are being constantly hit over the head by how data-hungry these huge corporations are. It's an uphill battle, sure, and there are a lot of things to overcome, but I'm not so sure I'd blame the leadership on this entirely. I'd blame the market…

Mozilla has so many privacy issues so that calling it privacy-friendly is misleading: https://brmlab.cz/project/spyzilla

I'm flagging this comment because some of the advice in the link makes the browser much less secure. Don't disable OCSP checking!

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#176

Post by sp332 »

ghevshoo wrote: post #54

Yesterday I started donating $10/month to the Mozilla Foundation. TIL it’s not the Mozilla Foundation that develops Firefox. I stopped using Chrome when they added the “feature” that logging into gmail was the same as logging into the browser. If there was a little notification to the top right in the Firefox with a link to “pay”, even if it was optional, there is some proportion of users who would. And I would bet t…

I had the same question. And what's even stranger is that the Mozilla.com (not.org) website has no way to send them money, and doesn't even mention the paid products like the VPN. At least Pocket gets a mention which I think you can pay for.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#177

Post by sp332 »

petepete wrote: post #70
leokennis wrote: post #15

I have to say this is one of the instances where I’m glad Apple’s hunger for profit and privacy engineering intersect. On Mac at least with Safari there is a privacy oriented browser left. Maybe Apple could revive Safari on Windows?

What about Chromium isn't privacy focussed? It was my understanding that all of Google's grubby code isn't present.

Chromium still depends on Google for certain features. https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium#feature-overvi...

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#178

Post by mirthflat83 »

jefftk wrote: post #164
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes. I remember when I first tried Chrome. It launched within 10 seconds while Firefox 3? 4?, my default browser back then, took almost half a minute to launch. It was fast.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#179

Post by fartcannon »

Lammy wrote: post #132
KingOfCoders wrote: post #55

Earlier 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.).

> not adding power features (vertical tree tabs) They made a pretty huge deal about the Tab Groups (aka Panorama) feature of Firefox 4 in 2010; designed by Aza Raskin! https://web.archive.org/web/20101105212333/http://www.azaras... But then it was removed in 2016 because few people really used it (or few people who had telemetry enabled, at least): https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups-removal

Oh jees, is that what's happening? If they're only building for telemetry data, theyre screwed. Gonna end up with a browser for people who think the internet is a series of tubes.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#180

Post by tarkin2 »

kinleyd wrote: post #73
Brakenshire wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

25% seems like much too high a number for the group you’re talking about. I’d be interested to see some data on level of technical engagement and knowledge, but in my experience a large percentage of users don’t even have a clear idea of what a browser is. The reason Firefox has lost market share in my opinion is because: i) Chrome is pushed by Google.com, which has a near monopoly on search ii) Chrome was bundled an…

Which is why, for the life of me, I just can't see the logic of firing the Servo team.

Hasn’t the quantum project been successful? It seemed like project accomplished to me. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24164058

It’s not like they binned servo and decided not to use it improve ff. It did improve ff.

They seem to have decided that’s done and finished now. And there’s no longer any need to work on it - whether that’s a wise move or not is obviously up for debate.

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