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Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

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Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#181

Post by pornel »

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

Mozilla is doomed when it's held to such an impossible standard (such as being "spyzilla" for supporting TLS PKI).

All this poo-pooing on Mozilla doing anything less than paranoid-extreme makes people leave for other browsers, which aren't any better, and often are way worse for privacy.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#182

Post by Certhas »

ksec wrote: post #153
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…

>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…

The managers at Google who authorized the huge as budgets clearly thought the ads did matter.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#183

Post by irjustin »

ekianjo wrote: post #167
Voliokis wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The statement is believable to me once there's context added.

IE was a terrible browser. Everyone knew it and Firefox was better in every imaginable way especially for "web masters". The Firebug system was a godsend.

Firefox unseated IE because of how much better it was. Microsoft could not get its head straight in this particular case. Always a non-conforming, slow browser with far fewer features.

That's what it takes to unseat the default - you have to be multiples better before people take notice in serious ways.

And, Chrome did that beautifully by leaning into the one thing the masses cared about. Speed.

Those ads were so good - extremely viral. Did they show anything objective or real? Maybe... maybe not. It's what caught people's attention and then when they tested it themselves, they believed it.

Personally I tested it and it was, by a very noticeable amount - I was hooked. Took me a bit of time to get over the loss of Firebug, but mostly sentiment because Chrome's debugger was quite good.

If Firefox was the semi-truck, Chrome was the Ferrari. Both got me to A => B. With firefox I could carry anything, plugins, extensions, whatever I needed. But it was a lumbering giant. Chrome came with none of that at launch but it went fast - and people talked about it.

Those were the days.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#184

Post by [deleted] »

Certhas wrote: post #107
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…

Pretty much every Firefox discussion on Hacker news you have commenters that say they just can't stand Firefox because it's 10ms slower than Chrome. Google also has been advertising Chrome heavily for the last ten years. And there was a time when Firefox was undeniably significantly behind on performance.

[deleted]

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#185

Post by pornel »

brador wrote: post #26

I still don’t understand how they spend 500M a year with so little to show for it. What’s the last innovation they dropped on the world? Nothing. I still can’t copy urls From multiple selected tabs without an extension. What we need is a group to step up, create a new browser, capture the 500M/year payday and put the money to work.

Quantum has proven CSS can be parallelized, and Rust is an enabler for complex multi-core code.

WebRender (and ongoing work on Servo/Pathfinder) shows that browser graphics can work on the GPU. Not just a couple limited CSS properties on carefully selected layers (like in WebKit/Blink), but all of it.

These are major architectural innovations.

I wonder what's the budget for Blink.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#186

Post by badsectoracula »

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

Relying on telemetry has been the biggest mistake developers decided to do in recent years. In the vast majority, only the most technically illiterate will keep telemetry enabled. For anyone with enough knowledge and two braincells to rub together, telemetry is an euphemism for spyware, so of course they'll do everything they can to disable it (also see all the Windows 10 "shut up" scripts, etc - people would rather run random scripts from the net than allow telemetry, even if doing the former isn't exactly that smart to begin with).

Relying on telemetry is heavily biased towards people who do not know what telemetry is.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#187

Post by anoncake »

joepie91_ wrote: post #60
KingOfCoders wrote: post #45

Earlier 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…

> Why is that? Because Firefox's "powerful extension model" basically constituted direct access to its internals, which prevented the Firefox developers from making the architectural improvements that were so sorely needed to make it performant. > Firefox is slow with many tabs open on Win10, Ryzen X3900 with 32gb of RAM (writing this from FF) Admittedly I'm on Linux, but I currently have approximately 7800 tabs open…

> Because Firefox's "powerful extension model" basically constituted direct access to its internals, which prevented the Firefox developers from making the architectural improvements that were so sorely needed to make it performant.

Not necessarily. They could have added and recommended stable APIs that solve most use cases while still allowing extension developers direct access to the internals at the cost of having to update the extension more frequently.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#188

Post by soniman »

jeswin wrote: post #48

Mozilla must put the advocacy bits aside and focus on the core product. Perhaps the problem with a non-technical CEO is that the advocacy and new shiny stuff is given as much importance as the invisible (and insanely complex) work that makes a browser fast and safe. A total failure of strategy here - if the leadership couldn't find other revenue sources and partnerships in 5 years they have to fire themselves. Instea…

You have to wonder what the firing of Eich was really about. Hard to believe Eich would've done the same thing.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#189

Post by kwanbix »

ekianjo wrote: post #170
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. 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…

Bs. The speed difference in real life was never that much.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#190

Post by jefftk »

pjmlp wrote: post #126
MattGaiser wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IE made life miserable for developers. I am not sure we would have cared if it were not moribund.

Nope it was pretty great actually, then Microsoft thought they had won the war.

Initially, IE6 was much better than the competition. But it was still buggy, and had some very weird rendering behavior. Over time, other browsers became much less buggy, but IE6 was still around. That's how IE6 came to be viewed, in retrospect, as a very buggy browser.
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