Mozilla’s Uncertain Future • Hacker News Board

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#191

Post by badsectoracula » Sat, Aug 15, 2020, 1:21 PM UTC

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…

> switch to a superior

It is so superior that to this day, Downthemall - an extension which is literally all about downloading - cannot even let you choose an arbitrary directory to put the files you downloaded.

> and standard

That was Google's "standard" that Firefox decided to adopt and even if Firefox decided to implement it, there was no reason to not also keep its own extension system - this way it would be able to have both its own advanced extensions and Google's functionally inferior extensions, essentially making it the most extensible and customizable browser by far.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#192

Post by boomboomsubban » Sat, Aug 15, 2020, 1:21 PM UTC

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…

>- if the leadership couldn't find other revenue sources and partnerships in 5 years they have to fire themselves.

Like the CEO who left at the start of 2020?

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#193

Post by badsectoracula » Sat, Aug 15, 2020, 1:23 PM UTC

orra wrote: post #58

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…

The old extensions were synchronous and ran in the GUI thread. Running firefox with extensions on a HDD would freeze all the time for me, before electrolysis. There also was not a good security model. WebExtensions fixed these problems.

> There also was not a good security model.

What security model? Pretty much every WebExtension i've come across asks for practically everything and even Firefox's own addon page tells you to only install extensions you trust. At that point if you trust the extension source why bother with the security model in the first place? You already trust the extension developer to not break anything.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#194

Post by jefftk » Sat, Aug 15, 2020, 1:25 PM UTC

mirthflat83 wrote: post #178

jefftk wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It sounds like you're describing how long it takes the browser to launch, when earlier you were describing how long it took to load pages? Browser launch time isn't nearly as important to most people as speed once running, because mostly you open the browser once, and then load many pages.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#195

Post by quicklime » Sat, Aug 15, 2020, 1:25 PM UTC

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #154

ksec wrote: post #153

Earlier 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.

It's not just page load speed, although that is important. After the page load, some sites still feel slower (e.g. the new Facebook). It's also the speed of UI interactions, in particular detaching a tab is slower in Firefox than Chrome. All up, Chrome still feels faster to me.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#196

Post by Macha » Sat, Aug 15, 2020, 1:26 PM UTC

irjustin wrote: post #183

ekianjo wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tak…

I'd also point out that tabs and adblock were compelling end user features to the extent that nothing any major browser has on its competitors today compare to. Sync is the closest to a compelling killer feature any browser has got to these days, and all browsers had it very quickly (except Safari, which doesn't have to care when you don't have a choice on iOS).

The fact that Firefox was faster than IE and any technical expert you asked for recommendation would prefer it due to better standards compliance/extensions/having the only devtools were really the icing on the cake.

Google also has the kind of trust amongst end users, especially non-technical end users, that Mozilla couldn't hope to have since Google has their hands in so many pies. And as a technical friend/family member asked to make a recommendation, if anything the incentive is to recommend Chrome to reduce tech support calls when HangoutMeetDuoChat/YouTube/Photos/their preferred google product is acting weird in Firefox again.

It's hard at this point to see what any browser could do to build that kind of end user feature lead again this far into the game.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#197

Post by kwanbix » Sat, Aug 15, 2020, 1:27 PM UTC

irjustin wrote: post #183

ekianjo wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tak…

Did you really measure the speed difference? I doubt it was that much. It was mostly about perception.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#198

Post by jhoechtl » Sat, Aug 15, 2020, 1:27 PM UTC

tannhaeuser wrote: post #127

goto11 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you "radically simplify" the web without causing breakage?

Couple ideas: - specify profiles that can be targetted by web developers and browser developers; demand web assets to be delivered in sane and portable formats (rather than a mish-mash of JSON configs and plugins) - in public tenders, demand that web sites for public information don't become apps: announce sites requiring JavaScript as application/html - promote, invest into new web frameworks for apps (not sites) th…

> - in public tenders, demand that web sites for public information don't become apps: announce sites requiring JavaScript as application/html

That would be bold. Unfortunately I dont see any lobbyist being motivated to inform policy makers accordingly and no politican himself having the knowledge and cochones for this step.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#199

Post by ekianjo » Sat, Aug 15, 2020, 1:29 PM UTC

irjustin wrote: post #183

ekianjo wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tak…

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

So, the statement does not mean anything anymore then. It should rather be: "it's difficult to unseat a technically superior product with an inferior one" which is patently obvious.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#200

Post by jhoechtl » Sat, Aug 15, 2020, 1:33 PM UTC

ThePhysicist wrote: post #78

mrweasel wrote: post #46

The mentioning of DoD contractors made we wonder: would the EU help fund the development of Firefox, in order to secure competition in the browser market? Mozilla would need to restructure and move Firefox to the foundation, but MDN, Firefox and possibly Rust could be funded by donations, corporate sponsors and perhaps the EU, assuming the money could be directed correctly. It would require a management skilled in se…

I'm all stoked for publicly funded open-source software, but somehow The EU and most governments seem to be pretty bad at doing this. I recall numerous initiatives that aimed to create open-source ecosystems with massive amounts of public money (billions of euros for some projects) in the past, each and every one one of them ended up as a big disaster. The latest attempt at publicly funded software is Gaia-X, the EU'…

Yeah for some time I had high hopes for FiWare but it turned out it was just subsidies for the tendering companies without ANY real incentive for a sustainable business model past the funding period.