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Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

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Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#201

Post by rndgermandude »

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…

>It’s only relatively recently with Electrolysis and Firefox Quantum that Firefox has regained a technical parity or superiority. And those changes depended on specifying a proper UI and Extension API which is the reason why the browser is no longer so customisable.

No, they did not. Electrolysis was around before WebExtensions. Sure, Electrolysis wasn't backwards compatible and a lot of existing extensions had to rewrite part of their code to be compatible, and abandoned extensions were broken forever - or would have been once mozilla removed compat shims (unless somebody picked up the slack, which people quite often did). This was still a lot better than breaking every extension and forcing a new extremely restricted WebExtensions API that was a clone of the Chrome APIs but came with their own bugs and a lot of "TODO: implement actual API".

Quantum is just a PR term. The impact of Quantum-related changes to extensions was tiny if present at all (if the extension already survived Electrolysis).

The only reason that old non-webext extensions do not work anymore in Firefox at all is that they helpfully removed the actually code that would run the extension (but not really last I checked, it's still around to support mozilla-owned sideloaded/builtin extensions such as pocket).

comm-central (Thunderbird, Seamonkey) even implemented their own implementation of what was removed to get (restartless) old-style extensions working again, falsifying the claim that forcing a WebExtensions-only change was a requirement to get e10s/Quantum going.

Underneath it all, to this day most of Firefox is still javascript + XUL/HTML on the frontend with bridges (XPCOM, etc) to expose the C components.

PS: e10s shipped in v53, "old" extensions were only removed in Quantum, which was v57 (but not really removed, as I noted, just disabled for everybody except mozilla's own stuff).

I ran (and sometimes still run) a personal fork of 60esr (aka >57 ;) where I added back "old" extension support by git-reverting a few hundreds of lines of code that they removed.. That thing was Quantum too, all the Quantum perf/speed improvements were still present, and yet magically still supported all the old extensions I cared about.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#202

Post by quicklime »

> But as the number of Firefox users decreases (due to the growing market dominance of the Chrome browser), and those users click on fewer online ads (for example, because they’re spending less during the COVID-19 pandemic), the willingness of Google and other customers to pay the Mozilla Corporation for those users decreases accordingly.

> Thus when COVID-19 hit and the Mozilla Corporation hit a brick wall in terms of search engine revenue...

Did the pandemic really have an impact on search engine revenue? From what I can tell, users are spending more time online, viewing (and maybe even clicking) more ads and searching for more things online. Google's stock is back to its pre-pandemic peak level, so they seem to be doing fine.

Did Google play hard-ball with Mozilla during their contract negotiations, and manage to lower the cost of their default search engine deal? If so, I feel like that should've generated a bigger outrage than some Chrome UX/Security people tweaking the URL bar. Especially with all the antitrust stuff going on.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#203

Post by jhoechtl »

Inventing an entirely knew programming language with new concepts that is aiming at smart people and basing critical components of the web browser on it.

It is this kind of decision which freaks out the ordinary HN reader but is otherwise an alarm bell to any sane business responsible.

That was the nail into the coffin.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#204

Post by [deleted] »

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

[deleted]

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#205

Post by sp332 »

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.

They did show Chrome how to block autoplaying audio in a way that does't annoy the crap out of users.

The screenshot feature is great and I use it constantly.

The containers implementation is pretty slick, and it enabled the first-party Facebook Container add-on which makes it harder for FB to track users across the web.

Edit: And readability mode, which was added a long time ago but I'm including it because Chrome still doesn't have one.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#206

Post by burtonator »

If Mozilla wants to have a future it needs to:

- Realize it lost the browser wars, abandon FF and base it on chromium. It might upset the average FF geek on HN but you're not paying for FF development - Google is. As FF user base keeps dropping Google is not going to be interested in funding their development. No one cares about FF enough to actually fund it. Google just is because they want to push you ads.

- They need another revenue model. Probably focusing on B2C products. They should start acquiring more companies to buy growth.

They've really squandered a huge opportunity.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#207

Post by rubber_duck »

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.

That's relatively irrelevant - Chrome was much faster at the most important sites - which are coincidentally mostly google owned - but still faster - GMail, Youtube, Google itself felt faster on Chrome back then. Then there's the flash handling which was important back then.

Also FF was shitty at stability, it didn't have multi process architecture for the longest time and I've had a page crash my entire browser (especially in the flash days) regularly.

And then chrome started pushing excellent dev tools (even in FF nightly I get dev tools hanging on complex sites because of how slow they are)

Chrome was the better browser back then and it won the power users and developers, then it took over the casuals as it was advertised on google and it was recommended as the best by everyone - it took FF too long to catch up and now a lot of sites don't even test compatibility - I've been trying to switch back to FF before this fiasco for a month and it wasn't a smooth experience compatibility wise.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#208

Post by jefftk »

ekianjo wrote: post #171
outadoc wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Superior, as in defines a standard API. A clear API means the browser maker is free to change the internals of the browser, without worrying about changing something that some extension relies on.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#209

Post by zajio1am »

pornel wrote: post #181
zajio1am wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

While some of these points are a bit extreme, most of them are pretty basic and could be avoided by simple maxim:

Don't call home and do not do communication with third parties unless opt-in or explicitly requested by user.

> All this poo-pooing on Mozilla doing anything less than paranoid-extreme makes people leave for other browsers

Well, i still use Firefox as lesser of two evils, but i do not see why i should say to everyone how wonderful it is.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#210

Post by zajio1am »

pornel wrote: post #181
zajio1am wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> which aren't any better, and often are way worse for privacy.

BTW, is there any neutral comparison of Firefox vs Chromium w.r.t. privacy?

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