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Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

civilityandtruth.com

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Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#371

Post by mdoms »

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.

I find Firefox much, much, much less reliable than chrome.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#372

Post by takeda »

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…

Agree the same thing started with Opera, previously they were known from inventing many features (some of them actually Chrome copied when it first appeared). Once Chrome started gaining traction they started be the ones that were copying Chrome. Ultimately dropping the Presto engine and becoming just another skin for Chrome. I didn't use Opera and later Firefox to get Chrome experience.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#373

Post by moritzwarhier »

I have to chime in... Mozilla seems to pull back on its investment in web standards and browser engine development for revenue reasons. Instead focusing on Pocket, VPN services and similar stuff, all the while keeping up a dubious privacy-advocating public image. Pocket, Mozilla VPN etc might look like they promise more short-term revenue. My view is that Mozilla wants to complete its metamorphosis into a near-irrelevant Opera clone. Gecko/Servo, Firefox and MDN are the valuable parts of Mozilla (to me). Introducing paid premium membership to MDN would have been acceptable. Now I fear that I have to revert my Chromium->Firefox switch. Also, people might not be as gullible as Mozilla thinks regarding their pro-privacy stance. They recently did a billboard and train ad campaign in my area (germany) about tracking and how they claim to prevent it. I doubt that won over significant numbers of users.

Sure, they struggled to survive going down the developer-centric "poweruser" road. I don't dispute that.

What they're missing is revenue-generating consumer products on a large enough scale. Still, I fear that on the basis of their current portfolio and corporate image they won't be able to become competitive in that area. Introducing paid products focused on more niche markets (e.g. developers) would have seemed more sustainable to me.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#374

Post by whoisthemachine »

dralley wrote: post #331
whoisthemachine wrote: post #223

It's really interesting that Mozilla doesn't funnel donations to software development interests. There are successful open source projects that do so, such as Linux Mint [0]. Maybe what's really broken is the idea that a browser needs a backing corporation to fund it? Personally, I can see no better way to keep an open internet than through the development of meaningful software that serves that purpose. [0] "Donatio…

The problem is that Mozilla Corporation needs to exist for various legal reasons, and that it's impossible for Mozilla Foundation to channel funds to Mozilla Corporation for other legal reasons. Whereas Linux Mint literally just operates a Patreon / Paypal / Bitcoin account and distributes the funds between a couple of people.

I wasn't suggesting the Mozilla Foundation channel funds to the Mozilla corporation. I was suggesting that the Mozilla Foundation own Firefox and use donations to the foundation to fund Firefox development.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#375

Post by tomc1985 »

eitland wrote: post #330
tomc1985 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FFS, learn to organize "your mind" then. 400+ tabs tells me you need to be using bookmarks

"Ahhh, finally I got you bug: I saw this just the other day when I looked at x" works so much better when x is an organized as a tree of tabs, in the memory of my browser, a short scroll and a click away instead of having to hunt through bookmarks reloading all of them in hope of figuring out which one it was. At least with the work I do it isn't alway obvious what is going to be useful or not. But while I don't have…

The bookmark menu supports the same hierarchical organization, and since you're pretty much using so many tabs as bookmarks anyway, I don't see much of a distinction. Deleting bookmarks is a bit more fiddly than closing tabs, but in my mind that is a good thing as I find myself accidentally closing tabs all the time. And I bet the "Close Other Tabs" option probably scares the crap out of you

Tabs are supposed to be short-lived, ephemeral things. Bookmarks have the functionality you want

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#376

Post by jefftk »

pjmlp wrote: post #365
jefftk wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think Chrome, Firefox, Edge, or Safari (the main evergreen browsers) have bugs that have been open for years and are as critical as considering an element's width to include its border and padding? This misinterpretation of the CSS specification was something that essentially all front-end developers had to work around for 10+ years!

Yes I think so, all of them have bugs that web developers have to work around, again should we look at Chrome's bug database or maybe AdWords has a better source of information for such workarounds?

If you want to point to an example bug, I think that would help me understand your point, yes.

(To give a sense a sense of the scale I think we're talking about, this would be a bug that, say, more than half of web developers have to understand and work around in a typical month)

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#377

Post by LockAndLol »

jefftk wrote: post #226
LockAndLol wrote: post #99

I'm starting to sincerely hope there'll be a fork of Firefox or at least a separation from Mozilla, and for Quantum/Servo to be separated and made an easily embeddable. The inability to donate directly to projects has imo has had a direct result of requiring Google money. Firefox and Quantum don't need 100M to survive. That's that just absurd. Even if you had 250 people working on it for 100k each, you still wouldn't…

> 100k for working on open-source is a pretty good salary. The kind of people you're trying to hire have the option to earn 3-4x as much working for a FAANG. Being excited about working on something you believe in can get you a long way, but that's still a lot to ask. (See discussion above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24157803 )

If money were everything, nobody would be working on opensource.

I'd jump at that opportunity. Earning a third or a even a quarter of what I earn now would pay for every single one of my living expenses and even allow a comfortable life. There's no way that salary would be OK for a corporation, but for doing something I truly believe in? It's friggin' great.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#378

Post by jefftk »

LockAndLol wrote: post #377
jefftk wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 100k for working on open-source is a pretty good salary. The kind of people you're trying to hire have the option to earn 3-4x as much working for a FAANG. Being excited about working on something you believe in can get you a long way, but that's still a lot to ask. (See discussion above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24157803 )

If money were everything, nobody would be working on opensource. I'd jump at that opportunity. Earning a third or a even a quarter of what I earn now would pay for every single one of my living expenses and even allow a comfortable life. There's no way that salary would be OK for a corporation, but for doing something I truly believe in? It's friggin' great.

> If money were everything, nobody would be working on opensource.

A large majority of hours spent on open source are paid, though. Developers working full-time on open source projects at various large corporations. I was in that category from 2012 to early 2017 working on mod_pagespeed, for example.

There are many small labor-of-love open source projects, but large ones are uncommon.

> I'd jump at that opportunity.

There are definitely people who would be happy to make that trade; I'm not claiming that you're the only one or something like that. Instead, what I'm saying is that there are a lot of people who are willing to take a modest pay cut to work on a public-benefit project like Firefox but aren't willing to take a ~60-75% one. And, further, Mozilla isn't going to be able to make a top-notch browser without hiring many of these people.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#379

Post by notriddle »

dependenttypes wrote: post #254
asddubs wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i mean I don't like it either, but I do believe them in this instance that it's mostly in service of not letting installers just sneak in a toolbar

I think that this is misguided. If a malicious installer sneaks in toolbars it can also install a keylogger/send all of your data to a server/install a firefox fork with the toolbar preinstalled/etc. If anything this kind of thing only hurts the users that know what they are doing (such as someone wanting to install a 3rd party addon or someone wanting to install addons via nix).

> If a malicious installer sneaks in toolbars it can also install a keylogger/send all of your data to a server/install a firefox fork with the toolbar preinstalled/etc.

If it's totally rogue malware, sure.

The toolbars, on the other hand, were coming from companies like Oracle that operated entirely within the bounds of the law.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#380

Post by marcinzm »

tomc1985 wrote: post #369
marcinzm wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The end result would have been the same: broken backwards compatibility. The fundamental design of the original extensions was incompatible with a modern browser model (APIs only rather than hacking internal functions, separate contexts for everything, multiple processes, etc.). They chose to do it one go rather than piecemeal. So rather than having to check every version if some functionality your extension depends…

It would have been gradual, and under most circumstances fixable with a bit of refactoring. Ripping the entire platform out from under people would not have produced the same result.

In the end the people who are most knowledgeable and most involved decided a gradual change was not feasible. Armchair quarterbacking them, without very specific and detailed arguments, just feels like the Dunning–Kruger effect in action.
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