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Firefox Was Always Enough

ianbicking.org

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Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#261

Post by ohgodplsno »

Brakenshire wrote: post #222
thrower123 wrote: post #68

I just don't know if 8% of desktop browser share is enough. It's creeping down into Opera range, and at that point, you're not a real option, you're a niche enthusiast brand.

I agree, they’re currently locked in a negative spiral, the share needs to be higher to be stable, otherwise maintaining compatibility will not be a high enough priority for web developers. 8% on desktop means 3-4% on all platforms and less in selected markets. To regain market share they need to be the unambiguously better browser. I thought there was a really solid path to do that with their parallelising efforts,…

WebRender has already been integrated into Firefox.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#262

Post by takluyver »

liminal wrote: post #175

"Quantitative improvement" is table stakes that I worry have been abandoned with the jettisoning of the Servo team. "Technological pessimism" is a differentiating strategy, but ultimately dooms them to the small subset of users who understand and care about privacy at a deep level. "All encompassing" is a death march. All is infinite and Mozilla can't afford to implement everything hoping something turns out to be va…

They didn't abandon the technological effort that went into Rust & Servo - they just decided to bring it into Firefox piece by piece under the name 'Quantum' rather than launching a brand new browser with a different name. Although there was a marketing push with Firefox 57 when the new code started to land.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#263

Post by steveklabnik »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #224
etempleton wrote: post #2

I will make the same comment I made on another post regarding Firefox and Mozilla: a few tips from from no one: 1. Rewrite the Mozilla mission statement. I read that and have no idea what your organization does. Mission statements seem like corporate naval gazing, but if it is honest and well written it keeps everyone focused on what you are working towards. 2. Refocus on Firefox R&D and core technologies - Firefox n…

I hate to bring it to you, but every single one of your priorities have been long rejected: Thunderbird was officially discontinued like ten years ago, Mozilla had just let go a large number of devs in early 2020 and then again a couple weeks ago, among them all Servo developers. Even if you wanted to financially support Firefox or Thunderbird development through donations, there would be no way to. Your money will g…

The Rust and Webassembly folks:

1. Were a very tiny part of the overall Mozilla budget

2. Were also employees of Moco, not Mofo, and so donations could not go towards them either.

> nobody needs (sorry Rustees)

Industry adoption says otherwise, see for example, the CTO of Amazon's comments during re:Invent yesterday.

(That being said, you could absolutely suggest that it's not Mozilla's job to help the industry in this way. That's a much better argument than "nobody needs Rust.")

Also, the main executive pay people complain about is paid by the Corporation, not the Foundation, so, suggesting your donations would go towards that is also incorrect.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#264

Post by dang »

etempleton wrote: post #2

I will make the same comment I made on another post regarding Firefox and Mozilla: a few tips from from no one: 1. Rewrite the Mozilla mission statement. I read that and have no idea what your organization does. Mission statements seem like corporate naval gazing, but if it is honest and well written it keeps everyone focused on what you are working towards. 2. Refocus on Firefox R&D and core technologies - Firefox n…

Please don't copy-paste comments on HN. These threads are repetitive enough without literal repetition.

If you want to refer to what you wrote before, a link is the way to do it. And of course you're welcome to add information that's specific to what's new in this article. There should be something different somewhere...

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#265

Post by toyg »

karaterobot wrote: post #88

What would happen if Firefox took away a significant number of users away from Chrome? Wouldn't Google just stop paying for search placement, removing Mozilla's main source of income? I get that Chrome isn't Google's direct source of income, ads are. But, it seems like controlling the web in order to facilitate serving advertisements (e.g. AMP, Extension Manifest v3) is part of its strategy. If Mozilla made a more su…

> Wouldn't Google just stop paying for search placement, removing Mozilla's main source of income?

They would haggle a bit more but they would still pay. That's because Firefox's very existence is their insurance against accusations of monopolistic practices in a field where antitrust caselaw actually exists.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#266

Post by falcolas »

buran77 wrote: post #100
falcolas wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is integrated with Google, in that it uses the Google API. However, relevant to this thread, it's not developed by Google, as Thunderbird would not be. And so Thunderbird could still provide value as such a client.

> for the average user I think this was the key. No average user I know uses an email client on their PC, outside of the corporate one. It's one more thing to take care of and average users rarely want that. It's easier on mobile where people are used with the "app" concept, not really on the PC. This is one reason why Thunderbird doesn't enjoy the kind of popularity browser based email does.

I'm a fairly average user, in reality. One personal email address. Few rules. No integrations.

I still find it to be a significant improvement, even if most of my interactions involve arrow keys and the backspace key (ironically the keys I can't use in their web interface).

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#267

Post by prepend »

kibwen wrote: post #245
tannhaeuser wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to bring it to you, but every single one of your priorities have been long rejected: Thunderbird was officially discontinued like ten years ago, Mozilla had just let go a large number of devs in early 2020 and then again a couple weeks ago, among them all Servo developers. Even if you wanted to financially support Firefox or Thunderbird development through donations, there would be no way to. Your money will g…

> Your money will go to the Moz foundation, and end up in all sorts of endeavors except the ones you care about: Moz spends money on discontinued mobile operating systems and new languages and language runtimes (Rust, WASM) nobody needs (sorry Rustees). Above all, your money likely goes to salaries and pension plans for CEOs and upper management. This is simply incorrect. The Mozilla Foundation is a 501(c)(3) charita…

> Notably, "software development" is not an endeavor for which such a charity can spend its funds. Donations don't go to Rust, or even Firefox, because they legally can't.

Not OP, but I think the comment was saying that donating to Mozilla will result in them using the funds on all sorts of stupid shit not FireFox related. Not to literally donate to FireFox as a stand-alone software dev endeavor. Mozilla could easily accept funds in a legally compliant way if they had some sort of “please direct my funds primarily on FireFox” if they wanted to do so. This is similar to how many charities take donations from donors (eg “Here’s some money, only use it to build a building with my name on it.”)

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#268

Post by khalilravanna »

toyg wrote: post #256
pantelisk wrote: post #79

If I understand this correctly. Mozilla let the author go, and the author still went out of their way to write a comprehensive and clear minded article full of feedback and honest recommendations. If I see one big problem with Mozilla, is that they chose to let go people like the author. Engineering & product culture only follows.

Ian Bicking left Mozilla something like a year ago, if I'm not mistaken. Already in March he was talking about it in terms of "what I would have wanted to do but didn't get to". This post appeared last month in the context of the big layoff round.

From the post: “...I myself was part of 25% of the workforce laid off in August 2020”

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#269

Post by dang »

SmokeyHamster wrote: post #54

>The problem? Firefox’s founders are all long, long gone. Brendan and Mitchell are Mozilla’s founders. Well then, you should have thought about that before you forcibly kicked out founder Brendan Eich because you disliked his unrelated politics. You can be a woke company that belittles everyone who doesn't share your narrow ideology or a company that makes a good web browser with a sound business model. You can't be…

Please don't take HN threads into flamewar, and especially not on classic flamewar topics that reached dead-horse levels years ago.

Surely we're not going to be repeating the same angry arguments all the way until we die?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#270

Post by prepend »

celsoazevedo wrote: post #52
yummypaint wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is already the best browser and has been for a long time. The problem is that most laypeople don't even know it exists. Combined with dark patterns used by microsoft and google to steer users toward their own browsers, it's an uphill battle. I'll stick firefox and appropriate extensions on a friends computer so they can watch youtube etc completely ad free, which is a major tangible QOL improvement, but then…

I don't know about Windows or Linux, but on Mac it's far from the best browser. It uses more resources (power/battery, memory, etc) than Safari (and sometimes Chrome[ium]), the UI is a mix of old and new code, and system integration is worse than Safari and Chrome. I use it, but both Chromium and Safari are better on this platform.

This. I was a FireFox long time supporter, but switched off when I started using Mac as my daily driver. It crashed more, used more resources, etc than Safari, Chrome, and Brave.

I also stopped recommending it to randos when they started coming back and complaining about weird behavior. Now if I don’t know someone and want them to just have the simplest working experience I recommend Safari on Mac and Brave on windows.

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