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Firefox Was Always Enough

ianbicking.org

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Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#321

Post by tannhaeuser »

pgt wrote: post #235
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…

Agree with all points except Rust and “standards”. The performance and stability of Firefox Quantum was largely driven by Rust. W3C standards are just out-of-date documentation. Do what’s good for the Web and the W3C will eventually document it.

W3C published editorialized snapshots of WHATWG HTML5 specs only until 2017; they're now just redirecting to WHATWG github's HEAD. SVG2 (part of HTML5) has reached CR status in 2018, and ended up to include only minor amendments vs 1.1/1.2 anyway.

W3C is mostly involved in CSS specs today, with significant influence on this past decade's advances, and also source of a lot of the complexity of browsers. CSS is a primary candidate for a formal spec among web standards IMO, since HTML5 the markup language is sufficiently covered by either the procedural spec or SGML.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#322

Post by js8 »

yummypaint wrote: post #19
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…

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…

> The problem is that most laypeople don't even know it exists.

How can most people not know it exists, when it had a majority user share at some point?

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#323

Post by loufe »

tomrod wrote: post #59

Except for mobile, where recent updates made it a hot mess.

It's a matter of perspective. I found the previous generation intolerably slow compared to Chrome, but the new version is now my daily driver. I wasn't using any addons which makes the difference, but still, boy am I happy to use Firefox instead.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#324

Post by benlivengood »

BrendanEich wrote: post #247
JohnBooty wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ostensibly, they pay Firefox for eyeballs, but.... Google certainly values the eyeballs they get via Firefox, but Firefox could disappear tomorrow and that barely affect Google one bit from a pure "eyeballs" perspective. How much traffic would Google lose? People would just use those same Google services through Chrome, Safari, native apps, whatever. So, I believe Google funds Firefox mainly as a hedge against monopo…

When I was there, we speculated Google was using Mozilla as antitrust lawyer repellant, but it's a weak argument. Google pushed Chrome onto Firefox users repeatedly, by accident or on purpose doesn't matter. Now that Google is in antitrust court, I think the Mozilla deal is mainly for PR, both positive while it lasts, and negative sense (to avoid being the Firefox killer by not renewing the deal this year -- Google p…

My impression is that Google is simply having to play the same game their own advertising business makes others play; in order to keep getting customers (eyeballs for adsense+doubleclick) they have to pay for it because the competition also advertises (via paid default search).

Firefox switching to Yahoo for default search was probably an eye opener for them; 30% of global search traffic (at whatever fraction of users didn't change their search engine) is a boatload of money and from public estimates at least an order of magnitude more than they pay Mozilla for the traffic.

From a business perspective Google might benefit if Firefox disappeared but there's no guarantee. Opera, Brave, Safari, Edge, etc. could take up Firefox's install-base without significantly increasing Chrome's. At least Firefox is a known entity for them and they would probably rather have a guaranteed platform with Google as the default search engine than having to negotiate with whatever sprang up to replace Firefox.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#325

Post by BrendanEich »

pvg wrote: post #292
BrendanEich wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not weird. A lot of people (especially on HN) repeat false claims they hear that "sound right" to them, especially where they have some animus against someone involved (me, in Brave's case). Brave was inspired by All Advantage, but we knew going in that Gator and worse examples of personal ad systems would be used to dismiss or disparage. Marketing challenge, not a reason to give up. “A lie can travel around the…

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/

I know, but I'm gonna cite Twain anyway, it's truthy ;-).

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#326

Post by soulofmischief »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #289
A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this may sound like a blasphemy and anachronism rolled into one, but why can we not return to purchasing a copy of software? All of a sudden, the incentives to deliver 'monetizable' product are gone, because you already got your money. Or that does not jibe with continuous rent seeking?

> why can we not return to purchasing a copy of software? Because your competitors are free and users expect free and we have a culture stuck in a rut of "everything is free" because ads don't have them taking money out of their wallet. Not every software is in a niche where they can flip the switch back into a premium model and have a good outcome. If Firefox did it, most of us would stop using it. Maybe Firefox is…

Besides, privacy and safety online should be available to all, regardless of financial status.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#327

Post by tehjoker »

fragmede wrote: post #281
mekoka wrote: post #135

It seems to me that Mozilla isn't just technologically pessimistic, but they also just lack vision for the future of the web and what roles the browser could play in it. Right now, the only reason we're talking about them is that Firefox is sitting atop a sizable share of a practically impenetrable market. Very successful companies are being started around much less of a product, but Mozilla seems to genuinely have n…

Can be done with a browser in the future? There's no shortcoming of vision , the problem is monetizing it. A browser in the future is going to let me copy and paste seamless between mobile and desktop. What, are you going to charge 1 cent per completed copy and paste? Am I going to pay a dollar to get nightly builds of Firefox onto my device? If I have an Apple device that's not even possible!

Why don't they go with a membership or donation model like Wikipedia? Any kind of financial independence for them would be wonderful in my view.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#328

Post by masterofmisc »

khalilravanna wrote: post #268
toyg wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”

Yep, he clearly didn't read the article or skimmed over that part.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#329

Post by BrendanEich »

benlivengood wrote: post #324
BrendanEich wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was there, we speculated Google was using Mozilla as antitrust lawyer repellant, but it's a weak argument. Google pushed Chrome onto Firefox users repeatedly, by accident or on purpose doesn't matter. Now that Google is in antitrust court, I think the Mozilla deal is mainly for PR, both positive while it lasts, and negative sense (to avoid being the Firefox killer by not renewing the deal this year -- Google p…

My impression is that Google is simply having to play the same game their own advertising business makes others play; in order to keep getting customers (eyeballs for adsense+doubleclick) they have to pay for it because the competition also advertises (via paid default search). Firefox switching to Yahoo for default search was probably an eye opener for them; 30% of global search traffic (at whatever fraction of user…

The Yahoo deal failed badly in first year, as Firefox users who were shocked by the change of default search from G to Y overrode default back to G. This caused Marissa Mayer's Yahoo to bleed money, as rumors supported by Mozilla statements say the deal was fixed-payment-per-year, not traffic-based. IIRC searchengineland cracked Yahoo's 10Q to show the blood loss. We also know the deal bled money because of Verizon getting out of it in 2017, when Mozilla went back to Google.

Firefox market share is now in the danger zone where Google can replace it with more Chrome promotion and still save on TAC vs. Chrome-eng+mktg. Also the danger zone where webdevs do not test in Gecko and break Firefox, even on such properties as AirBNB.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#330

Post by edgyquant »

Miraste wrote: post #7
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…

> 3. Invest more in Thunderbird the application and develop Thunderbird the privacy focus email service for independent professionals and small businesses. I know Mozilla's non-Firefox projects aren't popular here, but if Thunderbird really wanted a niche in the business world Mozilla would need to start an email service to go with it. The age of non-integrated email clients for the average user ended a while ago.

Thunderbird stopped being a Mozilla project a couple years ago
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