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Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

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Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#221

Post by elcritch »

temphnaccount wrote: post #151
pteraspidomorph wrote: post #6

I agree with this opinion piece. Firefox is a product strangely hostile to its core userbase. It's almost like they've been deliberately trying to sabotage themselves for years. I don't use it because I approve of all their stupid pigheaded UI choices, I use it because it has been the least bad option despite those choices. That might not go on for much longer, though.

I'd say other way around is true. HN crowd won't like this but it's very hard to continuously update a product for the core userbase that Firefox has. (small sample size but I maintain a small privacy focused app and from my experience, most of the reviews I get are how it's missing features which competitors have or how it's unusable because it can't handle stuff without jeopardizing privacy focused nature of the ap…

> So core userbase for these products becomes hostile towards the product growth by definition. In this environment, either the product stops growing and simply becomes a niche product for those set of users or it dies.

Except FF market percentage has been decreasing not growing. The technical foundation has gotten better, but it’s like Mozilla execs are completely out of sync with the market share they could have. They want a “shiny” app that in theory people should want, not the app people actually want.

I just hope some group of geeks decides to fork it and change it up.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#222

Post by freediver »

Firefox simply lost touch with its community.

Golden era was around 2005-2010 when Mozilla was running product innovation experiments such as Ubiquity or Tab Candy, "Design competitions", sending "Thank you" cards to beta testers, people like Aza Raskin having regular blog posts about development... My oh my, looking at those in archive.org and seeing treasure throve of comments, 100+ on each post, the excitement in the air with each new announcement feels just magical.

Roll forward 15 years and Mozilla Labs is about AR/VR(?), interaction with Firefox is through 3rd party sites like HN and real product innovation stagnates for years.

The real reason Firefox is losing market share is a simple fact that it is inferior to its competitors as a product, which is the direct result of this loss of connection with its userbase that it had and the passion for creating the world's best, most innovative, browser.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#223

Post by Someone »

FTA: “The argument that it was “too hard to maintain” a single setting enacted by 2 lines of code in a 4 Million line codebase is just insulting to the intelligence of users.”

I don’t grok that logic. Hard to maintain is about developers, not users.

“Code isn’t a lawn. It doesn’t change if you leave it alone for a few weeks.”

I disagree with that. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_rot

As to the main reason Firefox is losing users, I would say a) increased competition from (mostly) Google and Microsoft and b) lack of (short-term) incentives for Mozilla to listen to its users.

As to b), take a look at https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2019/mozilla-fdn-201....

If I interpret that correctly, contributions and subscriptions bring in less than $20M a year (probably closer to $10M, as $14M of that is labeled “Subscription and advertising revenue”)

Royalties bring in $450M. That’s money they get from search engines. “Other revenue” is $338M (can’t find where that comes from)

=> To me, it appears they have more income from advertising than the $3M they get from user contributions. They certainly get way more memory from search engines.

If you were CEO of the Mozilla Foundation, wouldn’t keeping the royalties flowing in be more important than raising user contributions?

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#224

Post by wilkystyle »

lavabiopsy wrote: post #207
wilkystyle wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you don't like changes in Chrome for example, you can either modify them, accept their decision, or find another product. And Chrome is not in decline. Yes, my point exactly. You can answer "just modify the CSS" every time someone complains about a change in Firefox, but in reality users will find another product instead.

I'm still not sure what that has to do with Firefox specifically? Those "other products" could very easily be modified versions of Firefox or Chrome, of which there are many. Some of them might even take the time to modify the CSS for you. So it's still unclear what your specific complaint is. Also if you're going to switch products constantly because of a few lines of CSS, that seems like you would always be switchi…

Try looking at it from the other direction: If other products have the same playing field (modify, live with it, or change products), and Firefox is in decline while their primary competitor is not, doesn't it stand to reason that Firefox is making decisions that lose them users while their competitor is making decisions that gain them users?

(edit to fix typos on mobile)

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#225

Post by freediver »

dralley wrote: post #214
freediver wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> maintaining a browser is incredibly difficult and expensive. It would be the death blow to their market share, which would destroy Gecko as a viable browser engine Assuming 100 people needed for Gecko, and $150k/year annual, world-wide, average developer expense, we come to $15M/year. Mozilla already has about ~$50M/year non-Google revenue from its products (coming from "true" users/customers).

150k / person doesn't account for benefits or office expenses. And they have closer to 750 employees.

It does if your team is world-wide.

Does Gecko really need more than 100 people?

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#226

Post by lavabiopsy »

wilkystyle wrote: post #224
lavabiopsy wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still not sure what that has to do with Firefox specifically? Those "other products" could very easily be modified versions of Firefox or Chrome, of which there are many. Some of them might even take the time to modify the CSS for you. So it's still unclear what your specific complaint is. Also if you're going to switch products constantly because of a few lines of CSS, that seems like you would always be switchi…

Try looking at it from the other direction: If other products have the same playing field (modify, live with it, or change products), and Firefox is in decline while their primary competitor is not, doesn't it stand to reason that Firefox is making decisions that lose them users while their competitor is making decisions that gain them users? (edit to fix typos on mobile)

I don't really have any comments on that, sorry. I was mentioning a fix for that specific issue, or other specific issues you might have with other browsers. Most complaints I see about Firefox tend to be about specific issues rather than about overall decisions made versus their competitors.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#227

Post by noasaservice »

deadalus wrote: post #211

I knew Mozilla was going downhill when they started purging words from the project. When your inclusion efforts start alienating moderate users it might be time to rethink them. * Removing "meritocracy" from the governance docs - https://blog.mozilla.org/careers/words-matter-moving-beyond- * Changing "master password" to "primary password" - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/primary-password-replac * Removing "cra…

^^ How to say you're a white male in tech, without specifically saying you're a white male in tech.

meritocracy - To whom? Who decides? That's right: the kingmaker. And the kingmaker decides on those who share significant amount of the same traits. And most of these "kingmakers" in tech are 20-30 something white male.

master to primary - Again, "master" in US culture has a very very bad connotation that equates with US slavery of black peoples. ""find . -type f -exec sed -i 's/master/primary/g' {} \; "" takes seconds to run, and only infringes on alt-right sensitivities.

crazy - Is a garbage word. Has no real definition, and just really shouldn't be used. If there's a problem with a person and their choices, the issue with that should be stated, not by calling them "Crazy". Same goes for the rest of the words in your mental illness link. Enumerate the problem at hand, not by labeling the problem with a garbage word that equates to crazy.

> Where they once were just supporting a software project they're now a political movement.

FLOSS has always been political. The predominant license (GPL) is a anti-capitalist license that seeks freedoms from creators to make everyone owners. The AGPL was made to challenge cloud operators in using and not sharing their changes. Again, political.

And the whole FLOSS ecosystem itself is and isn't about computers. It's about how humans interact with computers and other humans using computers - and guaranteeing individual rights when using computers. FLOSS is a human rights issue. So yes, it's completely understandable that high profile projects would seek to include everyone.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#228

Post by Tagbert »

BeefWellington wrote: post #178
bm3719 wrote: post #48

There's a theory in the Free Software community that BigTech sponsorship of Mozilla was intended to bring about the current state of affairs. The idea is that MS, Google, and others really have no reason to donate to a direct competitor. Perhaps they did so because they knew it would give them control. That control was exercised over the years and now Mozilla is more a social justice advocacy organization than a foun…

> The sorry state of FF was the inevitable result. What sorry state? The thing I don't get about this narrative is that Firefox works and works very well for me and so when I see people saying things like this it doesn't jive with reality.

i think it is less about the state of the browser itself and more about it’s continuing drop in user base.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#229

Post by Tagbert »

Torwald wrote: post #15
pteraspidomorph wrote: post #6

I agree with this opinion piece. Firefox is a product strangely hostile to its core userbase. It's almost like they've been deliberately trying to sabotage themselves for years. I don't use it because I approve of all their stupid pigheaded UI choices, I use it because it has been the least bad option despite those choices. That might not go on for much longer, though.

> I don't use it because I approve of all their stupid pigheaded UI choices I don't use Ff because I can't approve with exactly one of their UI choices: tab closing button on the wrong side. I am on Mac and this just messes with my muscle memory too much. (It used to be that the buttons where on the right side, which is to say the left side.) However, other than that I see a lot of UI love in both the macOs and iOS F…

Perhaps people think that basing your choice of browser on a minor point like the arbitrary location of tab close buttons is questionable. On second thought, that is a very HN type of reasoning so… I can’t explain it.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#230

Post by Tagbert »

pasc1878 wrote: post #164
pasc1878 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last version messed up macos dark mode completely. It ignores much css including including add-ons like tree style tabs which is the main reason I use firefox. So I am stuck on v90 The bug says fixed but the nightlies show it hasn't

The last version messed up macos dark mode completely. It ignores much css including including add-ons like tree style tabs which is the main reason I use firefox. So I am stuck on v90 The bug says fixed but the nightlies show it hasn't Oh and I had to switch to Safari to edit this comment.

Something seems off. I use current FF on HN all the time and never had a problem editing comments. Perhaps your session is messed up?
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