Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#451

Post by phendrenad2 » Tue, Sep 21, 2021, 6:02 PM UTC

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.

Every single time Firefox updates, it pops up a page telling me how great Firefox is, how great it would be if I donated. Updates happen weekly. It's effectively shareware at this point.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#452

Post by phendrenad2 » Tue, Sep 21, 2021, 6:11 PM UTC

I'll get a lot of hate for this (which is why I'm posting it long after this story was on page one), but Firefox is missing the writing on the wall. Now is the time to throw their weight behind becoming a Chromium fork like Brave, Vivaldi, and Opera. Let's look at the facts:

1. They still have good brand recognition, for now.

2. They lack the engineering capability to keep Firefox on par with Chromium-based browsers.

The usual objection is "but browser diversity, Chromium browser monoculture, monocultures are bad". To that I say: Why aren't you complaining about the world's most popular operating system kernel, the one with zero forks and also zero serious open-source competitors, you may have heard of it, what was it called, oh yeah Linux.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#453

Post by cnst » Tue, Sep 21, 2021, 9:34 PM UTC

phendrenad2 wrote: post #452

I'll get a lot of hate for this (which is why I'm posting it long after this story was on page one), but Firefox is missing the writing on the wall. Now is the time to throw their weight behind becoming a Chromium fork like Brave, Vivaldi, and Opera. Let's look at the facts: 1. They still have good brand recognition, for now. 2. They lack the engineering capability to keep Firefox on par with Chromium-based browsers.…

They've already tried this with Firefox Focus on mobile. It was the silliest idea ever.

The whole point of Firefox is that it provides an alternative. What sort of alternative would it be if it's the same as Chrome?

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#454

Post by cnst » Tue, Sep 21, 2021, 9:44 PM UTC

corty wrote: post #399

ragesh wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought it was possible to host your own sync server for Firefox. Is this no longer true?

It is theoretically true. They have changed the protocol at least three times, there are no user-accessible settings (just about:config) to point at your own sync server, there is no documentation. And at their rate of breaking stuff, your sync server will be obsolete as soon as you get it running. Happened to me, will never waste time on it again. And the open-source version of the sync server is bad software, age-o…

Chances are it is the version they're using themselves, too.

Proprietary software is often way worse than any of the OSS projects.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#455

Post by phendrenad2 » Wed, Sep 22, 2021, 4:55 AM UTC

cnst wrote: post #453

phendrenad2 wrote: post #452

I'll get a lot of hate for this (which is why I'm posting it long after this story was on page one), but Firefox is missing the writing on the wall. Now is the time to throw their weight behind becoming a Chromium fork like Brave, Vivaldi, and Opera. Let's look at the facts: 1. They still have good brand recognition, for now. 2. They lack the engineering capability to keep Firefox on par with Chromium-based browsers.…

They've already tried this with Firefox Focus on mobile. It was the silliest idea ever. The whole point of Firefox is that it provides an alternative. What sort of alternative would it be if it's the same as Chrome?

Focus wasn't the same thing at all. Mainline Firefox undermined it, it was a highly-privacy-focused browser, and it was only available on mobile.

> The whole point of Firefox is that it provides an alternative

Maybe to some people, but I think most people who use FireFox do so out of nostalgia or wanting to get away from FAANG-controlled browsers. Chromium rebranded to "Firefox" would be enough to make them accept it.