I wonder when Google will finally pull the plug on Mozilla. At 4.0% market share they can't deliver that much search volume to justify spending millions on their incredibly bad management.
Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
61–70 of 675 posts
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be easier for companies (who aren't anti Google) to administer Chrome policy via their existing Google/Gmail accounts and Google Workspace. Profiles, sync, extensions, etc. can all be centrally administered. And also deployed to Chromebooks for certain users. All without having to manage the overhead of a minority browser with Especially for any web shop... Firefox is even less relevant than Microsoft now an…
What large companies use GMail like that? Outside of corps ideologically opposed to using Office, like IBM and Oracle, I've almost never seen anybody that didn't run on Outlook. At least since Notes became abandonware anyway.
People still use Microsoft? My experience is largely in small medium biz and academia, both of which use a lot of Google. I haven't seen a Microsoft shop in decades. But that's just my own limited spheres of work.
(edit: to be clear, wasn't trying to be snarky. Genuinely surprised. Thought Microsoft intranets were a thing of legacy dinosaur companies, didn't know that modern enterprises still did that. But I don't work in enterprise, only in small biz, where nobody can afford dedicated sys admins and everything is in the cloud. From what I hear though, the UX of Outlook these days is better than Gmail and gcal (which isn't saying much, I know). Might be worth trying again someday...)
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#63I think part of this discussion needs to be that Firefox, while open source, doesn't provide footing for the community to build browser forks the way Chromium does. This sort of open usage, ironically, feels very fitting to the spirit of Firefox, but they're not even close to Chrom(e|ium). I've been building a browser full time the past year+ (synth.app) and FF core wasn't really even an option. They've done very lit…
I wonder how difficult would be an open source community project whose explicit aim would be to take the Firefox code base and make it more modular and embeddable, like Chromium? Would it be too much work for a community effort?
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#64FWIW Mozilla is doing everything they can to drive us FF users away.
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#65Firefox is compromised by the fact it’s core active users are also its largest liability. It’s the innovators dilemma. They want it to (more or less) stay the same and not move forward and make changes to compete with Chrome. Whereas for them to achieve a larger market share it needs a radical overhaul. Really what Mozilla need to do is build a “new browser” called something different and put their weight behind that. I thought they were on that path with Servo and the HTML based UI they were developing for it, but I think they bit off more than they could chew and did not move quickly enough.
The tight relationship between rendering engine and browser has been broken by Chrome and its “children” (and in some way also by Apples enforced usage of their WebKit implementation in ios). Mozilla need to follow suit in order to survive, rip that rendering engine out, build a new browser and a “browser toolkit” to let other people build their own.
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can still re-enable compact mode through about:config (at time of writing). It will nag you not to, but that's all.
> You can still re-enable X through about:config Meaning X will be removed within ~three versions.
Weird, I've been using `toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets` for a lot more than three versions.
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be easier for companies (who aren't anti Google) to administer Chrome policy via their existing Google/Gmail accounts and Google Workspace. Profiles, sync, extensions, etc. can all be centrally administered. And also deployed to Chromebooks for certain users. All without having to manage the overhead of a minority browser with Especially for any web shop... Firefox is even less relevant than Microsoft now an…
Could you name any major websites/apps that break in Firefox but not in Chrome?
Not, not any big ones, but I've seen a lot of Firefox specific bugs for smaller sites in the last 2 or 3 years. I've had to debug Firefox issues for my coworkers more than anything else. Sometimes Safari breaks too but that's important because of iOS. Firefox is only used by the ideologues and we don't bother officially supporting it anymore...
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#68I feel the article misses how Firefox's inability to get a foothold on the mobile platform contributed to its decline. There are more people today using web browsers via mobile then desktop. In many poorer countries the first and only access to the open internet for the people is through chrome on Android. I don't blame Mozilla for this though since they did not have a monopoly on a platform to capitalize on unlike t…
I use Firefox on Android, it works pretty good. Having dark reader and uBlock Origin on mobile is a big plus. But I do hate the lack of configuration options, pull-to-refresh, and their need to 'approve' extensions and in particular not allowing any kind of sideloading of extensions. For this reason I can't use some of the extensions I like (because they won't allow them in the firefox store either). This is in parti…
On FF nightly you can install any addon.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/find-and-install-add-on...
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#69> Clearly, that market share was lost solely to Chrome & co.3 I can attribute this decline to various factors: >Google’s massive development resources and marketing machine. >Most people not thinking about the long-term ramifications of ending up in a market with a single vendor in it. >Firefox losing its status of a shiny new thing over the years. >Mozilla’s inability to capitalize on the popularity of Firefox in th…
>or by forking Firefox
Unfortunately I don't think this will help. If their market share is already low, creating multiple forks makes it even harder for devs to target.
Simply look at desktop software support on Linux for an example of why this doesn't work.
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#70Doesn't Safari have the same relationship to WebKit as Chrome to Chromium? What's preventing other browsers to use WebKit instead of Chromium and make the open source browser engine competition a bit more lively?
I would assume that the answer is that the incentives for competing that way are small and maintaining a browser is expensive?
You would have to rely on donations. Which gives me an idea that probably already exists: a kickstarter/patreon alternative for recurring donations. Recurring donations won't start until there are enough for continuous funding of the project.