Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

batsov.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 675 posts

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#321

Post by freediver »

dralley wrote: post #304
freediver wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of such an apparent conflict of interest. At the end of the day we do not know how many good ideas (for the users, for the web and for Firefox market share) were silenced because not to upset the feeding arm. And where would Firefox be today if it relied on its own users for the revenue instead? Having your main competitor as your main customer is not a good position to be in for any company.

Yes but nobody on HN has ever - ever - come up with a better funding model for them. It's all complaints all the time and people don't even seem to bother researching what they have been doing lately. It's also fun to watch people complain about the Google situation and then, 10 seconds later, complain about "side projects" which are actual independent sources of revenue. I don't envy the market dynamics of their sit…

A better funding model is right in front of our eyes and is used by almost every other company - sell the product to the users. There is no rule saying that a browser needs to be directly or indirectly monetized by ads. On the contrary, in this day and age, not helping sell more ads would surely be seen as a good thing? So if the browser is that good as a product, it surely will be paid by a percentage of its current users, no?

10M Firefox users paying $50/year would yield same amount of revenue as 200M users monetized with a Google deal. Now, would 5% Firefox users convert to paid users is a different question. If not, then perhaps Firefox as a product (or as an idea) may not be as good. But I think they would, and even if the percentage is lower, it would at least set Firefox free. And that is a good position to be in for any company.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#322

Post by queuebert »

Forgive my ignorance, but why is maintaining a browser so hard? HTML and CSS are decades old by now. Javascript is handled through a separate engine.

Is the problem that the standards keep evolving? Or are the standards just too difficult to perfectly support? What is going on?

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#323

Post by ohgodplsno »

jeltz wrote: post #299
gausswho wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm unfamiliar with what you're speaking of. Can you elaborate?

He is talking about when Mozilla made Firefox send the browsing history of randomly selected German users to a company they had invested in, Cliqz. That is the by far biggest ethical violation of Mozilla and which, justifiably, still haunts them. That said both Chrome and Edge are worse.

Because this is overly broad and paints Mozilla in an unfairly bad light compared to how inconsequential this event was, here are the actual facts: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/74yo19/cliqz_and_m...

1% of german users had anonymised data sent over.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#324

Post by isodev »

tomxor wrote: post #265
NoGravitas wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's guaranteed Safari market also helps keep WebKit viable for other browsers like GNOME Web and Nyxt, so that's something I really appreciate.

The Apple of today has a very conflicted relationship with webkit, the anticompetitive reasons they want to keep their platform "webkit only", simultaneously encourages them to support and neglect webkit development. i.e on the one hand, webkit must be reliable and secure and compatible "enough" to provide a decent basic browsing experience. But should not improve so much as to make developing applications competitiv…

The Safari/WebKit team has made a great deal of improvements over the last couple of versions. I think "compatible enough" has turned into a good "basically the same as Firefox" when it comes to web standards with the release of Safari 15 and 15.1.

I also support the stance that certain features should remain focused where they belong e.g. natively installed apps. But who can decide what should be a web standard and what shouldn't... it's hard to say. I think having a healthy governance and enforcement body is a prerequisite before we look at technical specifics.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#326

Post by devenson »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #313
K0nserv wrote: post #153

I've been meaning to write almost exactly this blog post for a while now, glad that someone else did it. Two things that I think are worth calling out: 1. In many ways Apple's anti-competitive behaviour on iOS/iPadOS is a blessing. It's one of the few things that keep Chromium's dominance in check. Of course, it's not great that Apple are stifling innovation like this, but consider the alternative: Chromium dominance…

1 is the worst possible rationale I've ever heard. "Let's support a company that abuses its customers, developers and refuses to implement web standards just so a company that makes a far superior product doesn't gain more market share..."

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#327

Post by pdimitar »

Firefox might be the alternative but Mozilla is no longer a good steward of it.

I believe it was very visible, several times, that the execs are only concerned with taking home huge bonuses (there were several submissions here on HN about their balance sheets and budget). At the same time, amazing and strong research teams have been let go. And then Mozilla started doing a very classic corporation things like trying to diversify income while half-arsing almost every such effort (although I do think their VPN offering is a pleasant exception of this rule); an example coming to mind is of course Persona but it's not the only one. To this day I haven't forgiven them for putting Pocket in a right-click menu. It didn't belong there then, it doesn't belong there still to this day. Or has HN forgotten to awful privacy policy that Pocket had at the time? Apparently it has.

The way I see it, only Safari and Chrome(-ium) will remain in the next few years. Firefox is doomed when it's managed by Mozilla. And Mozilla hasn't been what they used to be, for a long time now.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#328

Post by acoard »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #313
K0nserv wrote: post #153

I've been meaning to write almost exactly this blog post for a while now, glad that someone else did it. Two things that I think are worth calling out: 1. In many ways Apple's anti-competitive behaviour on iOS/iPadOS is a blessing. It's one of the few things that keep Chromium's dominance in check. Of course, it's not great that Apple are stifling innovation like this, but consider the alternative: Chromium dominance…

1 is the worst possible rationale I've ever heard. "Let's support a company that abuses its customers, developers and refuses to implement web standards just so a company that makes a far superior product doesn't gain more market share..."

What hyperbole! It's entirely possible for some process to be bad, and it still have (some) good consequences.

The Black Plague was terrible; but it lead to increased social mobility in the aftermath. Likewise, Apple's "one browser" policy is bad, but ironically it's the main thing stopping the other browser, Chrome, from becoming the one browser that dominates everything. I'm still against the one browser policy, as I am against the Black Plague, but a reasonable person can make these distinctions.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#329

Post by mtomweb »

defaultname wrote: post #302
tomxor wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Apple of today has a very conflicted relationship with webkit, the anticompetitive reasons they want to keep their platform "webkit only", simultaneously encourages them to support and neglect webkit development. i.e on the one hand, webkit must be reliable and secure and compatible "enough" to provide a decent basic browsing experience. But should not improve so much as to make developing applications competitiv…

"basic browsing experience" Google pushes out yet another half-baked, poorly considered new feature in Chrome and overnight has mobs chanting about Safari purportedly holding everyone back because of some close to irrelevant fringe thing. Safari might just be the fastest browser, and it supports a ridiculous, awe-inspiring array of features and standards. And the greatest indictment of the ridiculous anti-Safari smea…

You wouldn’t be calling Safari awe inspiring if you had to develop for it. It is hands down the worst browser, filled with application breaking bugs and supports the smallest number of features out of any browser.

Arguably it’s a result of having no competition on iOS.

From idb, webrtc, to scroll to viewheight, to performance issues Safari is the worst to deal with and this is reflected in all the developer surveys.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#330

Post by aaron_m04 »

shultays wrote: post #208
the_duke wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> greater configurability leads to greater code complexity and therefore greater maintenance costs Firefox is extremely configurable. Settings being removed from the UI doesn't mean they are gone. `about:config` has a crazy amount of toggles that allow customizing pretty much everything, including turning off all the Mozilla services (telemetriy, account sync, Pocket, VPN adds, ...). Compare that with the measly set…

about:config is removed from (not beta) android version of firefox. Who knows if they will decide to remove it on desktop as well because "only x% of our users were using about:config!" Also if a setting is hidden behind about:config, it probably means dev will care less and less about it and eventually remove if it is becoming a hindrance

It is present in Fennec F-droid, which I am using now, FWIW. It is based on Firefox.
Post reply on HN