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

441–450 of 675 posts

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#441

Post by gigel82 »

Barrin92 wrote: post #418
_jal wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also never understood the massive hard-on that the technical user-base has against useful telemetry. > it seems that most of them have never worked on an user-facing product If you have worked on user-facing products, then I think you do understand. I think you just don't like the answer. Here it is in a nutshell: In the general case, how do you distinguish 'telemetry' from 'surveillance'? And the answer is you c…

>how do you distinguish 'telemetry' from 'surveillance'? For starters, consent. Telemetry generally supposes that the user opts into, either directly or by accepting the terms of using a service, and is free to walk away. I find the increasing usage of the word surveillance completely silly and ideological. If the NSA vacuums data from some underwater cable that's surveillance, when I exchange information, aware of w…

How aware can you be though? Windows has dozens of different endpoints [1] that collect thousands of data points [2], and I presume that can change at any time with an update.

Who has the time to read (let alone "become aware") of the full scope of that?

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/windows-11-... [2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/required-wi...

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#442

Post by unsignedint »

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

This precisely the reason I've dropped Firefox. (Previously I was using Firefox almost exclusively across all the platforms.)

I was using it to enable TRR on Android.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#443

Post by shadowgovt »

It's a decent goal to increase Firefox usage, but the blog appears to miss the elephant in the room with this comment:

> Don’t get me wrong, though - using Firefox is not painful at all. Quite the contrary!

... after noting an anecdote earlier in the post

> Last week I saw one site that directly didn’t support Firefox (it displayed a message I should switch to Chrome) and another where the sign in was broken on Firefox, but worked on Chrome-like browsers

These experiences make using Firefox painful for end-users, and if Chrome is 99% as good and doesn't have this friction, they'll use Chrome just to experience less online friction.

It's a vicious chicken-egg problem, because if Firefox's market-share is sub-5%, then it doesn't matter why that sign-in page doesn't work in FF... Nobody empowered to fix it will bother to look, because the workaround of "Just use a different browser" is very cheap from the site-owner's point of view (way cheaper than spinning up a debugging flow in a browser they're unfamiliar with).

Low market share drives increased likelihood of browser-site incompatibility drives users to switch to the larger-market-share browser drives low market share.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#444

Post by mdoms »

_jal wrote: post #234
bool3max wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to strongly agree with your last point - I also never understood the massive hard-on that the technical user-base has against useful telemetry. Perhaps it's just the loud minority, but to me it seems that most of them have never worked on an user-facing product (for-profit or not). Yes, users can themselves explicitly communicate feedback regarding the product or its features, and no, most of them don't do tha…

> I also never understood the massive hard-on that the technical user-base has against useful telemetry. > it seems that most of them have never worked on an user-facing product If you have worked on user-facing products, then I think you do understand. I think you just don't like the answer. Here it is in a nutshell: In the general case, how do you distinguish 'telemetry' from 'surveillance'? And the answer is you c…

> Here it is in a nutshell: In the general case, how do you distinguish 'telemetry' from 'surveillance'?

By never sending PII to your telemetry system. Or if you must use PII (you don't need to) then you lock it away with proper access controls.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#446

Post by The_rationalist »

NoGravitas wrote: post #279
yutijke wrote: post #10

I 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…

Firefox on Android is absolutely excellent these days, but it still shows how Mozilla is really hesitant to embrace it. It's the only mobile browser with really adequate ad-blocking, thanks to extension support. There are a lot of other extensions which are really useful on mobile that aren't on the recommended list, though. I can understand why they restrict extensions (some don't have a viable UI for mobile or woul…

Kiwi browser is chromium with uBlock

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#447

Post by rickspencer3 »

In my experience, such arguments don't move the needle on adoption. "Hegemony" of a specific useful product is a concern to such a small number of people that even getting 100% of those people who are concerned or could be made to be concerned to use an alternative will not make a dent in the "hegemony."

The only thing that I have seen work is shipping a better, cheaper, and more useful product and focusing marketing on why a user would prefer to use it on its own merits. Everything else is preaching to the converted.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#448

Post by mook »

rd07 wrote: post #164
rocqua wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electron, but based on Firefox instead of chrome. Not the most appealing idea, but an interesting one. Might help move more people to essentially using Firefox.

Mozilla has been trying to build an Electron alternative based on Gecko, but it has been discontinued https://github.com/mozilla/positron

They also had XULRunner… I was even lucky enough to have been using it in a professional context. Unfortunately it wasn't well supported; trying to submit patches was always painful, and framing issues as a Firefox bug was slightly more likely to get things merged. I imagine it's easier than landing changes in Chromium (because Electron is a completely separate project), at least.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#449

Post by balaji1 »

DeathArrow wrote: post #138
resonious wrote: post #53

I used to hold the same opinion: Google controls the world because everything is Blink/Chromium based! Must use Firefox to protest! Then I looked closer look at the history of Chromium and Blink. The reality is that a lot of the other "Chromium-based" browsers actually only use the Blink renderer. They don't use many (if any) other Chromium components other than probably V8. In ancient times, Blink itself was a fork…

>I used to hold the same opinion: Google controls the world because everything is Blink/Chromium based! Must use Firefox to protest! The end users don't care about who controls what. They care about having a simple, fast browser who just works.

Exactly. So what if Google controls the internet experience through Chromium. The user will have to pay someone eventually. Firefox is not a free magic bullet.

On the other hand, much bigger problems in the world, so we go build something else instead of reinventing what Google has already built.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#450

Post by sfink »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #375
dralley wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How about this for a funding model: tie executive compensation to revenue growth. Mozilla has had five fold increases in CEO compensation over the last fifteen years, as Firefox market share has gone down six fold . Firefox had ~30% market share in the mid 2000's, and now it has less than five percent market share. Safari has twice the market share Firefox does, by some metrics. Mozilla has literally paid its CEOs fa…

> How about this for a funding model: tie executive compensation to revenue growth.

I'm not sure this would go quite the way you think. The quick numbers I could find are $104 million in revenue for 2009 [1], $828 million in revenue for 2019 [2]. Your market share percentages sound about right, though (and is more relevant to the success of the mission.)

> Being a browser company and seeing declining revenue during a period when damn near every tech company was printing money because everyone hopped online...that's a real special kind of incompetence.

I would agree, if I were to completely ignore the existence of competition and all other forms of external reality. I mean, look at the size of the computer market these days. What were Cray, SGI, DEC, Commodore, etc thinking? They must have all been unbelievably incompetent!

Sure, the results are not good. It is perhaps true that you personally could have done far better. Maybe you should give it a try, in some other market where a little company called Google decides to move in on your territory.

> Mitchell Baker made $2.5M in 2018 and now in 2021 she's making over $3M.

She's CEO of a company with a revenue of $800M USD. What should the CEO's compensation be? Is $3M too high or too low? Personally, I honestly don't know. My perception is that CEOs are generally paid large sums of money until they're fired. Perhaps that's not the way it should be in an ideal world.

> Mozilla laid of nearly 300 employees post pandemic because of declining revenue.

Yeah, that sucks. It really sucks. (I work at Mozilla.) Though for the record, we're not post pandemic.

Still, when your burn rate is too high for your income, you have to do something. In some markets, it might make sense to go for broke: borrow to fund scaling, and pray a lot. In the browser market, that would be incredibly stupid. You can't crush your competitors with a $0 product and a compatibility moat that it is your mission to minimize, especially when your main competitor is many times your size.

> ...office rant...

Thanks to COVID, the offices are indeed getting pruned down. But you seem to place a lot of faith in your ability to armchair quarterback. Those offices provided value (partly as a result of their locations), they incurred costs, and people did the math on them. You can assume rank incompetence, but why?

[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2009/f... [2] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2019/

Post reply on HN