Fix the code base cruft; focus on reliability and performance/responsiveness. I'm still tracking a tracker bug regarding "do this every time" for PDF attachments not working. It was opened a decade ago, and is treated as too tough to fix. Something fundamentally is wrong with the code base.
Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
231–240 of 949 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#232My experience with Firefox has been mired with seemingly random breaking changes, going back to Firefox 2.0. I'm always having to search through menus to find common tasks and features in software I've used since the mid 2000s. The UI also doesn't respect native desktop conventions but seems modeled after a mobile app.
I'd put all emphasis on performance and embeddability, and practice a lot more restraint towards UX changes nobody asked for.
I'd also either tone down all the privacy talk several notches, or actually walk the walk and make telemetry and A/B studies opt in. Right now they just seem self-righteous and hypocritical.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#233Perhaps Mozilla could partner with DuckDuckGo and PureOS Librem and make a privacy-centric mobile smart phone with:
- PureFireDuck OS
- PureFireDuck search
- PureFireDuck voice & text
- PureFireDuck email
- PureFireDuck maps
- PureFireDuck app store (an app store unfriendly to spyware apps)?
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. However, I think they need to answer the question, why should Firefox exist? If there is no compelling reason, well, there you go. If there is, double down on that make that reason shine. They have wasted so much money on the wrong things, IMO.
If Firefox dies, the open web dies. It's that simple. For the open web to remain open, there needs to be at least one more truly independent source of authority regarding how a rendering engine should work. Everyone else has thrown in the towel and abdicated that authority to Google by embedding Blink. Google is either actively malicious to the open web, or doesn't care about it other than as something they can strip…
Why does everyone always forget about Safari in these discussions?
Safari has a respectable marketshare on mobile / tablets. Not as good on desktop but it’s not a lost cause.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#235No post body was provided.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#236They should focus on saving Firefox. - Cut out all (or at the very least, most) initiatives that don't serve the goal of promoting Firefox's market share or sustainability going forward - Donate the major money drains that aren't Firefox to the Apache Foundation or another worthy custodian - Fire all inessential staff that don't want to work on Firefox. - Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not…
Another interesting idea: what if they courted alternate browser projects and/or environments like electron to use the Firefox engine the way those currently tend to use Chromium?
I don’t know if Firefox is currently harder to integrate than Chromium, or if they would just need to gain some sort of edge (no pun intended). But they could for example:
- Provide first-class documentation for integrating
- Provide some kind of stripped-down version that’s optimized for Electron-type scenarios; perhaps they could make it more resource-light for this usecase than Chromium is
Gaining marketshare this way could garner better support from websites and/or libraries, and might also prompt corporate support from invested companies
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to the uBlock author: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b... I'm not sure how critical this is in practice; but the way this evolved may be a symptom of the fact that Blink's authors' motivations align less well with those of an ad-block user than Firefox's authors' motivations do. The worry of course is that once there truly are no competing rendering engines, that google will no l…
But why is that a worry? This happened before when IE6 dominated. Firefox was liberation. It can be that again and has set precedent.
What makes you think so?
The DRM industry's answer to the previous waves of DRM and DRM-breaking was Denuvo.
The copyright cartel's answer to copying via digital bypassing and the analogue hole was to make it all but mandatory to cryptographically secure every single element in the chain between their own servers and the pixels on our displays, and refuse to serve HD content if your hardware and software won't implement that. Not to mention, DMCA.
Just because Firefox was the liberation from IE6, doesn't mean it will be proportionally as easy to liberate ourselves from Chromium if it does become the only browser engine.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> We as a community, cannot afford to let Firefox languish until the only browsers in the world are Chromium derivatives. The diversity of truly independent browser engines is far too important to give up without a fight. There are a lot of people oh HN who agree with that but then use a different browser for whatever reason. I feel like these people are being very hypocritical and should use what they want to succe…
They offer nothing I cannot get elsewhere and thus I have no reason to switch. When it first came out, Firefox was faster, lighter and offered way better function than the alternatives at the time. Since then, competition has been fierce in the browser market and they’ve done little to distinguish themselves in any major way from their competitive set. Until they do something so vastly incomparable in the market, the…
> They offer nothing I cannot get elsewhere and thus I have no reason to switch.
I'm not going to tell anybody else what their reasons are or should be, but for me voting against the browser monoculture was a reason to switch.
Most people won't care enough, of course, but to me it's not that different than voting for a candidate in an election who might not be the absolute best fit for my personal interests but who seems better for an overall political culture, or some other similar compromise.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are answering the question "how can Mozilla make more money", but that wasn't what was asked. Mozilla as a whole is profitable already, and revenues have been growing close to 100% year over year. As a company they are in great health. Except that's not what users care about when picking a browser. Google has too much money, tech, marketing and too big an existing user and device base to make any kind of direct c…
They could pivot to compete with the Big Tech conglomerates in general. Provide their own suite of integrated tools, search engines, communication platforms, and so on. But with a privacy-focused and ad-free approach. DuckDuckGo already proved there is an appetite for something like this. They could go further, and remain relevant and viable in the way that DDG is, even if they never again are the most popular browse…
DuckDuckGo is to a large degree a wrapper around Bing. Why do you think Mozilla has a chance here when even Microsoft failed?
And I'm not even talking about on a technical basis, Bing is pretty OK. The marketing required to displace Google would be inconceivably large.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#240They should focus on saving Firefox. - Cut out all (or at the very least, most) initiatives that don't serve the goal of promoting Firefox's market share or sustainability going forward - Donate the major money drains that aren't Firefox to the Apache Foundation or another worthy custodian - Fire all inessential staff that don't want to work on Firefox. - Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not…
> - Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion Why stop there? Why not get developers who are "in it for the passion"?
The CEO and upper management do loads to steer the ship. If all they care about is enriching themselves, they will likely struggle to find developers who are in it for the passion.
Look at Google. It is a late-stage, post-IPO business that’s now, frankly, ran by the CFO with a CEO who cares only about the board and an ever-increasing stock number.
The people who have passion left for the most part. Replaced by those who only seek to enrich themselves and climb the perf ladder.
Would those who have passion stuck around if Google was ran by people who still had passion? I’d imagine a much greater number of them would still be there.