Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?

Well, they don't seem to do what they are supposed to do then. I don't think such an organization should give away golden parachutes (fat executive bonuses, including on the way out), yet they did so a few times.

And yeah I know the Foundation and the Corporation are separate. Potato tomato. Point is, they should not act like a corporation. But they do, and they'll kill Firefox, that seems a very likely possibility at this point.

I used to work at Mozilla, and here's my opinion.

There's no need to save Firefox. When Firefox came out, it was a breath of fresh air. Because of Mozilla, every browser is now really, really great. Even Microsoft's browser is standards compliant and open source! Yeah, I get the arguments that Webkit is too pervasive and Chrome is too tied to Google and all of that... but in my opinion, Mozilla wanted a world where every single consumer had the choice between numerous high-quality browsers, and that's the world we currently live in! Firefox is losing this current battle, but Mozilla won the war.

The problem now isn't the browser, but rather the websites. Too much tracking, too much fights over who owns your online persona, and not enough usability (I'm so sick of passwords).

Mozilla always had a unique skill... they were a non-profit that was great at taking complicated technical issues that plagued the internet, and packaging them in a way that was usable. They took hard problems and made it so nobody had to think about them.

I'd love to see Mozilla do the same for identity. I'd love to see them be the company that killed password, and made it so identity is simple, easy and safe.

First off, Google can't do it. Nor can the other big players. Why? Because identity and tracking so to tied to their core business model, they have to back off imposing it. Otherwise they'll be accused of making it so "you need a Google account to use the web". (Or in Apple's case, they've had to go so far the opposite way that nobody really uses it.)

There's a lot of money in this! Identity is very closely tied to payments (it's crazy how it's 2022 and in the browser I still am typing in my credit card number).

To me, identity online is tied to an email address. You can have an email address with your real name, a few throwaways, etc. Identity doesn't have to mean YOU specifically. I'd love to see Mozilla work with GMail/etc... but also spin up their own email servers. Since most people now access email from a client (Apple Mail, Superhuman, etc), having a headless email server would help both privacy and also put them in a great place to help own identity.

Lastly, Mozilla always was fighting two wars at the same time. They both wanted institutional changes for the Internet (aka standard compliant browsers) and also were building a really nice implementation of it (aka Firefox). I feel like this is how they should approach identity. Getting everyone to follow the same standards (i.e. I can still use my GMail account for anything listed above), while also building their own stellar implementation of it and giving their competition a reason to compete (their own mail server, including these identity features in Firefox, etc).

This is an interesting question.

As I understood it, Google doesn't really want Firefox out of the market since it keeps them out of anti-trust issues... which is why they pay Mozilla to be the default search engine. Without that money, Mozilla would fail. Mozilla obviously doesn't want to fail, so they keep taking the money from Google. I don't see anything about that flywheel which puts Mozilla/Firefox in the drivers seat of their fate. They exist as part of a cost-benefit analysis on the part of Google.

So to phrase this question in a different way, how does a fat-smoker lose weight and quit smoking? They just do. If Mozilla/Firefox wants to legitimately be competitive they're going to have to change the nature of their relationship with Google.

Now, if you were to ask me personally what I would do? ...I would probably try to strategically create an imbalance between the big tech firms by getting cozy with a specific firm, forcing other firms to compete in places where they don't want to. Facebook doesn't have a browser or a mobile offering... which is slowly hurting them (e.g. cookie apocalypse) they might make a decent ally. Amazon is similar, but they don't have an easy symbiosis, unless there was a way to create something between AWS or prime video. Samsung, Adobe, or maybe Salesfore are all bad fits, but if Mozilla created a product strategy to align and maybe have native support for adobe or Salesforce they might be able to make something happen.

In my opinion, I don't see anything like that happening in reality. Mozilla will probably slowly fade away, each CEO getting the comp that they can squeeze out while the business is still making money. Sometime 10-20 years from now we'll think of them like a sun microsystems or silicon graphics.

(*This was a quick throw together... I maybe incredibly off about the details of the Mozilla/Google relationship currently)

There’s no guarantee that lightning will strike twice in this case.

When Firefox overtook IE6, Microsoft had been colossally mismanaging IE for years, which meant that IE had become a rusted husk of what it was in its glory days. This made for incredibly strong incentive for web developers to support an alternative, because having to develop for an utterly broken browser for an indefinite period of time was intensely unappealing. On the end user side of the equation, Firefox’s incredible speed, UX improvements, and robust support for extensions did a lot to win people over.

Fast forward to today. Google is infinitely more savvy with web developer relations than late-IE-era MS could’ve ever been — they keep devs “fed” well enough with a steady stream of new shiny features that it’s unlikely that they’d ever revolt. For users, the difference in speed and UX between Firefox is negligible or even works in Chrome’s favor (which is tilting further in Chrome’s direction with every site that’s developed and tested only against Chrome).

Additionally, the barrier to entry for new web engines is so high now that anybody trying to build a browser that is to Chrome what Firefox was to IE is almost certainly doomed to fail unless backed by a company with deep pockets and no expectation of return on investment for many years.

My goal, if I were CEO, would be to reduce organizational expenses (and increase other forms of revenue) to the point where the 100s of millions of dollars from Google ($562 million in 2017) was not required for covering the cost of firefox development and spend all those millions on advertising firefox until Google stopped giving it. I can't see where having such a large part of your finances coming from your biggest direct competitor could ever be a good thing, but at least spending it on increasing firefox's market share directly through advertising would have a certain irony associated with it. At least of the Alanis Morisette variety.