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

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

#541

Post by eternityforest »

WorldMaker wrote: post #243
jjcm wrote: post #92

Here's my perspective on this - Chrome has established itself as the baseline. The baseline is no longer the W3C standard, it's Chrome due to all of the experimental future W3C spec items being in Chrome. Chrome leads the spec, and with its 70% market share developers allow it to. Firefox will always be playing catchup because of this, regardless of their market share. This leaves three main reasons for using Firefox…

We need a better way to communicate this: Chrome doesn't "lead the spec", it "rushes out ahead of the spec". The developers using non-standard features need to be held better accountable for using non-standard features, and Google needs to be held better accountable for releasing non-standard features ahead of standardization processes. W3C is seen as no longer relevant to HTML specs having delegated "HTML5" to WHATW…

Apple and Mozilla can't be compromised with. They want certain powerful features to just not exist. They don't trust users to choose for themselves. They are trying to ensure privacy at all costs by making tools that could be used to spy unavailable, no matter what the purpose.

If devs want to make something, Chrome wants to make it happen, and I want to use it, then I don't want Mozilla trying to block up the whole works.

Especially not to "protect my privacy" from a site I completely trust, that might even be an intranet site I built myself.

What's next, are you going to disable downloading executable files, probably the most dangerous browser feature of all?

There's no nice alternative, or sometimes no alternative at all besides making a native app for a bazillion different platforms.

Maybe WHATWG actually isn't just rubber stamping things because they're a google puppet, but at least partly because... it's what devs want.

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

#542

Post by jacquesm »

PeterisP wrote: post #448
jacquesm wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You should do that math again. No, I don't. Even if it is one percent (which I highly doubt) and that one percent is committed enough then that's enough of a core to guarantee the success of the project. It doesn't need a team of 1000 to build a browser, much less to keep an existing one patched and rolling along.

Quite on the contrary, even a team of 1000 won't be sufficient to maintain compatibility if your marketshare is so low that website and webapp builders ignore your concerns. A non-Chromium browser needs to maintain a critical mass of users to be sufficiently large to ensure that the world wants to stay compatible with it, and having 1% of marketshare is not sufficient for that, no matter how committed these users are…

That's not how web standards work - or how they ought to work, for that matter.

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

#544

Post by andoli »

eigenrick wrote: post #522
rpnx wrote: post #473

My thoughts on this are that every time I see a news piece about Firefox it's about "social justice", some code of conduct controversy, or something else utterly unimportant to web browser selection. Being "Open Source" does nothing for me when Firefox engages in the same crap as other closed source browsers, like Pocket. Mozilla also allowed social issues to take precedence over retaining good engineers. Whether you…

I think this post assumes that Firefox is an inferior browser, and that the cause is mismanagement. But is Firefox an inferior browser? I think it used to be, but over the last couple years, it has made massive improvements in features and performance. I use it in both desktop and mobile, and I prefer it over Chrome. As a software engineer, I rely heavily on my browser for work. For me, the multi-account containers i…

> Also, I like how Lockwise on mobile is divorced from the browser, making it easy to use it to manage passwords across websites and apps.

I liked that too. That was before they decided to shut it down...

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

#545

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

WJW wrote: post #364
makx wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd think that there are even qualified people who would do it for (almost) free, just for the chance of building a resume...

There's a weird type of logic going on where almost everyone who would be willing to do it for almost free is probably not qualified for the job. Would you really stake the future of your foundation on someone who still needs to build their resume?

Japanese CEO salaries are famously very low. The Toyota CEO makes about USD 3.5m. There are other C levels that make 3 times what the Toyota CEO earns in direct compensation.

Japanese CEO salaries in general seem to be below USD1m on average.

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

#546

Post by BEEdwards »

rpnx wrote: post #473

My thoughts on this are that every time I see a news piece about Firefox it's about "social justice", some code of conduct controversy, or something else utterly unimportant to web browser selection. Being "Open Source" does nothing for me when Firefox engages in the same crap as other closed source browsers, like Pocket. Mozilla also allowed social issues to take precedence over retaining good engineers. Whether you…

"Maybe they were assholes, but I don't give a shit how nice the developers who made my web browser are."

There coworkers do though, assholes have a right to exist and others have a right to not want to work with them.

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

#547

Post by bostonsre »

panarky wrote: post #533
rpnx wrote: post #473

My thoughts on this are that every time I see a news piece about Firefox it's about "social justice", some code of conduct controversy, or something else utterly unimportant to web browser selection. Being "Open Source" does nothing for me when Firefox engages in the same crap as other closed source browsers, like Pocket. Mozilla also allowed social issues to take precedence over retaining good engineers. Whether you…

> I don't give a shit how nice the developers who made my web browser are It sounds like you do give a shit that they care about "social justice" and you don't want to use their browser because of that? Or are there specific features / functionality / performance / security issues that prevent you from using Firefox and are somehow caused by the worldview of the developers?

Just interpreting what the OP said and not really sure where I stand on the topic, but I think he means that "social justice" controversies have purged asshole devs that were competent developers producing good features and that firefox as a product is not as good due to that. Taking senior engineers off the roster will usually impact the product whether or not they were assholes.

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

#548

Post by teawrecks »

rpnx wrote: post #473

My thoughts on this are that every time I see a news piece about Firefox it's about "social justice", some code of conduct controversy, or something else utterly unimportant to web browser selection. Being "Open Source" does nothing for me when Firefox engages in the same crap as other closed source browsers, like Pocket. Mozilla also allowed social issues to take precedence over retaining good engineers. Whether you…

I agree that it is your prerogative as a consumer to decide how much you care about the integrity of the companies who make the products you use. Maybe it's just my inner Hank Hill talking, but I don't think a responsible consumer would ever say, "I don't give a shit how nice the developers who made my web browser are." The way I see it, if you're willing to be an asshole for profit to someone else, then you're willing to be an asshole for profit to me too. So I appreciate and support companies who make deliberate choices to treat humans better, especially ones made at the cost of profits.

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

#549

Post by pavlov »

rpnx wrote: post #473

My thoughts on this are that every time I see a news piece about Firefox it's about "social justice", some code of conduct controversy, or something else utterly unimportant to web browser selection. Being "Open Source" does nothing for me when Firefox engages in the same crap as other closed source browsers, like Pocket. Mozilla also allowed social issues to take precedence over retaining good engineers. Whether you…

> "even assholes have a basic right to exist"

The problem is when some assholes are actively engaged in denying basic rights from others. If you say "well those assholes have a right to exist", you're effectively saying "the assholes have more of a right to exist than the people they're trying to erase."

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

#550

Post by tfehring »

BossingAround wrote: post #331
sebmellen wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The arrogance is hard to believe. > In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask peopl…

I don't think this has anything to do with arrogance, this is simply the market value speaking. Ginni Rometty did something similar with IBM; while being a terrible CEO ("IBM was the worst-performing large-cap tech stock during Rometty's tenure, dropping 24%" [1]), she got a whopping $20M per year [2] during her first 7 years of being a CEO, and she got $20M golden parachute [3] upon leaving the shell of an IBM. This…

IBM is more than two orders of magnitude bigger than Mozilla in terms of both spending and headcount. On a log scale, Mozilla's scale is about halfway between IBM and your local McDonald's franchise.

CEOs of smaller companies typically don't command that level of compensation, and when they do, it's generally because the company performed well and their pay was heavily perforamnce-based.

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