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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?

#631

Post by azinman2 »

paxys wrote: post #154
selfhoster11 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The subtitle of the question was "What would you do if you were in charge of Mozilla? How would you save Firefox?" My answer is an attempt at addressing these two questions. My goal wasn't to make Mozilla more profitable, but to ensure that it's focused on what should be its core mission, rather than the mire of sideshows that they engage in at the moment. Also, I don't care how Mozilla the amorphous blob of a corpor…

As a regular end user why do I care about what Mozilla's mission is? Apple makes shiny devices, Google gives me great free services, and in return I use their (perfectly great) browsers. What is one single reason to use Firefox? As long as these large companies continue to put effort into their browsers (which Microsoft didn't do with IE), users are simply never going to switch, the same way no one is using desktop L…

This is exactly right, and as you’ll see from the long tail of answers, there isn’t one that actually applies to normal people.

It used to be that IE etc was actually quite bad, and Firefox was substantially faster while adding important features like tabs. That’s when the nerds installed Firefox on their parents computers. Then FF languished, Chrome came out and was much faster and used less resources. So the nerds replaced everyone’s browsers with Chrome.

Now everyone is using their default browser from their phones, or apps, or inline system browsers in apps. All the browsers are roughly equivalent now, so the nerds don’t have a lot of reason to go around and change their parents browsers. Plus you don’t have any real advantage to changing the mobile browser from Chrome (Android) or Safari (iOS). Thus the market has shifted away from desktops, FF lost there, hasn’t regained, and has made almost no inroads on mobile.

They need a reason for the nerds en masse to go and change everything, while inertia and incompatible built-in password managers will make this painful.

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

#632

Post by lamontcg »

dundarious wrote: post #618
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…

The vast majority people who use web browsers have literally zero knowledge, awareness, or interest in these things. What actually seems to have happened, is that a long time ago now, their techy friends recommended they use Firefox instead of IE. Then those techy friends recommended Chrome because it was even better. Now it's arguably the case that Chrome and Firefox are equivalent from a non-techy standpoint, but n…

If Google shut all the doors making ad blockers on Chrome virtually impossible that'd be interesting. Ad blocker use is pretty high and might be as high as 40% and if those people all defected that'd do it. Probably why Google can't do that though even though they clearly want to.

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

#633

Post by mschuster91 »

jacquesm wrote: post #393
twblalock wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a reward for failure, it's an insurance policy. Here's a CEO job offer: take on a nearly impossible task, for a salary that is far below the market rate. If you fail (and you probably will!) it might damage your career and make it harder for you to find another job. If you succeed, you will get prestige, but you still won't get a lot of money. What kind of executive would accept an offer like that? A golden…

You don't want that kind of executive anyway. You want someone that identifies with the market and is seen as a safe hand to run FF into the long term future. That alone will do a good part of stopping the drain.

At the position FF/Mozilla is in, even finding such a person is a challenge:

Ideally, FF would need a developer or another seasoned IT person at the helm, but let's be real most of our profession find management borderline disgusting at best.

The MBA/beancounter/finance-type execs have no fucking idea about the business or the spirit behind a project like FF, all they care about is financial numbers - and the ones you might want from that group can earn ten times the compensation outside of the NGO sector.

And the NGO execs... most of them have absolutely no experience leading a project as large and international as FF and the ones that do (e.g. Greenpeace) don't have any idea about technology either.

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

#634

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

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…

> But is Firefox an inferior browser?

Several APIs that make powerful web applications possible are missing (e.g. WebUSB, various filesystem access APIs) and Firefox generally tends to lag behind Chrome when it comes to new APIs/web features.

The lower market share means that many web sites don't support it properly. For example, I need to keep a Chrome profile around for Zoom since the button doesn't even show up on Firefox, and when I tried to join a Teams meeting with Firefox, it failed in some non-obvious way, causing me to be late to a job interview (may have been due to some extension misbehaving or some config issue). I don't know if that's just because the sites don't test and do user agent sniffing, or whether Firefox is actually missing some APIs that would be required, but from a user perspective, it doesn't really matter, I can't use the browser for things I can do with Chrome.

I also still have occasional crashes.

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

#635

Post by StillBored »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #524
StillBored wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was the layoff where they got rid of all the rust people? Its going to sound harsh, but they are loosing market share to browsers that didn't have to invent a new language to write a browser in. So, getting rid of those people was probably a positive impact for firefox since they were mostly just yak shaving instead of actually improving the end product. The users don't care if you wrote it in C++ or fortran as…

> or create giant backdoors. Using memory safe languages is a big step towards this goal.

Yes, but consider the engineering effort to create a general purpose memory safe language vs just a domain specific one in comparison to the work required to write a browser, which also includes another domain specific language (javascript).

Seat of the pants, I would say getting something like rust on par with g++/clang code generation, and 3rd party tools is probably in the same ballpark engineering wise as actually maintaining the browser.

And if you spend a little time looking at firefox, there is/was a lot of low hanging fruit. I've mentioned elsewhere the difficultly building it, but even more than that, is that pretty much every single version of gcc that came out for a while would break firefox in some fundamental ways. And overwhelmingly these breaks were caused by crappy C++ programming where people were doing things that were known not to be syntactically correct but no one bothered to fix them. Then frequently instead of actually fixing them they did things like switch from building with an old GCC to a newer clang because it threw fewer errors. Then they claimed that the result was "faster" than gcc, despite the fact they were comparing an old version of GCC with a newer version clang. When the work was done to actually get it to build with gcc, it turned out to be even faster. (not that gcc is better than clang, only that ideally a project like firefox would compile cleanly with a wide range of compilers). Said compiler warnings are frequently valid, and analyzing them at least to know if its true is a worthwhile code quality exercise.

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

#636

Post by simondotau »

Melatonic wrote: post #621
travem wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Likely rooted in the experience with Brendan Eich who had a long history with Mozilla, was appointed as CEO and then (due to his personal political contributions, mainly Proposition 8 related) essentially forced to resign as CEO due to the accompanying backlash - https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/brendan-eich-steps-down-...

According to wikipedia he now an "ardent" anti-masker for Covid and now people are trying to get him to step down from Brave browser. Does this guy just not learn?

I don't think supporting a mandate to wear a basic cloth mask is a hill anyone should be willing to die on.

I'm fiercely, fiercely pro-mainstream-science, and there's no doubt that proper N95 masks (or better) are very effective against respiratory disease transmission. But mask mandates almost always permit basic cloth masks which lack strong evidence of efficacy. If we're not going to mandate an effective mask, I honestly don't see what the point of the mandate is.

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

#637

Post by selfhoster11 »

pdimitar wrote: post #148

At least in my eyes and I suppose in the eyes of other techies and open Web idealists: Because Mozilla became just another classic corporation that's laser-focused on extracting value for shareholders and executives and nothing else. A year or two ago an article about Mozilla made the rounds here: executives collecting fat bonuses (and some leaving afterwards?). Some mere months later they fired a lot of people. Is t…

Thanks for the call-out. I think you make an excellent point about them becoming just another corporation. I don't donate money to them for that exact reason. If there was some way for my donations to get routed straight to the Firefox team, even with enormous inefficiencies and percentage cuts, I'd still do it because I want the open web to exist. As it stands, I have no way to support that ideal monetarily.

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

#638

Post by spartanatreyu »

jwond wrote: post #595
pavlov wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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."

Could you clarify what basic rights you are referring to, whose existence ”the assholes” are trying to erase, and what methods they are using to do so?

I think they're talking about the creator of JS giving money to a political cause trying to block gay marriage.

There was a big huff about it in the tech space for a while when it happened and he ended up secluding himself after that for a while.

It was really not a good look. In the years since, we've seen a much larger push to shine the spotlight on behaviour that would have previously been swept under the rug or hidden behind technological "tenure".

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

#639

Post by dleslie »

presentation wrote: post #627
dleslie wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If people here who cares about Mozilla would volunteer, and also use the browser, Mozilla would be in a much better shape. > Want to fix Mozilla? Take an active part in it. Why would I volunteer for an organization that pays its CEO something like 70x the average American salary? It doesn't operate itself like a nonprofit. I don't want to put my free time into a project that exists to pay for someone's private vill…

Not specifically about Firefox but: if nonprofits can’t pay for talent then you get what you pay for, crappy talent for important positions. That said many people have your mindset so that puts all nonprofits at a disadvantage against any for-profit initiative as far as getting talent goes. You shouldn’t need to martyr yourself to do something good.

If the non-profit can pay market rates for a CEO then it can pay market rates for developers.

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

#640

Post by pas »

jwond wrote: post #595
pavlov wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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."

Could you clarify what basic rights you are referring to, whose existence ”the assholes” are trying to erase, and what methods they are using to do so?

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