Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

691–700 of 949 posts

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

#691

Post by behringer »

mrinfinite wrote: post #460
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…

omg, i am considering deleting firefox now. terrible.

if you think thars bad, just wait til you hear how google ceo is paid.

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

#692

Post by mulmen »

CuriousSpider wrote: post #688
selfhoster11 wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Mozilla is just Firefox then why to they need a CEO at all? Why does a web browser need an executive team? It doesn't make any sense to me. Linux doesn't have a CEO. Python doesn't have a CEO. Postgres doesn't have a CEO. It doesn't matter what the top position is called: CEO, the Grand Warlock of Yendor, or Benevolent Dictator For Life. CEO ≈ whoever is in charge and entrusted with enough authority that they ca…

> Apache has a reputation as the graveyard of open source software. Interesting. I did not seem to know that. I always thought that Apache was a leader in open source since a lot of the notable tools (i.e. Spark, Airflow, Kafta) are maintained by Apache. Are there any articles that I can learn more about this?

It's an interesting point. A significant number of Apache (big data) projects do indeed seem to be "in the attic"[1]. But they have high profile projects that are well maintained. AirBnB created Airflow then donated it to Apache. Do they still use it internally and contribute to Apache Airflow? Do other companies contribute?

Spark is central to Databricks, the company started by the original creator of Spark.

So at least for a couple high-profile Apache projects there are for-profit organizations with an interest in furthering development.

I assume Databricks pays devs to contribute to Spark, I actually don't know.

So maybe Apache Firefox with a Mozilla corporate sponsor isn't such a terrible idea. Although again, I have no idea what the commercial motivation would be behind supporting Firefox development.

[1]: https://projects.apache.org/projects.html?category#big-data

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

#693

Post by hammyhavoc »

artdigital wrote: post #689
hammyhavoc wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where would we go though? It's bordering on Chromium-derivative or bust at this point.

Safari or Brave Brave is the most non-google chromium variant, kind of like a Firefox based on chromium, and safari is still a good browser on Mac

For me, the crypto wallet built into Brave puts me off. I want my browser to be a browser, nothing more than that. Other than Brave, the option is Vivaldi, but that's not completely open source, and the devs refuse to completely open source it, making me doubt the trustworthiness of it.

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

#694

Post by mulmen »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #437
mulmen wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money, and cut their salaries (bonuses tied directly to increase in Firefox market share). If Mozilla is just Firefox then why to they need a CEO at all? Why does a web browser need an executive team? It doesn't make any sense to me. Linux doesn't have a CEO. Python doesn't have a CEO. Postgres doesn't have a CEO. But all those projects have commerc…

> If Mozilla is just Firefox then why to they need a CEO at all? Why does a web browser need an executive team? It doesn't make any sense to me. Linux doesn't have a CEO. Python doesn't have a CEO. Postgres doesn't have a CEO. It doesn't matter what the top position is called: CEO, the Grand Warlock of Yendor, or Benevolent Dictator For Life. CEO ≈ whoever is in charge and entrusted with enough authority that they ca…

> It doesn't matter what the top position is called...

In a conversation about salary I think it is clearly CEO-the-corporate-leadership-position, not a euphemism for BDFL.

> Apache has a reputation as the graveyard of open source software.

Except for httpd, Spark, Airflow, Kafka, Hadoop, etc.

https://projects.apache.org/projects.html?number

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

#695

Post by artdigital »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #693
artdigital wrote: post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safari or Brave Brave is the most non-google chromium variant, kind of like a Firefox based on chromium, and safari is still a good browser on Mac

For me, the crypto wallet built into Brave puts me off. I want my browser to be a browser, nothing more than that. Other than Brave, the option is Vivaldi, but that's not completely open source, and the devs refuse to completely open source it, making me doubt the trustworthiness of it.

You can turn the crypto and ads stuff off, that's what I do too. The other built in functionality like IPFS, AdBlocker and Tor make up a nice package

I don't trust Vivaldi either to be honest

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

#696

Post by QuarterReptile »

mitchdoogle wrote: post #392
WJW wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

$2.5 million per year is in the top 0.1% of income in the United States. No matter how you shake it, whether you want people with management experience, tech experience, browser experience, or some combination thereof, you will find a significantly large number who would be able to do the job, do it well, and make more than their current salary.

You could make this same argument about professional athletes, but all across the world no one seems to follow through on this obvious money-saving hack. So I presume it's more complicated than you're suggesting.

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

#697

Post by bentcorner »

yeeeloit wrote: post #529
bentcorner wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a look at tree-style tabs. I started using them in FF and have looked several times at chromium-based add-ins and absolutely nothing comes close. Edge vertical tabs is your best choice if you must use a chromium browser, however it is a weak imitation of TST.

What are you talking about exactly? Is this an extension for FF?

It's this extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

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

#698

Post by bentcorner »

garciasn wrote: post #556
bentcorner wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a look at tree-style tabs. I started using them in FF and have looked several times at chromium-based add-ins and absolutely nothing comes close. Edge vertical tabs is your best choice if you must use a chromium browser, however it is a weak imitation of TST.

I'm glad this exists (although it appears there are extensions in other browsers that do the same thing) but I never have more than 10 tabs open, so it's not something that would make me switch.

I'm glad it exists too. If you ever have a need to juggle tabs this extension is a godsend. Believe me, I've tried finding similar functionality for Chrome/Edge and aside from Edge vertical tabs, the rest are a kludge at best.

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

#699

Post by staticassertion »

StillBored wrote: post #483
snird wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And she raised her pay while firing essential engineers: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/313658-mozilla-fires-2... I'm a firefox user for over 10 years. I think I'm now convinced there is no future, I'll have to start to adapt to another browser now. I'll give Vivaldi a try.

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…

That's soooo wrong. Projects like Servo were exactly the sort of things they should have been working on.

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

#700

Post by staticassertion »

twblalock wrote: post #387
autoexec wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> High salary and a golden parachute would be required to attract anyone good enough to succeed. I'm not sure if the best way to get someone to save a dying product is a golden parachute which rewards them for running it straight into the ground. You have to make sure they're not risking everything to keep Firefox going, but ideally they'd have some skin in the game so they don't have an incentive to just loot whatev…

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…

> 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.

Keeping in mind that "below market rate" is still "retirement within a few years at the Mozilla CEO's rate.

So even if your career were damaged, and it's easy to not have it damaged, you can retire after like 3 years. That's a fine insurance policy.

> If you succeed, you will get prestige, but you still won't get a lot of money.

Of course you'll get a lot of money.

1. You can give yourself a raise. If the Moz CEO had come in and we saw market share increasing do you think anyone would give a shit about increasing their pay? The issue is it's tanking and they laid off a ton of people at the same time they took a huge pay raise.

2. Executives are compensated with stock. Company does well, your stock goes up.

Post reply on HN