Firefox mobile can't save a webpage anymore. They took away essential features and each new release I have to learn new ways to turn off their money making initiatives.
Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
751–760 of 949 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#752Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with your topline goal, but I am surprised by the way you think about it. Most of what you recommend has no obvious connection to firefox-the-program. Like... > - 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 the money, a…
My impression is that Mozilla is too focused on basically everything that isn't Firefox - to me, it's axiomatic that Firefox wouldn't be in such a horrifying shape if they were focused on it. They are lacking for attention, and not money, which is why they should jettison everything that isn't Firefox or doesn't serve Firefox. Anyone else can do funny extensions or VPN or what have you got, but browser-making is Mozi…
> My impression is that Mozilla is too focused on basically everything that isn't Firefox - to me, it's axiomatic that Firefox wouldn't be in such a horrifying shape if they were focused on it.
I really don’t think that most of us would have any meaningful knowledge on this without having first hand experience, so I don’t think these opinions are of any use.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#753Earlier 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…
> 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 y…
Stock in what? There is no Mozilla stock.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#754Earlier 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.
>I'll have to start to adapt to another browser now. I'll give Vivaldi a try. Seems silly, I see no valid reason to switch browsers. What technical or functional limitations are you running into that didnt exist earlier?
Firefox (android) doesn't always let me scroll back to the top of the page
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#755I feel like they need to get back to the place they were mentally in in 2004, fighting for their survival. They ran a two page ad in the NY Times:
https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2004/12/mozilla-foundation-pl...
This is the passion and marketing needed to save Firefox.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#756Maybe it has to do with its competitors being a 1.7 trillion dollar company and a 2.5 trillion dollar company! Winning against those requires not only better technology AND marketing AND consumer favor, but also leverage in the legal processes that enable/disable network effects. So anti-trust is unfortunately one of Mozilla's biggest hopes.
You think they don't have enough cash to save FF, when they get $400m a year from Google?
$400m/year is in the ballpark for estimates of Chrome's _advertising_ spend, at various points.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#757Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would instead argue that Firefox's Gecko engine is beyond saving and that any money invested in it now would be better donated to other community projects because there isn't enough resource to catch up. Sticking with Gecko will eventually lead to the dismise of Firefox the organization. Microsoft, with their resource and their ability to bundle Microsoft Edge in with Windows, couldn't get any appreciable amount of…
Why do you think the engine is beyond saving? I use Firefox everyday and have absolutely zero complaints...
Mozilla itself didn't think the Gecko engine itself has a long term future either. After all, Mozilla funded the development of the new Servo engine for eight whole years, and it slowly replaced pieces of Gecko with Servo.
After Mozilla laid off all Servo developers in 2020, the future doesn't look bright for Gecko or Firefox.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#758Earlier 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…
> The users don't care if you wrote it in C++ or fortran
Web site users don't care if a site's written with NodeJS or assembly; but that would make a huge difference to bugginess, development speed, feature set, etc.
Firefox is getting bogged-down in some areas due to its C++ codebase; especially trying to introduce concurrency (in a way which doesn't break everything, or cause unforeseen security implications, which is often the case in C/C++)
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#759Cater to power users. Remove as much bloat as possible Focus on extensibility. Setup stupid simple self hosting for things like bookmarks/pw manager.
Longshot: go all in on bringing mainline Linux to the desktop/mobile. Linux systems are the only place where Mozilla is the default. Hyper focus on high performance with Linux systems. Memory footprint and battery drain are abysmal. The way security controls for extensions are implemented requires stupid amounts of memory.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#760Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And you only get one profile active at a time. This isn't true. As I'm writing this, I have three Firefox windows open, each in a different profile. What makes you think you can only have one profile active at a time?
were there any hoops you had to run to get that to work? afaict that's not possible ootb without adding a flag to the command line. I'll admit that I haven't really tried it since many years ago. for 90% of the users out there that we need to convince to use firefox: having a command line switch is about the same as not having the feature at all... chrome has a menu item that brings up a brand new window in that prof…
You do have to use the command-line and there is a single hoop: the `--new-instance` flag. I agree the situation could be made "normal" user friendly and it isn't right now.