So many answers missed the fundamental point.
It is open source.
That means Google, Microsoft and anyone else is able to contribute and with enough contributions from these sources, the basic philosophy will be influenced by these sources. If you do the work you should get kudos & reward....
-Containers were / are brilliant
-Containers with "some sponsor leakage" ( it's not called that but that is what it is) is shabby and so google.
-Default search engine is Google is obscene, regardless of how much sponsorship you get.
-Turning off telemetry should mean what it says. What it really means Firefox still stores it locally, just doesn't transmit it (for now?)-so Microsoft.
Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
791–800 of 949 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#792Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 actuall…
Yes, you have to ask yourself why everyone is using V8 as their JavaScript runtime and not Mozilla’s equivalent or why every alternative browser is using Chrome as a foundation. Or XUL wasn’t packaged as cross platform GUI framework. And then of course the Firefox mobile fiasco. My guess is that the engineering and management don’t interact. Two different companies within the same company, no coherent vision.
All of them written in C++.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#793Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. However, I think they need to answer the question, why should Firefox exist? If there is no compelling reason, well, there you go. If there is, double down on that make that reason shine. They have wasted so much money on the wrong things, IMO.
If Firefox dies, the open web dies. It's that simple. For the open web to remain open, there needs to be at least one more truly independent source of authority regarding how a rendering engine should work. Everyone else has thrown in the towel and abdicated that authority to Google by embedding Blink. Google is either actively malicious to the open web, or doesn't care about it other than as something they can strip…
That is a reason why the world should want it to exist, but it isn't a reason why anyone individual would consider it better than Chrome.
Firefox used to at least directly target segments of the population with its more comprehensive developer platform, but they have slowly been tearing that out for many years and now Chrome is converging to the same place.
At best I would say "the reason for Firefox to exist is because we need it to exist" argues we would have to prop it up using some kind of government intervention--to deal with the "it is at least slightly worse for every given user"--but the problem is we need people to actually use it, not for it to merely continue to be developed, and "require some random percentage of people to draw lots and be forced to use Firefox" is probably a dystopia for other reasons.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#794Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chrome’s Profiles are the #1 reason I use it over Firefox. If Firefox had as complete of an implementation as Chrome then I would consider switching, but until then Firefox is a non-starter for me. I use all 3 of these profiles all day every day for work: * one personal profile logged into personal Google * one work profile managed by the company, logged into company Google * one development profile with all the debu…
headscratch I used profiles with Ff for ages... what is the difference to Chrome's?
When I open Chrome, I can open any profile straight away from the menu. On Mac, there’s just one Chrome icon.
When I open Firefox, I have to go to a page that looks like a developer debug mode, and then open a new profile in a new Firefox instance. I now have two Firefox icons in my dock. I normally work with three profiles, so now I have three Firefox icons in my dock all called Firefox. 66.6% of the time I press the wrong one.
The problem is that Firefox has to be at least as good as Chrome to succeed. Being _almost_ as good as Chrome means people will just use Chrome.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#795Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chrome’s Profiles are the #1 reason I use it over Firefox. If Firefox had as complete of an implementation as Chrome then I would consider switching, but until then Firefox is a non-starter for me. I use all 3 of these profiles all day every day for work: * one personal profile logged into personal Google * one work profile managed by the company, logged into company Google * one development profile with all the debu…
What's wrong with Firefox Containers?
It doesn’t sync your entire experience. I have a completely different setup for each profile, and then I use Containers _within_ each profile. They’re not the same thing.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#796Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rust and servo were how they were innovating, and where a lot of the competitive features came from. By firing them, Mozilla made clear that they do not care about these things. The CEO is quite clearly a parasite hell-bent on extracting as much value as she can before bailing for the next victim.
The problem--and I feel the pain here deeply as a security person myself--is that that innovation was primarily along an axis (security) that no users care about (with a small bit of performance from concurrency, but there were clearly other ways to be faster), and was draining resources away from innovation that users cared about... which I'd claim was even going in the opposite direction: for many years now they ha…
As a Firefox user I disagree. Their work on Servo and Rust resulted in many performance and reliability improvements. WebRender for example came directly from Servo.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#797Be the "User Agent" in the truest sense of the word that is sorely missing in the browser landscape nowadays. For that, two things are necessary: 1) become absolutely trustworthy again 2) become the power user's choice again To me, 1) means absolute control over updates and network connections. Become the antithesis to the patronizing "Ask me again later" school of thought which has become so sickeningly widespread o…
Fully agree. Currently I can't even use custom keyboard shortcuts in FF.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#798Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then someone at Redhat was probably bribed by some Googler, cause it only happens with Firefox updates /s Joke aside, Firefox is aware that it's been updated and the new tab states that I have to restart my browser. I'm not familiar with the inner workings of Firefox, I just expect it to have everything it needs to function, in working memory. I've been using Fedora for close to 14 years now, Firefox always installed…
Strictly, Fedora doesn't support doing updates while the system is running (or at least they don't recommend it). An alternative that might be smoother in this regard: use a flatpak version of Firefox instead. (Firefox is in Fedora's flatpak repo, and on Flathub.) GNOME Software updates flatpak apps in the background, and you just get the new version the next time you open the app.
Not sure from which perspective your comment comes from. dnf update or dnfdragora updates (if you prefer a GUI) are all done while the system is running.
Sure, distribution upgrades nowadays are just like Windows update requiring a system reboot and a black screen with a useless progress bar to stare at (that's also a pretty annoying relatively recent addition).
GNOME is not my cup of tea. And until flatpak delivers tangible finegrained software sandboxing (at least Android level sandboxing), I'm not really interested in using it for software that's already packaged in the dnf repositories.
I use Fedora because it has newer software, pretty stable in my experience, and my knowledge is transferable to RedHat/Enterprise Linux. But I stopped buying into most of Redhat's desktop innovations a while ago.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#799Earlier quoted context omitted.
$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.
Many peofessional athletes are not well paid at all so I am not sure I get your point.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#800Mozilla lost the nerds.
Everything that made Mozilla cool or innovative was shafted.