Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it? • Hacker News Board

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

#921

Post by account42 » Wed, Feb 16, 2022, 1:22 PM UTC

pritambaral wrote: post #920

account42 wrote: post #914

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mozilla has actually done some work to measure users with telemetry disabled; see the "telemetry coverage" section of https://blog.mozilla.org/data/2018/08/20/effectively-measuri ... The fuck are they thinking. Disabling telemetry means not sending telemetry. NO. EXCUSES.

It's basically a `if (random() > threshold) POST cookie-less-origin/telemetry-{{ telemetry_enabled() ? "enabled" : "disabled"}}`. I don't consider this telemetry. It does not keep any data on you, track you over time, or even fingerprint you. I think this is a great way to get an approximate usage stat, while preserving privacy, respecting the no-telemetry choice, and keeping network overhead ridiculously low.

> cookie-less-origin

Irrelevant, tracking does not need cookies.

> I don't consider this telemetry.

I do and I specifically configured my browser not to send telemetry. Any kind.

> It does not keep any data on you, track you over time, or even fingerprint you.

You can't know that. But if there is a concrete privacy issue is also irrelevant. There is a) a trust issue and b) a disregard of my wishes issue, which only reinforces (a).

> I think this is a great way to get an approximate usage stat

It doesn't matter how great this is for its intended purpose, that does not make it right.

> keeping network overhead ridiculously low

0 network connections outside of what I browse is what I asked for, "any" is ridiculously high compared to that.

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

#922

Post by 5580 » Wed, Feb 16, 2022, 2:19 PM UTC

snird wrote: post #371

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…

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.

Used Netscape Navigator until Firefox was released. Stayed on FF until a couple of years ago. I moved to Waterfox and Vivaldi, I highly enjoy both.

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

#923

Post by mrtranscendence » Wed, Feb 16, 2022, 2:26 PM UTC

ashwagary wrote: post #884

mrtranscendence wrote: post #864

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the CPI is fairly accurate, and those who calculate it are doing their best with a problem that doesn't have one easy to compute answer. Regardless, I know just from personal experience that your numbers are way off. My grocery bills haven't gone up 50 to 100% since 2012; what I spend on clothes and software and veterinary visits hasn't gone up 50 to 100% either. The only thing that I might buy that contradicts t…

>But the CPI is fairly accurate, and those who calculate it are doing their best Completely disagree. >Also: as part of my job I can check prices in a major sector of the retail industry That is probably the problem. >clothes and software Clothes = imported from countries we export inflation to. Software = ~0 cost to duplicate. Inflation doesnt hit the whole population equally or at the same time, and it doesnt hit a…

> That is probably the problem.

How is that a problem? Let's say I work in the grocery industry. Everyone has to buy groceries at some point, whether wealthy or impoverished, and for those on lower incomes groceries are a fairly major share of total consumption. I can check those prices and they haven't gone up nearly as much as you're saying. Ipso facto you're just wrong.

> Remember when house prices went up 20-30% in a 6 month period of 2021? Not inflation?

Inflation is more than just home prices, and just because something is more expensive than it used to be doesn't mean that inflation is the culprit. Supply and demand are still factors. Regardless, rent is accounted for in the CPI (though not assets like home purchases).

Got anything besides home prices? Car prices haven't gone up that much, at least. I can hardly think of anything besides houses and GPUs that (a) impact me and (b) have gone up fairly drastically in price. (Though around here, the suburbs of greater Cincinnati, home prices haven't generally doubled in ten years; my home's valuation is maybe 15% higher than it was when I bought it five years ago.)

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

#924

Post by StillBored » Wed, Feb 16, 2022, 3:50 PM UTC

jeltz wrote: post #796

saurik wrote: post #784

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The question is, would the work have been done sooner, or more effectively if they had just fixed the C++ code rather than spending a lot of time creating rust, only to rewrite said code?

I mean to this day (and i just tossed off a firefox build yesterday to see if most of what I was saying is still true), the firefox maintainers can't even be bothered to fix the tens of thousands of warnings that appear when built certain ways. That is a really low bar to cross with a C++ project, and they haven't even bothered. I've worked on projects where we had a recommended compiler, but we always spent some time assuring that the project appeared to work with the latest gcc/icc/whatever, because at some point those newer compilers would become the defaults, and also because they frequently pointed out issues in the code. Its just a cheap way to fix undefined behavior bugs.

So, I think the only answer to that is yes, that long stretch before they dropped the rust code was wasted time/effort.

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

#925

Post by sfink » Wed, Feb 16, 2022, 4:32 PM UTC

BrendanEich wrote: post #813

sfink wrote: post #721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point of clarification: Mitchell Baker was not CEO at that time (and never had been). She was chair of the board. The previous full CEO was Gary Kovacs, succeeded by acting CEO Jay Sullivan, then Eich for 9 days.

Mitchell was CEO before John Lilly.

Doh! I stand corrected.

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

#926

Post by sfink » Wed, Feb 16, 2022, 4:39 PM UTC

mhitza wrote: post #588

sfink wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I understand what you're reporting correctly, then that's something your OS "included a couple of years back". If you install Firefox from Mozilla's site, it won't have these update problems. What's happening is that your package manager is swapping Firefox's bits out from under it while it's running. Firefox's built-in update system doesn't do that. Which is not to say that I think you shouldn't be using a packag…

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…

Er... just yesterday I had the crappy update experience that everyone is talking about. And that's using Firefox Nightly, with a downloaded build. So I'd need to look more into this to understand what the actual situation is.

Hm... though now I wonder... I also had a cron job that ran me out of disk space. I wonder if that contributed to make it more like the external file replacement situation?

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

#927

Post by dleslie » Wed, Feb 16, 2022, 5:23 PM UTC

presentation wrote: post #893

dleslie wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Do they not pay market rates for developers?

The suggestion being made is that developers should engage in unpaid labour to make Firefox better.

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

#928

Post by ashwagary » Wed, Feb 16, 2022, 7:43 PM UTC

mrtranscendence wrote: post #923

ashwagary wrote: post #884

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But the CPI is fairly accurate, and those who calculate it are doing their best Completely disagree. >Also: as part of my job I can check prices in a major sector of the retail industry That is probably the problem. >clothes and software Clothes = imported from countries we export inflation to. Software = ~0 cost to duplicate. Inflation doesnt hit the whole population equally or at the same time, and it doesnt hit a…

> That is probably the problem. How is that a problem? Let's say I work in the grocery industry. Everyone has to buy groceries at some point, whether wealthy or impoverished, and for those on lower incomes groceries are a fairly major share of total consumption. I can check those prices and they haven't gone up nearly as much as you're saying. Ipso facto you're just wrong. > Remember when house prices went up 20-30%…

>Got anything besides home prices?

>Inflation is more than just home prices

>The items/services we all want/need, that are scarce, and can't be imported from our foreign "slaves", are where you will find it concentrated. Healthcare, housing, university, etc...

It seems you didnt read anything I wrote since you avoided my earlier point and are still ignorantly talking about retail goods that are, for the most part, subsidized, imported from countries we export inflation to, or experience heavy shrinkflation.

I also mentioned inflation is not evenly distributed. Different areas/segments of the population experience different rates. The Ohio housing market may not have been hit as hard, probably parts of Michigan fall in that same boat (these are not desirable markets), but most houses did 3-4x in the past 12 years.

I will move on... Everyone will understand the hurdle rate is higher than 7.5% after enough time has elapsed (just like they did with the BS 2.5% CPI number we used to use) and the standard of living decline is significant enough that it cant be ignored anymore. The investor class generally understands the new yearly hurdle rate is 20%-30% (must earn atleast ~120% of last year's return just to break even). Saylor and a few others makes this point often...

I'll leave those that disagree or aren't interested in learning to figure this out the harder way.

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

#929

Post by jslove » Wed, Feb 16, 2022, 10:08 PM UTC

Jayakumark wrote: post #164

selfhoster11 wrote: post #2

They should focus on saving Firefox. - Cut out all (or at the very least, most) initiatives that don't serve the goal of promoting Firefox's market share or sustainability going forward - 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…

Current CEO is a cancer to Mozilla, her main goal seems like to make more money personally before Mozilla goes bankrupt. As long is as she is there - there is no hope https://itdm.com/mozilla-firefox-usage-down-85-but-why-are-e...

previous one - now stellar ceo wasn't great either

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

#930

Post by tornato7 » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 6:04 PM UTC

mcv wrote: post #820

aeze wrote: post #763

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those numbers seem so much saner than the US.

Still insane, though. Nobody needs that kind of pay. This is not supply and demand, this is the executive class enriching themselves.

I disagree, if you're a company raking in $270B a year in revenue, you want the absolute best running it. The Toyota CEO is like 0.001% of the revenue, an extremely small price to pay for the right management.