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Firefox on the brink?

brycewray.com

61–70 of 840 posts

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#61
Why is the US government even supporting specific browsers? It should support a standard like HTML 4 with no CSS or JS required. i.e. make the actual functionality on their sites simple to reduce the chance it doesn't work somewhere.

They're not Spotify. They're not trying to growth hack. They don't need to look pretty and have fancy animations and match some designer's dream down to the pixel. They can add CSS etc. to make things a bit nicer, but government sites should work with as simple of a browser as possible.

Highly regulated critical infrastructure like banks should be required to do this too.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#62

Mozilla has been a horrible steward for their project. They receive hundreds of millions of dollars a year and I have no idea where this money goes. It also doesn't help that their organization is full of purity testing and social activism nonsense that has nothing to do with making a good web browser. At this point I'm convinced that the reason that google is paying them so much is because they actually know that fi…

They do a lot of PR campaigns and pay their execs well

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#63
The main issue is every startup and small business ties themselves to the gsuite apps and ultimately falls down the path of using and then requiring gsuite auth and often chrome as a whole for all work browsing. It is quintessentially the new IE. almost all my browsing during the day has to be chrome whether I like it or not and that has been true at my last 4 organizations. Three of which are multi billion dollar companies and two with tens of thousands of employees

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#64
post #7

What could get people to move to firefox? Is the only way really to have have your browser be popular is to have it either be installed by default, or being advertised on a page that people use daily? Would be crazy if facebook had a banner stating "switch to firefox now" suddenly

There is another way: make your browser THE browser for power users. Add crazy features that appeal to 0.1% of the userbase. Allow a free extension system that allows developers to come up with features you haven't even imagined and see what gets mindshare.

Once you have committed power users who love your product, they will be more than happy to evangelize it to everyone they know. While their friends may not use any of the advanced functionality, they'll still use it if it works okay for them and their friends insist on it.

Mozilla had something like this, and chose to throw it all away to make a browser for Idealized Grandma that more closely resembled Chrome - because Chrome was successful, so they figured they'd copy what they did. But while Chrome was a fine browser, and maybe even better than Firefox in some ways, what this mindset missed is that the main reason for Chrome's dominance was a) being shilled on all the largest web properties, even with popup bars, b) being installed as the default on Android and c), being bundled in installers. Also, if I remember rightly, an advertising campaign. Mozilla was not in a position to do any of this. They should have - and still could - stick to their strength.

Now the only reason to use Firefox is ideological (privacy) and habit. I still use it at home. But I don't bother installing it anywhere else anymore. What's the point?

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#65
post #52

Mozilla also just posted their State of Mozilla 2022 (this includes financial statements). From what I've read, it seems that expenses are up and revenue from search deals is down. https://stateof.mozilla.org/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38530382 https://www.ghacks.net/2023/12/05/mozilla-earned-close-to-60... Firefox's market share has been on the decline since 2010. https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market…

> Mozilla Corporation CEO Mitchell Baker's salary? What a ridiculous question. Obvious the chief captain on the Titanic is not responsible for the Iceberg jumping at the boat.

I think it's a pretty reasonable question when the salary is so incredibly out of line with what developers make. Is the CEO singlehandedly responsible for productivity equal to that of sixty or so developers?

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#66
post #52

Mozilla also just posted their State of Mozilla 2022 (this includes financial statements). From what I've read, it seems that expenses are up and revenue from search deals is down. https://stateof.mozilla.org/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38530382 https://www.ghacks.net/2023/12/05/mozilla-earned-close-to-60... Firefox's market share has been on the decline since 2010. https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market…

> Mozilla Corporation CEO Mitchell Baker's salary? What a ridiculous question. Obvious the chief captain on the Titanic is not responsible for the Iceberg jumping at the boat.

[deleted]

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#67
I'm not sure anymore that "The Web" is worth saving anymore. I find myself browsing less and less original content. The content that dominates is polarized between Internet Hate Machines on one extreme and Corporate Astroturfing on the other.

A lot of the interesting people I follow are already using Gemini (though I remain unconvinced that that's a way forward).

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#68

>Firefox peaked at 31.82% in November, 2009 — and then began its long slide in almost direct proportion to the rise of Chrome. It will be a sad day when Firefox is truly dead. But what did Mozilla expect? They spent so much time and energy on activist bullshit that doesn't really matter for THE BROWSER.

I think there are plenty of decisions worth consideration, but this is nothing to do with why Firefox is declining. It's because if I buy an iPad it comes with Safari and doesn't really let me use anything else (only a skinned version of Safari). If I buy a PC it's Edge. If it's an Android device it's Chrome. A Mac? Safari. Firefox is the default nowhere, and in this world because Google has almost limitless marketin…

Maybe a better execution of Firefox OS would have helped.

Nowadays KaiOS profits from it.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#69

It’s not on the brink, it’s that Firefox shims GA[1] with Enhanced Tracking Protection, which is on by default.[2] analytics.usa.gov uses GA. So you really can’t rely on usage figures that don’t represent the truth of your situation. [1] https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/blob/413b88689f3ca2a30b... [2] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-now-ava...

Per the article, this is irrelevant. The case being made is that the figure seen by the government falling under 2%, which it is getting close to, will trigger a chain-reaction of consequences that will dramatically hurt Firefox, and it's not clear if Mozilla, the organization, could weather that.

It doesn't particularly matter whether or not the figure is accurate in that context. Maybe that can be fixed easily by having Firefox contextually relax tracking a bit or by having the government change how they perform the tracking, but the status quo is not really sustainable. And that's really all the article is saying at the end of the day.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#70
post #18
post #3

I want Firefox to not be on the brink. I have had no problems with it on Linux over the last few years since I switched from Chrome. I do not wish to touch Chrome with a ten-foot pole.

Firefox regularly crashes for me on wayland. It slows down my whole system when it tries to load a page in first boot (but librewolf doesn’t for some reason) the HID and webgl/webgpu support is bad… It’s just not a very good browser compared to chrome forks or webkit based ones.

I also have crashes on sway, but there’s a rough workaround now which prevents the issue totally.

I believe there’s a design issue with Firefox and GTK handling input events; some Wayland compositors have workarounds but others do not.

https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/7645

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1743144

Firefox is my preferred browser and I hope we can keep its engine alive in this era of Chrome dominance.

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