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

Firefox on the brink?

brycewray.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 840 posts

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#291

Post by encom »

jdlyga wrote: post #90

Firefox needs to focus all their effort on making a good web browser first . If the browser is slow, has a clunky interface, or lags behind on features, then people won't use it. Mozilla focus way too much of their attention on privacy and non-browser related projects. Look at how much attention that The Browser Company has gotten for their Arc browser on Mac. Their primary focus is great UI and making an excellent b…

In my opinion, Firefox has been at war with its own users for years. I finally had enough a few years ago, and switched to Vivaldi. Every Firefox upgrade was a gamble on what feature or functionality they'd remove or change this time, or what bone-headed UI design change they'd make. And every time there'd be a Bugzilla bug with a of horde users who just had their favorite feature removed, and every time, without fail, it would get arrogantly WONTFIXed and eventually locked. This cycle has repeated for most of Firefox's existence, but it has accelerated.

Vivaldi can customise damn near every aspect of its user interface. I can set up every menu how I want it. Remove things I done use, and move the most used item to the top. I can dock my tab-bar wherever I want. I can have a proper status bar. The list goes on. It's what Firefox should have been.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#292

Post by RyanHamilton »

Certhas wrote: post #270
loganmarchione wrote: post #36

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…

Am I reading the documents you link right? Mozilla is wildly profitable. They made a profit of roughly 150 Million dollars last year. They have 1.2 Billion dollars in assets. They have increased revenue from non-search deals significantly (56M -> 75M, up one third). Despite all the gnashing of teeth in this comment section about woke Mozilla, they spent only 5 Million on grants last year. The vast majority goes towar…

If this was a for profit company I could agree with your focus on profit. Their mission statement is: "Mozilla is a global nonprofit dedicated to keeping the Internet a global public resource that is open and accessible to all.". You could argue the importance of market share at some percentages but below ~5% has to be considered a priority one emergency, if your goal is to keep the internet accessible for all. If their market share fell below 1% they would have effectively almost zero ability to steer standards.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#294

Post by vlovich123 »

Certhas wrote: post #270
loganmarchione wrote: post #36

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…

Am I reading the documents you link right? Mozilla is wildly profitable. They made a profit of roughly 150 Million dollars last year. They have 1.2 Billion dollars in assets. They have increased revenue from non-search deals significantly (56M -> 75M, up one third). Despite all the gnashing of teeth in this comment section about woke Mozilla, they spent only 5 Million on grants last year. The vast majority goes towar…

MAUs are down though and a non profit is supposed to be mission driven not revenue driven. The focus on market share is the belief that a better internet (Mozilla’s mission) starts by having a non profit browser leading the way. There might be some other metric but the financial health of Mozilla can only be one factor. Besides, at some point they get down to 0 market share and then the search deal revenue will go down (not sure again the next time they will be negotiating the deal)

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#295

Post by mardifoufs »

Miraste wrote: post #267
mardifoufs wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the USDS makes all or even most of the current federal gov websites.

No, they don't. But they did create the VA site: https://www.usds.gov/projects/va-dot-gov And they're involved with the Department of Education, although I couldn't find out exactly what they built.

Oof, that sucks to hear. I had a hard time believing they'd be behind that website seeing that I often hear complaints about it. :(

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#296

Post by ZeroGravitas »

mardifoufs wrote: post #190
rafram wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It's either that or they are referring to the board being useless against the CEO. Usually the board is the only group keeping a CEO in check. Honestly don't know from the tone of the comment though

That's just recursive as the main problem with the CEO seems to be that she's a woman.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#297

Post by amadeuspagel »

Chabsff wrote: post #143
robin_reala wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USDS aren’t idiots, and if they haven’t realised this yet then maybe this post will focus attention. They want to support every citizen it’s reasonable to support (or at least I did when I was working for GOV.UK) and dropping support from a lack of knowledge shouldn’t be on the agenda.

Sure, but the government HAS to make that determination in a data-driven way. It cannot be based on anything subjective, for what should be obvious reasons. On top of that, said lack of knowledge is a stated goal of all privacy-focused browsers. GA-blindness is an implementation detail of these policies. Any method the government could use to accurately track that information is effectively a bug in need of fixing fr…

There is no standard that you can use instead of a set of browsers. There is no way of making sure that a website works with a browser other then testing it with that browser. The reason people test with different browsers is not that they want to use non-standard features, it's that even standard features often do not work in certain browsers.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#299

Post by sp332 »

toast0 wrote: post #263
sp332 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to typing a nonstandard string in a nonstandard place? Going to about:config where all the deep settings are and searching for "ocsp" is downright obvious.

How is searching for oscp obvious when the problem was HSTS?

I was just copying what someone else said in this thread. It might actually be network.stricttransportsecurity.preloadlist but I have not tried it.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#300

Post by pennybanks »

Certhas wrote: post #270
loganmarchione wrote: post #36

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…

Am I reading the documents you link right? Mozilla is wildly profitable. They made a profit of roughly 150 Million dollars last year. They have 1.2 Billion dollars in assets. They have increased revenue from non-search deals significantly (56M -> 75M, up one third). Despite all the gnashing of teeth in this comment section about woke Mozilla, they spent only 5 Million on grants last year. The vast majority goes towar…

i assume instead of google outright purchasing the company due to monopoly issues and internet outrage, they instead are just doing what they are doing now. thought i read they are up to 90% funded by google.. so its a little silly how these browser warriors champion their precious firefox or whatever other browser and condemn the evil chrome. but if you think about it they are all basically chrome developers. building ontop of chromium or working on firefox where those devs and chromes collab.

but in my opinion that isnt the reason google keeps firefox funded. i just think they do it for goodness sakes and not to cannibalize the only "competition". it really wasnt too long ago when it was chrome and firefox the two sleek awesome browsers saving the internet from nasty slow internet explorer.

Post reply on HN