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Firefox on the brink?

brycewray.com

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Re: Firefox on the brink?

#381

Post by lucideer »

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…

> They have increased revenue from non-search deals significantly (56M -> 75M, up one third).

I'd love to feel optimistic about an increase in non-Google revenue, but 19M when the CEO alone is paying herself 7M of that alongside a 85M increase in expenses... it's still pretty hard to see it as a net positive here.

& of course the headline of this HN post is declining usage - that trumps profit either way imo

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#382

Post by JohnFen »

Barrin92 wrote: post #319
mariusor wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm deeply disturbed of this normalization of software as a subscription service. I want the return of good old days when people could pay once for their software and use it in perpetuity.

subscription is a significantly fairer revenue model for software which undergoes regular upgrades and has support, which is most software nowadays. It makes sure that people who continue to use continue to pay. Upfront charges are often either too low with long term users free-riding or too high, in case the project is abandoned. Subscription makes it much more likely to price products correctly.

> subscription is a significantly fairer revenue model for software which undergoes regular upgrades and has support

I could not disagree more. Subscriptions for software are a deeply unfair approach. Great for the companies, of course, but not for users.

A more fair approach is to charge for upgrades and support instead. At least that way, users only pay if/when they choose to obtain additional value.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#383

Post by jjoonathan »

klabb3 wrote: post #251
jjoonathan wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm. Maybe I should try uBlock. I usually don't like adblockers -- both on principle, because I believe in paying for what I consume, and because they tend to subtly break a website and cause hours of headaches at least once a year -- but I don't like feeding the beast either. I'll look into this.

Adblockers are highly configurable, you can simply disable them selectively in cases where you want to “support” those that sell your data to the highest bidder, if that’s your jam.. Your former comment indicates that you care about page load times, in which case an adblocker will typically reduce both UI yank and certainly network usage, in case you’re constrained.

> you can simply disable them selectively

Last time an ad-blocker caused a multi-hour debugging debacle, that turned out to not be the case. It was preventing me from logging into my bank even when it was supposedly disabled.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#384

Post by abrahms »

abirch wrote: post #331
widdershins wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, you're right. At 5$/month they'd need 6.66M subscribed users. Still a lot, but more acheivable.

Most people don't want to pay for anything. Look at all of the workarounds for news sites. I try to pay or donate for most of what I use but there seem to be a lot of people who want to get everything for free.

My experience w/ most news outlets is that they have a random article I'm linked to. That's not worth a subscription in my mind. A news service you have an ongoing relationship with is.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#385

Post by layer8 »

According to https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/browser-market-share-20..., Firefox still has 4.7 % global market share, 4.9 % in the US, and significantly more in some relevant countries, like Germany with 15 %. So this may be a bit premature. It’s still a significant-enough market share to support. Of course, if it continues to decline further, Firefox will eventually become irrelevant. Let’s hope this won’t happen.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#386

Post by stonogo »

lucideer wrote: post #257
ink_13 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When an open-source project somehow loses its way, it's often forked by a new team of contributors who have a better idea Perhaps ironically, this was also the genesis of Firefox

> Perhaps ironically, this was also the genesis of Firefox That's not entirely accurate (or at least, while accurate, is missing a lot of significant context) Mozilla was creating within Netscape, not in opposition to it, as a steward org for the open-sourcing of Navigator & Communicator. Even when Netscape was acquired by AOL, AOL continued to fund[0] Mozilla for years after the acquisition. [0] https://web.archive.…

Firefox, however, was not. It was created because people didn't use most of the tools built into the Mozilla suite, and they were difficult to port (because they had a Motif frontend AND a GTK frontend).

https://website-archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_...

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#387

Post by JohnFen »

oliwarner wrote: post #224
chii wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

good negotiation skills and friends in high places. Salary has nothing to do with productivity at this level of an org.

> Salary has nothing to do with productivity at this level of an org. That's nonsense. The difference at this level is you're not looking at personal productivity, you should be looking at a much broader interpretation. Except Mozilla doesn't. They've seen flailing commercial performance and have rewarded the CEO and laid off developers. It feels like madness because it is. I love Firefox but Mozilla deserves to burn…

> The difference at this level is you're not looking at personal productivity, you should be looking at a much broader interpretation.

That's one of the arguments made by CEOs who are trying to justify their insane salaries, yes. But it's very unpersuasive.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#388

Post by ndriscoll »

crazygringo wrote: post #334
ndriscoll wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Developers wrote and tested their sites for and with IE6, and were then surprised they rendered (in)correctly on Firefox and looked wrong But that's the point: rendering shouldn't really matter. For things that are important like government systems, we should treat web "apps" much like TeX encourages: you specify the semantics, and let the rendering engine do what it will. Don't try to precisely control it. You can…

You're asking government websites to run differently from 99.9% of commercial websites out there. First of all, that's just not going to happen for all sorts of practical reasons. But secondly, you're totally ignoring UX and design. "Specifying semantics, and let the rendering engine do what it will" might work for developers who are used to interacting with API's. It will not work for regular users. Regular users ne…

The things you describe aren't prevented by focusing on semantics, and are in fact enabled by it. Every modern app looks different for branding purposes, so users don't know what the buttons do. Things are complicated because we abandoned standard UIs that used to use the same widgets across every application.

And government stuff should work differently from 99.9% of commercial websites. Again, the goal should be for it to work. The government does not need to do marketing and make you feel like they are trustworthy. If you want to interact with social security, you go to ssa.gov. If you want to interact with the IRS, you go to irs.gov. End of story. They don't need to act like commercial entities because they do not have to worry about market share. Their share is always 100%. They need to just make their stuff reliably work, easy to figure out, and should make it cheap and easy to build. Basic HTML with minimal optional styles checks all of those boxes.

If you view the computer as a tool instead of a toy, you see that you really just need most websites to be a more convenient version of paper forms. It doesn't need to look fancy. It needs some boxes to type information, it needs to always work, and ideally every form on every website would stick to the same 5 or so types of input (rendered consistently by your OS) with no surprises. Government sites should take the tool approach. Commercial sites can sell toys.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#389

Post by the_third_wave »

Here's an idea on how to turn this ship in the right direction: get Musk interested in funding a project which will fork the code base, clean up the cruft - pocket etc. - and relaunch Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox. That is what a Phoenix is supposed to do after all, when the time has come to die it will burn to ashes from which it arises all new and fresh.

Why Musk? The choice seems clear as are the tangents to his other activities. He is one of the few "tech zillionaires" who does not kowtow to the demands of the censorious identity politics crowd which has instantly turned him from one of the darlings of "progressives" to "undesired person #1". He seems to have the drive to keep that crowd from dominating the 'net. Having all major browsers - Chrome, Safari, Edge and Firefox - under the control of that same crowd in one way or another is not conducive to the diversity of opinion on the 'net, the only type of diversity which really matters and yet the one type of diversity which is shunned by the aforementioned I.P. crowd.

What is needed is developers ("developers, developers, developers!" [1]), funding and mindshare. The latter is probably fairly easy to get given that there are many who are more than tired of all that identity politicking. Funding should not be that hard to arrange either given the way money is being thrown around. Developers who are versed in the Gecko code base and are willing to work for a project which explicitly states to be politically neutral - as in 'does not push any narrative' - is more of a question. If there is anyone here who works/worked at Mozilla who can shine a light on that it would be helpful. Do those who work/worked there actually support Baker's push towards politicising the Mozilla project while the flagship product - Firefox - is heading towards oblivion?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33grif58qO8

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#390

Post by tcbawo »

abirch wrote: post #328
mariusor wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm deeply disturbed of this normalization of software as a subscription service. I want the return of good old days when people could pay once for their software and use it in perpetuity.

I remember the forced obsolescence. There were a few good software packages but many would frequently force you to upgrade from version 12.31 to 13.0 which isn't backward compatible i.e., "This software doesn't run on Windows XP"

At least with Microsoft, they are fanatics about backwards compatibility. It is pretty rare for something designed for an OS prior to Windows XP to not run on current Windows OS versions.
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