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

441–450 of 840 posts

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#441

Post by aembleton »

oldpersonintx wrote: post #79
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…

Firefox will be better off longterm as a true community project free from Mozilla.org. Let Mozilla.org die.

You could fork it

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#442

Post by summerlight »

irrational wrote: post #23
dartos wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s still safari at 34% usage. :badpokerface:

Only because of iOS, I assume. But it looks like Apple might be forced to open things up and allow other browsers to run on iOS. If that happened, I'd expect Safari to drop like a stone.

No, that's not going to happen. Chrome replacing IE could happen only because of MSFT's strategical abandonment of their browser for sabotaging the web in favor of the Windows platform. Apple actually is well aware of this mistake and began to invest into Safari when it's clear that they cannot prevent 3rd party rendering engines forever.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#443

Post by [deleted] »

ndriscoll wrote: post #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.…

[deleted]

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#444

Post by GeekyBear »

Finnucane wrote: post #288
GeekyBear wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternately, the technically savvy users understand that allowing Google's control of Blink to replace open standards with whatever implementation details Google prefers is to be avoided at all costs. It's just a repeat of the IE 6 debacle.

Yes, which took years and years to resolve. And only because in the end developers refused to play along. If the people creating web sites decide collectively to support only open standards, then Google has less leverage. It kinda worked with Amp, so it's not impossible.

Given Google leveraging their control of the browser to go to war against ad blockers, I would expect to see movement much more quickly this time.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#445

Post by [deleted] »

coconut08 wrote: post #46

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…

[deleted]

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#446

Post by ndriscoll »

pavon wrote: post #422
ndriscoll wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What compatibility? If Firefox breaks forms, then Firefox broke forms and needs to fix it. Not your bug. If Chrome renders differently from edge because they decided the default color on .gov sites will be pink on white and all padding will be multiplied by 1.5, then that's fine. Not a bug. Chrome just decided to present a different look. If it's even possible for basic functionality to break in a way where you would…

You are assuming that your developers were perfect and write sites exactly to the standard every time. In the real world they don't and XHTML lost, so all browsers tolerate and mask non-compliant pages to various degrees and in various ways, and will surface different bugs in your work. So it behooves you to test with the browsers your users are using to find those bugs before they do.

I am assuming that a professional can do their job, yes.

The whole XHTML thing where allegedly it never caught on because people can't write valid markup has never made sense to me. They're able to get typescript to compile now, right? If a dev couldn't write react code that compiles, we would fire them, right?

We have tools to check that your document parses and conforms a schema. We've had them for 20 years. It's easy enough to have that be part of your CI pipeline. The tooling is 1000x simpler than modern frameworks, and the thing that was allegedly difficult was that if you enabled conformance mode (which was opt-in based on DTD and/or MIME type), you had to open and close your tags instead of just opening them. Surely any middle schooler understands when you open a parenthesis, you need to close it?

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#447

Post by JohnFen »

charcircuit wrote: post #405
JohnFen wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Leaving nonpaying users on old versions on browsers with security issues and who will no longer support the latest web standards will be bad for the web.

How would it be bad for the web?

If users want to stay on an old version, why shouldn't they be allowed to? Sure, there may be additional security considerations or missing functionality, but there's nothing wrong with a user making that choice.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#448

Post by Closi »

taf2 wrote: post #408

I can't be alone in my view that open source won. Just not the original Mozilla open source browser. Instead the re-invented one spear headed by Google - Chrome. Chrome is like the 2.0 of everything the IE6 team and Mozilla team learned the hard way. It was built by many of the original founding members of those teams. It's not a bad thing when Microsoft now uses the open source Blink rendering engine. It's not a bad…

That would be great, if Chrome was actually open source, and if the Chromium and Chrome projects weren't run by a company with perverse incentives (see: Manifest v3).

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#449

Post by digging »

HackerThemAll wrote: post #275
sp332 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is fast though.

It used to be slow, and many people who then switched, won't be looking back until Chrome stops working.

In which case, focusing on edging out more performance from the browser is perhaps the worst use of their time/money, no?

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#450

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

wodenokoto wrote: post #346
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If this was a for profit company I could agree with your focus on profit. There are two parts to Mozilla: a for-profit company and a non-profit company. They are separate. You are reading the mission statement of mozilla.org, not mozilla.com. Mitchell Baker is the CEO of the for-profit company, not the non-profit.

Isn’t she chief lizard wrangler at both?

No. Mark Surman is the executive director of the non-profit (executive director is the term used for CEO at non-profits). She is the chair of the non-profit board, which is probably not a paid position (or paid very small token amount).
Post reply on HN