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Firefox on the brink?

brycewray.com

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Re: Firefox on the brink?

#701

Post by fishpen0 »

JohnBooty wrote: post #229
fishpen0 wrote: post #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 co…

We're pretty GSuite/GAuth-oriented too but the parts we use work just fine on Firefox. What parts of that are forcing you guys to be Chrome exclusive?

If your organization uses beyondcorp for zero trust among several other Google products, they only work in Chrome. Many MDM solutions also only do hardware verification through chrome during the auth loop for gsuite and not other browsers. My current organization blocks the installation of other browsers in their jamf configuration as well, so it wouldn’t matter even if beyondcorp did work in another browser

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#702

Post by soundnote »

nextaccountic wrote: post #601
Semaphor wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to add some anecdata, we have both Google Analytics (if you accept the GDPR tracking request…) and our own internal statistics based purely on useragents. Here are some percentages for November (this is Germany, generally far higher FF usage) Ours: Chrome 37.4% Firefox 24.7% Safari 21.1% Edge 7.5% Opera 2.6% GA: Chrome 39.3% Safari 31.5% Firefox 11.9% Edge 9.9% Samsung Internet 2.9% For us, GA is undercounting F…

if google analytics is undercounting firefox in a way that may make websites to drop firefox support, i suppose this is a case for antitrust? because google is using a near monopoly on analytics to bury a competitor in another segment

It's not GA being malicious in any abnormal way. Some Firefox users are blocking some GA functionality, so GA can't count some Firefox users.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#703

Post by kemotep »

the_third_wave wrote: post #699
kemotep wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are probably turned off to the comment because of all the complaining about “identity politics”. There also exists several forks of Firefox already. Suggesting the nth idealogical fork that will be funded out of the kindness of a billionaire’s heart doesn’t sound productive. Why not donate to Librewolf? Why must Musk actually have any involvement besides funding?

The "complaining about identity politics" is part of the core reason for creating a non-politicised fork which can take over where Firefox left at a ~32% market share, i.e. it can attempt to regain part of the market lost to Chrome and its many descendants. The reason for Musk to get involved (apart from funding) is to make sure the project remains politically neutral as that would be one of selling points when compa…

No offense but nothing that Mozilla says about politics has had an effect on my experience with Firefox. Perhaps the Trillion dollar companies behind the phone duopoly, the Desktop OS with 80+% market share, and the search engine the world uses, leveraged their positions to advertise and promote their browsers to squeeze Firefox out of their 32% market share.

Like Linux, so what if Firefox only has a 5% market share? It does what I need to without having to deal with the nonsense of Google and Microsoft.

And frankly being “politically neutral” is itself a political stance. And Musk is far from impartial too. He too kowtows to dictators and bad faith politicians all the time. He takes strong explicit political positions that are not neutral. He doesn’t do the things that you would want him to do with this Firefox fork.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#704

Post by smegger001 »

The problem Firefox has as far as I can tell is that the people in charge of the Mozilla organization would rather it be a social justice philanthropic foundation than a web browser and mail client maker and thus neglect their main product. And those they do have working on Firefox seem to want to remove features and play with UI.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#705

Post by soundnote »

bambax wrote: post #278

> I am personally unaware of any serious reason to believe that Firefox’s numbers will improve soon. Is it possible that Manifest V3 will help Firefox? Of course most people don't know or care about Manifest V3, but if uBlock Origin or other effective ad blockers cease to work satisfactorily on Chrome, won't that make some users switch? I'd rather go back to fetching web pages from a terminal than suffering the insan…

Unlikely: You can make pretty good adblockers even with Manifest v3, and there are Chromium-based options with adblockers built in.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#706

Post by insanitybit »

riversflow wrote: post #659
Chabsff wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. There are a plethora of browsers out there, and no one can be expected to test against all of them. As long as we go for a "government conforming to industry" mentality, then the cutoff has to be somewhere, and if Firefox doesn't make that cutoff, then that's all there is to it. No browser deserves special treatment here. And this is as true for Firefox as it is for Lynx.

> No browser deserves special treatment here. Completely disagree. Privacy is a 4th ammendment right, so the government has a duty to support privacy first browsers. How am I "secure in my ... papers and effects" if I must use a privacy destroying browser to interact with the Government? If anything, chrome support is what should be questionable.

Maybe you can make this argument - that the government should support technologies that emphasize privacy. That could possibly lead to some funding. Creating a policy to support a single vendor, however, is something that I think would be a bit odd for the government. Government spending is supposed to be devoid of bias where possible - you can't just give a contract to someone you like or think is cool, you need to show that it's in the taxpayer's interest (ie: they are cheaper, usually).

To say "we are going to support a browser with 2% market share because we like it more" would therefor be a really big deal. I think a far better avenue would be for the government to provide funding for privacy technologies directly, in an effort to increase their marketshare, and thereby making support of those technologies trivial to justify without any potential issues of bias.

The thing is, the government already does this. The majority of TOR's funding comes from the USG, for example. I'd suggest that maybe the government could fund Mozilla's non profit, to a degree.

This is all based on a premise that Mozilla is worthy of that funding. Is Mozilla really the privacy champion that it touts itself as? Would funding be contingent on anything else? If the government is so determined to prioritize privacy, why not Brave? Or some other entity? Or a new entity?

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#707

Post by insanitybit »

neilv wrote: post #555

Instead of government leaving it up to "market share", in an industry with decades of documented history of underhanded anti-competitive behavior, how about: 1. All government Web frontends must be compliant with one of the government-defined profiles of browser features, which are defined in terms of W3C (not WHAT, not Chrome) open standards. With sufficient penalties to motivate compliance. 2. As a practical matter…

I don't think the government wants to (or possibly is even able to) get involved in defining web standards. Tracking market share seems like the least hands-on way to determine support as it's purely "pull based" - they follow everyone else's lead, they aren't trying to dictate what a "good" browser is.

The government is generally very slow and deliberate about technology recommendations let alone requirements when it comes to generally available software.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#708

Post by insanitybit »

usr1106 wrote: post #677
iteratethis wrote: post #589

Firefox was already statistically irrelevant 5 years ago. On our dashboard, a global e-commerce site with billions of views per year, it's not even in the top 10. Even regional browsers sometimes surpass it. Firefox is also no longer a developer-default browser. This too has been true for years now. There's very little Mozilla can do about it. Chrome and Safari are big because they're shipped as a default to platform…

Sorry, nothing personal. But as a 100% Firefox user I would very likely avoid to visit any global ecommerce site. It's the same world I want to avoid by not using Google products. I know I am a small minority, but you don't even see that minority.

Even if you assume that 50% of Firefox users are falling into "they wouldn't visit those sites to begin with" or "they run a user-agent spoofer" you're basically going from 2-4% to 4-8%, and the trend is clearly negative.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#709

Post by kiwijamo »

laurent123456 wrote: post #691
kiwijamo wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am regular and long time user of Fastmail in Firefox and I'm surprised at your report of issues in Firefox. Can you describe the steps to reproduce the issues you found?

Using the Android mobile app, create a Fastmail link and add it to your home screen. Open the app, try to block a sender - it asks you to confirm and it's not possible to press either buttons. The same workflow works fine in Chrome.

Yep I can confirm that certainty doesn't seem to work in a reliable way in Firefox on Android. I could only get it to work by tapping the button several times. Either it's not responding quickly enough, or the input field only works if you tap in a specific spot. The general performance of Fastmail in Firefox on Android is quite poor as well -- despite it being fairly snappy in desktop Firefox on Linux/Windows. I use the native Fastmail app on Android which performs much better -- I presume it uses a version of Chrome under the hood.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#710

Post by soundnote »

ako wrote: post #380

What should Firefox do for you to select it as your default browser? (It’s my default browser, I’m pretty happy with it, also use the pocket functionality quite bit)

Features. Vertical tabs, PWA support. More technically solid browser on Android. Primarily though they should just focus on making a browser. The organization seems interested in doing anything and everything but building a tool for the user.

Why not use Brave, or Vivaldi, or Arc, which actually add features and where the organizations are focused primarily on toolmaking?

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