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New Search Strategy for Firefox

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Re: New Search Strategy for Firefox

#241

Post by wodenokoto »

drdaeman wrote: post #145
sroerick wrote: post #81

Mozilla is making some major moves these days. They've ditched Google as their main revenue source, partnering with Tor and Yahoo. Yahoo is angling to be a digital magazine, which I like as a business model much more than Google's. Firefox is making a strong case for itself as the privacy centric browser. I still remember when Firefox started gaining market share. Even non-tech-savvy people were getting firefox, beca…

> Firefox is making a strong case for itself as the privacy centric browser. They try their best to market themselves as a privacy-centric browser. To promote themselves as so they add some shiny things like making clearing browser history a two mouse clicks more accessible. But I'm still worried. I'm really nitpicking but... That 3rd party cookie controversy that lasted for almost an year, the "oh, we're full of FLO…

Yes it sucks that Mozilla loses some battles, but you surely must understand that there are stronger players around the world and it is impossible to win every battle.

Firefox today is full of DRM features. They are called plug-ins. What theyre doing is cutting it down to one, secure plugin instead of a few insecure ones. Seems like a step up, though of course you can always wish for more. But again, stronger foes.

I still dont understand the controversy about the tiles. Everybody freaks out that a browser which take in more than 300 million dollars a year in advertisement is going to show an ad. I actually thought selling that space is a good idea. Why should Mozilla give away free traffic like that? They can still quality control the links.

Perfection is the enemy of good.

Re: New Search Strategy for Firefox

#242

Post by justinreeves »

throwawaymoz wrote: post #67

(throwaway account) While I believe the party line is probably true ("Mozilla decided not to go with Google"), it's also disingenuous. Mozilla chose not to go with Google because Google wasn't willing to pay what they were before. They straight up told Mozilla this 3 years ago when they signed the billion dollar contract; Mozilla had 3 years to become profitable. That's why they switched focus to FirefoxOS; they thou…

> They straight up told Mozilla this 3 years ago when they signed the billion dollar contract; Mozilla had 3 years to become profitable.

Wait, why does Google care if Mozilla is profitable?

Re: New Search Strategy for Firefox

#243

Post by jkldotio »

throwawaymoz wrote: post #225
throwawaymoz wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget that Chrome users are more tech savvy on average than Firefox users, meaning they click ads less.

My "source" is more direct, however this collaborates: http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/11/12/opera-users-click-on-t...

Even a large difference in CTR wouldn't necessarily say anything about being "more tech savvy". A sub 0.2% difference between Firefox and Chrome is therefore meaningless in this context. That's making the heroic assumption that Chitika Insights data is not biased in some way and can overcome methodological problems (no script, user agent changes, bots clicking ads) even if it was perfectly representative.

Re: New Search Strategy for Firefox

#244

Post by haberman »

drdaeman wrote: post #233
haberman wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google added support for XMPP fedederation in 2006, hoping that other messaging services would follow suit: http://www.zdnet.com/google-embraces-open-im-standards-30392... Seven years later, not a single other major IM service had added the same support. All XMPP federation support had accomplished was providing a spam vector to Google Talk users. Google's public statement when they dropped federation in 2013 was: "X…

Thousands of XMPP servers serving millions of people had S2S properly enabled and working among them. Or one has to be a single entity as large as MSN or AIM to be considered worthy to enjoy openness?

> Thousands of XMPP servers serving millions of people had S2S properly enabled and working among them.

I'm surprised to hear a number that high, but regardless of what the number actually is, it certainly sucked for those people.

But remember the context: Google was looking to expand Talk into Hangouts, and XMPP would have needed a makeover to support that product evolution. If Google had extended XMPP unilaterally, they would have been accused of "embrace, extend, extinguish." Without other major players to co-design with, it didn't make a lot of sense to try pursuing a next-generation standard.

> Or one has to be a single entity as large as MSN or AIM to be considered worthy to enjoy openness?

That's kind of inflammatory.

Remember when Mozilla removed MNG support from Firefox despite having 700 votes on the bug? Remember when the Mozilla CEO responded to a status update on the bug by saying "stop adding new noxious gas to this bloated corpse of a bug"? Are those 700 people not "considered worthy to enjoy openness" either? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18574

Organizations have to make trade-offs sometimes, and you can't please everybody all the time.

Re: New Search Strategy for Firefox

#245

Post by JohnBooty »

bjz_ wrote: post #167
ricardobeat wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe your memory is failing you, but FF and Safari were still great browsers when Chrome first came out. Chrome took over slowly because of constant improvement, it wasn't much different except for some technical details and clean UI.

Firefox was great, but the performance was sub-par around version 3, and the time between releases was measured in years, not weeks. Chrome definitely gave Mozilla a nice kick in the backside, which I am very thankful for. These days Firefox is now close to, if not faster and less memory hungry than Chrome.

  > Firefox was great, but the performance was sub-par around version 3
Before Chrome, Firefox's performance was sub-par compared to... what? Definitely not to Safari, Chrome, or IE.

The main knock on Firefox at that time was that it was too memory-hungry. That was always somewhat of an inaccurate rap. Not totally undeserved, but not totally deserved either.

  > Chrome definitely gave Mozilla a nice kick in the backside, which I am very thankful for. These days Firefox is now close to, if not faster and less memory hungry than Chrome.
Heck yes to all of that.

Re: New Search Strategy for Firefox

#246

Post by bastawhiz »

drdaeman wrote: post #233
haberman wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google added support for XMPP fedederation in 2006, hoping that other messaging services would follow suit: http://www.zdnet.com/google-embraces-open-im-standards-30392... Seven years later, not a single other major IM service had added the same support. All XMPP federation support had accomplished was providing a spam vector to Google Talk users. Google's public statement when they dropped federation in 2013 was: "X…

Thousands of XMPP servers serving millions of people had S2S properly enabled and working among them. Or one has to be a single entity as large as MSN or AIM to be considered worthy to enjoy openness?

Too often, people confuse the idea of open standards with "things that have to be implemented". If an open standard doesn't serve any significant portion of a user base (e.g., most Google Talk or Hangouts users) and is very commonly abused (by spammers or otherwise), it's not worth having in a product. It's simply not sensible to make a business decision to support something (open standard or otherwise) if the negative aspects far outweigh the positive ones.

Where's the outrage that Twitter stopped letting users post via SMS and XMPP? Should we shame Firefox for exporting my bookmarks as HTML and not as OPML? Should I be mad at Facebook for not allowing me to export my Like information in APML format and instead providing it in Facebook Archive format? Of course not, that's silly. RDF is an open standard, but that doesn't mean websites should bring Dublin Core back.

Re: New Search Strategy for Firefox

#247

Post by haberman »

stephenr wrote: post #238
groovecoder wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Mozillian who also cares very much about open standards, I agree. Google has both a long and recent track record of helping to advance open standards - CalDAV, WebRTC, WebM, etc. - and I have no doubt they will continue to do so - e.g., Physical Web. However, Google's purpose in the world is not to advance open standards. That is Mozilla's purpose. That's why this is a strategic, long-term decision on Mozilla's…

Advance open standards? * Like how they were planning to require whitelisting for CalDAV access? * Like how they completely bastardise the IMAP protocol? * Like how they disabled XMPP federation and then dropped XMPP support completely, for their GTalk replacement?

This is a perfect example of how (some) open-standards advocates have impossible expectations.

Your complaints about IMAP and XMPP are completely opposite. When Hangouts stopped supporting XMPP (designed in 1998) due to product evolution, you complain that they dropped XMPP support. But when Gmail continued to support IMAP (designed in 1986) despite the product diverging somewhat from traditional email, you complain they are "bastardizing the IMAP protocol."

What course of action by Google would make you happy? The Internet can't stay in the year 2000. Major players move it forward -- Mozilla, Google, and others. I think Google has a pretty good track record of doing this as openly as they can.

Re: New Search Strategy for Firefox

#248

Post by jfoster »

enneff wrote: post #131
DevX101 wrote: post #63

This is why Google built Chrome. Google's strategy has been to remove the layers between the user's intent to search and Google's own server. Every intermediate layer that Google does not control is a risk to their business. When viewed through these lens, many of the seemingly ancillary Google business units start to make strategic sense. Android (control the device), Chrome (control the browser), Fiber (control the…

> This is why Google built Chrome. Seriously? Do you remember what browsers were like before Chrome?

It can be both. The opportunity was there because browsers weren't good. The incentive to make Chrome was that it improved both Google's defensive position (Microsoft couldn't make Bing #1 through force) & offensive position. (Google can tie search & Chrome together)

Re: New Search Strategy for Firefox

#249

Post by opinali »

mbrubeck wrote: post #152
opinali wrote: post #148

Yahoo! is OK, but... Yandex and Baidu are not exactly recommended company for an organization that pretends to hold the Open Web's moral higher ground. They practice large-scale censorship, they are instruments of repressive regimes. How does that make any sense?

Note that Mozilla has had revenue arrangements with Yandex and Baidu previously. And Google doesn't exactly have clean hands in China itself.

As you mention with the Wikipedia ref, there was controversy with Google's early attempts to work in China. What happens here is that Google tried to do a "best-effort" service for Chinese users, with the assumption that partial service would be much better than no service (and certainly WAY better than what Chinese users get from their own web companies like Baidu, that not only enforce censorship but also report "bad users" to the government, actively help to spy on dissidents etc.--something Google never considered doing). The search UI would notify users that some results were excluded due to government-enforced restriction, which was at least transparent--and not unlike what Google has to do today in the EU with the "right to be forgotten" censorship. But this wasn't good enough for the PRC, their firewall would impose harsh punishment to users who tried to browse forbidden things; I don't remember details now but it was like: you try to search for certain words, you'd be cut off the internet and not only your IP but other people too. So in a later attempt, Google search tried to warn users in advance, with a customized Google Instant so the user could avoid submitting a "bad" query that could result in blocking. This idea didn't work because the firewall was quickly updated to crack down on it, and I think that was the last attempt, then Google desisted to fight this battle because any progress would clearly require too much compromising, more than could be justified by an attempt to provide a pragmatic, partial service.

[Disclaimer: Googler, but not especially intimate with the events above; none of this is internal info either, it's all widely reported stuff.]

Re: New Search Strategy for Firefox

#250

Post by jfoster »

briholt wrote: post #3

Anyone have any insights into this? From the outside it looks like Mozilla is parting ways with Google because of Chrome. Interesting they went with Yahoo and not Bing.

I don't have any internal knowledge, but I would like to point out that it can be more than one thing.

There's Chrome, in competition with Firefox, Mozilla's core business. There's also Google increasingly looking like a search monopoly, whereas Mozilla's mission is to "promote choice and innovation on the Internet." There's also the fact that Google are now feeling so secure about their grip on search that they were looking to reduce the amount they were paying to Mozilla in their partnership.

Individually, perhaps none of the reasons was quite enough for Mozilla to ditch their partnership with Google, but combined, it makes a whole lot of sense.

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