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Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

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Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#151

Post by hazz99 »

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #147
cageface wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with this is that the web is competing with native apps. A vanilla HTML site might be good enough in some cases but often you really need to push the envelope of what’s possible the web and that’s hard to do and also support niche browsers on a tight development budget.

> The problem with this is that the web is competing with native apps. Only in the minds of web “devs”.

> "dev"

Drop those apostrophes - a web developer is a completely valid, skilled profession.

Web apps unequivocally compete with native apps, that is a fact. I prefer the Slack web client to the native version. I use Google Docs instead of Microsoft Word. I use Google Drive, iCloud, Google Photos etc. instead of my own harddrive.

To think that web apps don't compete with native apps is simply untrue.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#152

Post by pbhjpbhj »

brianpgordon wrote: post #144
mcbits wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most recent financial statement I could see is from 2017: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-fdn-201... They spent $253 million (45% of revenue) on software development, presumably the bulk going to Firefox. Other major expenses were $66 million for marketing (yay Moz://a!), $72 million for the dubious "general and administrative" category, a few million here and there for other things, and the…

> They spent $253 million (45% of revenue) on software development, presumably the bulk going to Firefox. I'm curious if anyone can locate information on how much of that was spent specifically on Firefox, the browser. It seems like Mozilla was working on a bunch of peripheral stuff during that 2016-2017 period. * Work on Firefox OS was still ongoing through 1H 2016. ( https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.de…

>They were building a free subscription service to check HIBP for your info. (https://monitor.firefox.com/) //

Wasn't HIBP a single person.

So presumably a checking system could have been churned out by, being generous, a team of 6 on a mean-average $100,000 wage. Lets say $1.2M per year (doubled to account for facilities, etc.) as a top end. Realistically surely that's a couple of months work for such a team?

Looking at the Send github (https://github.com/mozilla/send/graphs/contributors) it's essentially 2 people, about 1.5 person years in the commits.

The first and fourth items you list sound like absolute white elephants that management should have allowed only as "we'll give you a full time dev wage for it and spare facilities, show us what you can do and we might take it on".

So, what have we got left $240M?

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#153

Post by gcthomas »

novaRom wrote: post #108
duncanawoods wrote: post #101

Well, I love Firefox! It's definitely a better browsing experience for me e.g. most-recently-used alt-tab order, vertical tab extensions, containers and deep configuration with about:config. Stability is great and my only performance problems are on Google sites. The things I would like: - default to private mode - store bookmarks with choice of container - really weakens the feature when I can't e.g. bookmark two di…

Yes, default private mode is absolutely necessary! I always open links in 'New private tab', while some of them like comments on HN in normal tabs because I am logged in to HN.

If I right-click on my launcher icon I get the option to open Firefox in Private Mode (KDE desktop).

If you want to always default to Private Mode, then set that in the Options.

https://www.howtogeek.com/137466/how-to-always-start-any-bro...

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#154

Post by blub »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #148
manojlds wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Google builds only a browser? What's the budget of the Google Chrome team?

Mozilla doesn't build only a browser either and as a Rust user, am glad they don't.

The Rust community prides itself on being independent from Mozilla, when their relationship is pointed out, but now Rust is suddenly a major beneficiary of those 500 million?

They do build only a browser.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#155

Post by [deleted] »

csdreamer7 wrote: post #78
brianpgordon wrote: post #57

> While I understand that they have to make money somehow I don't. I don't understand how Mozilla has over a thousand employees and over 500 million dollars in annual revenue. With that kind of money, Firefox should be absolutely dominating the browser space. They shouldn't be making Firefox worse with advertising in order to subsidize their flailing around trying to find traction in mobile or VR. It actually reminds…

> I don't understand how Mozilla has over a thousand employees and over 500 million dollars in annual revenue. Mostly agree. > The whole point of Mozilla is supposed to be Firefox and Thunderbird. I can understand your view. With that said, I am quite happy they funded Rust and also gave a grant to the Godot project to develop their webassembly interface.

[deleted]

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#156

Post by jamienicol »

brianpgordon wrote: post #57

> While I understand that they have to make money somehow I don't. I don't understand how Mozilla has over a thousand employees and over 500 million dollars in annual revenue. With that kind of money, Firefox should be absolutely dominating the browser space. They shouldn't be making Firefox worse with advertising in order to subsidize their flailing around trying to find traction in mobile or VR. It actually reminds…

No, the whole point of Mozilla is to "ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all."

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/

Firefox, Thunderbird, and other projects are a means to that end.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#157

Post by meerita »

> What privacy has the average Joe user gained by switching to Firefox? None. They’re still using Google Search and (most likely) other Google products. They’re being subjected to misleading ads on their new tab page. From their perspective, installing Firefox was a pointless hassle.

I use DuckDuckGo instead Google in Firefox. I'm a happy user. I will switch to Safari as soon as I get a new iPhone and ditch my Xiaomi phone to gain more level of privacy.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#158

Post by TheGoddessInari »

userbinator wrote: post #73
cageface wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with this is that the web is competing with native apps. A vanilla HTML site might be good enough in some cases but often you really need to push the envelope of what’s possible the web and that’s hard to do and also support niche browsers on a tight development budget.

The problem with this is that the web is competing with native apps. Only for certain things. A lot of web browsing is still pure information-consumption. The "native apps" are also turning into effective webapps, thanks to Electron and the like. Even this site, which is interactive, doesn't require JS to use (it provides some enhancements, but the site is still quite usable without.)

Google's practices pushing web non-standards haphazardly are so heinous that even Electron can't usually handle general web apps, like WhatsApp (especially) because it depends on Chrome-specific, not even Chromium, features. Many others are the same way.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#159

Post by maehwasu »

Nothing will change wrt usage of Google products unless/until Google starts deplatforming users from Gmail-type services on the basis of their Google searches or email content.

This is not currently happening, but a) it wouldn't be super out-of-character for what Google has become b) it's likely a necessary condition for non-technical users to start caring about Google's threats to privacy.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#160

Post by abraCadabstrax »

privethedge wrote: post #140
hutzlibu wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Mozilla cannot enforce idealism on the developers. They do already a great job with documentation, but they could and should improve on the dev-tools. Chrome dev tools are now in a state, that I only use them for developing and debugging. Built in code editor with autocomplete. And I can debug ... and change code while debugging. And it works great (mostly). Firefox dev tools on the other hand barely work for me…

I personally prefer firefox's dev tools to chrome's ones.

Boy, I am with you on this one. Full-time FF user too. The whole CSS grid thing is very well done and useful.
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