Earlier quoted context omitted.
The base they alienate just wants a web browser. You don’t need to iterate forever on a good tool that does the job. Software can be feature complete. Anyone wishing for a complete overhaul update for something like cp? Absolutely not, people want tools that work the same for years.
As long as web standards keep evolving you can never stop iterating on browsers. And with Google Chrome pushing some of those web standards additions, Firefox has to keep up or die. Also, it is possible to continue iteratively improving a complex piece of software like a browser, beyond just the web standards race. Security, privacy, performance, and reliability/bugs/code correctness are areas where new computer scie…
Firefox search update
181–190 of 253 posts
Re: Firefox search update
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s possible to repackage Chromium with a couple people. It’s not possible to build a browser from the ground up with a couple people.
Why not? Ladybird seems like it is coming along very well.
Re: Firefox search update
#183Seems like this is in support of "Firefox Suggest", which seems to show sponsored links. I really don't like advertising so I really don't like going down that road. Can't they just take Google's yearly $600,000,000 payment and build the best browser "for the user" while also addressing technical debt and organizational issues so it can continue as an open source project if/when the money ever dries up?
I constantly see this take and I'm afraid I don't agree with it. Firefox is continuing to lose market share, and I think it's less anything they're doing and due simply to the fact that Google is a household name while Mozilla is not. When the user is already using a Google phone, email, search, maps, drive, and document editor, it follows to also use their browser. Simply being a solid browser isn't enough to motiva…
Re: Firefox search update
#184Re: Firefox search update
#185Seems like this is in support of "Firefox Suggest", which seems to show sponsored links. I really don't like advertising so I really don't like going down that road. Can't they just take Google's yearly $600,000,000 payment and build the best browser "for the user" while also addressing technical debt and organizational issues so it can continue as an open source project if/when the money ever dries up?
I constantly see this take and I'm afraid I don't agree with it. Firefox is continuing to lose market share, and I think it's less anything they're doing and due simply to the fact that Google is a household name while Mozilla is not. When the user is already using a Google phone, email, search, maps, drive, and document editor, it follows to also use their browser. Simply being a solid browser isn't enough to motiva…
Right now, Firefox's strategy seems to be focused on trying to follow in Google's footsteps and do everything they can to implement something almost as good as Chrome just without some--but not all!--of the extra things we hate about Google. The result of this strategy is there are simply way too few answers to the question "why should I use Firefox instead of Chrome?" that aren't "because someone has to lest we lose the war, and it may as well be you (as I guess you drew the short straw today)" :(.
I want to be clear: these unique selling propositions can be really small. If you are using Linux on a computer with a touch screen, Firefox implemented good multi-touch with kinetic scrolling support for X11... it puts Chromium to shame, and so if you are using such a computer you are likely to use Firefox even if it is less performant or doesn't work with a few websites you like. The goal isn't to only target the majority by chasing analytics: it is to win a thousand 0.01% minorities that add up to 10%.
The only other UI thing--and I'm using Firefox right now, and have been using Firefox as my primary browser for months now--that I can think of are container tabs. This one is interesting because, frankly, it doesn't buy me that much over Chrome's support for multiple profiles, and yet I do slightly prefer the feature, and clearly a bunch of other people do if you look around: implementing this feature won Firefox a bunch of users who now consider this part of their workflow and can overlook other faults.
Firefox used to be really good at this: they owned the space of web developers due to Firebug--which was also a critical market as it meant websites tended to work in Firefox--but Chrome saw that and took it from them. If I were in charge of Firefox, my hail marys wouldn't be allocated to end user acquisition: it would be focused on what I can offer developers to get them back to using Firefox as their primary browser. But like, it isn't even clear to me Firefox right now cares about developers anymore :/.
I mean... not only did they lay off the entire MDN writing team back in 2020--which to me was putting Firefox at the forefront of developers' minds (in the same way you mention users knowing about Google)--but, as far as I understand, they also laid off a lot of the dev tools team. Their website showing the features of Firefox for developers sounds strong, but I feel like Chrome also now has all of this stuff. I am excited to see that Firefox claims to have better support for CSS Grid debugging, I guess?
I also say that, because another place Firefox used to have a unique selling proposition is that it was "the hacker's browser": you could easily alter any part of the interface due to its crazy XUL layer, and I knew a ton of developers and users alike who would sell you on Firefox due to the crazy Firefox-specific extensions you could install. But as Chrome added extension support, Firefox not only wanted to be compatible with Chrome's extensions... they dropped (almost) everything that was unique about Firefox.
As it stands, they at least do retain some functionality that isn't just the same as what Chrome offers: support for synchronous fetch hooks (which I might be describing poorly) that is used by the more advanced ad blockers. This is a great USP because, of course, Google isn't going to support those... but Firefox stops there. I contend that it wouldn't be a big lift for them to add some extra Firefox-specific extension API surface and get, for example, the Tridactyl user community back to 100% on Firefox.
And there is frankly a ton of uncharted territory on being able to make powerful web extensions. I used to be in charge of the iPhone native code extension community, and I seriously feel more crippled trying to easily modify a web page than I ever did with a native Objective-C app, and that's insane: I myself constantly run into roadblocks due to being unable to dig into the private data of JavaScript objects or closures, and I see other developers complain about being locked out of styling web components.
Firefox should lean into "it is easier to hack the web with Firefox" as we know Google is going in the opposite direction. Despite the insane complexities of jailbreaking your iPhone, we had around a consistent ~10% marketshare; and no: that wasn't piracy! Not only did the US Copyright Office investigate and say we weren't the problem, we had a thriving ecosystem of paid native app extensions! (Though, frankly, if Firefox managed to hold ~10% marketshare entirely on the back of piracy, I'd be OK with that!)
Otherwise, as it stands, Firefox seems to be removing unique selling propositions as they focus on narrowly re-implementing exactly the set of things offered by Chrome. They have decided that the only market worth targeting is the mass market, and so they are making the same analytics-driven decisions Google makes with respect to safety, streamlining, and prioritization that forsake developers and power users as part of a losing battle with Google for 90% of the web when they used to own the other 10%.
Re: Firefox search update
#186Seems like this is in support of "Firefox Suggest", which seems to show sponsored links. I really don't like advertising so I really don't like going down that road. Can't they just take Google's yearly $600,000,000 payment and build the best browser "for the user" while also addressing technical debt and organizational issues so it can continue as an open source project if/when the money ever dries up?
Re: Firefox search update
#187Stuff like this makes me wonder why I still cling to Firefox instead of switching to one of the actually privacy-focused Chromium forks. I've been using Arkenfox to turn off all the telemetry/etc but it increasingly feels like a game of whackamole. https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js
I might not have been running multiple browsers daily if any one browser is perfect, but currently some websites seemed optimized for Firefox while others seemed optimized for Chrome. (And a small handful of websites are actually better with Lynx).
Re: Firefox search update
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Can't they just take Google's yearly $600,000,000 payment They can do that for as long as Google is willing to pay. Without additional revenue stream, the day Google decides to cut cost and stop sponsoring Mozilla, that's the day Firefox will run into big trouble. Any additional revenue stream is going to help. I am no CEO but that seems very clear to me.
It's not a sponsorship, it's a sale.It's also made such deals with Yandex, Baidu, and Yahoo before. The sale is for eyeballs on your search (ad) service. Firefox is getting in a precarious situation with it though as the number of users on Firefox has been decreasing (in absolute terms) despite the number of web users increasing.
Re: Firefox search update
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
I want them to not replicate google. I use Firefox to fight ads, not to get ads in my searchbar.
Ironic that ads are what Google uses to pay Mozilla so you(we) can use Firefox.
Re: Firefox search update
#190I’d rather they make Firefox subscription based. I’d rather pay $5 a month and have no ads or tracking of any kind. They can even run a separate fork of Firefox or something for this purpose. If Firefox goes down Google will lock internet behind a DRM and we gonna need another rms or Torvalds to deliver us from this hell. Can you imagine a world without Linux, with Windows and Mac pretty much the only mainstream alte…
That's not the world we live in today?