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I've used Firefox only for a few years (up until last month or so). I'm no expert and would actually like to know, from the experts here, if the following is my subjective experience or not: I find that for not very heavy or for heavy, but well-behaved sites, I can't really tell the difference between FF and Chrome. But for very heavy and badly designed sites, Chrome seems to be much faster and have much less latency…
I don't know where you get money for such a venture, but IBM (Red Hat) and Amazon both a vested interest to not have a browser monoculture and don't already run a browser project.
I've used Firefox only for a few years (up until last month or so). I'm no expert and would actually like to know, from the experts here, if the following is my subjective experience or not: I find that for not very heavy or for heavy, but well-behaved sites, I can't really tell the difference between FF and Chrome. But for very heavy and badly designed sites, Chrome seems to be much faster and have much less latency…
Can you give examples of some very heavy and badly designed sites?
At a time when the web was dangerous, Chrome advertised security. Remember when Flash wasn't sandboxed? When Java executed automatically? When nothing had auto-updates?
Firefox caught up, but at best it's "as good". What's it really doing for me?
The answer is presumably privacy. And that's cool. But most people have a hard time understanding what "privacy" means. Further, you can say Chrome is weak on privacy, but it's hardly as bad as people make it out to be.
So basically Mozilla is, at best, equivalent to Chrome, but Chrome was way better for a long time. So it's got to convince people to come back, but its only selling point is really vague.
And then you have some other stuff like companies can manage Chrome via GSuite. So now your work computer is X% more likely to run Chrome. So now you have to choose to have a different experience at home and at work.
What would I do?
1. I'd refocus on the mission. Privacy is critical, security is critical. That would mean a number of things - how is it that Brave is the first browser to integrate TOR? Isn't that insane? TOR has been using Firefox by default forever, and no one thought "maybe we should just support this thing, and start heavily contributing to it" ?
2. I'd invest heavily in next-gen performance and security. Chrome has In-The-Wild zero days being exploited - that's an opportunity. The web is heavier than ever - that's an opportunity.
I'd focus heavily on that. I'd push benchmarks and I'd market those features heavily.
3. I would fire every executive who took a multi-million dollar bonus while firing tons of employees.
That's just day 1 stuff.
Going further I'd consider what it would look like to see Mozilla in the Enterprise. Integrations and management features built into the LTS releases are an obvious start.
Chrome just works and Firefox doesn't. I know that's reductive and perhaps not to the standards of this website, but that's really it for the majority of people who couldn't care less about the diversity of browser engines out there.
I use Firefox for all my ordinary desktop browsing and "it just works" most of the time. That said I have worked at places that have given up on Firefox compatibility for single page applications. If I've got any choice in the matter I do most of my development in Firefox and let the testers work out problems that turn up in Chrome. However if the app is solidly broken on Firefox I wind up using Chrome like the other…
To win back market share Firefox has to be much, much better than Chrome. That's how Firefox won market share from IE in the 2000s and how Chrome won in the 2010s. Firefox feels ever-so-slightly slower to me on loading most web pages and has more failures in loading page elements that I notice than Chrome.
"Just works, most of the time" isn't just works. Just works is perfection or as close to it as software can get.
They should focus on saving Firefox. - Cut out all (or at the very least, most) initiatives that don't serve the goal of promoting Firefox's market share or sustainability going forward - Donate the major money drains that aren't Firefox to the Apache Foundation or another worthy custodian - Fire all inessential staff that don't want to work on Firefox. - Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not…
> until the only browsers in the world are Chromium derivatives Do you mean WebKit derivatives? Or are you predicting that Apple would switch to Chromium? (No way)
Firefox is losing market share due to shortsighted/poor decisions from leadership, and a harsh anti-competitive landscape from Microsoft/Google/Apple. Firefox is difficult to save because it's been on constant life support from Google to misdirect antitrust investigators. Saving Firefox would involve not only raising its market share (which would probably have to involve a deal from Google/Microsoft/Apple or legislat…
I don't think most users care about that, the Google tie seems like a weak point considering most users choose chrome
Mozilla Corp makes 400 million per year from Google money. If this money dries up in 2023, then the browser has to find a new deal, or close shop (figuratively speaking; I'm sure it'd lumber on since it's an open source browser). This is a fair amount of business risk, so "saving" the browser probably would involve figuring out how to keep the lights on without a search engine deal.
Take a hint from Brave, which is growing fast. Go all in on privacy and ad blocking.
Can you imagine being the one to approve such a bone-headed design? I gave up and downloaded opera instead and it's been perfect. I have my desired links up when I open a new tab, nothing else, and life is good.
I mean, the reason everybody moved to Chrome last time was because it was faster than Firefox/IE and it included Flash so you didn't have that stupid update popup every time you logged in. Flash isn't a thing anymore, but if they could make it faster than Chrome (not just as fast) while keeping up with web standards, it would work. I don't know where you get money for such a venture, but IBM (Red Hat) and Amazon both…