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Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

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Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#271

Post by theandrewbailey »

saubeidl wrote: post #172
fijuv wrote: post #105

I think it's too late for Mozilla, since it seems they already squandered most of their good will, userbase and money. At any rate, I think their only good path of to get rid of Gecko. The best would be to replace it with a finished version of Servo, which would give them a technically superior browser, assuming Google doesn't also drop Blink for Servo. It may be too late for this, but AI agents may perhaps make fini…

If they switch to Chromium, they'll just become yet another Chrome rebrand. It'll kill what makes their browser special.

They keep redesigning their UI to be more like Chrome, might as well go deeper.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#272

Post by simiones »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #59
anothernewdude wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wouldn't bring in their estimate, it'd kill the browser.

The estimate does sound reasonable if it's an one-off payment. I agree that no one would pay that amount of money each year to keep adblocking from Firefox.

It's not impossible that people would pay Firefox that much yearly to keep their current user-base from using ad blockers. However, what is impossible is to imagine Firefox would have anything close to their current user base if people were prevented from using ad blockers. Most likely they would shrink to almost 0 users overnight if they did this. There are very few reasons to use Firefox over Chrome or Safari (or even Edge) other than the much better ad blocking (or any ad blocking, on mobile).

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#273

Post by OvervCW »

csin wrote: post #241
p-e-w wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox has a market share around 3%. Even most technologists stopped using it long ago. Many banks and government websites don’t even support it anymore and loudly tell people to use Chrome instead, especially in developing countries. Nothing can kill Firefox, because it’s already dead for all practical purposes.

This 3% number is deceptive. The whole desktop market is cratering. I was talking to a reddit mod a few months ago. He was looking at the subreddit stats. 95% of his users were on mobile. Think about that. We desktop users are dinosaurs. So FireFox having a 3% market share might actually mean more than half of desktop users are on FireFox.

It is the desktop where Firefox has a 4% market share right now. Once you consider all traffic it drops down to 2%.

Source: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#274

Post by lifthrasiir »

yupyupyups wrote: post #258
lifthrasiir wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just a wishful thinking. Too many ordinary users accept ads as inevitable annoyances and don't even know about the very existence of adblockers.

Maybe because they don't know any better.

Of course, but how would you convince them to switch? Not just your friends, but as a whole.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#275

Post by OvervCW »

csin wrote: post #263
abenga wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine browsing the web on my phone and tablet without Firefox mobile. That would honestly be the biggest loss once this CEO takes this nonsense to the logical end.

I'm genuinely curious. What does FireFox mobile have over it's competition? You can't install UBlock Origin on mobile. Like I still use FireFox on mobile, just purely out of habit. I don't really see anything better about it (I am quite inexperienced when it comes to phones).

You can install uBlock Origin on Firefox mobile; it's the only reason I use it.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#277

Post by timeon »

braebo wrote: post #88
ghusto wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which alternatives though? On Mac at least, I'm not aware of any viable non-Chromium alternatives.

Use Brave the privacy is better than Firefox already.

Question was about non-Chromium browsers. Although Brave's custom ad-blocker is not bad.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#278

Post by mlmonkey »

sysguest wrote: post #170
tda wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Firefox as my daily browser. If i have a website that fails to work, I might try chrome maybe once every two months. And then it usually also doesn't work. So for all browsing I do on the internet, Firefox works like a charm

well I use it because it can handle 2000 tabs on my m1 macbook air (16gb ram) ... damn do I have adhd?????

I use Chrome and have 1500 tabs on my MacBook Pro. I'm a packrat.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#279

Post by 4nonverbal-alit »

rbits wrote: post #200
darkwater wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In which country are you seeing that? For me the biggest offender are usually Google products and sometimes the lazy-coded website written by incompetents and whose audience is the tech illiterate (i.e. some websites involving schools/teaching) that just tell you "use latest Chrome just to be sure, download here" to, well, just be sure. Notable mentions for government websites that are like 10 years in the past and t…

I live in Australia and I can't log into government services using my myGov account on Firefox. Works fine on Chromium.

Usually that's because of third party cookies the government websites love to use for authentication. FF and Safari by default blocks them but both can be disabled temporarily to use those websites. Chrome is more lax on them since ad networks love cross origin cookies as well.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#280

Post by lifthrasiir »

shaky-carrousel wrote: post #235
autoexec wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's that part of the article: > In our conversation, Enzor-DeMeo returns often to two things: that Mozilla cares about and wants to preserve the open web, and that the open web needs new business models. Mozilla’s ad business is important and growing, he says, and he worries “about things going behind paywalls, becoming more closed off.” He says the internet’s content business isn’t exactly his fight, but that Moz…

I don't like how he assumes that a free internet must be ad-supported. The ad-supported web is hideous, even with their ads removed. A long, convoluted, inane mess of content. On the other hand, the clean web feels more direct, to the point, and passionate. I prefer to read content written by passion, not by money seeking purposes.

If something is free (en masse), you are probably a product. If you don't want to be a product you need to give something out instead, like ads.
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