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Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

civilityandtruth.com

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Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#31

Post by xxs »

MattGaiser wrote: post #7
causality0 wrote: post #2

Personally and strictly my own ignorant and informal opinion, Firefox and by extension Mozilla Corp. was doomed the moment it decided to compete with Chrome by being more like Chrome. Firefox built its userbase by being different than the dominant browser, then decided the only way to not die was to be exactly like the dominant browser except with less icky behind-the-scenes privacy behavior. That was a fundamental m…

The challenge with not competing with Chrome is that websites are now mostly developed with Chrome as the dev-tool. Even large companies are just optimizing for that one browser: https://thenextweb.com/dd/2017/11/28/please-build-websites-w... How many users are going to be willing to put up with stuff not working until they switch?

Make better and paid/subscription based(!) dev tools, instead screwing the UI and disabling add-ons. People are buying jetbrains products even though free ones exist.

I do use firefox but all the auto-update features are off on desktop. On mobile I am/will be stuck with 68 forever, I suppose as well.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#32

Post by TimSchumann »

leokennis wrote: post #15

I have to say this is one of the instances where I’m glad Apple’s hunger for profit and privacy engineering intersect. On Mac at least with Safari there is a privacy oriented browser left. Maybe Apple could revive Safari on Windows?

I’m slightly annoyed to agree with you here, but I do. I also hope Epic takes Apple to the mats and gets some concessions from the justice department with regards to all the stuff going down with ‘platforms’ and ‘app stores’.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#33

Post by pjmlp »

MattGaiser wrote: post #7
causality0 wrote: post #2

Personally and strictly my own ignorant and informal opinion, Firefox and by extension Mozilla Corp. was doomed the moment it decided to compete with Chrome by being more like Chrome. Firefox built its userbase by being different than the dominant browser, then decided the only way to not die was to be exactly like the dominant browser except with less icky behind-the-scenes privacy behavior. That was a fundamental m…

The challenge with not competing with Chrome is that websites are now mostly developed with Chrome as the dev-tool. Even large companies are just optimizing for that one browser: https://thenextweb.com/dd/2017/11/28/please-build-websites-w... How many users are going to be willing to put up with stuff not working until they switch?

The anti-IE generation is mostly to blame for that, they ended up adopting the behaviours they criticized so much.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#34

Post by pjmlp »

cotillion wrote: post #23
MattGaiser wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The challenge with not competing with Chrome is that websites are now mostly developed with Chrome as the dev-tool. Even large companies are just optimizing for that one browser: https://thenextweb.com/dd/2017/11/28/please-build-websites-w... How many users are going to be willing to put up with stuff not working until they switch?

The Firefox bug report for a websocket message inspector was opened 7 years ago. It took 6 years before it got implemented. Its no wonder they lost marketshare among developers.

I can find similar examples in Chrome, yet that doesn't detain some devs to worship it.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#35

Post by pjmlp »

moksly wrote: post #22

This is completely anecdotal, and maybe I’m the only one, but native browsers have become so good that I’ve gone from decades of using Netscape/Firefox/opera/chrome/whatever to mainly using Edge and Safari. I don’t really need to share a profile between my browsers as I use windows at work and Mac/iOS for personal use. We’ve gotten to a point in time where the browser is simply really good, and I think that simply ma…

They abandoned it because Edge team got tired to play catch-up, while still fixing IE 11 bugs.

Slowly but steady we will start seeing ads for Chrome developers instead of Web developer, ChromeOS has won.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#36

Post by esperent »

brador wrote: post #26

I still don’t understand how they spend 500M a year with so little to show for it. What’s the last innovation they dropped on the world? Nothing. I still can’t copy urls From multiple selected tabs without an extension. What we need is a group to step up, create a new browser, capture the 500M/year payday and put the money to work.

> What’s the last innovation they dropped on the world?

Rust, Wasm (although a joint project, inspired by asm.js which was purely Mozilla) come to mind.

Also, I consider keeping the focus on privacy in an age when huge behemoths of companies are determined to steal every aspect of our lives for profit to be truly important work, much more important than any tech innovation.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#37

Post by lrem »

TimSchumann wrote: post #3
causality0 wrote: post #2

Personally and strictly my own ignorant and informal opinion, Firefox and by extension Mozilla Corp. was doomed the moment it decided to compete with Chrome by being more like Chrome. Firefox built its userbase by being different than the dominant browser, then decided the only way to not die was to be exactly like the dominant browser except with less icky behind-the-scenes privacy behavior. That was a fundamental m…

I find it hard to disagree with this sentiment. I don't use firefox as my main browser because it's better than Chrome, I use it because it's not google.

Seeing Google from the inside, I have way more trust in it than the general public. But I do use Firefox as my personal browser because I like what they're doing with the tech stack. Having everyone just slap their logo on Chromium sounds like a way towards eventual stagnation.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#38

Post by quotemstr »

brador wrote: post #26

I still don’t understand how they spend 500M a year with so little to show for it. What’s the last innovation they dropped on the world? Nothing. I still can’t copy urls From multiple selected tabs without an extension. What we need is a group to step up, create a new browser, capture the 500M/year payday and put the money to work.

Mozilla did give us Rust and rr [1], both of which were genuine advances.

[1] https://rr-project.org/

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#39

Post by ansible »

causality0 wrote: post #20
ulfw wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares about the version number? Come on. People don‘t pick a browser based on a too high or too low version number.

Exactly my point. Mozilla used a rational numbering scheme where the larger the change, the larger the increment, with full integers being reserved for major changes. Then Chrome started changing its integer every few weeks and Firefox upended its own scheme to keep from looking unfashionable.

Between auto-updates and the numbers changing very often, I'm not even slightly aware of the current version numbers for Chrome or Firefox.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#40

Post by outadoc »

causality0 wrote: post #2

Personally and strictly my own ignorant and informal opinion, Firefox and by extension Mozilla Corp. was doomed the moment it decided to compete with Chrome by being more like Chrome. Firefox built its userbase by being different than the dominant browser, then decided the only way to not die was to be exactly like the dominant browser except with less icky behind-the-scenes privacy behavior. That was a fundamental m…

> the constant deprecation of power features and customizability

They made ONE switch to a superior and standard extension model, and HN loses its minds. Do you really think you're in the majority here? Making it a more secure, faster and just better browser is just the only way forward. Without that Firefox would just be slow as hell, wouldn't play YouTube or Netflix videos, and not have any extensions left because no one wants to create an extension from scratch just for Firefox.

They tried their best and I hope it's been enough, even though the future looks bleak.

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