malvertising - liking the term
Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?
311–320 of 851 posts
Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
What happened in the last 6 months or so to affect those numbers? According to them, Chrome increased in percentage quite a but recently and the others all got "compressed" towards 0.
Looking at the last 10 years gives a different perspective (not great for Firefox but maybe underscores something is different recently in general):
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?
#313Sincerely, I'm just using Firefox ATM because of Sidebery. If I could use something similar on Brave, I would go back in an instant. My main issues with FF are that it is a battery hog on MacOS, doesn't have AV1 playing capabilities (or it has, but I would need to go through some configuring that I don't need to do in other browsers) and sometimes it stalls in certain pages (that's probably not FF fault, but that the…
I used Sidebery which had niggles. I switched to native vertical tabs with collapsible groups, which Brave also has.
But it still doesn’t have work spaces, right?
Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
The interpretation is not the problem. Whether he will do it, is actually secondary to the fact that he thinks cutting adblock can bringing in money. No, it will just kill the browser. The fact he thinks otherwise tells me how out of touch he is.
Is it him or is it you? I'd think within the Mozilla organization is a data trove of telemetry which renders a fairly good picture of how many users actually are using ad blockers.
If nobody is using ad-blockers then disabling them wouldn’t bring in any additional revenue.
Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?
#315Genuinely can someone with knowledge of the business explain why they aren't simply doubling down on making Firefox better? Is there an existential problem facing them that they are trying to solve by adding AI into the browser?
I feel the problem they're trying to solve with that is "EB isn't sufficiently pissed off with the gradually deteriorating user experience yet so instead of actually displaying the page we'll have a big modal popup telling him how great the AI tools are and how he should try them!"
I do not want to try your AI tools, Mozilla, yours or anyone else's.
Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?
#316>> He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission. > It may be just me, but I read this as “I don't want to but I'll kill AdBlockers in Firefox for buckerinos ”. Yes, that does seem like a pretty uncharitable interpretation of that quote. I read it as "we won't do it, even though it would bring in $150M US…
I mean, that's also exactly what you would say if you had a $150M offer on the table, had received a lot of push back and were now just checking the waters and waiting to consolidate your position.
Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?
#317Genuinely can someone with knowledge of the business explain why they aren't simply doubling down on making Firefox better? Is there an existential problem facing them that they are trying to solve by adding AI into the browser?
Please enlighten me. How does one make a browser "better" these days? - They were ahead of the game with extensions. Then everyone copied them. - They were ahead of the game with tabs. Then everyone copied them. - They were ahead of the game with containers. Then everyone copied them. - They are still the best browser to use for an ad free internet experience. - The only flaw I can think of, is they are not leaders i…
How would I make Firefox better?
First, I would stop breaking up the stuff that works. Firefox was ahead of the game with extensions, then deprecated the long tail for a rewrite that took three years [1] (during which Firefox mobile had a grand total of 9 extensions) and even then it's hard for me today to know which extensions work on mobile. They were similarly ahead of the game with containers, and yet they still don't work on private mode [2] and probably never will. That's two out of three hits where they tripped over their own two feet[3].
Second, do the one thing that users have been requesting for decades: let me donate to the browser development. Not to the Mozilla Foundation, not to internet freedom causes, to Firefox. The Mozilla foundation explicitly says that they don't want to be "the Firefox company", and yet I'd argue they should.
Third, go on the offensive. I get the impression that, with the exception of ad-blocking, Firefox is simply playing catch-up to any idea coming from Chrome regardless of whether it makes sense or not. Would Firefox had removed FTP support had Chrome not done it before?
And fourth, make all these weird experiments extensions.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/14/three-years-after-its-reva...
[2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1330109
[3] I always associated tabs with Opera, though.
[4] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/a...
Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?
#318>> He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission. > It may be just me, but I read this as “I don't want to but I'll kill AdBlockers in Firefox for buckerinos ”. Yes, that does seem like a pretty uncharitable interpretation of that quote. I read it as "we won't do it, even though it would bring in $150M US…
The interpretation is not the problem. Whether he will do it, is actually secondary to the fact that he thinks cutting adblock can bringing in money. No, it will just kill the browser. The fact he thinks otherwise tells me how out of touch he is.
The question is what happens if he thinks the browser will die without that money. Is it a hill to die on?
For me as a user it is, but is it for him as a CEO?
Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?
#319I think blocking ad blockers (the whole FFing point of using Firefox is freedom to do use those) would be the shortest path for him out of the door as a CEO. It's so tone deaf that it is likely to probe the community into drastic action if he were to attempt to push that through. Including probably much of the developer community. I'm talking the kind of action that boils down to forking and taking a large part of th…
who are the shareholders?
Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?
#320Let's assume that Mozilla is not doing super hot and that's why their CEO is contemplating this topic.
Obviously we are not happy about ads, but we all understand that having money is pretty neat (if only to pay ones salary). Help the CEO fella: What great, unused options is Mozilla missing to generate revenue through their browser?