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Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

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Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#511

Post by ted_dunning »

kemayo wrote: post #455
iso1631 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikimedia stats from last year put it at 15% of desktop browsers, ahead of Safari and Edge.

If people are curious, all the stats for Wikimedia properties are here: https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#desktop... As of December 7th, Firefox is 10.3% of traffic there. This makes it the #2 browser, after Chrome (at 62.2%) -- a spot it has been dueling with Edge over for the last year or so. I'm inclined to think that "people visiting wikipedia" is a fairly representative sample of "normal users…

I'm inclined to think that "people visiting wikipedia" skews heavily towards "people who like facts" which is distinctly not a normal web viewer.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#512

Post by matthewkayin »

glenstein wrote: post #503
throwaway613745 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have used Firefox as my default browser through thick and thin for damn near two decades. If Mozilla killed andblocking extensions I’d switch to Helium Browser in a heartbeat since they’re maintaining manifest v2 support for uBO and even ship it OOTB. The web is unusable without a proper Adblock.

>If Mozilla killed andblocking extensions Yeah but they haven't and they're not going to, so what's the point of fantasizing about what you would do in that situation? It's like tough guy syndrome, where a person constantly fantasizes about what they would do in the imaginary situation where one of their friends or family is disrespected, or doomsday preppers who spend their life imagining what they would do in an ap…

Relax, man. It's perfectly reasonable to say that you would stop using a browser if they killed adblock support. Saying so is not "tough guy" syndrome because switching which browser you use is not a tough thing to do.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#513

Post by mghackerlady »

t23414321 wrote: post #500
throwaway613745 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have used Firefox as my default browser through thick and thin for damn near two decades. If Mozilla killed andblocking extensions I’d switch to Helium Browser in a heartbeat since they’re maintaining manifest v2 support for uBO and even ship it OOTB. The web is unusable without a proper Adblock.

The web was usable without JavaScript once. (JS has few good uses, but is too excessive. Less code is always better - and an art.)

Is there an extension that limits JS to things that actually improve websites (like the bare minimum needed to render a page usable under most metrics)

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#514

Post by lolc »

mplewis wrote: post #486
notepad0x90 wrote: post #470

I think people are wildly overreacting. There is a new CEO and he wants to make a splash so the throws around "AI" that's it. Of course there will be AI related features in firefox, there already are! Wait and see what the actual specifics are before reacting? Also, a small minor detail here: We're not paying for firefox! why are so many people feeling entitled? Mozilla has to do something other than beg Google to su…

Why do there have to be AI features in Firefox? No one wants them. They make the browser less secure. They distract from the mission.

I found the local translation feature nice on a few occasions.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#515

Post by OkayPhysicist »

lxgr wrote: post #41

>> 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…

It costs the CEO of Mozilla nothing to make hard, convicted statements that all their users agree with. If it was me, the quote would be something like "but then they'd need to find a new CEO, because I'd be in prison for what I'd do to anyone who even suggested it".

Literally the only people who talk about Mozilla, or read things about what Mozilla is up to, are unusually motivated power users who really, really care about ad blocking and privacy. They may still have other users, but those people are coasting on momentum from when their grandkid installed Firefox on their computer years ago. They're not reading interviews with the new CEO. Yet Mozilla seems to consistently fail utterly at messaging to their only engaged users.

It's not even that they're doing evil shit, they're just absolutely terrible at proclaiming that they are committed to not doing evil shit.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#516

Post by matheusmoreira »

JoeJonathan wrote: post #226
nialv7 wrote: post #81

Earlier 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.

Like many others, the ability to run uBO is the main reason I use Firefox. Otherwise I'd use Chrome or Safari.

Same. Without uBlock Origin I'll drop Firefox. There are very few reasons to put up with its "niche browser that nobody tests" status if they won't even allow me to block ads. They should just give up and end Firefox development already if they're going down that route.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#517

Post by t23414321 »

mghackerlady wrote: post #513
t23414321 wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web was usable without JavaScript once. (JS has few good uses, but is too excessive. Less code is always better - and an art.)

Is there an extension that limits JS to things that actually improve websites (like the bare minimum needed to render a page usable under most metrics)

That would be (progressive??) XBL. (!)

(- it's kind of behavior extension on tag level, yet has JS - and it's orthogonal, like CSS or XSLT (BTW. see that hack: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41245159), unlike JS which is.. untamed and invasive; i.e. there is video (any) tag but you could (+)DIY not touching the document - like custom playing with MPlayer or VLC as a plugin there for all AV formats or sorting filtering editing whatever, all aside custompacks? :)

- or, what about the other way, like a firewall ??

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#518

Post by pessimizer »

csin wrote: post #220
dom96 wrote: post #6

Genuinely 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…

> - They were ahead of the game with extensions. Then everyone copied them.

They were ahead of the game with extensions, then they destroyed their own extensions. They copied everyone else, not the other way around.

> - They were ahead of the game with tabs. Then everyone copied them.

They were ahead of the game with tabs. Then while destroying their extensions they made vertical tabs harder, while still leaving it as a charitable contribution by the community instead of an internal project, and slow-walked it for a decade. I still have to do weird CSS to make them look right, because they decided to have an opinionated sidebar for no particular reason.

> - They are still the best browser to use for an ad free internet experience.

This, again, is not their fault. It's because of a man who they don't pay, who has had to battle with them on multiple occasions. Their only contribution is not accepting a Chrome standard completely. Imagine wanting to be given credit for not exactly copying your neighbor, after an enormous amount of pressure was brought to bear. It's my belief that Google decided that Firefox wouldn't kill ad blocking in the end, because it would have looked horrible in antitrust court. Now that's over (Obama judges don't believe in antitrust), and you can expect Firefox to kill it soon enough.

> Because to me, they seem to be constantly trying to make FireFox better. It's just hit or miss.

Nah. They kept telling me, while ignoring everyone's complaints about their actual experiences, that the most important thing was to reduce startup time for some unknown reason.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#519

Post by computerfriend »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #274
yupyupyups wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If only they could see ads for ad blockers.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#520

Post by glenstein »

derbOac wrote: post #289
graemep wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many banks and government websites don’t even support it anymore and loudly tell people to use Chrome instead, especially in developing countries. I cannot remember the last time I came across one myself.

Reading comments here about problems using Firefox is odd to me as I never run into them. I feel like people are taking about totally different browsers. I don't remember the last time I had page rendering issues or was asked to use a different browser.

Same. I mean, I'm sure there have been cases where I've switched to Chrome for certain things. I just got a custom viewfinder for my partner for Christmas, is showing a bunch of photos of the cruise that we went on. And they have an online editor for it, but the editor seemed to be glitching when using Firefox. So I moved to Chrome. Later I realized I was just misunderstanding and it actually just worked fine in Firefox.

And I'm able to access my bank, my credit cards, my utility bills, in Firefox without issue. So I'm not sure what people are talking about.

One thing I am familiar with though in the aftermath of gamergate was a bunch of motivated reasoning to complain about games and insist that they had design flaws or bugs, when really? The bugs weren't real but were kind of just a different way of saying We Don't Like This Game. And so reports of perceived bugs in some cases are as much a social phenomenon as they are a sincere representation of software functionality.

I don't want to say there's no bugs but for every one person's unsubstantiated anecdote, I seem to be able to find two people able to reproduce a functional version of the experience without issue. And just to zoom in on the bank login issue in particular, I use a credit union with an old decrepit HTTP site that was recently updated to a slightly less old and decrepit HTTP site. Plaid is unable to successfully log in, but the web interface works perfectly fine on Firefox mobile.

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