Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony • Hacker News Board

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#551

Post by sfink » Mon, Nov 29, 2021, 9:53 PM UTC

soundnote wrote: post #487

sfink wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How about this for a funding model: tie executive compensation to revenue growth. I'm not sure this would go quite the way you think. The quick numbers I could find are $104 million in revenue for 2009 [1], $828 million in revenue for 2019 [2]. Your market share percentages sound about right, though (and is more relevant to the success of the mission.) > Being a browser company and seeing declining revenue during a…

I think "post pandemic" there means "after the pandemic drove everyone to WFH anyway", not "especially after the pandemic is over" (which would be an argument for more local offices, not less).

Ah, your interpretation makes much more sense, and upon rereading I believe that you're right.

I may have been confused because I know some surprising things about how search ad revenue did at different points in the pandemic, so I overthought things. (I don't know if those numbers are public or not, so I won't be more specific.)

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#552

Post by TedDoesntTalk » Mon, Nov 29, 2021, 9:53 PM UTC

handrous wrote: post #524

dralley wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but nobody on HN has ever - ever - come up with a better funding model for them. It's all complaints all the time and people don't even seem to bother researching what they have been doing lately. It's also fun to watch people complain about the Google situation and then, 10 seconds later, complain about "side projects" which are actual independent sources of revenue. I don't envy the market dynamics of their sit…

1) Save most of the Google bucks rather than spending them on bloating your org to at least 3x the size it has any reason to be, 2) Invest your saved Google bucks, 3) After a few years you can drop Google for a decade or two and coast entirely on savings + investment income while being beholden to no-one. Maybe indefinitely, depending on how well it goes and how lean you keep your spending. The alternative would have…

> Save most of the Google bucks rather than spending them on bloating your org to at least 3x the size it has any reason to be,

But then there would be no money for Mozilla's social justice initiatives.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#553

Post by wnevets » Mon, Nov 29, 2021, 9:54 PM UTC

dijit wrote: post #217

K0nserv wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree that is their publicly stated reason for the limitation. Them having the ulterior motive of stifling PWAs on iOS and competition for mobile Safari is a common theory. Whether they do have ulterior motives or not, the effect is that innovation is stifled.

And yet: Steve Jobs wanted PWA's (or something similar) in the beginning and begrudgingly made an App Store. Yes, I know the circumstances are different, but I do think it's ironic.

> And yet: Steve Jobs wanted PWA's (or something similar) in the beginning and begrudgingly made an App Store.

or it was just the typical double speak from Jobs until they were able to launch their walled garden. Anyone else remember when iPhone users were told they were holding the iPhone wrong during Antennagate? [0]

[0] https://www.engadget.com/2010-06-24-apple-responds-over-ipho...

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#554

Post by soundnote » Mon, Nov 29, 2021, 9:57 PM UTC

kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #248

clavicat wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I receive all of Mozilla’s newsletters and I seethe whenever I see them demanding that more be done to sanitize online expression, which is all the time. That said, Chrome is hardly an alternative given Google’s approach to moderating YouTube.

I tried Vivaldi for a while and now I am using Edge. None of the options are really good. It's a shame.

Edge is a privacy disaster, sadly. You can't even make their sync fully end to end encrypted, and that's the tip of the iceberg from startpages to hardware-based browser IDs. Absolutely amazing product otherwise, but yuck.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#555

Post by na85 » Mon, Nov 29, 2021, 10:01 PM UTC

K0nserv wrote: post #153

I've been meaning to write almost exactly this blog post for a while now, glad that someone else did it. Two things that I think are worth calling out: 1. In many ways Apple's anti-competitive behaviour on iOS/iPadOS is a blessing. It's one of the few things that keep Chromium's dominance in check. Of course, it's not great that Apple are stifling innovation like this, but consider the alternative: Chromium dominance…

>Why it's worth caring about this at all? So what if Chromium is the only engine, it would make things easier for developers after all.

It sure would, but here just as in many areas of tech, developer convenience is diametrically opposed to what's good for users.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#556

Post by soundnote » Mon, Nov 29, 2021, 10:07 PM UTC

queuebert wrote: post #322

Forgive my ignorance, but why is maintaining a browser so hard? HTML and CSS are decades old by now. Javascript is handled through a separate engine. Is the problem that the standards keep evolving? Or are the standards just too difficult to perfectly support? What is going on?

A web browser is essentially a small OS. The body of web standards is way bigger than it used to, and implementing things like security a much bigger deal than they were back then. Before, you could kinda say get this, get that, ok draw what they tell you, fine. Now you have to worry about shit like response times to your queries being used as an attack vector.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#557

Post by katsura » Mon, Nov 29, 2021, 10:19 PM UTC

mepian wrote: post #136

akagusu wrote: post #130

The real problem of Firefox is one that nobody cares about: distribution. Let's say Firefox is the most advanced browser of the universe. How can you get people to install Firefox? Chrome has the advantage here because it is preinstalled in every Android phone and Android has more than 90% market share. The second advantage Chrome has is that it cannot be uninstalled from Android. The fact that Android phones have a…

Nobody cares about? Mozilla tried to solve this exact problem with Boot2Gecko/FirefoxOS phones and failed.

Did it really fail? The fork, KaiOS, seems to do pretty well:

https://www.kaiostech.com/company/our-story/

They claim that they are on 160 million devices.

And based on this:

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

Firefox has about 220 million users at the moment.

So, I wouldn't say that FirefoxOS failed, it just failed in their hand.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#558

Post by foresto » Mon, Nov 29, 2021, 10:22 PM UTC

parhamn wrote: post #37

I think part of this discussion needs to be that Firefox, while open source, doesn't provide footing for the community to build browser forks the way Chromium does. This sort of open usage, ironically, feels very fitting to the spirit of Firefox, but they're not even close to Chrom(e|ium). I've been building a browser full time the past year+ (synth.app) and FF core wasn't really even an option. They've done very lit…

> Firefox, while open source, doesn't provide footing for the community to build browser forks the way Chromium does.

This reminds that Wine uses Mozilla code for their Internet Explorer replacement (wine-gecko). I wonder how far behind Firefox's rendering engine that code is, and how much effort is involved for the Wine maintainers.

https://wiki.winehq.org/Gecko

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#559

Post by freediver » Mon, Nov 29, 2021, 10:22 PM UTC

spixy wrote: post #549

freediver wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but I've never quite understood why Mozilla got such a hard time from users about telemetry Telemetry includes personal information such as IP address and some people are (rightfully) concerned about it. Also we do not know for sure what is done with this data, as Firefox server side code (the one that processes the telemetry) is not open source (and even if it was it would not be a guarantee). > Okay, did you enabl…

> Telemetry includes personal information such as IP address and some people are (rightfully) concerned about it. Source? I don't see any IP address in about:telemetry window.

Client IP address is included with every http request, regardless of what data is being sent. Mozilla is receiving it, wanting it or not. This is why any telemetry, even if the browser is sending benign data, is a potential privacy risk for the user.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#560

Post by freediver » Mon, Nov 29, 2021, 10:24 PM UTC

dralley wrote: post #304

freediver wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of such an apparent conflict of interest. At the end of the day we do not know how many good ideas (for the users, for the web and for Firefox market share) were silenced because not to upset the feeding arm. And where would Firefox be today if it relied on its own users for the revenue instead? Having your main competitor as your main customer is not a good position to be in for any company.

Yes but nobody on HN has ever - ever - come up with a better funding model for them. It's all complaints all the time and people don't even seem to bother researching what they have been doing lately. It's also fun to watch people complain about the Google situation and then, 10 seconds later, complain about "side projects" which are actual independent sources of revenue. I don't envy the market dynamics of their sit…

> Selling FOSS is hard to begin with

Also worth noting is that Firefox is not in the business of selling FOSS, it is (currently) in the business of selling primary search engine placement.