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Mozilla wants you to love Firefox again

fastcompany.com

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Re: Mozilla wants you to love Firefox again

#61

Post by nolist_policy »

hintymad wrote: post #51
alberth wrote: post #19

Dumb question: who’s Firefox target user? Chrome is able to capture the mass consumer market, due to Google’s dark pattern to nag you to install Chrome anytime you’re on a Google property. Edge target enterprise Fortune 500 user, who is required to use Microsoft/Office 365 at work (and its deep security permission ties to SharePoint). Safari has Mac/iOS audience via being the default on those platform. Brave (based o…

> due to Google’s dark pattern to nag you to install Chrome anytime you’re on a Google property I'm not sure if that's true. I switched to Chrome because Chrome felt snappier than its competitors. Its multi-process model made Chrome more robust. It's developer tool had better usability than Firefox's. And Chrome's extensions, at least initially, offered better experience and wider selections. Oh, Google's integration…

It was a conscious choice for me as well.

After the Bundeswehr Taurus leak[1] there was a lot of speculation of how the meeting was tapped. One possibility is that they mitm't the guy joining from Singapore with a Certificate from a Chinese CA.

Now Google saw auch a possibility and introduced Certificate Transparenty a few years ago which burns the whole CA if it signs sich a mitm Certificate.

However, Firefox does not check for CT timestamps to this date.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Taurus_leak

Re: Mozilla wants you to love Firefox again

#63

Post by incomingpain »

Back in the day, I was one of those who installed firefox on every computer. I used to love firefox. But then they took up california politics and activism. This decision has survived multiple ceos.

Mozilla has done it to themselves. New interim ceo wont be different. I can't fathom mozilla has any chance of selecting someone who could dig them out of their activist hole.

Re: Mozilla wants you to love Firefox again

#64

Post by immibis »

supertrope wrote: post #14
gotoeleven wrote: post #3

Is there something fundamental to the design of firefox that makes it use tons of memory and be prone to letting web pages peg a core at 100%? Every time I try to use firefox I have to quit because sometimes it runs like a 90s java applet.

Usually it's an ad laden local news website. I usually decide the solution is to stop visiting that website.

Go to about:processes and see. You can also choose to kill that process, which doesn't close the tabs - they will refresh when you select them again.

Re: Mozilla wants you to love Firefox again

#65

Post by attendant3446 »

alberth wrote: post #19

Dumb question: who’s Firefox target user? Chrome is able to capture the mass consumer market, due to Google’s dark pattern to nag you to install Chrome anytime you’re on a Google property. Edge target enterprise Fortune 500 user, who is required to use Microsoft/Office 365 at work (and its deep security permission ties to SharePoint). Safari has Mac/iOS audience via being the default on those platform. Brave (based o…

I still think that desktop Firefox is better than any other browser. Their mobile browser is just average though.

Re: Mozilla wants you to love Firefox again

#66

Post by M95D »

> "We’re finding that our messages are particularly sticking with younger generations"

Sure. Those are the people who don't know what a decent browser is. They never saw a browser with customizable UI, never saw Opera 12's notepad, never saw IE 5 Web Accessories (Links list, Image list), etc. etc.

Re: Mozilla wants you to love Firefox again

#67

Post by err4nt » 

    "Deep in the browser’s privacy settings, Firefox introduced an experimental “privacy-preserving ad measurement” toggle, enabling it by default without explanation or disclosure."
This isn't even the first time Firefox has collaborated with an ad or marketing company, rolled out a feature behind a checkbox that users didn't know about, turned it on by default. See the case of the 'Alternate Reality Game' ad campaign for Mr Robot a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15940144

I stopped hearing when Mozilla talks about privacy or caring about users. Most companies that treat their users like Mozilla just do it, but it actually adds insult to injury that Mozilla tells you they care, tells you you're important while they do the same things. It's gaslighting or manipulation or lying or something but I'm not going to listen to them any more.

Re: Mozilla wants you to love Firefox again

#68

Post by M95D »

alberth wrote: post #26
dtx1 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would almost be a good argument but the reality is that they cannibalized their core product to increase their revenue but have done so to the point where it no longer remains viable in the market. Alas, the locusts have had their feast and we are all worse of for it.

So in hindsight, if you were CEO of Mozilla - what would you have done differently that you believe would have maintained Firefox market share? —— I think diehard Firefox fans don’t understand that, no matter how great you make Firefox - it will always lose share to better distribution. Google had the best distribution because it was the vast majority of consumers homepage. And on the homepage, it was nagging users t…

OH MY GOD! Are you serious with this question?!? Or are you just mocking us?

Bring back editing the UI, custom toolbars, custom side panels, plugins for custom side panels, features Opera 12 had, such as Opera's Notepad, UI checkboxes for commonly used settings to be placed in custom toolbars (I would love a checkbox for JS enable/disable and a checkbox for Images enable/disable), directly editable UI colors without the need to search for a theme, smaller UI without margins/padding (90's style), HTML source code live patching with REGEX the way AdMuncher did it, save page link as .url files, a self-hosted sync server that can run on a OpenWrt router with 64MB RAM (no, I'm not talking about a nodejs crap that needs 8GB ram just for itself!), self hosted download manager as linux console app on a different computer (like Aria2, but with better integration), etc. etc.

This list is just what I could think of in 10 min. I'm sure that $$$ budget could build so much more. How about a new browser from scratch?

Edit:

Here's more: embedable engine allowing others to build browsers based on it, framebuffer support like "links -g" allowing it to run in linux console without X/wayland, ability to act as a remote rendering service to allow a very low power device to use it as a remote web rendering server to offload web page JS/CSS workloads (like Opera Mini worked, but with the intermediary server hosted by the user), integration with OS and/or DHCP server to request a new IPv6 IP for each page visited

Re: Mozilla wants you to love Firefox again

#69

Post by create-account »

fragmede wrote: post #52
tmtvl wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's 3 extensions which I consider must-haves: - Noscript Security Suite which has made it very obvious how absolutely fucked today's web is (there's sites which can't display static text without js, as though HTML and CSS are insufficient to display styled text with some markup). - uBlock Origin because obviously. - Multi-account Containers, which aren't quite as good as profiles, but get like 70% of the way ther…

> there's sites which can't display static text without js as developers, we understand how stupid that is and the utter insanity of javascriptium that got us there, but how is that a selling point? If I install that extension, I get a degraded experience and I get to be judgey because the framework the developer(s) they hired used some bit javascriptium that doesn't degrade nicely. am I supposed to feel smug that I'…

JavaScript makes the surf experience a PITA with constant pop ups with consent, subscription. “Cookies or coins”, etc.

Re: Mozilla wants you to love Firefox again

#70

Post by alberth »

M95D wrote: post #68
alberth wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So in hindsight, if you were CEO of Mozilla - what would you have done differently that you believe would have maintained Firefox market share? —— I think diehard Firefox fans don’t understand that, no matter how great you make Firefox - it will always lose share to better distribution. Google had the best distribution because it was the vast majority of consumers homepage. And on the homepage, it was nagging users t…

OH MY GOD! Are you serious with this question?!? Or are you just mocking us? Bring back editing the UI, custom toolbars, custom side panels, plugins for custom side panels, features Opera 12 had, such as Opera's Notepad, UI checkboxes for commonly used settings to be placed in custom toolbars (I would love a checkbox for JS enable/disable and a checkbox for Images enable/disable), directly editable UI colors without…

Everything you described is extremely technical.

Are you suggesting what you described above, 95% of global users care about? ... and that's why Firefox market share has gone down, because the general person wants a REGEX with live code patching?

Because right now, Firefox has 5% market share (based on the GP linked to graphic).

I'd wager that, 5% market share is roughly proportional to the global market of developers. And the 95% of the world who do not use Firefox today, are the same 95% who don't care about anything you described above.

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