Work on javascript engine more than anything else.Find a partner for this if you have to.
I use some JS heavy websites and the difference between Chrome's V8 is wide enough to not switch back.
Also there's this annoying bug typing in urls in the address bar face an unreasonable typing delay.
Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
781–790 of 949 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#782Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm, interesting, because I don't force myself to use Firefox. I use it because it's just plain better than Chrome, in that I can configure it just the way I want.
I'm curious what OS you're running. For me, on macOS Firefox performs the best out of all browsers I've tried, but on Linux it feels a bit sluggish.
My experience is the opposite :)
I have to use macOS at work, and it makes Firefox much more janky than it is on this 10-year-old Linux laptop.
(Though I rarely use other browsers on macOS, so maybe they're even worse.)
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#783Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a weird type of logic going on where almost everyone who would be willing to do it for almost free is probably not qualified for the job. Would you really stake the future of your foundation on someone who still needs to build their resume?
Japanese CEO salaries are famously very low. The Toyota CEO makes about USD 3.5m. There are other C levels that make 3 times what the Toyota CEO earns in direct compensation. Japanese CEO salaries in general seem to be below USD1m on average.
> Japanese CEO salaries are famously very low. The Toyota CEO makes about USD 3.5m
I'm genuinely curious: Do you not see how insane it is that you believe this is low? Earning even a tenth of that would be stratospherically high.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#784Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was the layoff where they got rid of all the rust people? Its going to sound harsh, but they are loosing market share to browsers that didn't have to invent a new language to write a browser in. So, getting rid of those people was probably a positive impact for firefox since they were mostly just yak shaving instead of actually improving the end product. The users don't care if you wrote it in C++ or fortran as…
Rust and servo were how they were innovating, and where a lot of the competitive features came from. By firing them, Mozilla made clear that they do not care about these things. The CEO is quite clearly a parasite hell-bent on extracting as much value as she can before bailing for the next victim.
The problem--and I feel the pain here deeply as a security person myself--is that that innovation was primarily along an axis (security) that no users care about (with a small bit of performance from concurrency, but there were clearly other ways to be faster), and was draining resources away from innovation that users cared about... which I'd claim was even going in the opposite direction: for many years now they have been continually tearing out the non-philosophical reasons I used Firefox in the quest to build a clone of Chrome, something the world doesn't have much use for as it already has Chrome.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#785Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'd think that there are even qualified people who would do it for (almost) free, just for the chance of building a resume...
There's a weird type of logic going on where almost everyone who would be willing to do it for almost free is probably not qualified for the job. Would you really stake the future of your foundation on someone who still needs to build their resume?
We can show with good data that the actual CEO is not qualified either for this job. So why not getting somebody unqualified but cheaper?
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#786Earlier quoted context omitted.
The arrogance is hard to believe. > In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask peopl…
It might be that they need to pay that amount to attract top CEO talent. But then again, I'm not sure if Mozilla should be large enough to need a top CEO. I mean effectively reducing it to just the Firefox team would be fine with me. And then it's maybe 80 people to manage in total. So that's one regular office building and you're done. It doesn't sound like the CEO will be critical for anything in this company.
And if top CEO talent results are a 85% market dip, why bother paying that much? A headless chicken can't make it much worse.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#787Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this post assumes that Firefox is an inferior browser, and that the cause is mismanagement. But is Firefox an inferior browser? I think it used to be, but over the last couple years, it has made massive improvements in features and performance. I use it in both desktop and mobile, and I prefer it over Chrome. As a software engineer, I rely heavily on my browser for work. For me, the multi-account containers i…
> But is Firefox an inferior browser? Several APIs that make powerful web applications possible are missing (e.g. WebUSB, various filesystem access APIs) and Firefox generally tends to lag behind Chrome when it comes to new APIs/web features. The lower market share means that many web sites don't support it properly. For example, I need to keep a Chrome profile around for Zoom since the button doesn't even show up on…
> Firefox generally tends to lag behind Chrome when it comes to new APIs/web features
Sometimes that is because chromium just implements anything they want and it's not in the spec.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#788Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, you have to ask yourself why everyone is using V8 as their JavaScript runtime and not Mozilla’s equivalent or why every alternative browser is using Chrome as a foundation. Or XUL wasn’t packaged as cross platform GUI framework. And then of course the Firefox mobile fiasco. My guess is that the engineering and management don’t interact. Two different companies within the same company, no coherent vision.
What FF mobile fiasco are you speaking of? I am using FF mobile happily and have been for years. I haven't noticed any issues with it. Was there a business level fiasco or something?
What I meant was the Firefox phone, the hardware plus the Firefox OS, not the mobile browser, sorry for the confusion about mobile vs phone.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#789for me, Firefox is nothing special. For privacy, I choose Safari. For extensions, I choose Chrome. Sometimes I use Brave as well. Firefox is the last option.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#790Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was the layoff where they got rid of all the rust people? Its going to sound harsh, but they are loosing market share to browsers that didn't have to invent a new language to write a browser in. So, getting rid of those people was probably a positive impact for firefox since they were mostly just yak shaving instead of actually improving the end product. The users don't care if you wrote it in C++ or fortran as…
This feels like a gross mischaracterization of the intent and work that went into Servo. You say this as if nothing else was being done on Firefox concurrently even though this is demonstrably false - and in fact, portions of Servo were integrated into Firefox (see: Quantum). Firefox keeps losing on technical merit because it is fundamentally impossible to keep up with Webkit and Blink, which are all backed by massiv…
Both of which are written in C++, with ongoing security efforts geared towards mitigation, instead of rewriting them.
Although they are experimenting with Rust, it doesn't seem they will ever adopt it.