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Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

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Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#91

Post by dsissitka »

pacavaca wrote: post #66

It has to freaking stop crashing first. And stop freezing my computer with just 20 tabs open (for 32gb of ram). And complete their password manager. And implement recent standards to make apps work. And... Yeah, I'm still using it instead of Chrome just because I want to depend less on Google, but dammit Chrome is better.

> And implement recent standards...

And maybe even some not so recent standards. Chrome has an extremely novel feature:

I can use my media keys...

...to control the playback of my media.

Why didn't anyone think of that before? :)

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#92

Post by jsinai »

brianpgordon wrote: post #57

> While I understand that they have to make money somehow I don't. I don't understand how Mozilla has over a thousand employees and over 500 million dollars in annual revenue. With that kind of money, Firefox should be absolutely dominating the browser space. They shouldn't be making Firefox worse with advertising in order to subsidize their flailing around trying to find traction in mobile or VR. It actually reminds…

> The whole point of Mozilla is supposed to be Firefox and Thunderbird

And the whole point of Google is search? I think it makes sense that Mozilla would expand into more than just Firefox and Thunderbird. They’re a software foundation so limit themselves to a browser or mail client? I like the fact that they’ve becomes champions of privacy and internet safety.

Agreed though. What they’re doing is technically hard but you would expect Mozilla to do more.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#93

Post by danis1 »

brianpgordon wrote: post #57

> While I understand that they have to make money somehow I don't. I don't understand how Mozilla has over a thousand employees and over 500 million dollars in annual revenue. With that kind of money, Firefox should be absolutely dominating the browser space. They shouldn't be making Firefox worse with advertising in order to subsidize their flailing around trying to find traction in mobile or VR. It actually reminds…

This is the downside of what happens when a corporation is not forced to report to someone from outside the corporation, i.e. shareholders, and does not have a direct relationship with their customers.

Usually public corporations are shaped in order to maximize profit and market share. But Mozilla doesn't have to report to someone else, so no one forces them to spend money economically, especially as the Corporation is being controlled by the Foundation who hasn't primarily economics in mind, either.

Additionally, Mozilla has grown exponentially between 2007 and 2014 not only due to a superior product but also because IE was bad, and the web grew exponentially and thus browser usage grew exponentially, too.

Mozilla has inherited a large userbase, and they are in an extremely comfortable position where they can be lazy and do not experience any immediate consequences. Employees earn a lot at Mozilla. Mozilla's own post-mortem of the extension-outage has also hinted at a systemic mismangagement inside what is nowadays a pretty complex entanglement of different groups working on similar stuff while not communicating efficiently.

Mozilla has a leadership problem.

Their business-relationship is not with the users, but the search engines who want to monetize the user base, and due to the exclusive deal with Yahoo for 2015-2019, losing 80 million monthly users within 2 years did not translate to a loss in revenue, revenue actually continued to increase despite user loss. So why care?

I suspect the CEO just resigned because he knows that 2020+ will be extremely difficult for Mozilla, as the Yahoo deal is running out, and for the first time ever mozilla will have to spend more money than they recieve. Lack of money will also be the only real motivation for Mozilla to change fundamentally.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#94

Post by sandGorgon »

Actually what Firefox needs to be doing is doing more community devrel.

It's beyond ridiculous that Google's biggest rival Microsoft has a service called Skype (that competes with Google's Hangouts) and Skype Web only works on Chrome.

Seriously ? This is a massive fail for the Firefox devrel team if you can't get Microsoft on your side. Same case exists with many products.

This is pretty much the only reason I switch back to Chrome. It's far too inconvenient not to.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#95

Post by [deleted] »

brianpgordon wrote: post #57

> While I understand that they have to make money somehow I don't. I don't understand how Mozilla has over a thousand employees and over 500 million dollars in annual revenue. With that kind of money, Firefox should be absolutely dominating the browser space. They shouldn't be making Firefox worse with advertising in order to subsidize their flailing around trying to find traction in mobile or VR. It actually reminds…

[deleted]

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#96

Post by fiblye »

avinassh wrote: post #86

For me, I have found Firefox to drain my laptop's battery more (Macbook Pro, 2017) compared to Chrome (and Safari). Once it changes, I would gladly go back to using Firefox.

Firefox has been hilariously bad for Macs for as long as I can remember.

I refused to touch for over 15 years because it was incredibly slow each time I tried. Now that I'm trying to get out of Google's sphere of influence, I'm kind of forced back into it (Safari just doesn't feel right to me). Speed seems much better than it used to be and I can't really tell any difference between it and Chrome. Memory usage is an absolute disaster though. There are times where I only have 4 tabs of HN open and Firefox will be consuming over 9 GB of memory.

Right now I'm sitting at 3.6 GB used for just a couple tabs of programming documentation. Madness.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#97

Post by boomboomsubban »

>This seems like an extremely difficult but necessary change, considering how much of their income comes from Google.

In the statement listed, at most ~28% came from Google ad Yahoo paid them $375 million that year. I realize things have since changed, but they aren't as hopelessly tied to Google as people make them out to be.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#98

Post by 0xdeadb00f »

Tistron wrote: post #34

Two things has me almost dropping firefox and going over to chrome: - It still doesn't remember my credit card details, and is generally worse at filling out forms. - On mobile, I regularly experience that the cookie jar gets broken somehow and all my logins are broken which will work again by closing the browser down and starting it again. The only think keeping me on Fx is a sense of ethics, the same reason I don't…

> It still doesn't remember my credit card details

(Slightly off topic) Personally, I don't get this. I wouldn't store my credit card, even encrypted, on any device if I could manage not to. It seems way too convenient for me that my personal+sensitive info is just a click away from being put into a form. I get that it's stored securely but it still doesn't sit right.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#99

Post by jrugk »

ajdlinux wrote: post #79
pacavaca wrote: post #66

It has to freaking stop crashing first. And stop freezing my computer with just 20 tabs open (for 32gb of ram). And complete their password manager. And implement recent standards to make apps work. And... Yeah, I'm still using it instead of Chrome just because I want to depend less on Google, but dammit Chrome is better.

It has to stop taking 3 times as long to load Slack, or crashing/freezing when I'm using WebEx. Yes, the applications bear a lot of blame here, but they are the applications I am stuck with for business use.

>the applications bear a lot of blame here

...or Firefox simply has some performance problems.

Touching the DOM in Firefox is a terrible bottleneck, for example

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#100

Post by lhotkins »

brianpgordon wrote: post #57

> While I understand that they have to make money somehow I don't. I don't understand how Mozilla has over a thousand employees and over 500 million dollars in annual revenue. With that kind of money, Firefox should be absolutely dominating the browser space. They shouldn't be making Firefox worse with advertising in order to subsidize their flailing around trying to find traction in mobile or VR. It actually reminds…

> They shouldn't be making Firefox worse with advertising in order to subsidize their flailing around trying to find traction in mobile or VR.

Ofc no one likes adds, but you have to see why they’d like to diversify their sources of income rather than being almost completely dependent on Google, who also (whoops!) happens to be their biggest competitor.

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