Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

https://batsov.com/articles/2021/11/28/firefox-is-the-only-alternative/

by gmemstr • 5 years ago

1360 624 5 years ago

batsov.com

daviddever23box• 5 years ago

A discussion of WebKit and its features would make this far less clickbait-y: https://webkit.org/status

Noting, however, that I use Firefox and Thunderbird as my daily-driver applications, and Edge + Safari when I must.

raxxorrax2• 5 years ago

Firefox would fit neatly in the corporate world in my opinion. You can have a centrally administered configuration file and Firefox is indeed able to just use certificated from your OS. It is just a small toggle. Still, a bit of effort and maybe advertising would do wonders, because there are companies critical of Chrome that think data protection is worth more than personal advertising. I think Edge is trying to fit in here.

Sure, Edge can be configured by domain policies and that is easy too. For example disallowing https exceptions is a popular recent policy (that gets reverted pretty quickly).

technobabbler7• 5 years ago

It would be easier for companies (who aren't anti Google) to administer Chrome policy via their existing Google/Gmail accounts and Google Workspace. Profiles, sync, extensions, etc. can all be centrally administered. And also deployed to Chromebooks for certain users. All without having to manage the overhead of a minority browser with < 5% marketshare. The "I can't get this web app to work in Firefox, how do I install Chrome?" support calls probably outweigh any ideological preference for a libre browser.

Especially for any web shop... Firefox is even less relevant than Microsoft now and forcing it as a primary internal browser is a great way to alienate your company from end user experiences.

raxxorrax2• 5 years ago

I couldn't name you a single webapp that requires Chrome and it wouldn't fit our quality p expectations and would get booted. Apps that require a certain browser will cause problems in the future or force Chrome to become IE. Can you centrally administrate Google accounts? Because employees certainly aren't allowed to use their privat ones.

thrower1232• 5 years ago

What large companies use GMail like that?

Outside of corps ideologically opposed to using Office, like IBM and Oracle, I've almost never seen anybody that didn't run on Outlook. At least since Notes became abandonware anyway.

Nextgrid2• 5 years ago

Could you name any major websites/apps that break in Firefox but not in Chrome?

dspillett2• 5 years ago

Firefox would fit neatly in the corporate world in my opinion.

Lack of corp support is one of the things that harmed FF from what I saw. Until a few years ago it was not as easy to control FF via group policy¹ as it was Chrome, so FF didn't get a look in. Telling infrastructure managers “but you can do X instead and it is just as easy or easier” would fall on deaf ears because while as convenient in isolation it is still something different instead of integrating with what they did for everything else they permitted on their user machine builds.

¹ This has changed since, but too late.

tannhaeuser• 5 years ago

Among the points missing under the "I can attribute this decline to various factors" section is IMO that Moz/FF have managed to alienate their original user base/plugin developers to become "more like Chrome". Maybe that's an unfair thing to say, but I guess it doesn't matter anymore anyway.

Oddskar• 5 years ago

Which is hilarious since extensions are clearly something Chrome barely cares about at all as is obvious from the Chrome extension page where one can’t even search for extensions to install.

hobs• 5 years ago

It's not unfair to say, and the more they tried to do it the more they lost any differentiating feature they had to normal users and just became "slow Chrome".

prohobo• 5 years ago

What's wrong with using Chromium though? I understand most of the work being done on it is by Google, but do they control the direction of the project?

Skyy93• 5 years ago

As soon as you do most of the work you are influencing the direction. That is inevitable.

Google is also not known as the company as the company that just has the best for you in mind.

matbatt38• 5 years ago

Chromium features some google's telemetry

jarcane• 5 years ago

I've started using it as my main browser both in daily use and dev.

In the past I had trouble with client projects or dev tools only working in chrome, but I decided that the only way things get freer is to make myself fix those pain points when I come across them.

minimilian3• 5 years ago

I prefer typing to pointing -- and I like clean interfaces --, so I use the VIm-inspired but Chromium-based Qutebrowser; but maybe I should just use Firefox and let the inconvenience of pointing inspire me to browse less. Qutebrowser would -- at least alternatively -- use the Firefox backend if it could, but Mozilla has chosen not to make it usable by other browsers than Firefox.

zwkrt• 5 years ago

There are multiple capable vi plug-ins for Firefox so you don’t even need to self-flagellate

minimilian3• 5 years ago

I tried those in the past, but found they didn't work well. They also tended to break with every Firefox update.

yutijke2• 5 years ago

I feel the article misses how Firefox's inability to get a foothold on the mobile platform contributed to its decline. There are more people today using web browsers via mobile then desktop. In many poorer countries the first and only access to the open internet for the people is through chrome on Android.

I don't blame Mozilla for this though since they did not have a monopoly on a platform to capitalize on unlike the other players.

Sadly Safari seems to be the only other option.

For a long time Firefox has been dependent on Google for sponsorship. This is a toxic dependency that Firefox hasn't been able to rid itself of and is seeming increasingly less plausible as time goes by.

teekert• 5 years ago

I'd use FireFox in iOS if I had my extensions and containers available. Sadly FireFox isn't even able to make proper use of the system wide ad blocking method iOS offers (probably due to iOS). I found DDG browser to block stuff a lot better (and I like the UI more).

But FireFox on Android was perfect, at least it was until the latest UI update when suddenly they lost the notion of favorites (or, they were now hidden under "new tab" instead of available on touching the address bar) and you needed to open a new tab for just about anything. I'd still prefer it over Safari or Chrome though.

traveler016• 5 years ago

I paid Adguard and enable the DNS option, so basically I can pretty much use any browser that it will block my ads.

MrDresden2• 5 years ago

Android user (and dev) and I exclusively use Firefox. That also goes for my Linux and Mac desk-/laptops.

I actually do not enjoy using Chrome on my Android compared to the feel of the new Firefo client.

baud147258• 5 years ago

Personally I didn't really like the latest changes in the Firefox mobile UI, especially with how it's managing tabs, but I'm sticking with it. I have also to recognize that with recent updates, it has stopped crashing (or at least the frequency is way reduced).

yutijke2• 5 years ago

But you are not the average case. Firefox users on mobile are the exception and are very few in number.

For most people the internet, Google and Chrome are one and the same.

GekkePrutser6• 5 years ago

I use Firefox on Android, it works pretty good. Having dark reader and uBlock Origin on mobile is a big plus. But I do hate the lack of configuration options, pull-to-refresh, and their need to 'approve' extensions and in particular not allowing any kind of sideloading of extensions. For this reason I can't use some of the extensions I like (because they won't allow them in the firefox store either). This is in particular one that bypasses paywalls. I assume the google deal has a lot to do with that.

I wish they would just charge for Firefox sync. The users that are left mostly use it for privacy reasons and they know that privacy costs money.

Safari is not an option for me, I use all platforms but I want the same browser on every platform which means no safari :)

TobTobXX• 5 years ago

On FF nightly you can install any addon.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/find-and-install-add-on...

nicoburns2• 5 years ago

I believe they've actually implemented pull-to-refresh now.

NoGravitas6• 5 years ago

Recent Nightly releases have pull-to-refresh, and you can jump through hoops to install all extensions on the mozilla site (not sure about side-loading).

Brakenshire• 5 years ago

I was surprised Mozilla gave up on Servo before realising its potential, particularly for a parallel layout engine, because that could have been a massive advantage on mobile, especially on cheap smartphones which have many cores but each low performance.

cxr• 5 years ago

they did not have a monopoly on a platform to capitalize on unlike the other players

Considering how poorly pretty much every vendor who wasn't named "Apple" was fumbling around trying to layer negative value added customizations on top of Android in the early days (and continued doing so for years), there was a ripe opportunity to ship a "Mozilla mobile" consisting of a stock Android device + Firefox. Of course, the powers that be predictably blew it.

NoGravitas6• 5 years ago

Firefox on Android is absolutely excellent these days, but it still shows how Mozilla is really hesitant to embrace it. It's the only mobile browser with really adequate ad-blocking, thanks to extension support. There are a lot of other extensions which are really useful on mobile that aren't on the recommended list, though. I can understand why they restrict extensions (some don't have a viable UI for mobile or would require significant changes), but I recently went through the hoops to install non-approved extensions, and having Privacy Redirect and Stylus are life-changers.

soundnote14• 5 years ago

Both Vivaldi and Brave have adblockers built in by default, and Brave's both won't get fucked over by Manifest v3 (since they're part of the browser) and do CNAME uncloaking, the thing that makes uBO better on Firefox than Chromium.

DeathArrow6• 5 years ago

Clearly, that market share was lost solely to Chrome & co.3 I can attribute this decline to various factors:
Google’s massive development resources and marketing machine. Most people not thinking about the long-term ramifications of ending up in a market with a single vendor in it. Firefox losing its status of a shiny new thing over the years. Mozilla’s inability to capitalize on the popularity of Firefox in the past. I think almost all of their revenue came from a search deal with Google.

The true reasons Firefox lost market share are:

1. Firefox has become a mess

2. Mozilla is terribly mismanaged

To see Firefox thrive, we have to push towards management change while there's still something to be saved or by forking Firefox

vvoyer• 5 years ago

The true reasons Firefox lost market share

I would say:

The true reasons Firefox lost market share is because we, developer & tech people started to install Chrome on family computers instead of Firefox because it was safer & faster (way way faster). And we never came back from it.

Performance is a feature.

traveler016• 5 years ago

Why would I even want to install Firefox on my families computer? The thing is, I want them to have a long term, good working solution that doesn't become a pain in my ass. Firefox isn't very stable for non-tech people, that's the sad truth. Mozilla is badly missmanaged, they are killing Mozilla and specially Firefox. Things need to change, badly.

DeathArrow6• 5 years ago

The true reasons Firefox lost market share is because we, developer & tech people started to install Chrome on family computers instead of Firefox because it was safer & faster (way way faster). And we never came back from it.

Which comes down to the reasons I've already stated.

Jnr• 5 years ago

I agree with this opinion.

When Chrome came out, it was way better. Now I don't really see big difference in performance, they have similar extensions, frequent updates, sync, etc.

I prefer Firefox but I don't really need to install it on family computers because whatever browser they use is probably good enough.

tunap• 5 years ago

"developer & tech people started to install Chrome on family computers instead of Firefox..."

I'm not so certain those numbers compare with the 10s of millions of people(100s?) who's default browser was hijacked by nefarious bundles in every 3rd party installer under the sun back in the 2000s and early 2010s.. Those people knew no better and have been conditioned(or just don't care) to continue whatever gets them interneting.

isaiahg2• 5 years ago

Those reasons might have applied half a decade ago. I was one of the early adopters of chrome and I've since switched back to Firefox for a better experience

AussieWog93• 5 years ago

or by forking Firefox

Unfortunately I don't think this will help. If their market share is already low, creating multiple forks makes it even harder for devs to target.

Simply look at desktop software support on Linux for an example of why this doesn't work.

dralley8• 5 years ago

Do you truly, honestly believe that being preinstalled on Android and ChromeOS, advertised specifically to Firefox users on the homepage of the #1 most visited website in the world (google.com, and it was literally the only ad that has ever been allowed there), and shoved into all kinds of installers for Antivirus, Adobe, Java and so on with the "make Chrome my default browser" button automatically checked --- all of that had nothing to do with the "true reason" Firefox has been trending down?

The marketing campaign for Chrome alone, if it is even possible to assign a dollar value to it, would have cost billions of dollars for anyone other than Google.

asdff2• 5 years ago

End users don't care about the management of firefox being messy or not. They install the web browsers that are advertised at them. Every time they go to a youtube link or to their gmail inbox there is a banner ad to install google chrome. Corporate IT now installs google chrome by default on work hardware at a lot of organizations because it works out of the box with their google business products, so you are familiar with google chrome from the workplace or even in schools with chromebooks now too. Google has millions of dollars more to blow than Mozilla at this sort of arms race and its shown in the market share.

dazag• 5 years ago

There is one thing I don't understand from the article. What is that he is so afraid of?that the website becomes more standarized and developers don't need to make a website for 5 different browsers? Or that because of that users will have less problems? Is that such a big deal to make most of the browsers dependent on chromium? Isn't chromium open source and tomorrow anyone could create a better browser? I use Vivaldi, can't be happier.... Some people seem to be worry about a lot of stuff

samhw2• 5 years ago

It's not viable to maintain an open source browser without a large team of engineers. Chromium would likely die if Google abandoned it.

topspin• 5 years ago

"Chromium would likely die if Google abandoned it."

I believe that is highly unlikely. At root the Blink engine is actively supported by several big tech heavyweights. Microsoft Edge is based on it. A rarely mentioned but important derivative browser is Silk (Fire tablets etc.) that Amazon develops. Then there are a bunch of smaller fish with Brave leading that pack.

I think the engine would survive just fine without Google. There was a time when you're view held, but that time has past.

_moof• 5 years ago

As someone who lived through the previous browser monopoly (MSIE), let me assure you that giving control over the entire web to one company is bad for everyone. Google didn't make Chrome out of the goodness of their hearts.

moritonal• 5 years ago

Just as a data-point, I forced myself to use Firefox on Mobile and Desktop in my personal life, and Chrome at work.

* Firefox is fine, the sync works well, I don't see any of the drama around management or new-tab or search being an issue, and I get a pile of benefits like sandboxing and better ad-control.

* Chrome is faster, but it also has literal billions of investment.

There really isn't that much drama about this? Sure I wish Firefox had more market share, but it also runs on a fraction of Chrome's budget, so it's never going to be as good, and I can't judge people for not caring about helping Google.

nisegami• 5 years ago

I've held the same view as the author for some time now. The popularity of "ungoogled-chromium" in some corners of the internet has always struck me as trading the data collection aspect of chrome for furthering the chromium hegemony even further. Same goes for Vivaldi and Brave.

GekkePrutser6• 5 years ago

I really love Firefox still.. Though they are starting to annoy me. Especially with GUI changes and the lack of customisation thereof. Like Compact mode disappearing. For the most used app on most desktops, customisation is super important. I think they're jumping on the 'opinionated software' bandwagon too much.

It still has some powerful features though, like E2E encrypted sync, multi-account containers etc. I'll keep using it. But they're aiming at the mainstream too much which has already given up on them. They need to win back the enthusiasts first instead of alienating us. Only then does it make sense to thing about mainstream adoption again.

Y_Y2• 5 years ago

You can still re-enable compact mode through about:config (at time of writing). It will nag you not to, but that's all.

formerly_proven• 5 years ago

You can still re-enable X through about:config

Meaning X will be removed within ~three versions.

GekkePrutser6• 5 years ago

I know and I've done this, but the writing is on the wall.. It may disappear at some point and that just annoys me because it's really valuable IMO. It makes me unsure if I want to keep using it when that happens. If they aren't planning to remove it, why remove the UI button for it?

And it just looks so bulky with compact mode off. I tried to get used to it but no. I actually used it without compact mode before, but with the latest version the compact mode is using about the same vertical space as the old normal mode :)

gadrev• 5 years ago

I didn't know/remember about this, just enabled it, great to know!

Instructions: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/compact-mode-workaround...

Now I have some extra vertical pixels :)

maccolgan• 5 years ago

The day Firefox disables my one-line UI is the day I leave Firefox permanently, containers are cool and all but I'll live with it.

death_syn• 5 years ago

As long as Chrom(e|ium) isn't limited to one architecture/platform like MSIE was, I don't see this as a problem. I'm using Chromium on my Raspberry Pi right now to post this. I could never dream of doing such a thing 20 years ago. I'd have to hope someone hadn't broken the site for Mozilla and that it wouldn't crash repeatedly. The MSIE-dominant days were bad, but we're nowhere near that now.

parhamn2• 5 years ago

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 little to make the engine usable outside of Firefox.

Now I'm sure there are a variety of savory and unsavory things that led here, but building that stuff out seems like a good way to grow the ecosystem. At least they would've had a chance at capturing the Brave/Opera/Edge/etc market and those seats at the committees.

This isn't to say that I'm not worried about these standards merging like this. I've spent many hours working out weird chromium only behaviors that websites rely on these days to do things (and egregiously so if they detect an agent remotely resembling chrome).

gjvc2• 5 years ago

... weird chromium only behaviors that websites rely on these days to do things (and egregiously so if they detect an agent remotely resembling chrome).

This sounds like the IE6 disaster all over again.

peakaboo• 5 years ago

Plenty of people said this would happen when chrome started dominating, but since people refused to switch browsers, here we are.

parhamn2• 5 years ago

oh man. I need to find some time to write about how bad it is.

The gnarliness spans the whole stack. From weird java-applet like API escalation behavior if chrome is detected (e.g. Google properties feature gate a ton around this) to how there is not even a clear way to get a DRM license for a custom browser without waiting for Google indefinitely [1].

Here's a challenge: fire up a chromium fork and get it to run a relaxed DRM website like Netflix. If you get that far now try loading HBOMax with their fingerprinting/DRM protection on top. I'm not even sure it'd be possible in FF (at least without some DRM piggy backing if there isn't one).

[1] https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/google-widevine-blocked...

piva00• 5 years ago

Yup, as someone who worked on fixing issues with IE5/IE6/IE7 behaviours I definitely feel the slow burning fire of Chrome repeating that whole saga once again. And probably in a much more painful way given the explosive growth of the internet and browsers since the early 2000s (I started working with web dev around 2005).

Santosh83• 5 years ago

I wonder how difficult would be an open source community project whose explicit aim would be to take the Firefox code base and make it more modular and embeddable, like Chromium? Would it be too much work for a community effort?

rocqua• 5 years ago

Electron, but based on Firefox instead of chrome.

Not the most appealing idea, but an interesting one. Might help move more people to essentially using Firefox.

occamrazor• 5 years ago

Even if possible, such an initiative could only be successful if Mozilla supports it otherwise the “new” code will quickly go out of sync with the Firefox codebase.

zesterer3• 5 years ago

Firefox, while open source, doesn't provide footing for the community to build browser forks

Say hello to https://servo.org/.

shp0ngle• 5 years ago

Wasn't Servo team disbanded?

dralley8• 5 years ago

Servo wasn't a fork, nor was it meaningfully a "community" project - sure there were community contributors (it was a fun project to hack on) but most of the meaty work was being done by Mozilla employees.

SturgeonsLaw2• 5 years ago

That's a real missed opportunity. Firefox would have made a fantastic embedded webview, and could have plausibly become the core of Electron. Back when webviews were IE, with atrocious Javascript support and all the usual IE quirks, Firefox was a superior product and interconnecting with other software is very in line with the open source ethos.

berkes• 5 years ago

That opportunity is still there.

Enough features to distinguish on, enough political/managerial reasons for choosing an independent FLOSS engine over one controlled by Google.

Sure, Edge/MS won't move to this engine anywhere soon. Nor will Brave switch over tomorrow, or electron rebuild around their tooling. But the world is full or "HTML-2-PDF renderers, headless testing toolkits, (embedded) webview-libraries or electron-alike toolkits, which are now almost all exclusively Chromium based.

qw• 5 years ago

I think that is a problem many open source programs have, and could improve.

A lot of GUI based programs should think of implementing parts of it as a library others can use. I remember early Git implementations in IDEs where they just ran git commands in the background and parsed the command line output. Imagine if the same had been done with SQLite, would it still be as popular today?

I don't have much experience with creating desktop software, but it seems to me that separating the GUI from the "engine" would bring other benefits too.

I have often looked at OSS and wanted to use parts of it myself. An email client might have a really good mail parser that handles encoding, attachments etc. But decoupling it from the rest of the program would take too much time.

Maxburn• 5 years ago

As a Vivaldi user I would really like to see more growth in this area. There are some great ideas in browser forks and I would like to enable them.

imbnwa• 5 years ago

They had that with XUL and threw it all away. I remember using a XUL music player called Songbird back in the day

foresto• 5 years ago

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

Y_Y2• 5 years ago

Can I pay for Firefox? Even better I'd love to pay to have someone finish off Servo.

jefftk4• 5 years ago

Not really. You can donate to the Mozilla Foundation, but they will use your money for outreach and advocacy, not Firefox.

72deluxe3• 5 years ago

This seems to be a repeat of the GNOME issues years and years and years ago where people would complain that donations were used to try and encourage women to program instead of spending it on infrastructure etc. I seem to remember people who complained about it were shouted down as mysogenist.

It seems the organisations forget why they're here - to write software, not to try and solve all of mankind's issues and injustices. The scope becomes too broad and unfocused.

sfink9• 5 years ago

The only direct way currently is to pay for associated products like Firefox VPN, assuming it's available in your region. That money will go directly to Mozilla Corporation, which develops Firefox. Donations go to Mozilla Foundation, which does advocacy and various world-improving things (IMO). Mozilla Corporation cannot legally accept direct donations IIUC. I think it'd be a money laundering loophole or something?

Servo was never going to grow into a complete browser, and much of it was absorbed into Gecko (the Firefox codebase). But I agree, it would be great to have the Servo idea pushed further forward.

SkeuomorphicBee• 5 years ago

I've been using Firefox exclusively on desktop and mobile for a few years now, and it is quite good. Lighter that Chrome (good because I'm a bit of a cheapskate when it comes to hardware), everything works, and it is quick. And they finally got their Linux support up to par (in the late 00s early 10s, Firefox for Linux was a forgotten stepchild, missing most of the newer features and integration present in the other platforms).

resonious2• 5 years ago

I used to hold the same opinion: Google controls the world because everything is Blink/Chromium based! Must use Firefox to protest!

Then I looked closer look at the history of Chromium and Blink.

The reality is that a lot of the other "Chromium-based" browsers actually only use the Blink renderer. They don't use many (if any) other Chromium components other than probably V8.

In ancient times, Blink itself was a fork of Webkit. So, does that mean Apple controls everything?? But Webkit actually came from KDE's KHTML, didn't it.. Linux wins...

The kicker for me is: Blink and V8 are open source, and anyone can fork them at any time. Because of this, Microsoft, Oracle, Brave - every "Chromium" based browser vendor is contributing code. So does Google really control us that much? Blink and V8 make a rock solid browser core and are being worked on by a lot of companies, not just Google. It's like the Linux kernel - kind of a marvel of open source. Not something we need to fight against so viciously, in my opinion.

(Edit: "rock solid" might sound extreme to some... The HTML and JS specs are absurdly complex to the point where there's basically no hope of anyone implementing them from 0. There's a lot of bloat in modern web, no doubt. But if you're really worried about crazy JS features cluttering your browsing experience, you can go clone the Chromium source and pull out the crap you don't like.)

sime20092• 5 years ago

True. People forgot that Microsoft had been developing its own browser for years before they moved to Chromium. That team and expertise didn't just disappear. They've been doing significant work in that code base. See https://twitter.com/ericlaw/status/1329200077517295618 from a year ago. Having that technical power does give them quite a lot of control over the code base which can help balance the political power here.

madc• 5 years ago

No web developer old enough will ever forget, I promise you that.

dralley8• 5 years ago

But given the recent developments with Edge, I'm not sure if Microsoft's political power is of much practical benefit to the community.

zesterer3• 5 years ago

So does Google really control us that much?

Yes. Contributing code to something doesn't mean that you suddenly control the direction of that thing. Google still makes the big decisions about what gets to enter the codebase: which web features to support, which ones to deprecate, how to interpret standards, and how to slowly align the web with their own financial incentives.

jasode• 5 years ago

Yes. Contributing code to something doesn't mean that you suddenly control the direction of that thing.

I think the idea of gp's point about others forking code means the forkers can also influence the code because they control the fork.

Otherwise, if we take your comment at face value, we'd conclude that Google's contributions to Webkit means it can't "suddenly control the direction" of Apple's Webkit. That's true, but also becomes irrelevant because Google controls its fork of "Blink".

In other words, does Apple's Webkit control us that much? No, because it seems like Google's Blink/Chromium is sufficiently independent. If we go back farther in the timeline, are we concerned that KHTML controls us? No, because it seems like Apple's fork of Webkit is independent and not beholden to KHTML decisions.

If Microsoft really wanted to, it seems like they have the resources to do what Apple did to KHTML and what Chrome did to Webkit.

DeathArrow6• 5 years ago

I used to hold the same opinion: Google controls the world because everything is Blink/Chromium based! Must use Firefox to protest!

The end users don't care about who controls what. They care about having a simple, fast browser who just works.

dotancohen• 5 years ago

  > They care about having a simple, fast browser who just works.

And the "just works" part won't happen without the other browsers' competition. It will become "just works with other Google products, for those who hold the same values as Google holds".

addicted2• 5 years ago

People said this about IE as well.

In fact, what's often forgotten is that even before MS's illegal monopolization, IE dominated Netscape because it was genuinely better.

But a few short years later it was regular end users who were suffering due to IE and it's lack of competition, which led to MS sleeping on it and letting security issues (both technical and social) pile up.

balaji1• 5 years ago

Exactly. So what if Google controls the internet experience through Chromium. The user will have to pay someone eventually. Firefox is not a free magic bullet.

On the other hand, much bigger problems in the world, so we go build something else instead of reinventing what Google has already built.

chupasaurus• 5 years ago

KDE now uses Blink to render KHTML IIRC.

lillecarl4• 5 years ago

KDE relies heavily on the Qt libraries and Qt is using Blink in their QtWebEngine[1]. There's even a web browser called Falkon (The KDE browser, kind of) that uses this library[2].

[1] https://wiki.qt.io/QtWebEngine

[2] https://www.falkon.org/about/

fault15• 5 years ago

Almost all of Blink has been rewritten from the time of the fork from webkit.

and almost all of Webkit has been rewritten from the time of the fork from khtml.

RicardoLuis0• 5 years ago

The HTML and JS specs are absurdly complex to the point where there's basically no hope of anyone implementing them from 0

That's actually being done in the Serenity OS project! HTML renderer, JS interpreter, and Web Browser, from scratch:

https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMOpZvQB55beChggmvk-s...

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMOpZvQB55be0Nfytz9q2...

TeeWEE• 5 years ago

Totally agree. I was using Firefox until recently. After they announced their Rust based parallel engines I started using it.

But i stopped using it now the Mozilla Foundation is having hard times surviving....

The big problem is the fact that Google has sooo much money... We need a Twitter, a Facebook, or another company with a big cash cow to seriously support a different browser engine.

jillesvangurp• 5 years ago

I use Firefox and am pretty happy with. It seems a lot of people are complaining/obsessing about its market share or insisting that chrome is the way to go. All not that relevant. It's fine. It has more than enough market share that most companies can't afford to ignore it. That's all that matters. As long as that's the case you can choose to use it or not. The point is that you still have a choice.

Also market share varies by region. Chrome and Safari are a bit over represented in the US and under represented in e.g. Germany.

And if people want to use edge, chromium, brave, or get their Chrome experience straight from Google, also fine. IMHO you are dependent on Google either way because it's mostly them doing the heavy lifting on the internals and setting the agenda/roadmap for that. I hear good things about Safari too. Though, I mostly use it to figure out why stuff that works in Firefox and Chrome doesn't work there. That seems to be a recurring annoyance I have to deal with.

From my point of view, having three browser engines (Chrome, Safari, and Firefox) is better than just having Chrome and Safari. At worst, it keeps the other two a bit more honest. Especially Google seems to need to have their arm twisted a lot more to actually do the right things.

If people don't like their browsers, maybe go and fix them? If you can't, pick the one that best caters to your need and be grateful for what you get for free.

flohofwoe• 5 years ago

Doesn't Safari have the same relationship to WebKit as Chrome to Chromium? What's preventing other browsers to use WebKit instead of Chromium and make the open source browser engine competition a bit more lively?

worldsayshi• 5 years ago

I would assume that the answer is that the incentives for competing that way are small and maintaining a browser is expensive?

You would have to rely on donations. Which gives me an idea that probably already exists: a kickstarter/patreon alternative for recurring donations. Recurring donations won't start until there are enough for continuous funding of the project.

dna_polymerase• 5 years ago

I wonder when Google will finally pull the plug on Mozilla. At 4.0% market share they can't deliver that much search volume to justify spending millions on their incredibly bad management.

Qem2• 5 years ago

Probably never, just to keep antitrust action at bay. Better to have a small market share competitor on life support than to be labeled a monopoly.

ddtaylor• 5 years ago

FWIW Mozilla is doing everything they can to drive us FF users away.

samwillis5• 5 years ago

Firefox is compromised by the fact it’s core active users are also its largest liability. It’s the innovators dilemma. They want it to (more or less) stay the same and not move forward and make changes to compete with Chrome. Whereas for them to achieve a larger market share it needs a radical overhaul. Really what Mozilla need to do is build a “new browser” called something different and put their weight behind that. I thought they were on that path with Servo and the HTML based UI they were developing for it, but I think they bit off more than they could chew and did not move quickly enough.

The tight relationship between rendering engine and browser has been broken by Chrome and its “children” (and in some way also by Apples enforced usage of their WebKit implementation in ios). Mozilla need to follow suit in order to survive, rip that rendering engine out, build a new browser and a “browser toolkit” to let other people build their own.

netizen-936824• 5 years ago

This sounds like a broad generalization. I have been a Firefox user for many years and I'm happy to see it compete with updates. I like seeing it change.

zesterer3• 5 years ago

They want it to (not or less) stay the same and not move forward

I don't think this is true at all. Anecdotally, a lot of Firefox users have been very receptive towards recent changes. Quantum was a huge success and I know very few people that miss the old Firefox with all of its jank.

Mozilla need to follow suit in order to survive, rip that rendering engine out, build a new browser and a “browser toolkit” to let other people build their own

This is precisely what Servo is: https://servo.org/. Mozilla know what they're doing.

samwillis5• 5 years ago

I believe they laid off the Servo development team?

Also they moved way to slowly with Servo, starting it as a research project was correct. But they should have gone all in on it years ago.

I know they have taken parts of it and folded them into Firefox, but it should have been the the other way round. Take the bits of Firefox they could and combine them into something new with Servo.

_wolfie_• 5 years ago

Wasn't lot of servo team fired? Or was that some other team? I remember reading about lot of rust people being let go.

chrisseaton• 5 years ago

This is precisely what Servo is

Great example - because Mozilla binned Servo!

https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/1295771633320448001

hansel_der• 5 years ago

I know very few people that miss the old Firefox with all of its jank.

one vote for the old FF because tabKitv2 is unsurpassed

CapitalistCartr• 5 years ago

I use Firefox for the obvious reasons, but I desperately want it to be as polished as Chrome, which it is a far cry from, especially on Android.

smt88• 5 years ago

I have been using FF on Android exclusively for 3+ years and never need to switch to Chrome.

In fact, switching to Chrome is agonizing because I lose my adblocker.

cout2• 5 years ago

What makes Firefox seem less polished to you than chrome? When I use chrome, the feeling I get is one of standing in an unfurnished office space with white walls and few windows. To me, that is the opposite of polished.

Firefox in comparison feels like being in a grand old house that was built before plumbing and electricity. You can tell that it used to be beautiful and polished, but the luster has faded over time.

howinteresting• 5 years ago

Both ad blocking and password manager support are much better on Firefox/Android than on Chrome.

xg15• 5 years ago

Maybe we should better ask the question why a browser dupoly is bad and what we expect from a competing browser.

I think the core goal is influence: The ability to meaningfully change the web ecosystem or counteract changes that would be harmful.

Of course market share is necessary for influence, but I don't think it's sufficient: If Firefox gained a larger market share but at the cost permanently catching up to Chrome, I don't think a lot would be won.

pizza234• 5 years ago

Firefox is compromised by the fact it’s core active users are also its largest liability. It’s the innovators dilemma. They want it to (more or less) stay the same

How much of the users are actually technical?

The Firefox user share is frequently seen through the lens of technical features, however, I have the suspicion that the vast majority of the audience is regular users who have no idea of anything technical.

throw8932894• 5 years ago

Really what Mozilla need to do is build a “new browser” called something different and put their weight behind that

Mozilla brand has value in privacy, not browsers. It could start VPN, cloud services, remote backups, smart home, security cameras... Even Android phones with stamp from Mozilla would be great.

There are no money in browsers, it is basically a feed tube from big corporation to its drones. Mozilla should not sponsor large corporations.

minimilian3• 5 years ago

The tight relationship between rendering engine and browser has been broken by Chrome and its “children” (and in some way also by Apples enforced usage of their WebKit implementation in ios). Mozilla need to follow suit in order to survive, rip that rendering engine out, build a new browser and a “browser toolkit” to let other people build their own.

Exactly. I would really like to use something google-free, but the interface of Qutebrowser is too good, and Qutebrowser can't use Mozilla's rendering engine, even though the developers would like to.

pdenton• 5 years ago

    > Mozilla need to [...] build a new browser

See The Book of Mozilla, chapter 11.

    >and a “browser toolkit” to let other people build their own

XULRunner was essentially this.

eloisant• 5 years ago

XULRunner was mostly like Electron before Electron.

And it could have take succeeded before Electron arrived if Mozilla didn't decide to let the project die.

DoingIsLearning• 5 years ago

They want it to (more or less) stay the same and not move forward and make changes to compete with Chrome.

Most of the negative feedback from users comes from two paths, changes that break add-ons, changes that remove customization. Either of those two effectively reduce the value proposition, so I think negative feedback is granted.

The problem most 'core' users have is this UX ethos that some how we are not having more MAUs because we fail to "make changes to compete with Chrome". This has penetrated the Firefox team and has lead to a copy cat of UX features from Chrome and a 'dummyfication' of UX.

The reason Firefox is unable to compete with Chrome or Edge is not because of missing features or performance. Both Firefox and Edge have million dollar advertisement and OEM agreements. Talk to anybody on the street and everyone and their dog will know Chrome, Firefox not so much. The average users will use whatever is pre-installed. They will not go out of their way because of Chrome-like features.

This causality that somehow Firefox is missing market share because of features or UX is flawed. Firefox is playing a Goliath and David game, with billion dollar revenue companies. Accepting and embracing it's niche nature is a necessary first step.

samwillis5• 5 years ago

I can see that, I was using fairly broad strokes in first part of my original comment.

I think it’s the second part that is more important than my initial (potentially unfair) generalisation.

In order to fund further development of gecko it needs to become a competitor to WebKit/blink and grab that market share in this new world of many browser front ends that are cropping up. Explore new business models, for example sign revenue share agreements with new browser developers in exchange for supporting (or even helping with initial funding) their development.

Miner49er• 5 years ago

The problem is that the web has gotten way too complicated. We're approaching the point where only trillion dollar companies are producing rendering engines. No open source project will ever likely be able to catch up and compete if Firefox can't.

It's time to consider stopping to try and save the standard web, and start looking at alternatives like Gemini for a non-corporate controlled alternative.

unnouinceput• 5 years ago

I switched to Firefox over 2 years ago, after using Chrome for more than 10 years. And while as a user I have my entire household converted to Firefox, as a developer I go with Chromium whenever I need to plug a shameless browser component in my projects. Why? Because Firefox does NOT have the equivalent!!! Why they won't do the same? I'll switch in a second to them instead of using Chromium. My 2 cents.

pragnesh• 5 years ago

I switched to firefox already and happy with it.

cehrlich• 5 years ago

I recently switched back to Firefox after using Chrome and Edge as my main browsers for the past couple of years. So far:

* Performance feels better. Both in terms of being more lean in everyday use, and in not having random issues where CPU/Memory spikes for seemingly no reason.

* I'm sure there are websites that don't work with Firefox, but I haven't found any yet.

* I don't like that tabs in the tab bar are roundrects instead of "connecting" to the content, but it's no big deal I guess.

* Other than that I've basically not noticed that I'm using a different browser, which I mean in the best way possible.

I'm going to continue using it for as long as possible, because while I think Mozilla has made some bad decisions in the past I strongly believe in their mission overall.

fma• 5 years ago

I've been outta the loop on the whole Firefox bad, Firefox declining and what decisions they made. I've used Firefox for the past many years after switching from Chrome. I'm not a huge privacy encrypt the world type person. I don't even use Duck Duck Go...but it makes the most sense to me that the app I use the most should not be tied to Google.

There is a webapp I use that has a chat feature and causes high CPU consumption on Firefox. It's the only app I know. I'll switch to Chrome if I use it.

Yizahi• 5 years ago

That's all true. At the same time people on HN of all places still seriously advertise Chrome clones as if they were a complete alternatives for a Google monopoly. I've lost hope and count the days until either Gecko/Quantum will go down or biggest websites will stop supporting it. I'm already encountering at least one not working website every few months, one of them was my bank portal (BNP subsidiary, not some out of the woods small bank).

NoboruWataya• 5 years ago

It's a depressing situation, particularly knowing that Firefox is pretty much kept alive at Google's whim. It makes one seriously wonder whether it is feasible at all to maintain an independent open-source web browser in 2021. People tend to blame Mozilla's management and I'm sure there have been management failures but I'm not sure what they could do to make Firefox a thriving, independent, sustainable browser. It seems that the market niche of tech-capable people who value privacy and customisation over a simplified UX is not capable of sustaining Firefox on its own. So Mozilla tries to move in Chrome's direction, removing configuration options and "dumbing down" the UI, which frustrates its existing user base (including me) while apparently also failing to eat into Chrome's market share.

So what to do? Go back to being the quirky, heavily configurable browser we all know and love? That would be great for me, but even assuming Mozilla can afford to do that now (greater configurability leads to greater code complexity and therefore greater maintenance costs), experience seems to suggest it won't be enough to allow Mozilla grow its market share to a sustainable level.

Finally, and this is a bit of a tangent, but I've never quite understood why Mozilla got such a hard time from users about telemetry. I understand that telemetry is in general something to be suspicious of, but we're not talking about handing your data over to Google so they can target you with ads; we're talking about sharing technical data with a non-profit organisation to help them maintain and improve the browser you rely on. Mozilla are removing a feature you use daily? Okay, did you enable the telemetry that lets them know you use it? Receiving and analysing user data is increasingly important to delivering a good user experience. If open-source projects can't access the same data as proprietary ones do, we can't expect them to be able to react to user demands in the same way, and so we can't expect them to be able to compete in today's market.

m-p-32• 5 years ago

IMO they're in a good position where then can include deep-rooted privacy services on which they could (and already do in some) capitalize.

for example Mozilla VPN and Firefox Relay which added a premium version with unlimited aliases and your own @*.mozmail.com subdomain.

If they can find a way to promote themselves as a leader of Internet privacy with well-integrated servoces, and from which they can get a revenue from it then at least they'll gain some independence.

aorth• 5 years ago

Relay

I started using Relay recently and it seems useful. I'll subscribe. I hope they can get a few hundred thousand paying users there...

bool3max• 5 years ago

I have to strongly agree with your last point - I also never understood the massive hard-on that the technical user-base has against useful telemetry. Perhaps it's just the loud minority, but to me it seems that most of them have never worked on an user-facing product (for-profit or not).

Yes, users can themselves explicitly communicate feedback regarding the product or its features, and no, most of them don't do that. That's why telemetry is useful.

ocdtrekkie• 5 years ago

Believe me, I understand the appeal. Yesterday we were discussing something dropping support for some platforms from an open source project and the issue is... we have no way of determining how many installs are on such platforms.

Telemetry would fix this, but it's not our right to collect data from other people's machines. So our best bet would be to detect the condition we expect to cause problems, notify them in advance, and allow time for feedback before implementing a change.

Is it less pretty and a worse user experience than telemetry? Absolutely. But when you realize you have no right to data collection on someone else's machine, telemetry isn't a viable option, and we would betray people's trust by doing it.

sce• 5 years ago

I have to strongly agree with your last point - I also never understood the massive hard-on that the technical user-base has against useful telemetry.

I think it would be far less hostility if we as users got access to the information ourselves. E.g. I would think it would be very useful to see stats on which features I'm using in firefox, how often, which features I'm not using, how many tabs I have (compared to the average user) etc., and I would be much more happy to share that data with firefox if I can see it first.

badsectoracula• 5 years ago

I also never understood the massive hard-on that the technical user-base has against useful telemetry.

People don't want to be spied on. Yes, you can find positive uses for it, but you can find positive uses for many negative technologies. If anything some of the most pervasive negative technologies also have positive uses to sweeten the pill (or even give the impression that this is a sweet and not a pill you are swallowing).

_jal2• 5 years ago

I also never understood the massive hard-on that the technical user-base has against useful telemetry.
it seems that most of them have never worked on an user-facing product

If you have worked on user-facing products, then I think you do understand. I think you just don't like the answer.

Here it is in a nutshell: In the general case, how do you distinguish 'telemetry' from 'surveillance'?

And the answer is you can't, because the difference between 'telemetry' and 'surveillance' lies in the intent of the consumer of that data. Technically useful information collected in good faith today can become intrusive surveillance tomorrow with a court order, or business pivot, or just a bored insider & lack controls.

Now consider the fact that the author of every stupid new piece of code out there now seems to think it is so special it deserves to be allowed to send... who knows what back to some opaque collection endpoint as the cost of executing.

The only reactions in response to this mess that don't cost a huge amount of overhead are "block everything" and "have your way with me". Guess which a technically inclined user picks.

ineedasername• 5 years ago

In general for applications, I usually say no to telemetry because I don't know exactly what data is being captured and how much they're stretching the truth on what it will be used for.

GoblinSlayer• 5 years ago

I work on a user-facing product and our users don't hesitate to provide feedback on stuff like long click sequences or bad keyboard navigation.

In case of mozilla specifically telemetry didn't help them to not destroy firefox's UI.

pdimitar2• 5 years ago

I also never understood the massive hard-on that the technical user-base has against useful telemetry

Leaving your veiled insult aside, I think it's pretty easy to see but you don't want to listen to it. Namely: telemetry and surveillance are literally the same thing and the only difference lies in the goodwill of the steward of the data.

I believe we've been witnesses, dozens of times, here on HN, about yet another "private data leak" because some company can't be bothered to hire an intern for $2000 a month to do proper data and security hygiene of some meager 3-4 disks that don't even total 10TB.

So why should I trust companies by default to take good care of my data AND to use them for good only, when all the historical evidence points at them being unable to do either? Shouldn't I take the matter in my own hands? I answered yes and so I did. My PiHole black-holes anything such I can think of and until that gets criminalized I'll be freely admitting it anytime when asked.

michaelt• 5 years ago

I also never understood the massive hard-on that the technical user-base has against useful telemetry.

Once upon a time, Firefox probably had a normal ratio of privacy-conscious users to privacy-indifferent users.

But if the privacy-indifferent users are increasingly lost to Chrome, FF is probably left with an unusually privacy-conscious userbase.

yjftsjthsd-h2• 5 years ago

I also never understood the massive hard-on that the technical user-base has against useful telemetry.

I'll leave it to others to argue why it's a privacy problem, but I'd like to push back on the "useful" and "feedback" arguments. It's appealing to say "X% of our users use this; we should prioritize it", but Mozilla has a charming history of saying "only Y% of users use this feature; we'll remove it", and for bonus points, "after we pushed this option into a really obscure sub-menu, nobody uses it, so now we can remove it while claiming that nobody cares". That is, telemetry isn't even useful for the thing that people claim it's good at, because it only provides raw data that gets used to justify things regardless of reality.

handrous5• 5 years ago

It's creepy. Like someone looking over your shoulder. Before it became normalized, that wasn't a niche opinion. I'm sure it's very useful for developing software. A camera behind me pointed at my screen might be even more useful[0]. Both are invasive and gross.

[0] Session-recording spyware "telemetry" products practically are this, and are widely used. Watching their session playback, or ability to monitor live users on "your" site (but actually, on their computer) is disturbing.

cout2• 5 years ago

I thought firefox was supposed to be a simplified interface (compared to the older mozilla suite).

squiggleblaz2• 5 years ago

That's how I remember it too, but I think the expectations of simplicity has changed over the years - in those days, it was closer to great defaults and no gratuitous features, whereas now it's a bit more like less flexibility (although really, Firefox has masses of options that aren't included in the UI but are accessible from about:config, so I don't really think Firefox falls victim to this criticism).

Part of the old tradeoff was that extension writers could do almost anything to make the web browser do almost anything. Nowadays, extensions are much less flexible. I think for good reason: being able to click a few buttons and get pwned isn't really a desirable feature. But the tradeoff has moved. I don't think that's really an argument against Firefox, but consider that powerusers are often very conservative, I'm not surprised that it caused some disagreement.

the_duke• 5 years ago

greater configurability leads to greater code complexity and therefore greater maintenance costs

Firefox is extremely configurable. Settings being removed from the UI doesn't mean they are gone.

`about:config` has a crazy amount of toggles that allow customizing pretty much everything, including turning off all the Mozilla services (telemetriy, account sync, Pocket, VPN adds, ...). Compare that with the measly set of settings and undiscoverable CLI flags available in Chrome...

I personally feel removing settings from the standard UI is perfectly fine when almost no-one is using them, and power users can work just fine with settings.js or `about:config`.

shultays• 5 years ago

about:config is removed from (not beta) android version of firefox. Who knows if they will decide to remove it on desktop as well because "only x% of our users were using about:config!"

Also if a setting is hidden behind about:config, it probably means dev will care less and less about it and eventually remove if it is becoming a hindrance

hutzlibu2• 5 years ago

"we're talking about sharing technical data with a non-profit organisation to help them maintain and improve the browser you rely "

No we are talking about a non-profit and a for-profit at the same time, where the distinction is often not clear. But it is clear, that they included ads and "studies" by default in their browser, that did send data to whoever, without any user consent.

So no, I do not really trust them anymore. Still more than google maybe, but not enough to voluntarily send them my data. And this is a shame, because I would have liked to keep trusting them.

bluedays• 5 years ago

Has Mozilla explained whether or not they are not handing your data over to Google?

jefftk4• 5 years ago

Which data are you talking about?

The only thing I know of that's similar to that is how Mozilla has Google Analytics on some pages as part of the Firefox interface, but there they have a contract restricting how the data is used: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=697436#c14

(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

Yoric• 5 years ago

Mozilla does not handle data over to Google.

DeathArrow6• 5 years ago

It seems that the market niche of tech-capable people who value privacy and customisation over a simplified UX is not capable of sustaining Firefox on its own.
So Mozilla tries to move in Chrome's direction, removing configuration options and "dumbing down" the UI, which frustrates its existing user base (including me) while apparently also failing to eat into Chrome's market share.

You can have sensible defaults for people who value simplicity and want it to just work and have customisation accessible from the settings page for the people who want customization.

ldng• 5 years ago

It's a depressing situation, particularly knowing that Firefox is pretty much kept alive at Google's whim.

Firefox or the (quite lost) Mozilla Corp ? They're not the same.

lvncelot2• 5 years ago

What's worse, I think it's extremely difficult, if not impossible, for another project to start from either a fork or from nothing and provide an alternative, as developing a browser (with its own rendering engine) is extremely complicated, comparable to an operating system.

onion2k• 5 years ago

The rendering engine part is kind of the least problematic bit, because there are three primary options (Gecko, WebKit, and Blink) and they're all pretty up-to-date and open source. You could also pick up Goanna, KHTML or Servo if you didn't want to use any of the big three as they're open too, but there'd be work to do on them.

There's no particularly good reason to start your own renderer from scratch.

eitland• 5 years ago

I've been suggesting someone starts maintaining a set of patches to Firefox and building based on them.

Start by fixing low-hanging frukt (the tab-strip api, make real customizability for the UI possible again) and build momentum from there.

I'm ready to pay a bit for what is one of my most important tools, and I think we all should think about it that way.

Just don't start growth hacking me or anything sleazy and I'm also your free billboard on HN and elsewhere.

GuB-422• 5 years ago

Finally, and this is a bit of a tangent, but I've never quite understood why Mozilla got such a hard time from users about telemetry.

That's the consequence of marketing themselves as "privacy first". Many people use Firefox because they don't want to be tracked, and therefore, any tiny bit of tracking/telemetry will be frowned upon. Google makes no such claim with Chrome, in fact, it makes it pretty clear that it tracks you.

nathias• 5 years ago

it would be great if we can move past the browser and debundle the tech, for example we should have a few different JS engines, a few different CS engines and a multitude of different GUIs ...

moron4hire• 5 years ago

Mozilla Corporation, which represents the majority of activity on Firefox, is not a non-profit. That's only Mozilla Foundation, and it's never really been clear to me what their role is, regarding Firefox.

squiggleblaz2• 5 years ago

Mozilla Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. There are various advantages to this kind of structure, but I don't know what they are. The upshot though is that the incentives of the owners of the Mozilla Corporation are not to squeeze every drop of profit, but rather to benefit the goals of the Mozilla Foundation (to raise money to support open source development), because the profits of the Mozilla Corporation are paid to their only shareholder: namely, the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. (No idea if they have any profits, but that's a different matter.)

GekkePrutser6• 5 years ago

So Mozilla tries to move in Chrome's direction, removing configuration options and "dumbing down" the UI, which frustrates its existing user base (including me) while apparently also failing to eat into Chrome's market share.

Well, no surprise there. Technical people like us experiment. Mainstream users just use what they know, and what their techie friends recommend them. They're not suddenly going to use Firefox now that it's more like chrome. They'll just use the real chrome. And they don't like touching something that works.

Note that this approach didn't work for Microsoft either (and they went a lot more 'like chrome' than Mozilla!). They're having some success with Edge but it's mainly because they push it really hard to enterprise users with their O365 integration, so people are getting to know it at work and bringing it home.

[...] If open-source projects can't access the same data as proprietary ones do, we can't expect them to be able to react to user demands in the same way, and so we can't expect them to be able to compete in today's market.

I don't want them to become like the proprietary browsers in this regard. Telemetry is not an all-seeing oracle, it's often used to confirm their own bias because it doesn't say why the users like something or what they'd prefer. What they should be doing is listening to users instead of blindly trusting telemetry. Google and Microsoft make the same mistake but they already have a monopoly on the browser and OS markets respectively so their mistakes are easily absorbed. It's not like their products have become a lot better since they started relying on telemetry so much.

But no, I won't allow telemetry and I block it for Microsoft and Google too in my DNS. The reason I use Firefox is because I don't want to "get with the program". If I have to change my ideology, I would be changed so much that the primary reason to use Firefox is no longer relevant.

soundnote14• 5 years ago

Note that this approach didn't work for Microsoft either (and they went a lot more 'like chrome' than Mozilla!). They're having some success with Edge but it's mainly because they push it really hard to enterprise users with their O365 integration, so people are getting to know it at work and bringing it home.

Edge is also - aside from being a privacy disaster - a legitimately good product that does a lot of good UI innovation on top of stock Chrome.

Things like normie-friendly but powerful vertical tab implementations, turning menus into floating panels that can be turned into sidebars with a click, Collections etc. They're actually adding lots of customer-facing features that are really well designed.

Andrew_nenakhov2• 5 years ago

particularly knowing that Firefox is pretty much kept alive at Google's whim.

This is simply not so. Google pays to be the default search engine on Firefox because it is beneficial for them. Had they not, this place would be bought out by Bing or whoever else, and in the end Google will lose more.

latexr3• 5 years ago

It seems that the market niche of tech-capable people who value privacy and customisation over a simplified UX is not capable of sustaining Firefox on its own.

Perhaps they could care for the automation niche. There are thriving communities on macOS who are deeply into automation, and virtually no one uses Firefox. The ones who do stop because Firefox’s AppleScript support is non-existent, while Chromium’s (and thus every browser based on it) is top notch, even better than Safari’s.

I’m not talking developers, either. Non-coders frequently cobble up short AppleScript snippets do to what they want. When they visit the forums asking for help and how to do what they want in Firefox, they are directed to the open bug report which is old enough to drink.

I have seen plenty of users abandon Firefox on account of that gap. I tried to convey that to Firefox developers multiple times—both in person and online—and their response was to not care.

asoneth3• 5 years ago

If they're going to be paying developers to do it they'd need an expectation of a stronger ROI than their other efforts. I wonder if the size of the macOS automation community is large enough to make much of an impact on their market share. Would you estimate they'd gain hundreds of users? Thousands? Tens-of-thousands?

If they're relying on volunteers then they'd need a few folks with the right set of skills and a motivation to scratch that itch. I would personally love to see better AppleScript support in Firefox, but I won't judge anyone else for not stepping up if I don't have the inclination to either.

floatboth4• 5 years ago

did you enable the telemetry that lets them know you use it?

I have all telemetry and Nightly studies enabled wherever I can (unfortunately the option is unavailable in custom builds, and I use custom builds on my main OS, since I contribute code to Firefox occasionally).

removing configuration options and "dumbing down" the UI

I never understood the whole "dumbing down" thing either. It's fundamentally the same UI as it was in Firefox 2.0 back in the day, except the menus are more well-structured (there's now a convenient hamburger rather than everything being in a crowded "application menu" bar at the top).

I'm not sure what they could do to make Firefox a thriving, independent, sustainable browser

I think it's still all these things. But to make growth possible, they need to somehow fight against Google persistently advertising Chrome right on the fucking google dot com main page (and YouTube and so on).

freediver13• 5 years ago

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 enable the telemetry that lets them know you use it?

There would be no problem if Firefox shipped as a zero-telemetry browser, and all telemetry was opt-in. This would remove all doubt and if you want to send Firefox data you can choose to do so.

However that is not the case. Significant amount of telemetry is enabled by default. Choosing to go for opt-out vs opt-in is what is hurting Mozilla's credibility here.

What then happens (and I am speculating here) is that this behavior triggers most power users in a negative way (for various reasons, one of them being simply using your bandwidth and resources for telemetry and noone likes having a slower browser) so they do their best to disable it. This in turn leaves Mozilla with data that does not include most of its power user base, the one that actually has most impact on Firefox market share (because as 'techies' they install the browser for their family and friends). The crippled data leads to crippled product decisions, which in turn makes power users even angrier and thus we witness the death spiral of user attrition that Firefox is currently in.

spixy• 5 years ago

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.

Hidios4• 5 years ago

Would it not be in the interest of Google as well to fund Firefox? I would imagine they wouldn't mind spending a small amount to keep it alive to prevent accusations of Anti-competitive practises? ;)

philipwhiuk• 5 years ago

That's exactly what they do.

chmod775• 5 years ago

[..] but I'm not sure what they could do to make Firefox a thriving, independent, sustainable browser.

They could focus on building that browser, instead of getting sidetracked and wasting money on other things. Also reduce the friction of contributing to their projects from the outside, streamline the process, bring it into the 21st century while keeping top-down politics and egos out of it. I wouldn't be surprised if their rivals see more outside contributions (in total) simply because they are somewhat easier to work with.

However, overall the vast majority of contributions to Mozilla's projects is likely still coming from the outside.

Mozilla is afraid it will fail with Firefox if they don't diversify. But if Firefox fails, the world doesn't need Mozilla. If that happens they should just pack up and hand the custody of surviving technologies (Rust etc.) to someone else.

xanaxagoras• 5 years ago

Mozilla are removing a feature you use daily? Okay, did you enable the telemetry that lets them know you use it?

I would much rather lose a feature I use daily than send telemetry data.

soundnote14• 5 years ago

So Mozilla tries to move in Chrome's direction, removing configuration options and "dumbing down" the UI, which frustrates its existing user base (including me) while apparently also failing to eat into Chrome's market share.

The funny thing about this is that it's a narrative, but is it correct? Configuration options may be low, but Chrome has added things like tab groups and a reading list / bookmarks sidebar. They're in no way aiming to be as customizable as Vivaldi/presto!Opera/xulExtensions!Firefox, but even stock Chrome is actually adding useful features, while most news I've seen from Firefox have been them removing unique features I've used and loved, like being able to sync keyword searches via bookmarks.

The only significant feature I've seen them add - and it's a doozy, I admit - is Containers. But that's cold comfort when other features get removed at a steady rate.

It seems that the market niche of tech-capable people who value privacy and customisation over a simplified UX is not capable of sustaining Firefox on its own.

This may be true, but it can really come down to quality of product: Firefox is losing ground, but Brave for example is growing, and doing it by a privacy sales pitch (with some dumbfucks who think they're going to get rich off BAT added in - it's a cut from Brave's ad revenue, ffs, and individual ad viewers aren't worth shit except en masse when the money pools up at creators' and ad agencies' wallets).

Okay, did you enable the telemetry that lets them know you use it? Receiving and analysing user data is increasingly important to delivering a good user experience. If open-source projects can't access the same data as proprietary ones do, we can't expect them to be able to react to user demands in the same way, and so we can't expect them to be able to compete in today's market.

This is true, but making decisions purely off telemetry stats and setting up self-fulfilling prophecies of making features harder to find and then saying nobody uses them isn't exactly the way either. Telemetry is a good jumping off point, I think, but as a sole director it's shit precisely because privacy-conscious users are going to turn that shit off if they can out of habit.

I've never quite understood why Mozilla got such a hard time from users about telemetry.

I think a lot of the Mozilla userbase is from an earlier age, before everything became cloud-based subscription services. They long for the days of locally installable software, buying new versions vs. subscribing to an app, etc. Some are the kind of obstinate FOSS purists who'd use gNewSense even if it meant they had to use their computer as a command line only device.

Think about Pocket, for example. I was one of the abovementioned people and hated its inclusion, and people still grumble about it in part due to the source code, in part just due to the old bad blood.

They'd essentially need a relaunch with a new take and attitude - look at Brave, whose pitch is pretty similar, and how people are a-ok with monetized services within the browser so long as they're opt-in. The product's newer, and so the attitude people come to it is newer. And it's growing.

Finally, there's an issue of focus: The organization increasingly feels like general activists first, custodians of a product second, which is not a vibe much of the competition gives off. Actors like Brave and Vivaldi have firm, in some sense political stances, but they're of a narrower sort of user control and privacy. I know people at both orgs who do/have shown their politics, but it doesn't show at the org/product level. The user? Does. I never, ever want to hear shit like "we need more than deplatforming" from an ostensibly privacy and user centered organization.

fomine3• 5 years ago

Agreed. For who dislike telemetry, it's your choice to disable it. But you shouldn't blame developers to have optional telemetry, like Audacity case.

2-718-281-828• 5 years ago

As far as I am concerned Firefox has only one flaw and that is missing separation between tabs.

kkjjkgjjgg7• 5 years ago

Maybe I am a minority, but I and some others I know of have turned their backs on Firefox because Mozilla got woke and spoke out in favor of censorship and promoting fake news. Since they are no longer proponents of freedom on the internet, any reason to still give them the time of the day has been gone away.

In fact I now celebrate their shrinking market share.

ahartmetz4• 5 years ago

Partisan politics is one hell of a drug

kkjjkgjjgg7• 5 years ago

I don't know why so many companies feel compelled to needlessly take political stances. I think they can only lose from that.

Although I have heard Nike earned billions with the Kaepernick campaigns, so maybe sometimes it does pay off. But for Mozilla? Do they get government funding?

clavicat• 5 years ago

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.

kkjjkgjjgg7• 5 years ago

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

gdelfino01• 5 years ago

After many years, I stopped using Firefox for this same reason. On the other hand, there is a fork named LibreWolf which so far is working well for me and is not related to Mozilla.

kkjjkgjjgg7• 5 years ago

Thanks, I hadn't heard of LibreWolf before. Will check it out.

chaosisequal• 5 years ago

It is not until it ships with tabs that scroll and don’t minimize

agumonkey• 5 years ago

I'm still not over the chicklet tabs.

I hope Mozilla can find a more coherent use of their energy. I'm still rooting and using firefox but it's more of an ethical effort than the obvious pleasure it used to be.

Good luck

da39a3ee• 5 years ago

but from my perspective Apple is just another company that’s more focused on advancing their own agenda than the well-being of their users or open web standards

Right. Strange that. Who’d have thought that’s how a company would prioritize things.

DeathArrow6• 5 years ago

If Google will be able to have a monopoly on the rendering engines and dictate web standards that will be hugely detrimental to lots of companies.

I don't understand why those companies don't finance the development of alternative rendering engines and browsers. Right now Google is financing the only alternative left, Firefox. So they kind of control that, too.

akagusu4• 5 years ago

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 limited storage space is a compelling reason to not install a second browser.

The third advantage Chrome has is the fact that more than 90% of people use Google has search engine and every time you access google.com with a browser other than Chrome you get a "Switch to Chrome" notification telling you that Chrome will help you "hide" annoying ads (without telling you that Google is responsible for the annoying ads) and you will be safe against malware. The regular user fears malwares and viruses more than ads or anything else because they think their bank account info will be stolen, so better security is a compelling reason to install Chrome.

Please, tell me, how do Firefox or any other browser can compete with the fact that Google is abusing their dominance of the search engine market and the mobile phone market to "force" people to use Chrome?

mepian• 5 years ago

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

akagusu4• 5 years ago

Users don't care.

katsura• 5 years ago

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.

DeathArrow6• 5 years ago

To me some of the things you mention sound like anticompetitive practices from behalf of Google.

akagusu4• 5 years ago

Microsoft used these same anti competitive practices with Windows and Internet Explorer and they got an antitrust lawsuit.

mysterydip• 5 years ago

A browser installed by default that can't be removed... where have I heard that one before? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_C....

judge20204• 5 years ago

Well, the engine has to be there for all the apps that use a WebView and are expecting Chromium to embed that webview (in terms of utilizing any css/js quirks so that the experience is guaranteed consistent across vendors), so "deleting" chrome wouldn't do anything more than how deleting Safari on iOS just hides the app icon away [in App Library].

kwertyoowiyop2• 5 years ago

Google: ‘We don’t force people to use Chrome! We just ask them again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again…’

Spivak3• 5 years ago

I mean that's why people used to call certain software nagware.

dharmaturtle• 5 years ago

Are you talking about Chrome or Edge?

Both are better than Safari on iOS though, which does force you to use it.

GuB-422• 5 years ago

Firefox had more than 30% market share at their peak, against pre-installed IE and Microsoft aggressive tactics. It was before the ballot screen.

Together with Chrome, they ended up beating IE, at the time neither had a significant advantage in distribution, at least compared to IE.

So in theory, Chrome can be beaten, except that unlike IE, Chrome doesn't suck, in fact, about the only thing going for Firefox is that it is not Chrome.

veidelis• 5 years ago

Addons on mobiles are another thing going for Firefox. What youtube ads?

Andrex• 5 years ago

I don't disagree with this comment, but it's worth noting Chrome was already rising to dominance as a desktop browser before Android/mobile internet usage became a significant factor.

Somehow even with Microsoft promoting IE on their platform, people still chose to install an alternative.

tim333• 5 years ago

Internet Explorer used to have that edvantage - included in Windows but most people used it to download Chrome because Chrome was better in various ways. I think the problem with Firefox is it's not noticeably better. Not sure how you fix that though.

romanovcode• 5 years ago

I use Safari for like a year already and see no problems with it.

Decabytes• 5 years ago

I work for a company whose product runs on the web and it’s super frustrating that when we have a browser error our response is “are you using chrome”? One of the big draws of browser based apps is that they can run unchanged on Linux/Mac/Windows. But now you are telling me that most apps only work on chrome???

Also so many of the tutorials on JavaScript are done with chrome. People are learning how to use the chrome dev tools, and then not able to transition to using other browsers for web dev. It’s a mess.

thriftwy2• 5 years ago

I remember using Konqueror in the middle of 00s. It was much better UI-wise, but a lot of web sites were broken in it so I had to default to Firefox often.

Guess what, today using Firefox is the same, even if it's better than Chromium derivatives for you, too often will you need to switch to Chromium when faced with Google Hangouts / Google Meet / Zoom / the fad of the day, or some random websites.

And this time it does not worth it since it's the same US corporate product, so I jumped this ship more eagerly. I'm on Yandex (the web browser) now.

floatboth4• 5 years ago

Google Meet works perfectly in Firefox, what are you talking about?

hawski• 5 years ago

Can you blur your background now on a meeting?

thriftwy2• 5 years ago

Nobody is using Google Meet now, and when people did, it didn't work. Maybe a few years back I had this problem - Hangouts would run but not Meet.

That's the thing with second-class citizen browsers - bleeding edge is often broken.

speeder2• 5 years ago

To me that is not good. Firefox just suck.

I insisted on Firefox for a while because Google hegemony but in the end I switched to brave.

1. Firefox often loses settings

2. Also it is really, really bad at saving your session. After losing important tabs I ignited that but...

3. After painstakingly preparing a bunch of docked tabs, it lost these too.

4. Frequent interface changes, often for the worse (to be honest my favourite interface was firefox 2.0)

5. It often breaks extensions too, this is felt heavily on Thunderbird where I have to often teach my family all over again how to do what they want or have to code more extensions myself because some critical extension does not work anymore.

jerieljan• 5 years ago

Mind if I ask when you've last used Firefox?

I've had these problems before (on rare occasions) but ever since Firefox did its Quantum leap, these issues were pretty much resolved.

speeder2• 5 years ago

I switched to Brave 2 weeks ago, that was when Firefox deleted my pinned tabs.

K0nserv3• 5 years ago

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 on all platforms.

2. 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. To this I say, go read some of the discussions in standard bodies(for example about FLoC). Engineers from Apple and Mozilla are largely our bastion against Google's harmful proposals for the web. Pushback from Apple and Mozilla are only relevant as long as they have market share to speak of. The recent lawsuit against Google(summary[0]) by many US states should be extremely worrying to anyone that cares about the open web and it should make handing over any more control to Google a terrifying prospect.

Mozilla maintains a list[1] of their positions on various standard suggestions that is also a useful resource.

0: https://twitter.com/fasterthanlime/status/145205393819534131...

1: https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/

sneak• 5 years ago

FLoC has nothing to do with rendering, though.

Mozilla existing (and shipping spyware, just like Chrome) doesn't really do anything to stop any of that.

metalliqaz2• 5 years ago

it's not "just like Chrome". It's not great, but it's not in the same ballpark as what Google does.

samwillis5• 5 years ago

  > 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 on all platforms.

I think it’s worth noting that (at least I believe) the reason apple limit the usage of other browser engines in iOS isn’t (mostly) about maintaining control and dominance. It’s about battery usage, WebKit is heavily optimised on iOS to ensure optimal power efficiency. The number one priority is that the lowest denominator of iPhone user is happy with their device, and battery usage is the number one KPI people care about.

metalliqaz2• 5 years ago

battery usage is the number one KPI people care about.

I wish all phone manufacturers actually understood that

/me glances at my Pixel 3XL with 3430 mAh batt

K0nserv3• 5 years ago

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.

politelemon• 5 years ago

I think it’s worth noting that (at least I believe) the reason apple limit the usage of other browser engines in iOS isn’t (mostly) about maintaining control and dominance. It’s about battery usage,

I disagree with this word gymnastics, it is Apple-ogism. It takes just a brief look at other decisions they've made to easily see that it is about user lock-in which fits in with their general philosophy. It is not great that they are stifling innovation at all, conflating it with browser dominance is a separate thing.

gjsman-10002• 5 years ago

Another reason is actually security.

Remember that Apple doesn't allow other web browser engines in any application. Imagine if an Electron application on iOS just decided to ship with it's entire, own browser engine. We would have super-bloated apps like our desktops, and if a security flaw was found, good luck getting all those apps to update.

In a way, Apple knows that allowing other browser engines means:

1. Chromium-based browsers just increase their monopoly, Firefox continues stagnation by almost all odds

2. The Electron mess on our desktops will claim new territory on our phones and bring security problems with it

Not very appealing. Limiting competition? When your only realistic competition is Chrome with it's 80%+ dominance, I don't think a regulator would have a problem with that.

simion314• 5 years ago

I think it’s worth noting that (at least I believe) the reason apple limit the usage of other browser engines in iOS isn’t (mostly) about maintaining control and dominance. It’s about battery usage

Why would this be a believable excuse? you can install a Firefox skin of WebKit on iOS and this skin could maybe be terrible on battery usage. A good default browser like on laptops is good enough for battery, people who care about it will use Safari, the obvious reason Apple is doing this is to prevent competition, so if Apple fucks with WebGL then you can't have say a WebGL based mobile game that would go around the Apple Store.

soperj• 5 years ago

haha yes, and Microsoft included IE4 into the Windows desktop so that users could have all the benefits of IE for free.

yborg• 5 years ago

This is a specious argument. Allow competitors to deploy apps causing lousy battery life, and Safari should win easily on that basis. Apple's battery app makes it obvious when apps use a lot of energy.

the_solenoid• 5 years ago

#1 reason, and, think back to when iOS came out, was security. The knock off effect was it ensured that ios/webkit gained defacto marketshare for each device since there was no other option - as the thread starter mentions. I disagree with the contention about innovation - keeping IOS from being a minefield for 99.9999% of users I think was the right course. And killing off flash.

pmontra• 5 years ago

Battery usage, yes, but if developers could create theirs apps as websites with no loss of functionality and pay zero money to Apple a non empty set of users would use them and Apple would lose some money. I think that Apple ultimately cares about money. Battery, PWAs, etc are all factors they ponder upon to optimize the bottom line.

gizdan• 5 years ago

Even if battery usage was the reason behind it, it's not good enough. Let the user decide whether or not they're willing to sacrifice battery life if they want to.

shmerl• 5 years ago

That always sounded like very crude excuse to exert control over Web standards by them. If battery usage with their own browsers is so much better, then everyone would be using their browsers on iOS. Why even ban others?

So I don't buy any of the Apple's excuses when they actively cause anti-competitive harm.

emiliosic• 5 years ago

Actually, as a tidbit, Chromium is a fork of WebKit, which is Safari's rendering engine, which for some reason started as a fork from Konqueror (KDE Linux desktop's browser). Google did however replace the javascript engine in Chromium. The Javascript engine in Chromium deserves a different discussion, since it also powers NodeJS. Back in the day, WebKit was quite popular as a rendering engine and is also used by Qt.

danielheath• 5 years ago

As far as I’m aware the justification is “no executing pages you can write to at runtime” (because it’s a huge security issue). They give safari an exception to that because you can’t make a JIT without doing that, and that’s the most straightforward way to get fast JavaScript.

Siira• 5 years ago

So why can’t we just choose what we want? All evil actions have some pretext, though in some cases (such as this one) the pretext is quite flimsy.

fault15• 5 years ago

It's hard to believe Mozilla will do much considering 90% of their revenue comes from Google.

for better or worse, Apple has been the single biggest driver towards privacy enhancement.

judge20204• 5 years ago

In general the people making decisions on standards and implementation don't directly answer to the people honoring the Google deal. Plus, Google knows they really shouldn't stop feeding FF revenue lest they be called out, leading to bad PR and more potential antitrust lawsuits, so I don't see them stopping anytime soon.

dralley8• 5 years ago

Why do people keep saying this when Mozilla is and has already been vocally fighting against Google's overreaching proposals?

There's new headlines about this every few months.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/privacy-security/privacy-analysi...

https://www.howtogeek.com/756338/mozilla-says-chromes-latest...

There's also this:

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/04/latest-firefox-roll...

https://twitter.com/__jakub_g/status/1365400306767581185

And the top comment of the hacker news thread associated with that last link?

My friend who works in an adtech company:
"Protip: Use Firefox instead of Chrome. We get very little data from Firefox users"

ohgodplsno• 5 years ago

This list of standards also shows how Google attempts to make it even more impossible for anyone but them to maintain a browser. Shape detection API ? Seriously ? Picture-in-picture as a standard when it should be up to the OS/browser ? having the <input type="image"/> perform resizing and compression ?

kwertyoowiyop2• 5 years ago

They’re copying the old Microsoft playbook. Add so many APIs - the more complex the better - that nobody will be able to copy them all.

freediver13• 5 years ago

We can thank WebKit and Apple's policy around it on iOS for suppressing and holding back these attempts, as sites on average still _need_ to work on an iPhone.

Spivak3• 5 years ago

Shape detection is to have predictable QR code scanning across web apps, PiP as a browser API is necessary to enable it cross-platform. And image transformations are to try and collapse 100 js libraries of varying quality into a feature that people clearly want.

I’m a huge proponent of platforms aiming to be stable and largely not messing with shit but it has to be feature complete first.

NoGravitas6• 5 years ago

Apple's guaranteed Safari market also helps keep WebKit viable for other browsers like GNOME Web and Nyxt, so that's something I really appreciate.

tomxor6• 5 years ago

The Apple of today has a very conflicted relationship with webkit, the anticompetitive reasons they want to keep their platform "webkit only", simultaneously encourages them to support and neglect webkit development. i.e on the one hand, webkit must be reliable and secure and compatible "enough" to provide a decent basic browsing experience. But should not improve so much as to make developing applications competitive with the apple store.

The difference between the resources Google and Apple contribute to their respective open source browser engines is night and day, and as any web developer will know - it shows.

In an ideal world two things would change at the same time: Apple is forced to allow other browsers, and webkit gets some genuine love and decent resources to make it a legitimate competitor again, instead of being used as a pawn in a game between Apple and Google.

Mikeb852• 5 years ago

1 is the worst possible rationale I've ever heard.

"Let's support a company that abuses its customers, developers and refuses to implement web standards just so a company that makes a far superior product doesn't gain more market share..."

truculent• 5 years ago

They aren't advocating or supporting Apple, though. They are merely pointing out that in suchg a dire situation as the one we have now, Apple's interests partially align with consumer interests.

I think their tone makes it relatively clear that this is not a healthy state to be in!

devenson• 5 years ago

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

acoard• 5 years ago

What hyperbole! It's entirely possible for some process to be bad, and it still have (some) good consequences.

The Black Plague was terrible; but it lead to increased social mobility in the aftermath. Likewise, Apple's "one browser" policy is bad, but ironically it's the main thing stopping the other browser, Chrome, from becoming the one browser that dominates everything. I'm still against the one browser policy, as I am against the Black Plague, but a reasonable person can make these distinctions.

K0nserv3• 5 years ago

I view it more like the lesser of two evils. I don't like Apple's behaviour and I agree with a lot of the criticisms against their behaviour. That said, I think it's preferable to the alternative.

criddell• 5 years ago

abuses its customers

Apple customers are generally pretty happy with their hardware and software.

kumarsw• 5 years ago

I'll go ahead and point out the obvious that the chances of Safari going Chromium-based are high given that (1) iOS Safari sucks and (2) Microsoft has had good success with Edgium. So the likelihood of Mozilla being the only dissenting voice is high.

halostatue• 5 years ago

The chance of Apple switching from a browser engine whose security and energy profile they control completely to one built specifically to advance the goals of a competitor is somewhere close to the chance of the heat death of the universe happening in the next five minutes.

It could happen, but even if it were to happen, there would be a split from Blink in a very short time period because Google’s values and mission do not align with Apple’s values and mission.

nilslindemann• 5 years ago

I always wondered why the engine is not separated from the GUI in browsers. In chess world this is totally normal, you have a chess GUI and a chess engine (and a crude communication protocol).

my123• 5 years ago

I always wondered why the engine is not separated from the GUI in browsers

For WebKit that's the case.

kevingadd• 5 years ago

All the major browser engines can be embedded, the GUI is a separate layer. It's been that way for ages, even IE was this way.

HeavenSmile• 5 years ago

As someone who for quite awhile almost exclusively used Chromium based browsers and then coming back to only using but actually appreciating using Firefox I approve and very much agree with this message.

roystonvassey• 5 years ago

Google is up to so many sneaky things, it's stopped surprising me to find out how they're always one step ahead to make their products even more intrusive.

A new one I found out is their supposedly open-source initiative called 'Cloud Information Model' [1]. Along with others such as Salesforce, Genesys and AWS (companies that I personally don't trust), they promise 'you can create seamless and tailored personal experiences across cloud-native applications'. It's all a bit vague and fancy and sufficiently "tech-y" to impress the marketing folks but colour me suspicious.

EDIT: forgot the link,

1: https://cloudinformationmodel.org/faq/

SimeVidas• 5 years ago

Engineers from Apple and Mozilla are largely our bastion against Google's harmful proposals for the web.

Brave also deserves a mention. As long as Brave exists in its current form, there will be a version of Chromium without Google’s “bad” stuff.

andrepd2• 5 years ago

Sure, it just has Brave's "bad stuff" instead :)

_-david-_3• 5 years ago

As Chromium adds more and more bad stuff, it will be harder for Brave to patch everything out.

iamtedd• 5 years ago

Does Vivaldi deserve a mention here alongside Brave?

na85• 5 years ago

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.

stjohnswarts3• 5 years ago

I think firefox and apple are our last voices before google takes over web browser technologies which is a really scary proposition, at least to me.

yosito• 5 years ago

If there is any validity to crypto and DAO governance, someone would start a DAO to buy Mozilla and run the org in a decentralized way. Why are people messing around with buying copies of the constitution and NBA teams?

pyjarrett• 5 years ago

I use Firefox rather than Chrome just to support an alternative to a monoculture. When I was on Mac, I enjoyed using Safari. I'm not a power user--I just use tabs and bookmarks, and don't use sync. Mozilla makes Firefox hard to justify since it keeps adding features I don't really care about (e.g. Pocket). I just want a simple browser that is lightweight.

When I've tried out alternatives, I run into sites that don't work correctly. I don't particularly like Firefox, but it "just works" most of the time.

GNOMES• 5 years ago

I started using Firefox again on my computers and mobile with the hype around Manifest v3 inevitably restricting future adblocking.

I see friends switching to Brave, but I dislike how they seem to be focusing their RnD into BAT/crypto features. Firefox also has the advantage of having addons on mobile.

It's a pipe dream, but I could see Google reverting to the don't be evil days with the rise of these Chromium forks and other ad agencies. Somehow change their business model away from ads, promote adblocking, and support addons on mobile. Checkmate Brave/Vivaldi/Edge/etc. Other than niche features or those apposed to Google will look elsewhere.

smoovb• 5 years ago

If Brave lets me down, I'll revisit Firefox, but at the moment Brave is the most compelling browser in the space.

Brave is also the closest to the "Let me pay to see no ads" model.

Google could mirror Youtube Premium, and give us ad free 'Chrome Premium' for $x.xx per month.

coretx• 5 years ago

Mozilla betrayed the people a thousand times. It's time to face we the people have lost the war. It's time to move on and build something new.

josefresco• 5 years ago

18ish years ago I was using Firefox as my primary browser and then testing in IE. Now I still run Firefox and instead test in Chrome. Rinse, repeat. Although I'll admit testing and fixing for Chrome is quite easier than it was dealing with IE and it's various versions.

streamofdigits• 5 years ago

the thing is, mozilla and firefox is the embodiment of a valiant battle for a sane, honest, human-centric digital universe. a battle that was fought and lost in the last decade. dystopia has won and it doesn't think of itself as dystopic, it thinks that it is doing God's work

there is no point crying over spilled milk, hoping that it can reconstitute into a jug. post-mortems might useful but they need to account for the tectonic continental plate drifts that tamed even extremely well funded actors like Microsoft

what the broader open source community should focus on is where the next choke point will materialize and ensure the same mistakes do not happen again

assuming there is a second chance

fallat• 5 years ago

Related, maybe someone wants to submit it to the HN queue: https://gist.github.com/ad72f1da36fbc965e4a1d4daeb1d6cb3

sleepysysadmin2• 5 years ago

Recently reinstalled OS and tried Firefox for some time. Could only last a couple weeks before dumping firefox.

I guess Safari is still their own. KDE Konqueror still their own. Sad that opera became chrome. Guess I'll be staying Brave for awhile.

Firefox's huge decline also makes sense to me. Firefox stopped building their browser ~5 years ago? It's not that Chromium is inherently just better, it's that Mozilla moved off of firefox. When you lose focus on firefox, you lag behind.

https://blog.mozilla.org/careers/mozilla-diversity-inclusion...

They are far more concerned with hiring women. They hired themselves a 'Culture Manager' and 'people managers' and 'diversity managers'. Note how these are not Rust Software developer manager, protocol developer manager.

https://blog.mozilla.org/careers/mozilla-introduces-gender-t...

Imagine how good firefox could be if they weren't so concerned with their staffing diversity and instead worked on their browser.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/

They are concerned about political activism, calling for people to be deplatformed, etc.

For that reason, firefox isn't even an alternative.

tapoxi• 5 years ago

Why do you think inclusion and good engineering are mutually exclusive?

sleepysysadmin2• 5 years ago

Why do you think inclusion and good engineering are mutually exclusive?

I would not agree that is what I said. I'm not opposed to inclusion. I'm not even saying their decision is wrong. Maybe they are exactly what we need on the internet. I fully support their choice to do what they have done.

I have made a judgement against firefox. It has very clearly been neglected. There are a myriad of problems that have been unsolved for years and this is recent experience. I suspect nobody can refute this very real experience. I remember a time in history when firefox was a top contender with tons of market share.

So did I say that they are mutually exclusive? Certainly not, but in Mozilla's case their priorities are clear and the consequence of a bad browser is reality. they lost focus on their browser and it lagged behind.

I'm interested in why you asserted I said more than I did. Do you believe inclusion and good engineering are mutually exclusive? It certainly looks bad for Mozilla.

soundnote14• 5 years ago

In my experience woke activists are attention vampires who drain focus away from doing things to doing activism. It is one thing to have activist organizations, but these types invariably try to turn production-focused organizations into activist ones.

For example, the recent move to switch from master branches to main branches provides near zero benefits, mass gnashing of teeth, and hours upon hours of wasted time. It is time spent increasing adherence to a cause and beating down dissent to the cause, and time spent away from things like producing code or, on the activists' part, doing things like teaching people if you're of the opinion that their cause is a good one.

I've seen far more environments turn for the worse after their entry, than become better for it (though a small handful have done so)

mitul_45• 5 years ago

I've been using Firefox for almost a year now (on Phone and Desktop) and the only reason I switch to Chrome is to translate websites. I live in Netherlands and don't speak Dutch so to browse any local website I have to rely on Chrome's auto-translate thingy.

aembleton2• 5 years ago

I find this plugin works well for auto translating https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/traduzir-pagi...

mlinksva• 5 years ago

Thanks! That works great. Like the parent, easy access to autotranslation is a reason I sometimes reach for a non-Firefox browser. It really ought be a feature shipped with Firefox; without it most of the web is effectively inaccessible.

The plugin relies on Google and Yandex for translations. Mozilla doesn't seem to have a problem with relying on or providing proprietary services (for better or worse) so that shouldn't be an obstacle, though I'd love to see an open source translation service replace them eventually -- maybe LibreTranslate https://github.com/FilipePS/Traduzir-paginas-web/issues/278

bluefox2• 5 years ago

The article says that if you care about the web, you should care about Firefox. I disagree, because my "web" is probably not Batsov's "web". What is "the web" for me? Well, I'd say it's IRC, torrents, mailing lists, git repositories, oh and mostly-textual websites. I use Firefox for the latter, but for most of them I wouldn't mind using emacs-w3m instead. Unfortunately GitHub turned into a shitty JavaScript Web App, and many people still use it so I need to interact with it at times. So yeah, I care about having a Firefox version that can work with it. It doesn't need to be updated every week with the latest user-hostile interface changes. It doesn't need endless security updates, because JavaScript is disabled by default. I don't care about Firefox qua product anymore, because it too turned into a piece of trash long ago. I definitely don't care about the Mozillas. The only reason I still use it is that some mostly-textual websites are too shitty to run in a basic browser like emacs-w3m.

orbital-decay• 5 years ago

Hold on, Batsov's article is specifically about Web. Web is a hyperlinked document system accessed through the browser (modern WWW has an app layer on top of that, but it's not the point). IRC, torrents, e-mail, and git are not part of the Web.

bluefox2• 5 years ago

Yes, I know. I thought about it after I posted. I wanted to emphasize that "web" can be a small part of Internet use, so a browser's importance is placed in a wider perspective. The rest of my comment talks about its importance within that niche, though.

sarasasa28• 5 years ago

firefox is the new internet explorer, deal with it

senko• 5 years ago

For anyone thinking "we can't possibly create a new production-ready browser engine", note that all major browsers except Firefox descended from one such project - KHTML.

"But you can't actually do it unless you're a $1T company" crowd forgets (or wasn't around to see) how dominant IE was, and how huge a project Mozilla was even back in the day.

cyber_kinetist• 5 years ago

You still have to consider how much new stuff got added into the overall Web (HTML+CSS+JS) spec since the old KHTML days though.

brunes• 5 years ago

There are a couple of misleading things in this post.

The assumption that Chromium (& Webkit) is controlled soley by Google, is outdated.

If you think Microsoft would have made a strategic shift like basing Edge on Chromium without ensuring they had a seat at the table, you would be very mistaken - and they did not.

Microsoft, Google, Brave, and Samsung all contribute to the core, Microsoft very significantly.

Someone1234• 5 years ago

An article I want to see is: A broad overview of Chromium's governance and exactly how much control any one party has.

You're arguing "sole" control which is a Strawman and doesn't really address anyone's actual concerns. A better discussion is: Can Google make unilateral decisions on Chromium's direction/support/features in any circumstances?

What I'm about to say may upset people but if Chromium's governance model was good enough I could see Firefox joining it and turning Firefox into another Chromium based browser.

The problem with hegemony is governance and control, it isn't technological. Purely on a technical level hegemony is a good thing. But who controls the hegemony? If it is Google or any corp that is really, horrible.

whywhywhywhy2• 5 years ago

Firefox isn't an acceptable alternative, over the past few years it's completely obvious the priorities of the organization in control of it are not to build a great browser and to de-homogenize the web tech stack.

Best thing that could ever happen for the browser problem is for Mozilla to go under and FF be taken over by the community who actually care about the problem that FF is the solution for, not just some overpaid executives who think selling a VPN is a good use of their time between private jet flights.

isaiahg2• 5 years ago

I use Firefox as my daily driver and I couldn't disagree more. But it's hard to reply adequately because you don't actually tell us what your problems with it is. In what ways is Firefox not an acceptable alternative?

celsoazevedo• 5 years ago

The parent comment seems to be referring to some of the things Mozilla has been doing lately. I'll focus only on the browser.

I think it's fair to say that the experience with Firefox will depend a lot on the platform and how much its imperfections affect you.

For example, I use macOS. Until last year Firefox would cut my laptop's battery life in half compared to a Chromium browser. That alone would make it a bad browser for me. Some sites that rely a lot on JS are often noticeably slower than Safari or Chromium. Then you have Firefox's UI. One thing that annoys me... CTRL/CMD+Click means opening on a new tab, right? On Firefox, by default, links on pages works like that, but links on the bookmarks bar don't! Talking of the bookmarks bar, after many UI updates, it no longer has the correct margins and doesn't fit with the rest of the UI, not to mention that favicons are a pain in the rear to update. And then there are the little things... Firefox moved to a "settings in a tab" for some things, but stuff like downloads and the bookmarks manager still open on windows with sizes that don't fit the OS or even Firefox's design. This old code was also stopping context menus and other parts of the browser from using the OS dark theme until recently.

Is Firefox terrible? No, but it's a mix of old and new code, UIs, etc, and the macOS version has been neglected for years. It's usable. Firefox's problem on this platform is that Safari and Chromium are so much better platform. Even with the recent improvements, Firefox is still behind in many areas.

I use Firefox daily, but only as a secondary browser. I've tried... but I get annoyed after a week or two and end up going back to a Chromium-based browser.

whywhywhywhy2• 5 years ago

My problem is with the organization, their mismanagement has already cost it a huge amount of usage % and it's only going to get worse because it isn't their priority.

An alternative isn't an alternative if no one uses it therefore no one tests or supports it.

I want Firefox, without Mozilla.

BenoitEssiambre• 5 years ago

To me the problem is almost information theoretic. Browsers need to have a standard specification for interoperability and one that includes an open source reference implementation of the core parts. It seems chromium has become that standard.

I often argue against pure natural language specifications in favor code based specs. I just don't think human language is nearly precise enough to write an adequate specification. Natural language words are incredibly polysemic and contextual. Look for example, at how many meanings the word "break" has: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/break

Kolmogrov has long ago suggested that fully specified information distills down to a computer program: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_description_length

The ideal language for a pure specification might be a mix of natural language and pseudo code with a pseudo test suit. However, if you are writing that, you might as well go one step further and write working testable code.

Other technical fields usually go beyond language for specifications, using blueprints and diagrams which are their version of code.

There is also an history of trying to tackle the inadequacy of natural language for technical specifications. A pioneer of this is Donald Knuth with his Literate Programming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming) and the descendant concepts of having code with extractable inline comments that you can use to auto generate documentation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentation_generator

I would argue that modern platforms with pull request based workflows that tie discussions to version controlled code changes are also the progression of this line of thought.

A cleaned up version of these might make sense for a specification.

And I get some of the concerns. While natural language under specifies, reference implementations over specify. This is more of a problem with low level languages however. Modern, high level languages are getting fairly close to a form of pseudo code. I fully agree that the reference implementations shouldn't contain or should hide, low level optimizations. I also understand that reference implementations can unduly tie specs to specific hardware, OSs and platforms.

But to me, over-specification is less of a problem than under-specification and it can be mitigated by labeling particular functions or blocks of code as implementation specific and not part of the spec.

Without spec written in code, the different implementations always have subtle incompatibilities. I see egregious versions of under-specification in government where horrendously vague specs are created in order to issue RFPs for getting software built. They usually end up with non working software at mind blowing cost.

People have this weird misconception that they are contracting out to build software. They are not. Building software is really easy. You press the build button or type the compile command. Building software has been fully automated for a while now. What is difficult is designing software and specifying what it must do. This is because there is a vast jungle of protocols, business flows, hardware and software platforms that need to be interacted in different ways for different needs. This is what needs to be specified and only computer code can do it adequately.

I wish that Mozilla adopted the chromium core. We really need a well funded non-profit managed release of the reference browser.

Karunamon• 5 years ago

In principle, I agree with this. Gecko/Quantum seems like a dead end.

The problem here is twofold. The "reference implementation" is already beholden to Google's interests, and only getting more intertwined as time goes on. The other problem is Mozilla, who I wouldn't trust to manage taking a dump, let alone a web browser.

Chromium is a fine platform. I'd love to see a community implementation of that which isn't directed by corporate interests or utter incompetents.

Causality1• 5 years ago

I can attribute this decline to various factors:

In my opinion the author missed a large one: Mozilla chose to chase after Chrome's market share instead of focusing on the reasons people liked Firefox. For years there were a ton of things that made Firefox objectively more powerful for a skilled user than Chrome. Mozilla has burned all of them to the ground.

They could have kept us, the ten percent. Instead they chased the 50% and they will end up with nothing at all. When they write the obituary for Firefox, it will begin with the day they decided if Chrome does something then they have to do it as well. Personally I'd peg the terminal diagnosis for June 21st 2011.

Mozilla should be comparing their user share to their user demographics. When Firefox had thirty percent of the market its users were talking about all the amazing things they could make Firefox do that other browsers couldn't. In 2021 Firefox users pretty much just talk about getting off on Google not knowing what they're up to. What's that get Mozilla? 3.29%. So why is Mozilla hell-bent on the same attitude and pattern of behavior that's been ruining them for a decade?

kertoip_1• 5 years ago

I'm Firefox user, but those arguments are ridiculous for me, it almost sounds like conspiracy theory. You just keep convincing people to use software not because it's better, but because of some blurry ideological reasons.

I keep reading articles like that on tech-related websites and they all miss the point which is: if Chrome-based browsers one day manage to gain 100% market share, what will it change if it is open source? What stops anyone from just forking that browser if Google makes anything wrong with it? And what did Google do with browsers so far, that we hate it?

soundnote14• 5 years ago

Parts of this are comedy.

For me Firefox is the only alternative to a complete Chrome hegemony in the sense that:
it’s open-source in the real sense (a project that’s truly community-driven)

I missed when the community wanted to do away with tab groups, compact mode, or keyword searches synced via bookmarks. The project is handled by a corporation with a multimillion dollar advertising deal with one of the EvilCorps. Uhh, yeah.

it has a great track record of fighting for its users and for a better Internet.

Last I checked, it's owned by a foundation that's very okay with advocating that others tell me what I should see on the 'net. "We need more than deplatforming" are not words I ever want to hear from a privacy organization's mouth. That and "fighting for its users" don't exactly go together, unless you believe the Foundation's purpose is to be its users' moral custodian in matters that are not tech-related.

The whole sales pitch of this thing is "you should use a browser that increasingly sucks, that's increasingly lacking in support, whose stewards get their money from EvilCorp and cheerfully advocate for Internet censorship, all because they use a different browser engine". When my option would be to use browsers that do not suck and actually improve release by release, have revenue streams not so beholden to EvilCorp and put their makers' personal politics aside for user control and privacy.

Choices, choices.

mschuster913• 5 years ago

"We need more than deplatforming" are not words I ever want to hear from a privacy organization's mouth.

Any entity participating in a democratic society should be allowed to voice their support for keeping said society healthy. Antivaxxers and "the vote was stolen!!!" putsch supporters are a direct threat towards society itself.

There are things in a society where standing "impartially" aside is taking a stand in itself - a stand on the side of those who want to destroy society.

malermeister4• 5 years ago

Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them

~ Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1945

starik365• 5 years ago

putsch supporters are a direct threat towards society

What is your feeling towards the summer 2021 rioters? Are they a threat towards society?

sfink9• 5 years ago

Last I checked, it's owned by a foundation that's very okay with advocating that others tell me what I should see on the 'net. "We need more than deplatforming" are not words I ever want to hear from a privacy organization's mouth.

Ugh, I dislike the title of that post. I still claim that you're misinterpreting it, though. It should have been something like "We need better answers than deplatforming." Deplatforming is not the answer, and we need better ones.

Sometimes deplatforming is the right answer. Not when it's about a political agenda, but there are many many actually harmful uses out there, many of them illegal, and ignoring those on your platform is the same as facilitating them. But deplatforming is about as effective as sticking your finger in a dike for truly improving things.

In my opinion, Mozilla has done a decent job of being apolitical when possible. Yes, it does think you shouldn't see some things on the 'net, but those things are things like scams and malicious disinformation. It does not say that you should not see the latest blatherings of Trump or whoever, except perhaps when they're directly encouraging violence or sedition.

soundnote14• 5 years ago

In my opinion, Mozilla has done a decent job of being apolitical when possible. Yes, it does think you shouldn't see some things on the 'net, but those things are things like scams and malicious disinformation. It does not say that you should not see the latest blatherings of Trump or whoever, except perhaps when they're directly encouraging violence or sedition.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...

Turn on by default the tools to [amplify factual voices](link points to below) over disinformation.

Their idea of "factual voices"?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/16/technology/facebook-rever...

The change resulted in an increase in Facebook traffic for mainstream news publishers including CNN, NPR and The New York Times, while partisan sites like Breitbart and Occupy Democrats saw their numbers fall.

The entire post reeked of political tribalism in a way I don't like from people who make my tools. While seeing less Breitbart and Occupy Democrats might be welcome, Mozilla were completely fine with third parties boosting the visibility of openly partisan organizations who'll happily lie to my face. No, no thanks.

kuschku2• 5 years ago

I missed when the community wanted to do away with tab groups, compact mode, or keyword searches synced via bookmarks. The project is handled by a corporation with a multimillion dollar advertising deal with one of the EvilCorps. Uhh, yeah.

Hm? When were keyword searches or compact mode removed? I’m still using them in 94.0

soundnote14• 5 years ago

They're removed from mobile and as far as I know slated for removal on desktop.

muxator2• 5 years ago

That's true. They have been gone from Firefox for Android for some time now.

Keyword removal totally dumbed down my browsing experience on mobile. I fear the moment the same will happen on the Desktop version.

proyb2• 5 years ago

One annoyed UX I dislike about Firefox is swipe back on iOS. Firefox team should fix their swipe back which go to previous page, it also lead to page refresh, and caused the scroll lose its position.

This deliver a poor experience when implementing History API compare to Safari and Google on iOS that work as expected.

thrower1232• 5 years ago

Headline editing is getting silly around here.

Andrew_nenakhov2• 5 years ago

I do my part, using firefox on all my devices and insisting it to be the main browser in my company. Interestingly, I also feel that Firefox is actually superior to Chrome in every aspect that matters: it is faster, passwords sync better and more reliably, and the user interface is better.

queuebert• 5 years ago

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?

soundnote14• 5 years ago

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.

Beached• 5 years ago

Too bad Firefox doesn't fully support hangouts. in a work from home world, I cannot operate without the ability to blur background in video meetings. it's the only feature that is holding me back from using ff full time now

sfink9• 5 years ago

Whether it's more accurate to say that Firefox doesn't support Hangouts, or Hangouts doesn't support Firefox, is tough to say. Hangouts disables the blur feature because it performs poorly the way they've implemented it. Firefox is working to optimize that implementation (it's a valid way to go about it), but I believe it would be possible to have a different implementation that worked fine on existing Firefox.

pdimitar2• 5 years ago

Firefox might be the alternative but Mozilla is no longer a good steward of it.

I believe it was very visible, several times, that the execs are only concerned with taking home huge bonuses (there were several submissions here on HN about their balance sheets and budget). At the same time, amazing and strong research teams have been let go. And then Mozilla started doing a very classic corporation things like trying to diversify income while half-arsing almost every such effort (although I do think their VPN offering is a pleasant exception of this rule); an example coming to mind is of course Persona but it's not the only one. To this day I haven't forgiven them for putting Pocket in a right-click menu. It didn't belong there then, it doesn't belong there still to this day. Or has HN forgotten to awful privacy policy that Pocket had at the time? Apparently it has.

The way I see it, only Safari and Chrome(-ium) will remain in the next few years. Firefox is doomed when it's managed by Mozilla. And Mozilla hasn't been what they used to be, for a long time now.

macinjosh• 5 years ago

I recently had to do a video call for a medical appointment. The video client was web based. I opened it up in the latest Firefox and was welcomed with a message informing me only Chrome was supported (or Safari on iOS). Ok, so now in order to receive healthcare in 2021 I must install Google spyware on my devices. This timeline is just swell.

aembleton2• 5 years ago

Does Chromium work?

Devasta• 5 years ago

Web standards in 2001: Everything will be interoperable because we'll all use XML, it'll allow easy embedding of various formats, you'll only need an XML parser and you'll be able to read any document, and with XSL/XPath getting the information you want will be easy.

Web standards in 2021: Don't need interoperability if everyone is using Chrome, and thanks to the living standard if you want to compete you'll not only need to implement a spec that is changing daily, but you'll also need to implement all the bugs in Chrome as they'll eventually become part of the spec, and any unrelated specs that disagree with Chrome will end up having to be changed too!

Switching to FF is good, but the reality is that nothing can compete with the dominant players in this morass, so we'll never see new entrants. The Chrome team will determine the direction almost all software moves in probably for the next 2-3 decades at least barring some sort of legislative action by the worlds governments

minusSeven• 5 years ago

This blog is probably not meant for hackernews community overall. I for one have been using firefox in both desktop and mobile for quite sometime now.

I guess the problem today is nobody can be bothered to maintain sites for different browsers. Today I see most websites work well only in chrome.

spurgu• 5 years ago

Maybe someone has the answer to the main reason I'm not using Firefox:

Is there a (sane) way to map Cmd+D to highlight the URL bar? I was trying to do this about a year ago but it proved insanely complicated. I managed to update omni.ja in v80 but then couldn't anymore in v80.0.2 (plus this would get annoying quick to do frequently).

In Chromium this is easy since the there's a menu entry for it ("Open Location...") so I can natively create custom mappings for it, but I refused to retrain my muscle memory for Cmd+L so I went back to using Brave. :|

sadfev• 5 years ago

Mozilla is a terrible organization and Firefox is a joke

jude-• 5 years ago

Firefox needs to go with a one locked-down process per tab model. There is no excuse these days for a single tab crash to kill off substantial portions of the browser. Moreover, there is no excuse for a tab compromise to allow access to other tabs' memory.

I use Chromium because it has both a safer and more reliable design and implementation. If web browsers were OS's, Firefox would be Mac OS 9. If Mozilla wants to understand why they're losing market share, they should try and understand why no one builds OS's like that anymore.

sfink9• 5 years ago

That's in the latest version.

It's an inefficient use of computing resources, but necessary for security, mostly because of Spectre.

EchoReflection2• 5 years ago

I love the idea/ethics of Firefox 100%, but (and maybe this is just a "me" problem/my own lack of technical-prowess) but I actually find FF TOO "secure"/paranoid. Mainly the 2FA is just too much. I shouldn't need two devices to login to my account. Couple that with an apparent bug in FF that always sends the 2FA verification to my old email address (@gmail.com) despite my FF account showing that my email address should be "@vivaldi.net" and I'm over it. Vivaldi is the real winner, not Firefox. Plus the Vivaldi "ecosystem" also includes calendar and email. Browser supports tab-stacking, themes (including scheduled themes, if one desires), support for RSS feeds, and a ton of other features...

https://vivaldi.net/

EchoReflection2• 5 years ago

www.vivaldi.net

nunez• 5 years ago

I am honestly surprised that the webdev community allowed this to happen. This is, pretty much, exactly what happened with Trident/Internet Explorer back in the day. This is also how we got the awesomeness that was ActiveX.

Though, to be fair to the Chromium maintainers, they've done an excellent job of making it incredibly easy to develop against. Puppeteer is the gold standard for browser automation, Chromium Headless makes it easy to run pretty much any webdriver against it, then there's Embedded Framework, Electron, etc. Firefox could have/should have done more here.

darepublic• 5 years ago

I use firefox on my android device, its a blessing to escape the ads. Predictably google maps is not very cooperative with it, which is one downside.

shadowgovt• 5 years ago

It's a decent goal to increase Firefox usage, but the blog appears to miss the elephant in the room with this comment:

Don’t get me wrong, though - using Firefox is not painful at all. Quite the contrary!

... after noting an anecdote earlier in the post

Last week I saw one site that directly didn’t support Firefox (it displayed a message I should switch to Chrome) and another where the sign in was broken on Firefox, but worked on Chrome-like browsers

These experiences make using Firefox painful for end-users, and if Chrome is 99% as good and doesn't have this friction, they'll use Chrome just to experience less online friction.

It's a vicious chicken-egg problem, because if Firefox's market-share is sub-5%, then it doesn't matter why that sign-in page doesn't work in FF... Nobody empowered to fix it will bother to look, because the workaround of "Just use a different browser" is very cheap from the site-owner's point of view (way cheaper than spinning up a debugging flow in a browser they're unfamiliar with).

Low market share drives increased likelihood of browser-site incompatibility drives users to switch to the larger-market-share browser drives low market share.

robobro• 5 years ago

I use Pale Moon because Mozilla crippled Seamonkey (bastards!)

rickspencer3• 5 years ago

In my experience, such arguments don't move the needle on adoption. "Hegemony" of a specific useful product is a concern to such a small number of people that even getting 100% of those people who are concerned or could be made to be concerned to use an alternative will not make a dent in the "hegemony."

The only thing that I have seen work is shipping a better, cheaper, and more useful product and focusing marketing on why a user would prefer to use it on its own merits. Everything else is preaching to the converted.

irrational• 5 years ago

Firefox is a terrific browser. It is the only browser I use for both web development and normal browsing. The only time I use Chrome is when I come across a site that was built to only work on Chrome. Fortunately, those are very rare.

zaptheimpaler3• 5 years ago

Anyone who has ever actually worked on OSS or just hangs out in ANY support channel/forum for open source will see that users are endlessly demanding, need lots of support, but will never, ever pay for anything if a free alternative exists.

Linus and the “gamers” will compare and try distros, point out tiny flaws, judge developer team strength but the one thing they will almost never, ever do is _pay money_. Even the nicest folks try their best, ask for support politely but they typically will not or cannot pay, and cannot contribute to a project beyond a solid bug report in most cases.

Linux OSS fanboys also are allergic to paying for software. God forbid someone charges a dollar for a useful application on a linux distro. Elementary OS is trying to inch towards payment with a “pay what you want” model because developers and teams actually charging for their labor would piss off 99% of the users. They may talk about the virtues of open source but what 95% of (non-technical) users love about open source is the fact that its FREE.

Kovid Goyal, creator of Calibre & Kitty gets ~$3000/month on Patreon for software used by millions that he’s built and supported for a decade now. How much does Amazon make on the Kindle instead? Tens or hundreds of millions? This isn’t a case of an evil corporate company not paying for OSS either, its just people who like to read.

We could end the Chrome hegemony tomorrow if Firefox was realistically able to charge for a browser, hire folks and not get completely dropped by their userbase. I hang out in the Firefox chats and fixed a bug once. Like most OSS, “community driven” basically means ~1000 people are actually willing and able to contribute to the project in some capacity. The rest is freeloaders, even if they happen to have good intentions. Google figured out an indirect way to get compensated for what they build because they too know users will not pay for a browser, or a search engine, or maps, or cloud storage, or photos, or news or everything else Google just gives us for free. As developers we could help solve this problem too - simply work for Mozilla negotiate a lower salary if you feel so strongly.

smoldesu4• 5 years ago

Adding money to the equation doesn't fix problems. It's another situation of "the mythical man-month" where you can hire as many people as you want, but it doesn't make the problem go away faster. Take MacOS for example: it's an operating system that has thousands of people working on it, backed with decades of R&D as well as hundreds of billions of dollars. That doesn't make it any easier for Apple to support 32-bit software, add Vulkan drivers to their system or make a decent first-party software distribution system that doesn't scalp the developers selling their software. Every organization has their own goals and ulterior motives, if Firefox got 100 million dollars tomorrow they'd probably use it to add a second "Pocket" advertisement on your taskbar and lock the rest away in a vault somewhere.

Open source software walks a hard line on freedom. Nothing is stopping you from charging a dollar for your Linux software, but nobody will pay for it unless you're offering some kind of actual utility. Similarly, if Google started charging a dollar for their browser, I imagine there would be a lot of disgruntled people looking for new browsers.

Money is not the solution here, it's the problem. Hiding away code and restricting access is the opposite of freedom, and while you're welcome to disagree with the principle it doesn't change the fact that there's thousands of open source projects floating around, many of them best-in-class. Do you think Hacker News would exist if every CSS component charged a dollar so you could support the developers, or every coreutil you used had a 50-cent tax after every invocation?

zaptheimpaler3• 5 years ago

Linux desktop is great now because OSes have stagnated and its easier to catch up. Mac was as good in 2010, 10 years ago. I do believe that its at least partly because Apple had the money to hire and support teams full of talented people working hard.

I see the same pattern in Firefox. Back when Chrome launched, and for years after, it was miles ahead of firefox and IE.

Anyways, if money is a problem then just work for free lol. Easy solve. Why do you care about Vulkan on Apple anyways? Seems like you were a Mac user.. if i had to guess you used Mac for many years and switched recently, now that Linux desktop has become viable. Why did you not use linux 10 years ago too? The money you paid to Apple only causes problems right? If money is the root of evil you should work for free contributing to the FOSS you believe in and find some other way to pay the rent. But I guess money is the root of evil only when you're paying, not when you're getting paid.

julienb_sea• 5 years ago

I've recently converted my personal usage to Safari as Chrome was proving buggy on the new MacBook Pro. I've enjoyed it, performance is essentially identical and Apple pay in the browser is the smoothest payment experience I've ever had on mobile web.

Although, autofill on Safari is objectively worse.

awill• 5 years ago

I get it. We all wish more people would use Firefox.

I tried to switch from Chrome to Firefox, and 98% of my websites work fine, but you still need Chrome as a backup for those sites that don't. Without 100% compatibility it's a hard sell when most users have no reason to leave Chrome.

I can't recommend Firefox to friends with the caveat "Keep a copy of Chrome around for when stuff doesn't work" Hopefully Mozilla can keep making things better. I'm glad someone is competing in this space

steren• 5 years ago

It’d be nice to see something similar on the mobile front at some point, but I doubt that will happen

AFAIK, Google Play offers a browser choice prompt on new Androids, at least in Europe

olliej• 5 years ago

iOS is literally the only reason that all websites don't require chrome at this point.

sdeframond2• 5 years ago

I have just set up a monthly donation to Mozilla.

If Wikipedia can live on donations, why not Mozilla?

https://donate.mozilla.org

1_player2• 5 years ago

Be aware that donating to Mozilla doesn't contribute towards the development of Firefox.

sdeframond2• 5 years ago

Do we know for sure ?

Mikeb852• 5 years ago

If Firefox is the alternative they better try harder...

godshatter• 5 years ago

We somehow need to incentivize the proliferation of browser engines more than actual browsers themselves. Maybe an open design committee that could standardize modules the engines should contain along with calling conventions between them? That would encourage people to work on smaller chunks and not have to build the entire thing by hand. Perhaps browser engine prize competitions?

If there were even half a dozen capable browser engines to choose from when making a new browser that were all accessible, then we wouldn't be in this mess.

ksec2• 5 years ago

it’s open-source in the real sense (a project that’s truly community-driven)

I guess that is why some companies are starting to get wary of the term open source.

Chrome started with a great narrative when it was facing an uphill battle with Internet Explorer,

That is just not true, the uphill battle was hard won by Firefox and their supporters. People knew there were alternative browser. Developers were taking action in supporting Firefox. Chrome came in, with the help of Google Services steal the thunder. Although you could also blame Mozilla for failing to work on e10s, which was originally schedule for Firefox 3.5, pushed to Firefox 4 and later that is what we now call quantum.

it’s home to the last major rendering engine, that’s not derived from WebKit

I dont think that is bad. Gecko isn't necessarily better than Webkit. You need to win on technical merit.

Google were still the company that “does no evil”. It’s almost surreal how things have changed

"Surreal". I guess that is just life, when most were too young and naive to believe a new startup company could do evil. And Google was so righteous back then. When a few lonely conspiracy theorist were crying about Google, no one listened. Remember, that was before Steve Jobs declared Thermonuclear war. And before the Great Battle between Apple and Google started. But then even after the thermonuclear war, most people still believed in Google.

It wasn't until 2021 did anyone from ex-Mozilla stepped up and suggest what Google might have done.

And here is what I wrote about Mozilla [1] not long ago.

And here is another unpopular opinion. I dont care if her salary is 3 million or even 30 million. If she had managed to bring Firefox to 60% marketshare and bring down Chrome on Desktop, would you have still complained if she was paid 30 million?

The problem is Mozilla is in such a bad shape and she is under performing as a CEO.

Unfortunately people dont learn much from history. And history dictate the only way to solve this problem is Mozilla think of it as a problem. Otherwise its current status at ~10% marketshare is enough to sustain its operation. Nothing bad enough is happening, no interest or incentive for changes. Inertia. Let's keep thing this way.

So yes, it is counter intuitive. The only way to save Mozilla ( or change Mozilla's direction, I guess the word "save" is a hyperbole, at least from Mozilla's perspective. ) isn't trying to get more user to use it. It is actually push people to abandon it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28961544

elias94• 5 years ago

Firefox has the best set of tools for developers imo. Had largely surpassed Chrome in my daily usage (frontend dev) and works well with large sets of tabs

entropicgravity• 5 years ago

Sure but the Firefox interface is just so horrible. I've tried to switch at least three times in the past two years and after about two weeks I just throw my hands up go back to Chrome.

evolve2k• 5 years ago

About 6 months ago I forced myself off of Chrome and went cold turkey on just using Firefox until it was normalised for me.

In the end I gave up on the feature I’d be hoping Firefox would implement (tab search), and went with I just need to use this for the future of the web.

It’s been a happy process, I love containers for privacy and in the process I’ve discovered many niceties of Firefox.

Don’t miss chrome as my daily driver since I detoxed.

xiaomai• 5 years ago

it's not discoverable, but ff does have tab search. You prefix a search in your URL bar with '% ' (so like, if you enter '% esbuild', the "suggestions" in the dropdown will all be your tabs that match 'esbuild'

soheil• 5 years ago

I wish there was an easy way to map all my chrome ext to firefox exts. For the ones that don't have an exact equivalent maybe the closest match would work fine. The point is I have over 30 extensions and every time I decide to use ff I realize I'm missing one or another ext. Even if I download the ff version of the ext it's still missing all the configuration and customized key bindings.

This is probably the major blocker from people switching.

panny• 5 years ago

sign in was broken on Firefox, but worked on Chrome-like browsers

I've seen that, but it was related to hardware keys. If Firefox cannot be bothered to support keys, why should anyone be bothered by using it?

More importantly though, it seems like the whole world is in this mess, because browser developers develop monoliths. If the browsers were split into small reusable parts, any developer could assemble one, and there could be lots of competing parts. The number of available browsers would explode to infinity. Why is everything lumped under a single massive code base known as "Browser engine" like gecko or blink or whatever? Why do they keep making monoliths? There could be parser engine, css layout engine, svg render engine, etc etc etc. But there isn't, there's one giant lump, browser engine.

If anyone made a focused attempt at a new browser ecosystem, it seems like it should attack the glue layer between these disparate parts.

forgotmypw17• 5 years ago

The real alternative: Simple and lightweight HTML, comprehensive compatibility and accessibility testing, noJS support, and progressive enhancement.

cowvin• 5 years ago

This is precisely why I've switched to Firefox in recent years. It's quite good these days. I don't even have Chrome installed on my current personal PC.

brutal_chaos_• 5 years ago

Firefox is no longer just a browser. It's a brand. The gecko engine needs promoting; not Firefox any longer. The name confusion is going to destroy any hope, IMHO.

Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

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