Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30335455

by feross • 4 years ago

486 902 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

What would you do if you were in charge of Mozilla? How would you save Firefox?

They should focus on saving Firefox.

- Cut out all (or at the very least, most) initiatives that don't serve the goal of promoting Firefox's market share or sustainability going forward

- Donate the major money drains that aren't Firefox to the Apache Foundation or another worthy custodian

- Fire all inessential staff that don't want to work on Firefox.

- Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money, and cut their salaries (bonuses tied directly to increase in Firefox market share).

- Make sure that all donations from now on are redirected to things that support Firefox development and nothing else, period.

- Make whatever partnerships are needed to have a steady stream of income, be that donation or selling out to Google or Bing.

Firefox is in trouble. Firefox is also Mozilla's raison d'être, and they should embrace that. We as a community, cannot afford to let Firefox languish until the only browsers in the world are Chromium derivatives. The diversity of truly independent browser engines is far too important to give up without a fight.

jefftk• 4 years ago

until the only browsers in the world are Chromium derivatives

Do you mean WebKit derivatives? Or are you predicting that Apple would switch to Chromium? (No way)

wmil• 4 years ago

Imagine going back to 1997 and trying to convince tech people that one day KHTML on ARM would be the most popular web browsing platform.

jms703• 4 years ago

This.

However, I think they need to answer the question, why should Firefox exist? If there is no compelling reason, well, there you go. If there is, double down on that make that reason shine. They have wasted so much money on the wrong things, IMO.

Shared4042• 4 years ago

they need to answer the question, why should Firefox exist? If there is no compelling reason, well, there you go. If there is, double down on that make that reason shine.

Unfortunately, that reason (browser engine diversity)is compelling to people who understand the situation, but not general consumers - and it's impossible to make general consumers care, unless maybe Firefox went for an edgy "rebel against the man" vibe.

selfhoster1153• 4 years ago

If Firefox dies, the open web dies. It's that simple. For the open web to remain open, there needs to be at least one more truly independent source of authority regarding how a rendering engine should work. Everyone else has thrown in the towel and abdicated that authority to Google by embedding Blink.

Google is either actively malicious to the open web, or doesn't care about it other than as something they can strip-mine as a revenue source. They sufficiently diversified into mobile and Android that the death of the open web would be but a blip to them.

IMO, Firefox should consciously be that alternate source of authority. How they accomplish that organisationally is irrelevant, what is relevant that their browser as a whole is competitive and focused enough that it stops haemorrhaging market share, and can start to slowly rebuild it as people look for a way out of Google's ecosystem.

phkahler• 4 years ago

> We as a community, cannot afford to let Firefox languish until the only browsers in the world are Chromium derivatives. The diversity of truly independent browser engines is far too important to give up without a fight.

There are a lot of people oh HN who agree with that but then use a different browser for whatever reason. I feel like these people are being very hypocritical and should use what they want to succeed. Firefox is very usable and increasing its market share starts with you. Or to use another cliche - be the change you wish to see.

That's not to say Mozilla doesn't need to get their shit together, but if market share drops too low they will not be able to get money to do the things they need to do.

garciasn3• 4 years ago

They offer nothing I cannot get elsewhere and thus I have no reason to switch.

When it first came out, Firefox was faster, lighter and offered way better function than the alternatives at the time. Since then, competition has been fierce in the browser market and they’ve done little to distinguish themselves in any major way from their competitive set.

Until they do something so vastly incomparable in the market, they gonna continue to falter.

sockaddr3• 4 years ago

Recently switched to Linux and only installed Firefox. When you force yourself to use it, it's doable. I think only once in the last 6 months did a website not work (my dumb HOA website). Other than that, it's more than sufficient.

It crashes sometimes but if that's the price for not having coercive software controlling my life, so be it.

paulcole3• 4 years ago

Firefox is very usable

Are you intentionally underselling it or is this what I can expect of Firefox? Because it's not a super awe-inspiring endorsement.

selfhoster1153• 4 years ago

I use Firefox. Not exclusively, but most of the time, on principle.

I would call it usable, but not "very usable". For normal people, Chrome(ium) UX is better. For power users, Vivaldi is a far better choice despite the Chromium browser engine. And for both of these groups, Firefox UX worsens and improves seemingly at random.

Quite frankly, I'm conflicted whether I should recommend Firefox at all. If I say "look, here's Firefox! It's more private than Chrome, and almost as fast and error-free!", and then Mozilla goes on to ruin that perception 6 months later (as they are wont to do), then it's my reputation and credibility at stake. Not only is that an unnecessary ego hit, but also makes me look like a liar (or at best, like an ivory tower dweller divorced from reality).

com2kid• 4 years ago

Firefox is very usable and increasing its market share starts with you. Or to use another cliche - be the change you wish to see.

I use Firefox despite long standing bugs. Somehow a browser that aggressively throttles background tabs is still able to leak memory to background tabs. For the longest time Firefox messed with my wireless headset, they finally added proper support for web audio APIs and things are better now.

CPU usage is still all over the place. Some inactive tab will cause FF to spin CPU usage up to 100%.

Firefox still leaks resources, I can shut down all tabs and still have the media playback process using up tons of CPU and RAM.

WebGL performance is worse than Chrome.

TBF it has been getting steadily better over the last year, I have noticed a marked improvement. I'd say a year or so ago it was noticeably bad on a regular basis, now it is an occasional annoyance. But it should never have gotten that bad.

More to the point of the question, Google spent a LONG time pushing Chrome, hard. They paid lots of # to bundle it with app updates years ago. Visiting Google properties causes banner ads "Download Chrome!" to appear. A few years back YouTube videos would occasionally just stop working in Firefox.

And now days with Node development, well, Node developer tools are built into Chrome. React developer tools run in Chrome.

heurist• 4 years ago

A while back I spent a few weeks figuring out how to configure Firefox to work exactly how I want a browser to work, then months happily using it. Then a big update was released and everything broke. I never bothered to get it working again. And despite claims of performance improvements that came with the release, it still chugged slower than Chrome. I would love to use a browser that I can actually configure how I want without things breaking every week, even if it's slower in general. But if I can't configure reliably and it's slower -- what's the point?

perryizgr82• 4 years ago

I want Firefox to succeed. But that doesn't mean I will use an inferior browser, especially when I feel the decision makers at Mozilla are out of sync.

paxys4• 4 years ago

You are answering the question "how can Mozilla make more money", but that wasn't what was asked. Mozilla as a whole is profitable already, and revenues have been growing close to 100% year over year. As a company they are in great health.

Except that's not what users care about when picking a browser. Google has too much money, tech, marketing and too big an existing user and device base to make any kind of direct competition feasible. Giving Mozilla a few hundred million dollars extra isn't going to make a difference.

nwah12• 4 years ago

They could pivot to compete with the Big Tech conglomerates in general.

Provide their own suite of integrated tools, search engines, communication platforms, and so on. But with a privacy-focused and ad-free approach.

DuckDuckGo already proved there is an appetite for something like this.

They could go further, and remain relevant and viable in the way that DDG is, even if they never again are the most popular browser.

greatgib• 4 years ago

I think that the point of the GP is not necessarily about money, but to have the structure focus on Firefox. ie that it should be the source and the objective of the funding to have all the attention that it needs.

TAForObvReasons• 4 years ago

The real (and often downvoted) answer is that Mozilla compromised on their core values. A "death by a thousand cuts", as it were.

For me, it started back when "sponsored tiles" were first announced in 2014. On the surface it was obviously advertisements, but many defenders tried to argue that it was a "good thing"

Then there was the proprietary Pocket extension baked into the browser with no easy removal. Again, many defenders tried to argue it was a "good thing"

Then the "studies" channel was used to push a Mr Robot ad. It's unclear how it was aligned with the values, but defenders tried to argue it was a "good thing".

They partnered with Cliqz to collect data and make recommendations. Again, defenders tried to argue it was a "good thing"

They partnered with Booking.com to push advertisements, going so far as to argue that they didn't receive any monetary compensation and that it was just a "social experiment". Again, defenders tried to argue it was a "good thing"

This is just a sampling of the events in the last 8 years (sponsored tiles was 2014). Every single time, they may have received some sort of benefit, but a number of users who bought into firefox for the security and privacy aspects ... felt betrayed and left. Because if it isn't about the privacy, what is the USP of firefox? "Not google" is only a small part of the user base.

selfhoster1153• 4 years ago

The subtitle of the question was "What would you do if you were in charge of Mozilla? How would you save Firefox?"

My answer is an attempt at addressing these two questions. My goal wasn't to make Mozilla more profitable, but to ensure that it's focused on what should be its core mission, rather than the mire of sideshows that they engage in at the moment.

Also, I don't care how Mozilla the amorphous blob of a corporation is doing. I care about how Mozilla the vehicle for the survival, promotion and development of Firefox is doing, and that one seems to be on the brink of death if nothing is done to change the current course.

camjohnson26• 4 years ago

I know many people who used to use Firefox and moved on to Brave. Brave has a mission that is easier to get behind and till it’s unclear what Firefox is trying to be.

zerocrates3• 4 years ago

I know you're saying this not the question being asked, but what's your source for their revenue growing anywhere near that rate, or indeed at all?

As far as I can see their revenue peaked around FY 2017 at $562 million. In 2018 that number was about $450 million and short of expenses, they were short of expenses again for 2019 but for a $338 million settlement from Yahoo/Verizon.

The most recent reported year, 2020, saw a slight drop in their search income but a sharper cut to expenses (mostly by cutting about $60 million in "software development" expenses), putting them back on track, in a way.

They've had a steady increase in subscription income, but it's still dwarfed by the current search deal (in 2020, just shy of $25 million in subscriptions vs. over $440 million from search).

soundnote10• 4 years ago

I don't think that's true: Brave is actively building independent revenue-generating services so they have a footprint on the web instead of just being a company that makes a window to the web.

And they are growing. The big thing there is just positioning, and being aggressive in the right places.

That's the fundamental problem with Mozilla: MS, Google and Apple can leverage web footprint and physical platforms to market their products and generate revenue for browser development. Plus Apple's happy to take money from Google. Brave's building some kind of revenue-generating platform that stands on its own.

I don't know if Mozilla has a vision in that kind of way.

Hell, Firefox OS? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS

This rant is pertinent: http://dpldocs.info/this-week-in-d/Blog.Posted_2021_09_06.ht...

missedthecue• 4 years ago

Cutting organizational expenses might be good for unrelated reasons, but I don't see how that increases the market share of Firefox, and I can think of a few ways it could decrease their market share.

bonestamp2• 4 years ago

I guess the idea would be to only cut organizational expenses that aren't serving the purpose of increasing firefox market share.

selfhoster1153• 4 years ago

If the goal is to plow all available resources into Firefox, then cutting down on expenses that don't directly or indirectly support the existence of Firefox seems key.

readthenotes1• 4 years ago

What he said was: get rid of the people who are not interested in making the Firefox browser better. Get rid of the distractions. Focus on the browser.

godshatter2• 4 years ago

My goal, if I were CEO, would be to reduce organizational expenses (and increase other forms of revenue) to the point where the 100s of millions of dollars from Google ($562 million in 2017) was not required for covering the cost of firefox development and spend all those millions on advertising firefox until Google stopped giving it. I can't see where having such a large part of your finances coming from your biggest direct competitor could ever be a good thing, but at least spending it on increasing firefox's market share directly through advertising would have a certain irony associated with it. At least of the Alanis Morisette variety.

AnIdiotOnTheNet• 4 years ago

[...] (bonuses tied directly to increase in Firefox market share).

This might be a perverse incentive depending on if your goal is to make Firefox a good browser or just a popular one.

selfhoster1153• 4 years ago

True, but at this point it doesn't feel to me that the community has that much to lose. If we're truly sub-5% like Statcounter says, then as long as we minimally muzzle this particular paperclip maximiser (say, the browser engine must remain Gecko or an in-house project and cannot be Blink, user privacy must be no worse than currently, selling data or "partnering with" third parties is disallowed) and let it run for a couple of years, at least we'll get a viable browser out of it.

loudtieblahblah• 4 years ago

If all that is left is chromium, then you can kiss what is left of web standards good bye. Google will set the standard, taking input from any other tech player big enough to have a seat at the table.

Its bad enough ISO certification boards and official positions of the W3C can be bought or corrupted. Let there be only one engine, controlled by Google? And even the pretense of a open and fair playing field goes away.

Open source and open protocols were not resistant enough to for profit corporations.

Now our standards are dwindling, open source projects and standards boards re completely co-opted, and the conversation on mailing lists and forums sounds like the never ending squabbling and finger wagging from your Fortune 500 HR department.

Foss and open standards have been captured by capital. And it shows in the culture.

Hell, it shows in the conversations around places like this.

selfhoster1153• 4 years ago

Exactly. This is why Mozilla, as the only credible custodian of the only credible Chromium/Blink/WebKit competitor, needs to wake up and die trying to stop that future, if needed. If they lose that war, there is no reason for them to exist over Brave or Vivaldi, for example.

antupis• 4 years ago

Yeah we would get "IE6" from google not like first 2-4 years but soonish.

dmitriid• 4 years ago

If all that is left is chromium, then you can kiss what is left of web standards good bye.

Well, we've already done that. Google a) dominates the standards bodies and b) releases "standard" features that are only standard because Chrome says so

ameminator5• 4 years ago

I think that's a bit too far - for example, Thunderbird is a great web client. I do think they should have found a way to hold onto the Servo team and make that engine more useable and better than the base chromium engine. If they had been able to keep the Rust foundation on board, it would have also made sense.

However, I do agree that their leadership has made terrible decisions and they've absolutely focused on the wrong products.

Brakenshire2• 4 years ago

The obvious thing to do was continue to invest in Servo. If they could have produced a parallel layout engine, which could provide app like animations without fiddling on desktop and Android, and then make that easy to embed, they could have made real inroads into blink/webkit.

selfhoster1153• 4 years ago

Thunderbird was on my mind when I was writing this. I think it ultimately comes down to whether they can afford any missteps or side concerns at all - and if the answer is "no", then Thunderbird must be cut loose no matter its value. It can always be mothballed until the times get better, or it can even be given "on loan" for some fixed duration to another trusted FOSS foundation and re-adopted when the time is up.

As good as Thunderbird is, I wouldn't want it to be anywhere near the top of Mozilla's priorities list right now.

2Gkashmiri• 4 years ago

can we just eat the execs?

on a more serious note, what if mozilla fires ALL execs? will it just crumble under its own weight or will that "industry linked remuneration" be replaced with more money for actual developers who get things done and are not in for the quick buck like address bar ads?

selfhoster1153• 4 years ago

I'm hoping for the latter. Or if not, the that if the Firefox collapsed, it would re-emerge in some fashion as a grassroots community project with non-Mozilla governance.

Jayakumark• 4 years ago

Current CEO is a cancer to Mozilla, her main goal seems like to make more money personally before Mozilla goes bankrupt. As long is as she is there - there is no hope

https://itdm.com/mozilla-firefox-usage-down-85-but-why-are-e...

sebmellen• 4 years ago

The arrogance is hard to believe.

In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to." [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker

xfitm3• 4 years ago

As someone who knew someone who worked there she is absolutely nuts and her thinking is beyond radical. She will destroy Mozilla if she doesn't step down. Assuming it's not too late already.

twblalock7• 4 years ago

A better CEO would not be cheaper, particularly considering that whoever takes the job would be tasked with saving a dying product.

High salary and a golden parachute would be required to attract anyone good enough to succeed.

wyclif2• 4 years ago

A big part of the problem IMO is that Mitchell Baker is a lawyer, not a technologist or engineer. She does not understand how software companies are supposed to function.

doetoe• 4 years ago

I used to strongly support the mission of Mozilla. When I first read about the practices of upper management I felt like a fool for ever having donated in the past.

That is not going to happen again and I don't even like Firefox so much anymore because of it.

andriesm• 4 years ago

Well they fired the previous competent CEO for political reasons. If politics and what you do in your private time is more important than competence, then this is what you get. Well deserved. FireFox getting it what it deserves. If you hire CEOs based on being women or having nice private beliefs, instead of competence you can eat failure all day long as far as I'm concerned.

jslove• 4 years ago

previous one - now stellar ceo wasn't great either

dpark• 4 years ago

Thanks, Bain and Company.

Permit2• 4 years ago

- Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion

Why stop there? Why not get developers who are "in it for the passion"?

Hnaomyiph• 4 years ago

The CEO and upper management do loads to steer the ship. If all they care about is enriching themselves, they will likely struggle to find developers who are in it for the passion.

Look at Google. It is a late-stage, post-IPO business that’s now, frankly, ran by the CFO with a CEO who cares only about the board and an ever-increasing stock number.

The people who have passion left for the most part. Replaced by those who only seek to enrich themselves and climb the perf ladder.

Would those who have passion stuck around if Google was ran by people who still had passion? I’d imagine a much greater number of them would still be there.

selfhoster1153• 4 years ago

A CEO can single-handedly sink the ship (witness Nokia's death). Developers don't have the power to do that.

mcv5• 4 years ago

Why not get developers who are "in it for the passion"?

Aren't they? Do Mozilla developers work there just to get rich, or because they care about open source?

brundolf2• 4 years ago

Another interesting idea: what if they courted alternate browser projects and/or environments like electron to use the Firefox engine the way those currently tend to use Chromium?

I don’t know if Firefox is currently harder to integrate than Chromium, or if they would just need to gain some sort of edge (no pun intended). But they could for example:

- Provide first-class documentation for integrating

- Provide some kind of stripped-down version that’s optimized for Electron-type scenarios; perhaps they could make it more resource-light for this usecase than Chromium is

Gaining marketshare this way could garner better support from websites and/or libraries, and might also prompt corporate support from invested companies

zsims2• 4 years ago

Some of the reasons for why it's not used as a base were discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29900496

jacquesm6• 4 years ago

I would happily support this.

zo1• 4 years ago

They must definitely fire some of their developers too

https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/i8nuyb/firefox_de...

celdon25• 4 years ago

Yikes, I see quite a lot of grandstanding in that thread, and the linked Github issue.

samwillis2• 4 years ago

Agree with this.

I feel they should start trying to out “out innovate” the other browser developers. Stop playing politics, which Google will always win, and just start making new “cool shit” that developers want to use! Hire the best innovative thinkers in the industry and set them free to invent browser apis for developers to use.

Also, they should be attacking things like electron, and “hybrid” mobile app development. Build a toolkit based on Gecko for cross platform development that addresses the problems with electron.

account4230• 4 years ago

Hire the best innovative thinkers in the industry and set them free to invent browser apis for developers to use.

I think they should be doing the opposite: Adding features the users want to use and keeping the web as simple as they can get away with. Google is already busy giving web developers whatever APIs they want, that is not a fight Firefox can win.

pohl• 4 years ago

They should also consider more "Oxidation" of Firefox components, if only because it lowers the bar for mere mortals to make open source contributions.

mccorrinall• 4 years ago

I wish they would gift Thunderbird a few new features, such as Mozilla Account Support. :(

mulmen3• 4 years ago

Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money, and cut their salaries (bonuses tied directly to increase in Firefox market share).

If Mozilla is just Firefox then why to they need a CEO at all? Why does a web browser need an executive team? It doesn't make any sense to me. Linux doesn't have a CEO. Python doesn't have a CEO. Postgres doesn't have a CEO.

But all those projects have commercial support in some way because other companies rely on them and provide resources. It's unclear to me how Firefox achieves the same. Maybe that's a question a CEO can answer.

If you think you need a CEO then it makes perfect sense to me to pay them a competitive salary. For the same reason you should pay your devs a competitive salary. You can't just say "they should work for less". That's unfair and unrealistic. Either you need one and should pay for a good one, or you don't need one at all.

Donate the major money drains that aren't Firefox to the Apache Foundation or another worthy custodian.

Or how about they donate Firefox to Apache?

selfhoster1153• 4 years ago

If Mozilla is just Firefox then why to they need a CEO at all? Why does a web browser need an executive team? It doesn't make any sense to me. Linux doesn't have a CEO. Python doesn't have a CEO. Postgres doesn't have a CEO.

It doesn't matter what the top position is called: CEO, the Grand Warlock of Yendor, or Benevolent Dictator For Life. CEO ≈ whoever is in charge and entrusted with enough authority that they can elevate or kill whatever they are managing, and that was probably the intended meaning.

Or how about they donate Firefox to Apache?

Apache has a reputation as the graveyard of open source software. If Firefox gets donated to them, it's curtains. Maybe if they went elsewhere it could work.

Or, they could create a Totally-Not-Mozilla Foundation and bring trustworthy old-timers with the right vision on board. Then they could either do a hostile takeover aka LibreOffice, or coax the original Mozilla Foundation into handing over the brand peacefully.

javitury• 4 years ago

What do you think of Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) or Rust? Do you think they were a mistake?

eternityforest7• 4 years ago

Rust is the most interesting thing to come from Mozilla in years.

It was from an earlier era where they innovated instead of just campaigned against powerful web features and tried to be a FOSS version of Apple.

selfhoster1153• 4 years ago

Not necessarily. I do think that UX redesigns, and social and political advocacy were definitely mistakes, though.

onion2k• 4 years ago

This set of policies would spell the end of Mozilla, and the end of Firefox unless the community (or another org) picked it up. Mozilla is mostly funded by search engine companies, the largest being Google, and any direct attempt to compete with Chrome would probably end a significant chunk of that funding.

Like it or not, unless Mozilla does what Google sees as acceptable, Firefox can't continue. The only way to turn Firefox around and continue development would be to find an alternative benefactor.

wyclif2• 4 years ago

Mozilla is mostly funded by search engine companies, the largest being Google

Not only that, but this creates perverse incentives for Mozilla. Google funds Mozilla to avoid charges of monopoly, and that disincentives Mozilla to compete with Google and make Firefox a competitive browser to Chromium.

account4230• 4 years ago

Mozilla is currently funded by Google but why are you assuming that a non-profit oriented Mozilla could not find other funding sources? All their past attemts seem to be about monetizing the browser but just like Google has been throwing cash at them there will be others whose motives are more alligned with Mozilla doing the same. As far as I am aware there is no way to donate to the development of Firefox and even if there was I and many others would not do so while Mozilla while the Google funding steers Mozilla's interests.

Would Mozilla be able to get as much without Google as they get from Google? Probably not, but if they do follow the suggestions of the OP then hopefully they would not need as much.

wolpoli2• 4 years ago

I would instead argue that Firefox's Gecko engine is beyond saving and that any money invested in it now would be better donated to other community projects because there isn't enough resource to catch up. Sticking with Gecko will eventually lead to the dismise of Firefox the organization.

Microsoft, with their resource and their ability to bundle Microsoft Edge in with Windows, couldn't get any appreciable amount of marketshare. Firefox, with less resource than Microsoft, won't fare any better.

Rebuilding Firefox with Chronium would salvage whatever the mindshare/marketshare left. Then Firefox could still wield some influence with their marketshare and the threat of forking Chronium.

eternityforest7• 4 years ago

I'm 100% onboard with Chromium being the universal de facto standard for the web as long as it's open.

Really, all I want from a browser is Chromium, full features without disabled APIs, with a few extras like Sync, P2P stuff, and codecs, fully open.

Right now, I think anyone with name recognition and marketing ability could probably develop a winning browser for 50k or so. Just... take chromium, add sync, and an ad blocker for high bandwidth video ads. Done. You have made the world's best browser, the rest is business stuff.

voidlogic2• 4 years ago

Why do you think the engine is beyond saving? I use Firefox everyday and have absolutely zero complaints...

aeturnum2• 4 years ago

I agree with your topline goal, but I am surprised by the way you think about it. Most of what you recommend has no obvious connection to firefox-the-program.

Like...

- Donate the major money drains that aren't Firefox to the Apache Foundation or another worthy custodian
- Fire all inessential staff that don't want to work on Firefox.
- Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money, and cut their salaries (bonuses tied directly to increase in Firefox market share).
- Make sure that all donations from now on are redirected to things that support Firefox development and nothing else, period.

All of these are good suggestions if the problem is that Firefox is running out of money or has too few resources. But that's not my impression at all!

Google's strategy with Chrome demonstrates how valuable it is to develop other compelling services that use cutting-edge standards supported by your browser. Google does it in a way where they freeze out other compatible browsers, but Mozilla does not have to. I would say that the number one thing that Mozilla can do to support the web is to make web standards meaningful again - and the best way to do that is to develop things aside from web browsers to demonstrate the value of those standards.

We as a community, cannot afford to let Firefox languish until the only browsers in the world are Chromium derivatives.

I don't think Mozilla having non-Firefox projects harms Firefox. I think there is every reason to believe that a healthy Mozilla has Firefox at the center, with many other ongoing projects.

selfhoster1153• 4 years ago

My impression is that Mozilla is too focused on basically everything that isn't Firefox - to me, it's axiomatic that Firefox wouldn't be in such a horrifying shape if they were focused on it. They are lacking for attention, and not money, which is why they should jettison everything that isn't Firefox or doesn't serve Firefox. Anyone else can do funny extensions or VPN or what have you got, but browser-making is Mozilla's core competency that no one in the FOSS ecosystem has mastered to the extent they did.

It seems evident to me that if they made Firefox into a power user browser again, somehow, then power users would flock to it again and bring in some of their peers and family, putting it back in a safe 10-15% range of market share where it can't be picked off or ignored by Google. And I know that power users are leaving en masse - I stuck with them through thick and thin for nearly 15 years, and I'm finally getting ready to leave if the situation doesn't improve.

I think there is every reason to believe that a healthy Mozilla has Firefox at the center

Neither Mozilla not Firefox are healthy, in my assessment. And this is exactly because they are getting sidetracked instead of centering on Firefox.

topspin2• 4 years ago

"- Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money"

That has to be the first on the list, because that is the prerequisite for everything else.

Unfortunately there is no mechanism to achieve this within Mozilla. The people that need to go won't; they've got their trophy titles and they've feathered their nest as they want it. Thus Mozilla and Firefox with it are doomed.

Solving that would take a fork, just like it did with Netscape. It would also require an endowment of capital to fund a core of developers for years just to catch up with blink/webkit/etc. At this point the best plan might be to adopt the latter.

Thing is the market is producing this without Mozilla. Brave and others are delivering real alternatives to Chrome, Safari and Edge.

So at this point what is the value proposition of saving Firefox? That's a rhetorical question; I get it. I just don't know if it's enough to attract the developers and funding to do it. It's conceivable; one could imagine a leader with the passion to inspire people and attract the funding and developers.

Maybe that person exists. If so they won't be doing it under Mozilla.

mschuster912• 4 years ago

Thing is the market is producing this without Mozilla. Brave and others are delivering real alternatives to Chrome, Safari and Edge.

And in the end, it's all WebKit derivatives under the hood. That is the danger. There used to be three major distinct engines (Firefox, IE/Trident, WebKit) plus a boatload of specialized ones (Opera)... and that competition bred improvements and features. These days it's all about walled gardens, which is what the "market" (aka a bunch of ultra rich companies) wants, and Firefox is the last truly independent fighter standing.

Sadly, Firefox has been mismanaged for almost a decade now.

selfhoster1153• 4 years ago

Was an endowment needed for LibreOffice and Maria DB? I don't actually know how it happened with those two, but they both seemed to be more or less grassroots forks when people realised that Oracle won't ever be a good custodian. Perhaps a Firefox fork here could emerge in a similar way.

generalizations• 4 years ago

Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money, and cut their salaries (bonuses tied directly to increase in Firefox market share).

They fired the CEO that knew what he was doing. Personally, I think Mozilla is getting what they asked for.

throwaway4200• 4 years ago

What makes you think Brendan Eich would have been a good CEO? He was CTO of Mozilla during the period that Chrome was eating Firefox's lunch. He was probably more responsible for Firefox product decisions at that time than CEO Mitchell Baker.

vegai_• 4 years ago

Personally, I think Mozilla is getting what they asked for.

A continuously increasing revenue seems to be what they're getting currently.

perryizgr82• 4 years ago

I'll add one more to this:

Use all/most of the money from the Google deal to build a fund. Even doing this for a couple years will build a huge backup plan for Firefox and they can look at not relying on the deal for survival. Instead work off the interest earned on the fund.

forgotmysn• 4 years ago

Assuming the board are unable or unwilling to salvage FF for the sake of Mozilla, would it be worth considering starting a new non-profit browser based on FF? A new organization without all that baggage? WaterWolf or something?

crossroadsguy• 4 years ago

Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money, and cut their salaries (bonuses tied directly to increase in Firefox market share)

And people wonder why non-profits and NGOs don’t attract the best talent. This entitled mindset is the why.

That people who want to do good work should earn less. Perfect! Let them pay for their vacation with goodwill and air.

This is especially rich coming from the HN crowd. Everybody wants a revolutionary but in the neighbour’s house.

account4230• 4 years ago

There is a vast ocean between strugling to pay for your vacation and making millions every year.

And there is no "the HN crowd" - don't fall into the trap of assinging to collective consciousness for groups and then complaining that it does not behave rationally.

pers0n• 4 years ago

FF user since it was called the Phoenix Project.

Donating money isn't going to help them. It might help them look good to some techies that follow that information, but otherwise most wont care.

Mozilla needs to focus on other products to use in tandem w FF. Email service that is private, VPN (i think they have a partnership), Thunderbird, zoom like platform. They need office/business solutions most likely. Devtools, dev services, etc.

I'm not saying forget FF, but they can't just focus on 1 product or they are doomed.

endemic• 4 years ago

I know their phone project fizzled, but I wonder if there's a market for a Chromebook competitor. Position it as a privacy-respecting product for schools. Introduce kids to the idea that Chrome != The Internet.

ghiculescu• 4 years ago

I’d make it work with the password manager in chrome, and tell everyone the dev tools are better. That’s what would make me seriously try it again.

vntok• 4 years ago

Yes, but that is not a great way to convince people. Surely they would move back to Chrome as soon as they realize you were lying?

sergiotapia• 4 years ago

They do way too much that's not _Build the best browser in the world_.

Persona, Pocket, a whole bunch of non-technical stuff....

It adds up. I wish they would slim their team down dramatically and become a lean mean killing machine to build the best browser in the world. But unless they get sponsored by some billionaire I don't see that happening.

sergiomattei• 4 years ago

Chrome is just good enough for the average user.

Taking measures to appeal to a more enthusiast audience won’t do much for the numbers.

Only the masses will, and the masses moved long ago to Chrome because it was a 10x product. The alternative was awful. Not only this, but it was backed by Google, the world’s entrypoint to the internet.

Now, Chrome continues being “good enough” if not great.

For me, I have no reason to move, even being a reasonably privacy-conscious person.

uniqueuid• 4 years ago

Maybe it has to do with its competitors being a 1.7 trillion dollar company and a 2.5 trillion dollar company!

Winning against those requires not only better technology AND marketing AND consumer favor, but also leverage in the legal processes that enable/disable network effects. So anti-trust is unfortunately one of Mozilla's biggest hopes.

kazinator• 4 years ago

Maybe it also has to do with depending heavily on their money, too.

ErikCorry2• 4 years ago

You think they don't have enough cash to save FF, when they get $400m a year from Google?

dylan6042• 4 years ago

Googs just gave them $400m which means they have soooo much more than $400m. FF has to pay all of its budget with that, so hiring lawyers to take on Googs with that same bucket of money will never work. Googs will continue to give Moz $400m, but then turn right around and spend $401m on their lawyers to fight off whatever Moz can afford.

bzbarsky• 4 years ago

$400m/year is in the ballpark for estimates of Chrome's _advertising_ spend, at various points.

mbreese• 4 years ago

Winning against those requires

I think the point here isn’t winning, it’s surviving. They need to maintain enough market share to keep going, but they don’t need to be the dominant browser. The goal of avoiding a monoculture can be achieved with a smaller marketshare.

dralley8• 4 years ago

I'm not sure which two of Google, Apple or Microsoft you're referring to, but you're missing a third trillion+ dollar company.

account4230• 4 years ago

With Google giving them new golden handcuffs every year Mozilla is unlikely to do anything to upset the status quo, including lobbying for anti-trust enforcement.

jimbob45• 4 years ago

The number one issue with the browser ecosystem right now is Safari. iPhone browsers being forced to render with Safari's engine is already bad. Blocking browsers from having extensions is far worse in my opinion. Most of the reason I use Chrome and Firefox on my desktop is their rich array of extensions.

If I were Firefox, I'd sue Apple to hell for abusing their dominance in OS and device market share to block me from competing fairly in the browser market.

shagie• 4 years ago

If I read https://kinsta.com/browser-market-share/ correctly, the global market share of browsers is 77% Google Chrome.

Safari only makes up 8.87% of the global share (and Firefox is 7.69%).

From a mobile perspective and limited to the US - https://www.statista.com/statistics/272664/market-share-held...

Safari makes up only 54.87% of the mobile browser market and chrome makes up another 38.95%.

Another set of graphs - https://backlinko.com/browser-market-share

Even if every safari user switched (desktop and mobile), it still wouldn't do much more than double the marketshare and yet remain a small fraction of what Chrome has.

I find it difficult to say that iPhone safari is the reason that Firefox is having trouble when overall, iPhone safari has less of an overall market share than Firefox currently has.

kaesar142• 4 years ago

Chrome just works and Firefox doesn't.

I know that's reductive and perhaps not to the standards of this website, but that's really it for the majority of people who couldn't care less about the diversity of browser engines out there.

PaulHoule• 4 years ago

I use Firefox for all my ordinary desktop browsing and "it just works" most of the time.

That said I have worked at places that have given up on Firefox compatibility for single page applications. If I've got any choice in the matter I do most of my development in Firefox and let the testers work out problems that turn up in Chrome. However if the app is solidly broken on Firefox I wind up using Chrome like the others.

kaesar142• 4 years ago

If a browser fails in some key function even 1% of the time that's enough to drive most users from Firefox to Chrome.

To win back market share Firefox has to be much, much better than Chrome. That's how Firefox won market share from IE in the 2000s and how Chrome won in the 2010s. Firefox feels ever-so-slightly slower to me on loading most web pages and has more failures in loading page elements that I notice than Chrome.

"Just works, most of the time" isn't just works. Just works is perfection or as close to it as software can get.

sys_64738• 4 years ago

Probably once Chrome brings in the new Manifest v3 changes then FF will start reversing the trend.

chomp2• 4 years ago

Firefox is losing market share due to shortsighted/poor decisions from leadership, and a harsh anti-competitive landscape from Microsoft/Google/Apple.

Firefox is difficult to save because it's been on constant life support from Google to misdirect antitrust investigators. Saving Firefox would involve not only raising its market share (which would probably have to involve a deal from Google/Microsoft/Apple or legislation because they currently preconfigure their systems/devices to use their proprietary browsers, which are mostly "good enough") but also find a way to wean Mozilla Corp off of the Google payments, which would mean investments in tangentially related services (like VPN, etc.)

sorry_outta_gas• 4 years ago

I don't think most users care about that, the Google tie seems like a weak point considering most users choose chrome

chomp2• 4 years ago

Users absolutely don't care where their browser gets paid, but financially, Mozilla Corp is dependent on an external entity's good graces to pay them.

Mozilla Corp makes 400 million per year from Google money. If this money dries up in 2023, then the browser has to find a new deal, or close shop (figuratively speaking; I'm sure it'd lumber on since it's an open source browser). This is a fair amount of business risk, so "saving" the browser probably would involve figuring out how to keep the lights on without a search engine deal.

account4230• 4 years ago

find a way to wean Mozilla Corp off of the Google payments, which would mean investments in tangentially related services (like VPN, etc.)

I disagree - the way forward should be for Mozilla to stop acting like a corporation and start acting like a non-profit. They will never be able to compete with tech giants when it comes to selling things and services in order to throw the profits at the browser - and trying will only incentivize them to make the browser worse to help sell things. Instead they should emprace that having an open browser that is not controlled by a for-profit corporation is a common good and seek people, organizations and governments that agree and are willing to fund it for that reason alone.

nikanj3• 4 years ago

Every time I restart Firefox, I get about 8 different prompts for "See what's new!" "Reset your Firefox profile now!" "See our new diversity initiative now!" etc.

It feels like opening a Windows Me installation from 2000. I just want to get browsing done.

pasc1878• 4 years ago

I get none of that - you musty have some odd config.

madjam002• 4 years ago

I get the same thing and I reset my config to defaults.

Nextgrid3• 4 years ago

He's exaggerating a bit bit his point still stands. After an update there's at least one extra tab about the update, and sometimes more like the recent-ish stupid color scheme feature.

dewey• 4 years ago

I have a pretty standard config and I got that the other day: https://twitter.com/tehwey/status/1483531515631919106

ZeroGravitas4• 4 years ago

I believe the reset thing is due to it being a good way to solve user problems that have accumulated over time.

It seemed a bigger thing a few years ago, but if you keep seeing it, then they've probably identified you as someone likely to benfit from it. I don't think I've seen it for years.

This is just speculation though.

I just get an update "what's new" tab after every update, which seems reasonable if you are adding or removing things.

temp08262• 4 years ago

That's...not the case (and never has been) for me. You only restart it when you get an update (in which case that wouldn't be very often)? Or you did something whacky in about:config? Or maybe a bad extension. Dunno, not normal

Steltek• 4 years ago

Updates are probably more frequent on the Beta/Aurora/Whatever channel?

nikanj3• 4 years ago

I only start FF when I get a customer report about an issue on FF. I guess I start it seldom enough to always trigger some sort of watchdog?

Anyway, here's my 2 cents. I only open FireFox when a customer reports an issue, and I'm always barraged by a deluge of unwanted info, which doesn't encourage me to open FF more often.

dpedu• 4 years ago

I don't often relaunch my apps but I relaunched firefox just now to see what would happen to test this.

Here's what I was greeted with - an ad for pocket: https://i.imgur.com/hYYZYE3.png

selfhoster1153• 4 years ago

Maybe you have an old profile. I often see this kind of messaging when starting up Firefox on a freshly installed OS.

tgsovlerkhgsel5• 4 years ago

May be OS-specific, or it may not happen when you've set Firefox to restore previous tabs when restarting, or there may be a way to turn it off.

I don't remember seeing many of these on my actual machine (I did get the color scheme nonsense if I remember correctly), but I'm constantly seeing these in dev/testing VMs where I just installed it for testing and occasionally keep it updated.

BlackLotus897• 4 years ago

  about:config

Search for mstone (browser.startup.homepage_override.mstone) and set it to "ignore" (without the quotes) am not sure why this has to be done this way and I don't have it disabled since I want to know what's new, but hope it helps.

Oh and browser.disableResetPrompt and set it to true. Create it if it doesn't exist

marcosdumay3• 4 years ago

Honestly, I gave-up on editing about:config.

As soon as I do it, the non-dismissable "let's reset your profile" message pops up again. There's no point.

russdpale• 4 years ago

What? I've been using firefox for years and I never see any of this, you may want to run some virus scans.

system2• 4 years ago

Same here. I just started Firefox now, UAC prompt came again. Restarted, pocket started showing me random stuff, tabs open.

I do not want any of this.

nicoburns5• 4 years ago

I would:

- Prioritise getting the new extension framework fully functional. And continue innovating on the capabilities that are exposed. Especially on mobile where the new fenix engine is still limited to a small whitelist of extensions

- Sort out the multi-profile story. Container tabs are great, but the chrome model is also a great fit for many workflow (e.g. different people in a house or home vs. work profiles).

- Try and work on making Gecko easily embeddable again. Webkit/Blink gets all the attention because it's easy to embed into things. I suspect Gecko needs to compete in this market if it hopes to survive. It needs to have more than one company invested in it.

This ship has probably sailed now as they've fired most of their Rust and Servo teams. But IMO they ought to have created a rust-based cross-platform UI framework. They tried to do it web-based with Firefox OS but that was too slow. But with a Rust solution I think they could have owned both the mobile and desktop application spaces, which could potentially have made them a bootload of money and been a huge win for linux.

ssorallen• 4 years ago

Chrome’s Profiles are the #1 reason I use it over Firefox. If Firefox had as complete of an implementation as Chrome then I would consider switching, but until then Firefox is a non-starter for me.

I use all 3 of these profiles all day every day for work:

* one personal profile logged into personal Google

* one work profile managed by the company, logged into company Google

* one development profile with all the debugging extensions installed, like React and Redux tools (they require access to all pages all the time)

benjamir2• 4 years ago

headscratch I used profiles with Ff for ages... what is the difference to Chrome's?

BlackLotus897• 4 years ago

Why not use the firefox profiles?

I also use multiple profiles. My setup is as fallows.

  firefox -ProfileManager

Create 2 profiles work and private.

Change the theme of work to orange and private to black.

Create two .desktop files and append to the Exec line -P work (or private) and the Name to include (work)

I have work on desktop 5 and private on desktop 8 and 9.

Works like a charme for me. Additional bonus. Use container to add additional seperation.

baq4• 4 years ago

about:profiles

tenacious_tuna• 4 years ago

I use Firefox's container tabs all the time, which segment exactly the same way as profiles (albiet with the same extension pool). Personally I prefer having blended tabs in a single window, or having additional segregation; I keep Amazon punted out to it's own container, as well as social media. I know it won't stop all the cross-identificaiton, but it should at least help.

cryptonector• 4 years ago

What's wrong with Firefox Containers?

zamalek• 4 years ago

Especially on mobile where the new fenix engine is still limited to a small whitelist of extensions

Fenix is bloody fantastic. I would double-down on this and really push the fact that (even with the limited extension list) it has uBlock Origin.

rvz• 4 years ago

Firefox declining market share cannot be reversed. The users have stuck to Chrome for years and they don't care about the broken websites that Firefox can't render or support. In the long run it will continue to decline and Google will just see its not worth it.

Firefox is beyond saving. The question is, what can Mozilla do to save itself?

They had a chance with Rust to turn that into something like Erlang Solutions did with Erlang. ie. A Rust Consultancy and will be able to make a significant amount of money in the long term with that. Instead we were given a corporate foundation that is already in chaos by Amazon.

Mozilla has given up on its mission statement and has partnered and joined the anti-privacy gang: Google and Facebook as they watch them push whatever hostile web standard to W3C, and being powerless to stop or object them.

What a shame.

blinding-streak• 4 years ago

Take a hint from Brave, which is growing fast. Go all in on privacy and ad blocking.

slig2• 4 years ago

That would surely be bad for their 0.5 billion/year deal from Google. Not going to happen.

28304283409234• 4 years ago

They're not getting that money for the ads. They're getting it to be a decoy for anti-trust investigators. Which is not hampered in the slightest by adding a default adblocker.

gausswho• 4 years ago

That presumes Google is paying Mozilla primarily to secure the search market. But if they're paying primarily to secure staying out of anti-trust court, Firefox culling ads doesn't affect whether big G keeps their wallet open.

selfhoster1153• 4 years ago

Do you need $500m/year to maintain a web browser? Cut all the dead weight, rebuild trust, and you could probably do just as well on donations. For one, I'd be donating to Firefox every month, if there were such a fund ringfenced only for Firefox development.

rvieira2• 4 years ago

I've used Firefox only for a few years (up until last month or so).

I'm no expert and would actually like to know, from the experts here, if the following is my subjective experience or not:

I find that for not very heavy or for heavy, but well-behaved sites, I can't really tell the difference between FF and Chrome.

But for very heavy and badly designed sites, Chrome seems to be much faster and have much less latency.

joombaga• 4 years ago

Can you give examples of some very heavy and badly designed sites?

rvieira2• 4 years ago

I wouldn't call it "badly designed", but certainly heavy. I've opened a free account with ClickUp. It _feels_ a lot snappier in Chrome.

kirbyfan64sos• 4 years ago

Because Chrome works well enough to be, at worst, "okay" for the average user.

People only really change tech when the one they currently have is visibly & obviously worse, which is part of what spurred the initial migrations to Chrome (I remember switching from FF and in awe at how much faster Chrome was).

That's not to say Chrome hasn't been acquiring it's own list of missteps (manifest V3, restricted Chrome Sync, even attempting Flow), but none of them so far are the type that a non-tech-savvy user would care about, or even know about unless explicitly told.

Then you add on the massive budget Chrome has, compared to Mozilla's struggles to find a revenue source, and it's not hard to see why it's having a hard time.

With that in mind, the obvious solution is for FF to find something distinct it can excel at that the average person finds attractive and that allows for monetization in some way. Problem is, no one really knows what that would be, and the current attempts at being privacy-focused just...aren't widely applicable enough. (Whether or not people should care about privacy is a different debate, and how to get them to care about privacy is its own rabbit hole.)

easton• 4 years ago

I mean, the reason everybody moved to Chrome last time was because it was faster than Firefox/IE and it included Flash so you didn't have that stupid update popup every time you logged in. Flash isn't a thing anymore, but if they could make it faster than Chrome (not just as fast) while keeping up with web standards, it would work.

I don't know where you get money for such a venture, but IBM (Red Hat) and Amazon both a vested interest to not have a browser monoculture and don't already run a browser project.

matt_heimer• 4 years ago

Amazon has Silk (Chromium based) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Silk

kiutroap• 4 years ago

but if they could make it faster than Chrome (not just as fast) while keeping up with web standards, it would work

This is easier to be said than done, as browsers are mostly limited by I/O nowadays. There's a little you can do about it other than introducing something like AMP. I'm afraid Google is going to win this one.

staticassertion5• 4 years ago

Chrome went heavy on marketing. And their marketing was compelling. At a time when the web was really slow, Chrome advertised speed - remember those Chrome ads where they'd load web pages while something flew by the screen?

At a time when the web was dangerous, Chrome advertised security. Remember when Flash wasn't sandboxed? When Java executed automatically? When nothing had auto-updates?

Firefox caught up, but at best it's "as good". What's it really doing for me?

The answer is presumably privacy. And that's cool. But most people have a hard time understanding what "privacy" means. Further, you can say Chrome is weak on privacy, but it's hardly as bad as people make it out to be.

So basically Mozilla is, at best, equivalent to Chrome, but Chrome was way better for a long time. So it's got to convince people to come back, but its only selling point is really vague.

And then you have some other stuff like companies can manage Chrome via GSuite. So now your work computer is X% more likely to run Chrome. So now you have to choose to have a different experience at home and at work.

What would I do?

1. I'd refocus on the mission. Privacy is critical, security is critical. That would mean a number of things - how is it that Brave is the first browser to integrate TOR? Isn't that insane? TOR has been using Firefox by default forever, and no one thought "maybe we should just support this thing, and start heavily contributing to it" ?

2. I'd invest heavily in next-gen performance and security. Chrome has In-The-Wild zero days being exploited - that's an opportunity. The web is heavier than ever - that's an opportunity.

I'd focus heavily on that. I'd push benchmarks and I'd market those features heavily.

3. I would fire every executive who took a multi-million dollar bonus while firing tons of employees.

That's just day 1 stuff.

Going further I'd consider what it would look like to see Mozilla in the Enterprise. Integrations and management features built into the LTS releases are an obvious start.

silicon24012• 4 years ago

Firefox makes poor decisions. I've been trying to use firefox for years and just gave up this past weekend. As far as I know, there's no way to customize your firefox home view on android so that you have a permanent, customizable set of links, and nothing else. You can have "recent bookmarks" which disappear eventually, presumably once they're no longer "recent".

Can you imagine being the one to approve such a bone-headed design? I gave up and downloaded opera instead and it's been perfect. I have my desired links up when I open a new tab, nothing else, and life is good.

BlackLotus897• 4 years ago

* Go into the settings, customize, home

* Disable everything.

* Visit an important page

* Menu -> add to top sites

Voila

ameminator5• 4 years ago

I mean, this will work, but it seems a far cry from a truly custom home page.

silicon24012• 4 years ago

I tried that and it doesn't work. It shows all your "top" sites, with "add to top sites" letting you pin some to the top of the list. I don't want a list of my top sites, I want a list of bookmarks. For some reason FF Android only lets you have recent bookmarks (temporarily) or pinned top sites + other top sites. It's absurd that such a basic feature isn't provided and a great example of the stupid decisions that firefox seems to enjoy making

throwawayboise2• 4 years ago

I have my browser default homepage set to ~/home.html. I maintain all my common links in that local html file.

There was a period of time where FF didn't allow a "file://" URL as the default for a new page or tab, but it works now. I'm not sure if Chrome allows it.

softwarebeware• 4 years ago

Firefox is losing marketshare because Chrome is the default browser on Android devices and Android devices are the number one device in the world. Most people don't even know how to change their default browser.

I don't think Firefox needs saving. Those who use it are active and committed to it.

vi28373• 4 years ago

Yeap, the same story like Windows and Explorer.

fuzzy2• 4 years ago

Those who use it are active and committed to it.

Are they though? Are they so very committed they'll take all the crap Mozilla throws at them? Because Mozilla sure is trying their very best to get rid of Firefox users.

selfhoster1153• 4 years ago

I don't think Firefox needs saving. Those who use it are active and committed to it.

Don't be so sure. I stuck to Android though thick and thin since 2.1 or 2.2, but my next phone will be an iPhone, because I bloody had enough of their nonsense.

Firefox is harder to replace, if only because it's the only counter to Google's browser monopoly (so I consider it a moral imperative to keep using it), but if they keep reducing openness and end user control, I will eventually snap and abandon them. And if I'm nearing this point, then many have already passed it because I have a remarkable tolerance for shitty FOSS software. A family member already requested I throw out Firefox and install Chrome, and I complied because honestly, I can't fault them.

Klonoar2• 4 years ago

Look, I hate to say it, but Firefox is not the counter to a Chrome monopoly. Firefox lost this fight quite some time ago, and the only thing truly stopping Chrome from owning the web is Apple and Safari.

Yes, it's true that it's fairly anti-competitive behavior to only allow WebKit on iOS, but the painful truth here is that it stops Chrome from being spread around enough devices and taking over. Google cannot push Apple around anywhere near as easily.

Firefox is a literal drop in the bucket compared to that effort.

horsawlarway2• 4 years ago

This is my personal opinion only, so take it with a grain of salt.

----

Mozilla can't save Firefox. It's not that Firefox can't be saved, but rather that Mozilla as an organization is not capable of doing so.

My take is this - Despite a history of being relatively privacy friendly, the vast majority of funding for the organization comes directly from Google (To the tune of ~90% of their total funding, straight from Google so that Google can maintain its position as the default search in Firefox).

That leads to insurmountable conflicts of interest - They claim they are for people and for privacy, but they are funded almost entirely by Google, and have to secure search deals for their continued existence (the latest just this year: https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-go...).

In this light - I believe it actually BENEFITS mozilla to keep Firefox relevant, but not good enough to replace Chrome. If the browser genuinely becomes good enough that customers start switching from Chrome to Firefox en mass, Mozilla needs a replacement funding plan because Google can essentially turn the lights off at any point by simply refusing to pay them for search at next contract renewal.

While they've dipped their toes into paid products... most of them are not particularly relevant or compelling on their own merits (that's not to say they're bad, just not all that innovative or likely to drive enough revenue to replace the 500million a year google is paying them)

So not only do I not believe that Mozilla is capable of "saving" Firefox in this way, I don't believe they have the right incentives to even seriously try.

axg11• 4 years ago

I don't follow this line of reasoning. Google pays Mozilla for the search traffic. If Firefox overtook Chrome in market share, Mozilla's position would become even _more_ favourable and they could command a larger sum from Google. If Google threatened to end the agreement, Mozilla could simply walk to Bing/DuckDuckGo or whoever else.

michaelt• 4 years ago

Right now, Google pays more than Bing or DuckDuckGo.

Perhaps Google just has mountains of spare cash, which DDG doesn't. Perhaps Google gets extra value as FF both provides search traffic, and keeps competition regulators off their back. Perhaps Bing thinks if FF changed the default search engine away from Google, 95% users would change it right back.

But if Bing is only willing to pay 70% of what Google pays - could Mozilla survive losing that much income? Or would it trigger a death spiral, with less money meaning less development meaning lower market share?

dralley8• 4 years ago

DuckDuckGo's total revenue is less than 20% of Mozilla's.

bokchoi• 4 years ago

As far as paid products go, it seems like a no brainer to offer paid plans for privacy focused email or other g-suite-like collaboration services. It seems like Mozilla needs additional revenue streams.

boomboomsubban2• 4 years ago

Mozilla needs a replacement funding plan because Google can essentially turn the lights off at any point by simply refusing to pay them for search at next contract renewal.

And then Bing/Yandex/Baidu buys the rights, and all that changes is the amount they get. It'd drop if Google publicly vowed they won't bid on it anymore, but there's also the possibility that someone like Yahoo pays more than Google like what happened in 2015.

It's not like Google is arbitrarily deciding how much money to give Mozilla, they are buying something at the lowest price they can.

horsawlarway2• 4 years ago

I think Google is fairly arbitrarily deciding how much money to give to Mozilla (and it's roughly their current OpEx) - They aren't just buying search, they're also buying "competition" in the browser space.

Further, the kind of transition where Firefox might gain users from Chrome isn't instantaneous, and it turns out users have a preference here (most users don't want to have google removed from Firefox - they still prefer it. Mozilla is quietly testing a program to use Bing as the default, just to see how loud the feedback is: https://www.pcgamer.com/firefox-is-conducting-a-study-to-see...)

So there's a tension here that's beyond just enterprise deals.

Last - that deal didn't actually work out very well for Yahoo, and that was when Firefox had nearly 15% of the browser market (vs ~8% today).

heyitsanewacco• 4 years ago

The unsaid part is that Google keeps Firefox alive so that they are not hit by anti-trust over in-browser search. That's why FF will always trail Chrome, its the designated loser. If it weren't for anti-trust, Google would have bought out Mozilla years ago.

selfhoster1153• 4 years ago

You can't buy out an open source project. If Google bought it out and started messing with it, there would be an immediate outcry and Firefox would end up with the community fork winning out, just like it happened with MySQL and OpenOffice.

ordx2• 4 years ago

Current CEO has no vision and more interested in turning Mozilla into some version of internet ACLU. First and foremost she has to go.

egberts12• 4 years ago

Mozilla Foundation is all about fattening the C-suite payroll (including board members) and whatever payola they can get and not about the corporate lifeline they are supposedly to dutifully protect which is Firefox.

ZeroGravitas4• 4 years ago

I wouldn't try to save Firefox, I'd try to save the benefits of an open web (I'm assuming some variant on that is their actual mission statement but not checked).

Firefox itself is just one in a series of reinventions. I am at peace with using a Firefox branded chromium fork in some future date as I think a balanced corporate sharing economy similar to Linux is probably the best we can hope for.

On that theme, some kind of more loosely combined ecosystem that involves internet archive, Wikipedia, Mozilla, OSM, Atom, open standards, free software, royalty free tech and democratic governence and pro-consumer advocacy in a global context is probably a good idea, to counterbalance large corporate interests. It probably already kind of exists in some ad-hoc manner, but further moves in that direction would be good.

account4230• 4 years ago

Firefox itself is just one in a series of reinventions. I am at peace with using a Firefox branded chromium fork in some future date as I think a balanced corporate sharing economy similar to Linux is probably the best we can hope for.

Except Chromium is not that. WebKit might have been but Google and/or Apple decided they'd rather want their own fiefdoms than play along. Both companies have made it very clear that they want to be in control.

duped• 4 years ago

I think they could transition to being a developer tools company with a focus on building enterprise web applications with the goal of making the "default" web development process correspond to their mission statement.

I think that Chrome and IE proved that the most important users are developers and business admins. If Mozilla wants to make the web a place for real human users in line with their ideals, then they need to focus on making their vision the default for developers and businesses.

ozten• 4 years ago

#1 reason: Google has been spending millions of dollars on ads. 2010 many subway, buses, and TVs had ads about how fast Chrome was. Advertising works! Early adopters switched, followed by mainstream users.

Additional Key Strategies:

Google focused on developer experience with its tools.

Google shipped a good enough extension system.

Google invested in matching or beating a few key features but kept Chrome a leaner project overall. Worse is better and 80/20 rule.

Ecosystem evolution:

Google successfully got every major browser vendor to move to their rendering engine, except for Firefox. Gecko has always been harder to embed.

Slowly over time, some web devs stopped testing their work on Firefox since they were using Chrome and most browsers "just worked" like Chrome. Every week I hit a site that I have to use in Chrome because of a bug I'm seeing in Firefox.

Mozilla went all-in on trying to disrupt itself with a mobile phone operating system, which didn't work out.

Mozilla dabbles in many strategies (Privacy, Games, Advertising, WebXR), but none have been successful in growing active daily users.

Some people say Mozilla should focus on executing Firefox, but I think Mozilla is smart for trying to re-invent itself because the browser is a commodity, and if Google wants to own that on-ramp to the internet, it will.

Netscape and Firefox 1.0 were massive products. Mozilla needs a 3rd act to return to a significant marketshare.

dralley8• 4 years ago

#1 reason: Google has been spending millions of dollars on ads. 2010 many subway, buses, and TVs had ads about how fast Chrome was. Advertising works! Early adopters switched, followed by mainstream users.

Not to mention paying the likes of Adobe, Avast, AVG, and Oracle to have their installers auto-install Chrome using dark patterns.

alangibson• 4 years ago

This had been answered well by others, so I'll pose an even better question: "why do we need Firefox?"

To answer my own question: without at least one competing browser, all web standards are effectively controlled by Google. It'll be AMP from here on out.

hirundo• 4 years ago

I left Firefox for political sentiments that most of you do not share, judging from past conversations here. There are enough people like me that those events likely continue to put downward pressure on their market share. But not all that much in the big scheme of things. The larger effect of those politics was a change in leadership. Firefox used to be led by a passionate, opinionated technologist with a clear and consistent vision. His replacement, while more politically palatable, seems to have a weaker grasp of the market and the technology. The direction of the browser's market share reflects that. CEOs are non-fungible.

The primary "author" of Firefox changed, and that had a similar effect to the change in author of the final season of Game of Thrones.

ameminator5• 4 years ago

I left Firefox about 8 months ago and I haven't looked back. On desktop, I was tired of these constant "company partnerships" and so I decided to give Vivaldi a shot. I haven't looked back (for a variety of reasons, including how customizeable the whole browser was).

On mobile, I switched to Brave and I grew to really like groups of tabs.

sebow• 4 years ago

For the past years FF updates seem to focus on the fact that: One-two new color themes are available: "Try these out, tune your browser! Look at the 1000th time we're shilling Pocket because people like bookmarks!" instead of appealing to the more important aspects of a browser like firefox which is chosen by "more tech literate people": precisely because it's not chrome; for usability, privacy, features not being removed in the name of "reshaping the web", customization, etc.

Also, let's hit a nerve here: Mozilla& Co, ideologically speaking, and by "following the money", are mostly the same hand dealt as Google.I speak for myself but i'm sure many other people also use FF only because there are legitimately no other options besides Chrome, except maybe some obscure ones like qutebrowser/browsh/lynx/etc which aren't really something you jump to for daily driving due to the pain of installation/usage.That or maybe one still has to close/migrate/transition the google/mozilla account for the bookmarks sync features, which is the only useful feature and reason why one should use these 2(/3 including edge I guess) browsers.

To answer your question(s), I would do nothing, because I won't save Firefox.If they save themselves that's fine, but with a fresh memory of the netscape days and the battle of the browsers for the "advertisement bucks", this is not the first rodeo of the company/project/browser, and the usability of the browser is, again, the only reason i'm using it.As a side note, they're way too political for my taste.

dnissley• 4 years ago

My opinion? Mozilla should take a big portion of it's funding and direct it towards the fight for browser choice -- and the biggest offender here is of course, Apple. There's already some tailwinds in their favor here (the Epic court case, general grumbling about the 30% take, etc), take the opportunity and ask openly that Apple support browser choice, and hammer them on it repeatedly.

robryan• 4 years ago

I wonder how many users they would actually gain from this. People that both care about browser engine diversity on iOS but don't already use the webview version of Firefox.

chockablocker• 4 years ago

Everybody is moving to mobile and almost nobody uses Firefox on mobile. However, Firefox mobile does support extensions. Is that something that could emphasized? However, Firefox speed on mobile is much slower than Chrome. That should probably be improved upon.

For desktop there's not much of a distinguishing factor left. Chrome is good enough. I like Firefox for the privacy, but is that enough of a distinguishing factor for regular (less privacy conscious) folks?

benjamir2• 4 years ago

Ff on mobile with uBlock origin is IMO awesome.

I switched angrily to Chrome on mobile ca. 4y ago, but came back ca. 2y to give it a 2nd chance and I'm not missing Chrome.

tayo422• 4 years ago

I use firefox on android. Its frustrating at times. It doesn't integrate well with android stuff like opening up in apps I think. It takes me to the app store or doesnt even open in apps. Google stuff like looking at reviews doesn't work in firefox.

alex23478• 4 years ago

There's an addon for making the Google pages work as they do in Chrome:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/google-search...

DangitBobby• 4 years ago

I just assumed this was because Android ignores your default browser setting for special cases. Is this an FF problem or an Android problem?

unethical_ban• 4 years ago

I'm a FF fanboy but I have moved to Vivaldi for mobile. Two issues persist for me on FF mobile, even the nightly version:

* Scroll lag/tearing on many websites which doesn't occur with Chromium engine

* Reloading of tabs when I return to them, vs. leaving them as-is until I request a reload. This is abominable behavior.

So I installed Vivaldi and then blocked the domain on my pi-hole to prevent the daily checkins the browser attempts.

DoingIsLearning• 4 years ago

FF implements what they call 'smart sizing' on Android. The basic principle is the larger the amount of disk space available (on Android they use disk caching) the larger the cache size. You can inspect this dynamically on your device in 'about:cache'.

I am violently critical of FF's current direction but to be fair to FF the reloading of tabs is a compromise to deal with how little disk space there usually is on Android (because the OS itself hogs large chunks of it in most Android devices).

captn3m05• 4 years ago

Firefox Android does support extensions, Firefox mobile arguable includes iOS - which does not.

lovehashbrowns• 4 years ago

I want to be done with Firefox so badly. I just don't want to go to Google.

There's this really obnoxious issue where search in the address bar has taken a complete dive recently.

For example, if I want to go to reddit.com/r/videos and it's a page I go to often, I can't just type "videos" because the suggestions that come up are links to threads I've visited recently. None of the suggestions are to reddit.com/r/videos which I visit far more often than a thread I've visited just once.

And it triple annoys me that this used to work just fine but then they recently changed it when they put in those stupid paid suggestions / ads.

thisisonthetest• 4 years ago

I left long ago for Vivaldi. Glad I was gone for the ads in the search bar by default. That kind of behavior, to me, shows a change in priorities away from the user.

In Vivaldi you can set nicknames for bookmarks. So you could type

“Ctrl+L” to select the address bar

then

“rv” or “vid” or whatever you want, to take you to the bookmarked r/videos page, which you can also leave out of the bookmarks bar if you don’t want the clutter

I do this all the time now, since most websites I visit are my frequently visited (probably true for everyone). Optimize life’s most used code paths my friend and come on over to Vivaldi. This is not a paid ad lol.

selfhoster1153• 4 years ago

Firefox supports bookmark keywords too, though the UI isn't optimised for that. Vivaldi is the next in line for me if Firefox stays on course.

commandlinefan3• 4 years ago

I started using Brave - it's still based on Chromium, but at least it's not really Google.

elforce0022• 4 years ago

Brave + DDG (Browser + Essentials) + ublock origin. I don't remember when was the last time I saw an ad.

BlackLotus897• 4 years ago

Not what you are looking for but if you got a bookmark you can edit it and set a keyword (videos).

Bonus if it's a searchable site and you often search bookmark the search url, replace the get parameter with %s and you can search using the keyword

gostsamo2• 4 years ago

you can bookmark it and tag it with "videos". typing it on the address bar will bring it as suggestion I think.

zelphirkalt3• 4 years ago

There are several issues.

Firstly it is much much harder to keep a clean sheet, when you focus on privacy, than when you merely focus on introducing features and pushing your own agenda like the Chrome project does. Just one misstep and you can already lose lots of believers of the good cause. And missteps Mozilla had more than enough of during the recent years.

Secondly they time and time again incorporate things, that privacy minding people do not wish to have in their browser and make the defaults so that it is "on" by default. This erodes people's trust in Mozilla's vision and where the journey is going.

Another reason, which is a huuuuge fail in my opinion is, that I still!! cannot donate specifically for Firefox, for Thunderbird, for whatever, but only to Mozilla overall. I cannot donate with a cause, but only with trust, which has been slowly eroded. They will not get those donations they hope for and then in turn make stupid decisions, thinking that not so many people want, what they are making now, because they do not donate. Duh! I would immediately donate to projects like Thunderbird. You can pry Thunderbird from my cold dead hands! They should shut up and take my money.

newacc9• 4 years ago

I left because of woke messaging from their CEO.

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

yoavm2• 4 years ago

What's wrong with this message? Are you against ads revealing who's paying for them and who's targeted? Against transparency of algorithms? What exactly is the issue?

I don't see any reason to leave after reading this.

logicalmonster• 4 years ago

To me, I think it's impossible to evaluate those statements in a vacuum and not consider the obvious second-order effects that result from it. Advertising transparency is of course a good thing, but what happens in a culture where perfect transparency exists and one side is repeatedly targeted by activists in Tech, Media, and Finance for deplatforming? Suddenly every advertiser that goes against a narrative can be targeted for elimination. What sounds like a bright and positive message is suddenly a tool for personally going after your political enemies and probably creates even more divisiveness and conflict.

There's a lot wrong with what she said, but especially her opinion that tools should amplify "factual voices" by default. There is no central source of accurate human knowledge to even attempt to do this with and we know that what's considered true and accurate can change. This alone is a disgusting and disqualifying opinion and anybody who espouses this viewpoint should be considered a propagandist and tyrant in waiting and certainly unable to head an organization dedicated to an open Internet.

assemblylang• 4 years ago

One thing missed when talking about Firefox's market share is desktop versus mobile market share.

If you look at Wikimedia's metrics, Firefox still has ~10% market share of the desktop browser market[0], not too bad considering Firefox is not the default browser on any platform outside of linux systems for the most part, and that Mozilla is much smaller entity than competing browser vendors. Still down from the ~30%[0] desktop share they had, but now they have 2 large competing entities offering default browsers so the decline is somewhat expected.

Also, contrast this with Firefox's ~0.7% share on mobile[0] where Mozilla has never been able to get a good foothold.

As long as Firefox isn't available as a default on mobile and as the share of mobile device web browsing increases, Firefox will keep losing total market share as a percentage.

Strategy wise, refocusing efforts on retaining that 10% desktop share might be a good idea. From there, work on building up more of the desktop share and then try marketing the mobile browser to the desktop browser community to build up mobile browser share.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_market_share#Summary_t...

nicoburns5• 4 years ago

I feel like Firefox on Android should be more popular than it is. Chrome is default, but it doesn't offer an Ad Blocker. Firefox with uBlock origin is a far superior experience. Although there are other 3rd party chromium-based browsers that are just as good.

I suspect that it's poor market share is due the very poor performance of the older fennec implementation.

captn3m05• 4 years ago

I’d argue that FF could possibly convince some manufacturers to preload Firefox with uBlock installed as a faster browser (if UCBrowser could, surely FF can).

jakub_g4• 4 years ago

I tried to use FF on Android, and while it's capable and works rather well, perf-wise Chromium is just years ahead (I use Brave).

You can see it well on JS-heavy sites like Twitter, the difference is very easy to perceive with loading time, scrolling perf, and also with memory management (Firefox evicts pages from memory cache aggressively compared to Chromium; you sometimes switch a tab or switch an app, go back, and bang, it's gone and needs a reload); and I have a decent good phone (not top shelf, but a "high-mid" Pixel 3a, probably 60-70th percentile within Androids?).

marginalia_nu4• 4 years ago

I've tried using it on Android and it simply doesn't work on my hardware. Takes minutes to load a page.

noselasd• 4 years ago

I can't use Firefox on mobile, its tab management is too annoying, that's the sole reason I abandoned it before christmas.

selfhoster1153• 4 years ago

I use Firefox mobile for the past 3 or so phones. To be blunt, it sucks. The only reason I haven't switched to a Chromium derivative is because I don't want to migrate my bookmarks, because they don't have as good ad blocking support, and out of sheer stubbornness.

jakub_g4• 4 years ago

This. When I joined my prev company in mid 2018, I checked some graphs, and mobile users market share was around 45%. When I checked the same graph in mid 2021, mobile market share was >60%.

Many people don't have a desktop anymore those days, or barely use it.

0xbadc0de5• 4 years ago

Follow Brave's lead. I was a Firefox-only user for 10+ years until Brave Browser delivered what Firefox had been promising.

jjcm• 4 years ago

Here's my perspective on this - Chrome has established itself as the baseline. The baseline is no longer the W3C standard, it's Chrome due to all of the experimental future W3C spec items being in Chrome. Chrome leads the spec, and with its 70% market share developers allow it to.

Firefox will always be playing catchup because of this, regardless of their market share. This leaves three main reasons for using Firefox:

1.) decoupling from Google / ad privacy

2.) promoting browser ecosystem health

3.) familiarity / history of use

Unfortunately, these three items lead to a very narrow TAM, especially when talking purely about new users. The gap will continue to grow as sites that work in Chrome but don't work in Firefox, despite the site using things not in the W3C spec, will be seen as Firefox issues by non-technical users. These users will eventually default to Chrome.

WorldMaker3• 4 years ago

We need a better way to communicate this: Chrome doesn't "lead the spec", it "rushes out ahead of the spec". The developers using non-standard features need to be held better accountable for using non-standard features, and Google needs to be held better accountable for releasing non-standard features ahead of standardization processes.

W3C is seen as no longer relevant to HTML specs having delegated "HTML5" to WHATWG, and WHATWG seems to exist entirely to rubber-stamp Google's will (up until Firefox or Safari or increasingly less common Microsoft complains, and then they try to compromise, sometimes). WHATWG seems to have no teeth to hold Google accountable to standards processes and the Emperor Has No Clothes. (ETA: And yes, that's a hot take that's very unfavorable. I understand many individuals still care inside the W3C and WHATWG, but the end result of collective action is a dangerous rubber-stamping of a Chromium monopsony.)

eternityforest7• 4 years ago

Apple and Mozilla can't be compromised with. They want certain powerful features to just not exist. They don't trust users to choose for themselves. They are trying to ensure privacy at all costs by making tools that could be used to spy unavailable, no matter what the purpose.

If devs want to make something, Chrome wants to make it happen, and I want to use it, then I don't want Mozilla trying to block up the whole works.

Especially not to "protect my privacy" from a site I completely trust, that might even be an intranet site I built myself.

What's next, are you going to disable downloading executable files, probably the most dangerous browser feature of all?

There's no nice alternative, or sometimes no alternative at all besides making a native app for a bazillion different platforms.

Maybe WHATWG actually isn't just rubber stamping things because they're a google puppet, but at least partly because... it's what devs want.

selfhoster1153• 4 years ago

Mistreatment of users is quickly eroding 3. for me, and I deeply care about 2. A family member already explicitly asked for assistance in migrating away from Firefox.

cbxyp• 4 years ago

Because of the pivot from XUL and forgoing of the firefox extension model for a copy that is exclusively Chromium's.

guilhas• 4 years ago

I think there is still fallout from this. A lot of their core users had their long time workflows alienated

The announcement of XUL removal started a time of uncertainty for community developers that led to increase in addons bugs or being abandoned, that webextensions still struggle to match in quantity and quality

Together with constant UI changes, tab groups removal, occasional serious bug, bookmark bugs, firefox sync bugs, and in general being slower, just created a too unstable environment. And people were slowly forced to look at alternatives, forks or chrome like, palemoon, waterfox, icecat, librewolf, chromium, iridium, ungoogled-chromium, brave, opera...

I am still thinking in changing back to Firefox, as it is better with x2go which I started to use recently, but my main day to day is still in Iridium until I get time to change it

commandlinefan3• 4 years ago

Well, I quit using it/supporting it because of their politics. So maybe get out of politics and focus on software?

gdelfino01• 4 years ago

Same here after many years of using it. In my opinion, and to try to keep the internet free, we should look into supporting LibreWolf (a Firefox fork) just like most people moved from OpenOffice to LibreOffice.

acheron2• 4 years ago

You think Google's politics are better than Mozilla's?

commandlinefan3• 4 years ago

No, they're worse. I'm using Brave + DDG - I can't completely de-google-ify, but I can try.

carapace7• 4 years ago

Why is Firefox losing marketshare?

For myself, I am moving off of Firefox right now (I don't yet know to what though, recommendations welcome) for one reason: they keep changing the UI in ways that I find irritating and then deprecating the methods to change it back. For me it's really that simple. There are other issues I have with FF but that's the one that got me to the point where I'm ready to abandon FF entirely.

What would you do if you were in charge of Mozilla?

Concentrate on docs, standards, and libraries. Be the "one-stop shop" for all the information and software one needs to do things with the Internet.

How would you save Firefox?

First you have to answer the question, why save Firefox?

What's so bad about having fewer browsers? (I know most of the arguments, I'm not asking you to repeat them I'm asking you to revisit them.)

Rather than saving one particular browser, I would make it easy for anyone to create a custom web browser.

If you really want to save FF you have to discover or create something about it that beats the competition: speed, reliability, ...? Those are "table stakes" these days, so what is the differentiator that makes it compelling?

paulryanrogers• 4 years ago

so what is the differentiator that makes it compelling?

Is a focus on privacy and independence not enough?

carapace7• 4 years ago

Well, no, evidently not. That's why we're having this conversation, eh?

waingake• 4 years ago

What if we forked it with a Kickstarter campaign to fund core engineering salaries, followed by a low monthly subscription. Personally I'd happily pay if I knew the money was going where it should.

vi28373• 4 years ago

Probably, Mozilla could try this financing model, to save FF.

selfhoster1153• 4 years ago

They could just jettison most of the dead weight they don't need anyway.

account4230• 4 years ago

I wouldn't pay a subscription for Firefox but I would donate regularly if it was freely available and managed as a non-profit without any deals that make them beholden to megacorporations.

SamReidHughes• 4 years ago

Is Mozilla still on Evelyn? That's within artillery range of the Google campus. They just have to wait for Google to return to office.

I can't think of any other solution.

captn3m05• 4 years ago

- Fight against Apple in court on the iOS browser monopoly.

- get Web extensions (real ones, like uBlock) into Firefox for iOS.

- start a campaign around Web browsing speed (using numbers with Privacy Protection and/or uBlock0 enabled). That’s the last competitive advantage FF has, and it needs to use it to gain marketshare.

- Keep investing in Open Web initiatives (such as ActivityPub). Mozilla, like it or not, is one of the last bastions of the open web, and they need to keep investing in it (with research such as Persona).

hnaccy• 4 years ago

Get the EU to adopt firefox or a firefox fork as official project to counter balance Chrome/Blink.

concinds• 4 years ago

The best way to predict the future is to analyse the constraints on what can happen.

There is no mass-switching campaign in favor of Firefox. The only foreseeable hope of one happening in the future, is if ManifestV3 kills adblockers, and people decide to switch to Firefox; but now there are so many competitors that oppose ManifestV3 (Brave, Opera, Vivaldi) that Firefox isn't ideally positioned to benefit.

Otherwise, there is no reason to expect the factors behind Firefox's decline to disappear.

Apple bundles Safari with their platforms. Google advertises Chrome on their web properties. Microsoft heavily discourages Windows users from switching away from Edge, and occasional "bugs" reset Edge as the default browser. Most corporations promote Chrome to their employees.

There is no major reason to expect any of this to change. The likeliest change is antitrust action, with "browser choice" screens[0], but I don't see why that would help Firefox more than other browsers.

There's no reason to think that continued incremental improvements in Firefox (the current path) can prevent its decline.

The ballsiest thing Mozilla could do is switch to a forked Blink engine (Mozillium?); they'd save tons of engineering resources which they could refocus on user-facing features & UX, they'd have better webcompat with cutting-edge things (VR, MIDI, etc), they'd still be a part of web standards decisions (since they could still choose how their Blink fork deviates from Google's), and could encourage other Chromium forks to rebase on Mozillium instead of Chromium. But Firefox's most diehard fans would never forgive Mozilla, and they might lose as many users as they gain.

It's hard to think of anything Mozilla can do to double Firefox's market share. Continued decline is the most likely path.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu

sovok_x• 4 years ago

Well, if they reproduce pre-Proton UI, Developer Tools and userChrome.css this way I'll just use it without complaints, despite being former diehard fan of Firefox. Because when they killed XUL addons and started messing with UI/UX every so often I stopped being one and now already consider it one of the Chrome average lookalikes on PC as there is no practical difference between using ungoogled Chromium (before manifest v3) and latest Firefox in my use-case. With Chromium being slightly better because I don't need to jump through hoops to install unpacked local addons there.

scotty79• 4 years ago

They should copy everything DuckDuckGo android browser does and develop in this direction.

Basically default mode should decruftify all the websites you visit. Destroy all the known garbage on websites that doesn't serve browsing expeirience just tracking and advertising.

Have an easily accessible slider to adjust level of this intervention for current website so you can turn all the crap back on if site doesn't work or complains, or disable event more (javascript, decorative styles).

I'd be also happy if they provided additional tools for modifying the way content is presented, for example influencing order of repeating element like table rows and other. Filtering. Site specific bookmarking. Linking to specific positions in the document. Highlighting.

It should bring back the control to the user and give the users more control they ever had

elforce0022• 4 years ago

Nice. I use DDG on mobile browser and Brave/DDG on Desktop. I can't navigate without shebangs anymore.

BeefWellington• 4 years ago

I actually have wondered about this. Given the changes in the way tracking protection has been done, have there been any actual studies/analyses that show Firefox is losing marketshare? If it's all based on ad companies and server-side detection, I'm unclear that you could actually correctly make the claim.

If anyone has links I'd be interested in reading; I'm sure there are fingerprinting techniques, but ones that rely on JS would potentially be prone to being miscounted due to NoScript (365k+ users of it according to FF).

For the record, I do not doubt that chrome dwarfs everyone, but I'm curious about the way the numbers are being reported/studied.

Diti• 4 years ago

I have the same question as you. I will add that it is possible Chrome’s market share might be partly artificial since Firefox might be using Chrome’s User Agent string so that websites “compatible with Chrome only” remain usable.

jakub_g4• 4 years ago

I don't have hard data to back it up but I don't think Firefox is spoofing UA for compat, at least not on a massive scale.

WorldMaker3• 4 years ago

I also suspect a lot of the "Firefox is losing marketshare" is driven in part by ad companies, especially the huge one named Google.

Given how many websites think Firefox in Enhanced Privacy Protection mode is "an ad blocker", of course ad trackers think Firefox is losing marketshare because it isn't feeding their trackers.

Between that and how Mobile Firefox still has to use platform browsers (and a lot of user agent detection picks out the platform browser rather than the "user browser" on mobile), I'd be surprised if Firefox marketshare has dropped as much as the narrative believes.

That said, even before Enhanced Privacy Protection and Mobile, Firefox was down in marketshare compared to the behemoth competitors, and so even if it is a trick of "Heisenberg metrics" that Firefox is losing marketshare, it probably could stand to gain marketshare (to push us away from the growing monopsony).

account4230• 4 years ago

Between that and how Mobile Firefox still has to use platform browsers

That's only on Apple platforms - FF on Android uses Gecko (but then they go and arbitrarily limit the extensions you are allowed to install anyway).

pdimitar2• 4 years ago

At least in my eyes and I suppose in the eyes of other techies and open Web idealists:

Because Mozilla became just another classic corporation that's laser-focused on extracting value for shareholders and executives and nothing else. A year or two ago an article about Mozilla made the rounds here: executives collecting fat bonuses (and some leaving afterwards?). Some mere months later they fired a lot of people.

Is that the right signal to send to a community that wants an open Web browsing experience? Squeeze any money you can and then fire staff. Those pesky people that have the audacity to want money for their work, how dare they!

As the (currently) top commenter @selfhoster11 says, cut out everything that's not Firefox or is not related to its mission.

I could probably agree to use some of their other offerings like Pocket or VPN, assuming they're done well. Mozilla needs the diversified income, like badly. They are at the mercy of Google and always have been. *THIS IS NOT OKAY* and should have been addressed like 10 years ago. If the expenses are so huge, well, again, fire everyone who's not working on Firefox or closely related to it.

Finally, Mozilla needs no "executives". Get a CEO, CTO and CFO who are passionate about the mission, get rid of everyone else at the top. It's a semi-charity organization, the hell does it need a board of directors for?

butlerm• 4 years ago

A board of directors is more important for a non-profit organization than for a for-profit one. They are part time, serve in a non-executive role, and are in charge of the overall direction of the enterprise, and for a non-profit organization are usually supposed to represent the general, public interest since non-profits have no shareholders to represent. The Mozilla Foundation is a 501(c)(3) and so that goes double for them.

pdimitar2• 4 years ago

Well, they don't seem to do what they are supposed to do then. I don't think such an organization should give away golden parachutes (fat executive bonuses, including on the way out), yet they did so a few times.

And yeah I know the Foundation and the Corporation are separate. Potato tomato. Point is, they should not act like a corporation. But they do, and they'll kill Firefox, that seems a very likely possibility at this point.

selfhoster1153• 4 years ago

What enterprise? It's not rocket science, they are building a web browser. They are supposed to have just enough layers of management to be a thin wrapper between Firefox developers and the outside world. Collect donations, make sure developers are working on Firefox and get paid on time each month. That's all the community needs and that's all the community is asking for.

selfhoster1153• 4 years ago

Thanks for the call-out. I think you make an excellent point about them becoming just another corporation. I don't donate money to them for that exact reason. If there was some way for my donations to get routed straight to the Firefox team, even with enormous inefficiencies and percentage cuts, I'd still do it because I want the open web to exist. As it stands, I have no way to support that ideal monetarily.

davidandgoliath• 4 years ago

Fix the default scroll settings on Linux.

lexx• 4 years ago

Firefox is great. Just use it and tell your friends to use it. Problem solved

rish1_2• 4 years ago

make it the fastest browser in terms of loading and launching. rest will follow

phendrenad2• 4 years ago

Why? Firefox is just an advertising platform for other Mozilla products:

* Mozilla VPN ($5/month)

* Pocket Premium ($5/month)

And a way to monetize users:

* Google search ($500 million / year)

* Paid ads in the search bar

And a way to radicalize you to fight for privacy, so that you'll donate:

* Donations (400,000 donations / year)

Let it die, I say.

jakub_g4• 4 years ago

Why losing marketshare? Because it's a statistical error on mobile, and world is going mobile more and more each year. 60-80% of visits are now mobile, depending on country and website type.

Without mobile, any investment in desktop no matter how good would still mean losing marketshare in general.

But winning mobile is not possible IMO. Android Chromium is just too good, slicker, faster, better managing memory etc, and Apple bans other engines and Apple users go all-Apple most of the time.

asoneth2• 4 years ago

It seems like a lot of people would have liked to see Mozilla double-down on Firefox to the exclusion of all else.

Personally I would have leaned towards the opposite approach to meet their stated mission of ensuring an open internet. Historically, Firefox has been the means by which Mozilla earned a seat at the table, but I would have liked to see them diversify their portfolio a bit rather than relying entirely on a single browser. If I had been in charge, I would:

Focus on developing Rust, Servo/Gecko, SpiderMonkey. Keep projects like Firefox and Thunderbird as reference implementations but encourage Microsoft, Brave, Opera, and open-source forks to build their own products based on Mozilla technologies. Assemble a broad coalition of companies that base their web browsers, email clients, feature phones, smart TVs, consoles, etc on Mozilla technologies. Explore using licensing and corporate memberships to offset decreases in advertising revenue. The end-goal being to ensure that Mozilla-based browsers capture enough of the market that they have a seat at the table with Apple and Google and then use that leverage to push for web standards that are beneficial to end-users.

Of course, that ship has sailed now that Safari and Firefox are the only browsers with a non-negligible market-share that are not built on top of chromium. Given Firefox's trajectory, Apple is realistically the only player left who can prevent Google from dictating the direction of the web. If Apple decides to throw in the towel or let Google drive, webpages essentially become Chrome-pages.

StillBored9• 4 years ago

#1, Listen to the users, even if it makes the developers lives harder and the code base uglier. (although the firefox build system is just sad, and is a symptom of the entire project, "make" should actually build a working browser)

Stop fsking with the UI and using creative non native looking stuff just to be cool like chrome, and instead focus on making the rendering/JS/developer tools engine best in class. Along with, stop breaking shit. Hiding shit in about:config and then silently removing the option doesn't make users happy, if they spent the time to figure out how to disable search in the address bar because they are tired of accidentally telling google/etc where they are browsing than actually honor that setting, or better yet, give them that option in the config UI rather than pretending they are all idiots and don't understand how computers work.

There are too many chrome only web sites, so make the developers happy with tools that make their jobs easier. About:memory is better these days, but its still a far cry from what it could be, and AFAIK its still doesn't have something similar for CPU or networking outside of the network and cpu tracing functions in the developer tools. I want to be able to manage my browser with similar functionality to my OS (aka what tab is sending/reading all this data, then drill into what/where its sending it along with better whitelist/blacklist functionality/etc)

Then for users, you will gain their appreciation if it feels faster than chrome, which far to often is still false (despite it too getting better). And yes, for tabs, menus and the like using the native widgets not only will make people happier when they change their system color schemes and firefox isn't doing its own thing, but the system components are frequently far far faster to render than firefox's. And yes, sometimes the code to have multiple UI toolkits is ugly, as is the code to support optimizing some JS path, deal with it, thats the job.

I could go on, but others have said some of my other points.

simion314• 4 years ago

Last chance to save it is to try the Rewrite it in Rust and see if will braing users by magic.

gostsamo2• 4 years ago

Firefox has three main issues:

  * Aggressive competition who are ready to use dark patterns on all platforms to push their own products. All of Google, Microsoft and Apple are doing it one way or another.

  * No financing. Pocket and Mozilla VPN are rather miserable revenue streams and therefore FF relies on the likes of Google for the bulk of their budget which means that they are limited in what they can do against Google.

  * Really old code base that needs to be adapted for the modern web which takes money and resources from other initiatives.

  * The Mozilla Foundation which seems to consider the browser a golden hen that will provide them nice profits to waste.

Saving it is nearly impossible. The things to happen are:

  * major legislation that must level up the browser market or an economic shift that will break Google, Microsoft and Apple dominance on the major user platforms.

  * a miracle new money tree should grow up in San Francisco such that it will be an independent revenue source for the project.

  * much more people and organizations should invest in improving the browser either with money or effort (magic tree or failure of all other browser engines).

  * Firefox should be liberated from the foundation and be a community project like Debian so that people have better feeling of ownership of the project.

PS: The off-by-one error is intentional.

bcrosby95• 4 years ago

You probably can't save Firefox. Between Edge and Chrome, you're fighting against billions of dollars worth of free advertising, nevermind the advertising Google and Microsoft actually spend money on.

revskill• 4 years ago

To me, the developer tools is getting out of date for modern development tooling on frontend.

mrandish2• 4 years ago

Restore "User Customizable" as a top-level priority. I came to FF initially over 15 years ago because add-ons could change almost anything including fundamental appearance and workflow. When changing to the new, far more limited add-on infrastructure ~5 yrs ago, Mozilla promised that new APIs would be added to re-enable hugely popular add-ons like Tab Mix Plus yet this and other add-ons users relied on still remain impossible to implement.

This "Have It Your Way" capability would be a profound differentiator and user value proposition to stand out from the sameness of Chrome and Safari. I still use FF but to make it usable I have to install my own UserChrome.css and User.js which isn't easy for non-tech people. On top of that I regularly have to go "fix" new UI behaviors that Mozilla's designers keep shoveling into the UX in a constant game of Whack-a-Mole.

JohnTHaller4• 4 years ago

Firefox is already more customizable than Safari or Chrome. If Safari and Chrome were growing in userbase due to being more customizable than Firefox, it might make sense.

ameminator5• 4 years ago

In my experience, Firefox is not more customizable than Vivaldi. Examples include: custom tab layouts, sizing options, default behaviors and more.

It would be really nice if they went all-in on those custom features, but I suspect it might need to come from the Servo base engine, first.

mrandish2• 4 years ago

FF is slightly more customizable for non-tech users. It used to be almost infinitely more customizable.

The difference has gone from dramatic to negligible and even that much is now hidden behind flags that don't even appear in the UI.

_23sd• 4 years ago

It's interesting, often prompted by Mozilla doing something particularly silly I try out the competition and every time I go back to Firefox utterly unimpressed by the supposedly better Chromium based browsers out there. Honestly I don't see what people like so much about them.

Most recently when they came out with Colorways I decided to give Vivaldi a shot for the first time in a few years, since it has that easy custom color theming without a pointless time horizon. First problem I ran into was that the built-in ad blocker breaks YouTube. Not a great first impression, but hey you can just disable it and install uBO. But I quickly came to miss the flexibility of Firefox's interface. On the surface Vivaldi is very customizable, but you quickly run into a wall when wanting to go outside what they've built. For example, you can put the tab bar anywhere, but you can't have it in multiple places or pretty it up beyond changing the colors. Firefox on the other hand has enough tab management addons for any taste, plus it supports custom CSS within the addons themselves and at the browser level.

The alternative browser I've been most impressed with is actually Edge, but I can't tolerate it constantly shoving features I don't want in my face or the mandatory telemetry.

So to answer the question, I would save Firefox by breaking the mobile browser duopoly. Desktop Firefox is already obviously better than Chrome and Edge, even in the basic experience with no addons, but people just use Chrome for some reason. I think it comes down to habit, an over-reliance on Google Apps that work better with Chrome's tight integration, and familiarity due to Chrome being the only serious browser on Android. And on iOS the situation seems to be even worse: non-Safari browsers are forced to use Safari's engine anyway, and all of them offer a noticeably worse UX than Safari so why bother. Of Firefox's problems, losing on mobile is the easiest to fix, not that it's super easy. Mozilla "just" needs to focus creative resources on building a compelling alternative browser on Android and a functional one on iOS. That would go a long way toward bringing users back.

Another thing that might help is for Mozilla to make a clear (down to earth, jargon-free) statement of its values and goals as a nonprofit. I think a lot of the criticism Firefox gets in tech circles isn't exactly sincere, because many people have switched away from Firefox due to actual or perceived political differences but don't want to come out and say that, so they contrive or exaggerate some UX or privacy issue. If Mozilla's leadership would speak openly about these issues it might make those detractors a little more comfortable saying something like "I don't use Firefox because the causes they support go against my political convictions", rather than the current situation where they might be reluctant to say that and start a likely pointless argument over whether Mozilla supports a certain cause or not.

asdff• 4 years ago

I don't care that its losing marketshare as long as its still used and supported, just like how I don't really care that most computer users aren't using the command line anymore. The age of the average user being choosy about their web browser is over, and the hand wringing about market share is not important. Users either use the browser that ships with their OS (safari, the limited people on edge), or they download chrome because youtube and gsuite have been giving them banner ads to download chrome for a decade and that's where their autofill passwords are saved.

Instead, mozilla should really lean in on catering to the techie who is going to come to the conclusion to use firefox no matter what mozilla really does anyhow, just from the fact that its not google and you can do more with privacy oriented extensions. It's always frusterating when mozilla does things they really don't have to do, like break certain CSS configs with the move to proton for no reason other than change is good I guess (like, why pull another python 2/3-esque debacle when you don't really have to and could just support legacy syntax?), or taking out niceties like the built in RSS reader, which I found handy to confirm a feed looked OK before throwing it into my actual RSS reader. There are other issues too. Maybe I'm not doing it right in firefox, but I have to go into chrome to find the correct CSS selectors to use in a given webpage for javascripting.

kirse• 4 years ago

Never understood this convo about Firefox dying or all the complaints. I love Firefox, been using it since 2005 or so. Firebug was awesome back in the day and FF Developer Edition w/ all its developer tools is still great. Only annoying thing they've done recently is rename/re-sort a bunch of menu options that undid years of muscle memory.

Someone explain to me why I would switch to Chrome? If anything I'd switch to Edge before Chrome.

modzu• 4 years ago

if i were in charge of mozilla, i'd leave to start a new browser called brave

CodeGlitch• 4 years ago

More and more people are concerned about privacy and security, see the popularity of VPNs in recent years. So Mozilla should concentrate on making Firefox the most privacy enhanced browser along with being the most secure. Marketing should double down on getting that message across.

Additionally it looks like Web Assembly has a promising future, so Firefox should having the best support for that.

agentdrtran• 4 years ago

The amount of people saying "listen to power users" in this thread seem to have read the questions as "what do I want Firefox to do"

nix0n• 4 years ago

The most important thing to a regular user, is that their websites work. But for websites to work, the developer had to test in Firefox. So, Firefox's alienation of power users has hurt its regular userbase.

selfhoster1153• 4 years ago

"What would you do if you were the head of Mozilla" sure reads a lot like "what do I want Firefox to do".

Firefox lost the battle for average users against Chrome. But it's always been a favourite of power users for a reason. It's time to listen to power users again, or be extinguished (incidentally, that's the third stage of EEE).

dotcoma• 4 years ago

Dump their terrible bookmarks and copy how Chrome handles bookmarks.

janitor61• 4 years ago

Firefox, like most modern software, is suffering from Winchester house syndrome. Hiring full-time UX designers and making them perpetually justify their salary will eventually turn any software into an unusable, unlearnable amorphous blob that blindly follows trends and alienates even the most determined users, much like hiring dozens of full-time plumbers for your house would transform it into a sci-fi movie set given enough time and money.

rastapasta42• 4 years ago

For starters, Firfox 97 update made me lost all my open tab and tab groups. I want Mozilla to stop losing my tabs with every update.

the__alchemist• 4 years ago

Fix the code base cruft; focus on reliability and performance/responsiveness. I'm still tracking a tracker bug regarding "do this every time" for PDF attachments not working. It was opened a decade ago, and is treated as too tough to fix. Something fundamentally is wrong with the code base.

marginalia_nu4• 4 years ago

My experience with Firefox has been mired with seemingly random breaking changes, going back to Firefox 2.0. I'm always having to search through menus to find common tasks and features in software I've used since the mid 2000s. The UI also doesn't respect native desktop conventions but seems modeled after a mobile app.

I'd put all emphasis on performance and embeddability, and practice a lot more restraint towards UX changes nobody asked for.

I'd also either tone down all the privacy talk several notches, or actually walk the walk and make telemetry and A/B studies opt in. Right now they just seem self-righteous and hypocritical.

speedcoder• 4 years ago

Perhaps Mozilla could partner with DuckDuckGo and PureOS Librem and make a privacy-centric mobile smart phone with: - PureFireDuck OS - PureFireDuck search - PureFireDuck voice & text - PureFireDuck email - PureFireDuck maps - PureFireDuck app store (an app store unfriendly to spyware apps)?

syrrim• 4 years ago

One strategy might be to pursue creating software to run on the server or as a proxy. There are probably a number of optimizations that could take place on the server that would benefit from knowledge of how browsers will interpret a page. Eg, you could inline certain styles or other resources to speed up loading, rather than requiring the browser to request them separately. I think chrome benefits from being the best way to view a number of google properties, and it would be interesting if firefox could respond by being the best way to view diverse other sites on the web. Note that I'm not suggesting they purposefully break features on chrome, but rather that certain browser features might become nore useful if there was a guarantee that servers would take advantage of them.

manquer• 4 years ago

Build more SaaS services users can pay for, like Mozilla VPN[1] which enhances privacy , better user experience and keep things more secure.

Mozilla needs recurring revenue stream strong enough to help them get off Google deal and scale up revenue to compete with big guns on equal footing.

Firefox has the advantage of not being advertising driven, privacy focused and a great brand.

Services like say Identity(expand Firefox account for say form-less login to supporting websites), password management (LastPass), payment/credit card management , their own email/calendar service to complement Thunderbird, notes/clipboard like Evernote/notion , screen recording sharing like loom and so on and deeply integrate to their browser to provide seamless experience .

Focus on services which browsing better/ safer can build strong revenue runway that can fund all the ambitions they have for other projects

Opt -in for any service and modular. Nothing breaks regular experience. Just offer better convenience people will pay, one thing Apple get right.

[1] Yes it is white labelled Mullvad VPN, but it is still recurring revenue for Mozilla.

Mustache• 4 years ago

Make if fast.

a-dub• 4 years ago

DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS

firefox lost out from me because some sites didn't work correctly, so i'd say that the first right move would be to really see what can be done to win over more developers as the browser they use for primary development. both firefox and chrome have good developer tools, but how much further could firefox be taken? how much community outreach might land firefox on more web developer desktops? are there corporate barriers to getting firefox on more professional web developer desks? how might they be removed?

also, have viable competitors for both chromebooks and android.

zodzedzi• 4 years ago

Fork it, create a new non-profit to oversee its development, a la Linux kernel.

selfhoster1153• 4 years ago

The fact that this isn't already the case is concerning.

gkoberger• 4 years ago

I used to work at Mozilla, and here's my opinion.

There's no need to save Firefox. When Firefox came out, it was a breath of fresh air. Because of Mozilla, every browser is now really, really great. Even Microsoft's browser is standards compliant and open source! Yeah, I get the arguments that Webkit is too pervasive and Chrome is too tied to Google and all of that... but in my opinion, Mozilla wanted a world where every single consumer had the choice between numerous high-quality browsers, and that's the world we currently live in! Firefox is losing this current battle, but Mozilla won the war.

The problem now isn't the browser, but rather the websites. Too much tracking, too much fights over who owns your online persona, and not enough usability (I'm so sick of passwords).

Mozilla always had a unique skill... they were a non-profit that was great at taking complicated technical issues that plagued the internet, and packaging them in a way that was usable. They took hard problems and made it so nobody had to think about them.

I'd love to see Mozilla do the same for identity. I'd love to see them be the company that killed password, and made it so identity is simple, easy and safe.

First off, Google can't do it. Nor can the other big players. Why? Because identity and tracking so to tied to their core business model, they have to back off imposing it. Otherwise they'll be accused of making it so "you need a Google account to use the web". (Or in Apple's case, they've had to go so far the opposite way that nobody really uses it.)

There's a lot of money in this! Identity is very closely tied to payments (it's crazy how it's 2022 and in the browser I still am typing in my credit card number).

To me, identity online is tied to an email address. You can have an email address with your real name, a few throwaways, etc. Identity doesn't have to mean YOU specifically. I'd love to see Mozilla work with GMail/etc... but also spin up their own email servers. Since most people now access email from a client (Apple Mail, Superhuman, etc), having a headless email server would help both privacy and also put them in a great place to help own identity.

Lastly, Mozilla always was fighting two wars at the same time. They both wanted institutional changes for the Internet (aka standard compliant browsers) and also were building a really nice implementation of it (aka Firefox). I feel like this is how they should approach identity. Getting everyone to follow the same standards (i.e. I can still use my GMail account for anything listed above), while also building their own stellar implementation of it and giving their competition a reason to compete (their own mail server, including these identity features in Firefox, etc).

account4230• 4 years ago

a world where every single consumer had the choice between numerous high-quality browsers, and that's the world we currently live in!

I strongly disagree. There are numerous browsers than can render websites well enough but not a single one that puts the needs of user first before everything else.

soundnote10• 4 years ago

Vivaldi

jppope• 4 years ago

This is an interesting question.

As I understood it, Google doesn't really want Firefox out of the market since it keeps them out of anti-trust issues... which is why they pay Mozilla to be the default search engine. Without that money, Mozilla would fail. Mozilla obviously doesn't want to fail, so they keep taking the money from Google. I don't see anything about that flywheel which puts Mozilla/Firefox in the drivers seat of their fate. They exist as part of a cost-benefit analysis on the part of Google.

So to phrase this question in a different way, how does a fat-smoker lose weight and quit smoking? They just do. If Mozilla/Firefox wants to legitimately be competitive they're going to have to change the nature of their relationship with Google.

Now, if you were to ask me personally what I would do? ...I would probably try to strategically create an imbalance between the big tech firms by getting cozy with a specific firm, forcing other firms to compete in places where they don't want to. Facebook doesn't have a browser or a mobile offering... which is slowly hurting them (e.g. cookie apocalypse) they might make a decent ally. Amazon is similar, but they don't have an easy symbiosis, unless there was a way to create something between AWS or prime video. Samsung, Adobe, or maybe Salesfore are all bad fits, but if Mozilla created a product strategy to align and maybe have native support for adobe or Salesforce they might be able to make something happen.

In my opinion, I don't see anything like that happening in reality. Mozilla will probably slowly fade away, each CEO getting the comp that they can squeeze out while the business is still making money. Sometime 10-20 years from now we'll think of them like a sun microsystems or silicon graphics.

(*This was a quick throw together... I maybe incredibly off about the details of the Mozilla/Google relationship currently)

baq4• 4 years ago

at this point network effects of Chromium are so great that only antitrust procedures can do anything about Google's domination, just as they did with Microsoft a decade or two ago. (Remember that?)

The same argument can be made against Google now, since the browser has effectively become an OS.

selfhoster1153• 4 years ago

Arguably, the open web is the only place where network effects don't dominate. If they actually focused on Firefox..

baq4• 4 years ago

oh, they do... development cost on multiple platforms (browsers) makes one of the platforms is not as well supported in aggregate. cost to switch for the user is not big, so you end up with sites which 'work best with chrome', which creates a positive feedback loop.

pier25• 4 years ago

The main reason I left FF after trying it out for a couple of months last year is that after 21 years it still doesn't support multilingual spell checking properly.

For anyone writing in multiple languages daily this is a deal breaker.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69687

deltron3030• 4 years ago

I'd create a Chrome OS alternative (like CloudReady which was bought by Google) for old Intel Macs and other laptops that won't get official Win 11 support, and maybe partner with some productiviy SaaS to have a working GDocs and Office 365 alternative.

Open/Libre Office and their UX are too complicated for normal users like most Linux apps that are modeled after professional desktop applications.

Considering the amount of hardware that's out there and never will work on newer operating systems having a easy to install and use OS for web productivity tasks will very likely be a big driver for overall market share.

Ekaros• 4 years ago

More is more. Focus on the power users again, don't just remove features because metrics say they aren't used. Information density and ease of use of power features are critical or they jump somewhere else and don't market the browser anymore.

Kalanos• 4 years ago

The only reason I use firefox is web development (right-click inspect). If I was FF I would pivot into dev tools for the JS stack.

kevwil2• 4 years ago

As Chromium's monopoly approaches and passes critical mass, the likelihood of a nasty zero-day increases. I wouldn't go so far as to hope for a terrible hack, but humanity putting all its eggs in one basket like this is just begging for consequences.

I defiantly use nothing but Firefox unless a website won't work with FF.

shmapf• 4 years ago

I wish they'd advertise it better. I use Firefox mobile and it's so much better than Chrome I'd hate to go back. If the mainstream were aware how much better advert-less browsing is, by using adblockers on Firefox mobile, that would probably solve the problem.

I'm also a fan of having the address bar at the bottom for easier reach, though I admit it's a niche thing that sounds like a gimmick.

Barrin92• 4 years ago

Why is Firefox losing marketshare

very simple answer, because Mozilla doesn't control the infrastructure that runs on 80% of smartphones in the world and ships Firefox as the default browser.

It really has nothing to do with the bespoke features that people on HN pay attention to. Firefox doesn't control any platform and defaults matter. There's a reason Google pays them a gazillion dollars to be the standard search engine, which you can change with one click. It's also why Safari is still going relatively strong.

echelon• 4 years ago

Microsoft was forced to allow browser choice in the EU. I don't see why Apple and Google shouldn't be subject to the same, with the added condition that browser rendering engine diversity gets preferential treatment.

Give users a 60% chance to see Firefox as the first option, then show them the multitude of Chrome/Safari-based browsers.

maccam94• 4 years ago

The problem is that even when that choice is given, every Google search pushes Chrome, Microsoft constantly pushes you to switch to Edge. I'm not sure how much Apple pushes Safari, but last I heard it actually gives superior battery life on Mac OS so there's a real technical reason to not use Firefox.

Gigachad2• 4 years ago

Because no one cares anymore about browser diversity now that the main browser is open source, runs on every platform and complies mostly with browser standards. Not to say it isn't important. But it was way worse when IE was creating a dependency on IE and Windows due to poor standards.

muzikman1• 4 years ago

Get a new CEO my friend!

tjansen• 4 years ago

I'd try to find ways to make Mozilla a better browser, instead of trying to convince people with ideological arguments, which is obviously not sufficient for a mainstream browser.

Things that could convince me:

- automated clicking for cookie banners

- built-in password manager with network storage

- better bookmark management, with bookmarks as icons on the start page, similar to mobile phone home screens

- built-in video calls with browser sharing (many years ago I saw a tech demo from Mozilla that looked a bit like around.co)

- cloud-storage for tabs and cookies/storage, maybe even JS state, so I can switch machines and get an identical browser window.

qudat• 4 years ago

I would stop chasing the browser as an OS and try to break the many uses of a browser into multiple sub apps, with specifications to match.

This is the reason why Gemini are gaining popularity: the scope is limited and focused on doing one thing well.

account4230• 4 years ago

This is the reason why Gemini are gaining popularity: the scope is limited and focused on doing one thing well.

Speaking of, firefox should support alternative web protocols (again), even if they are not used much.

Hard_Space• 4 years ago

Give the innovations a rest for a couple of years, and redevote the funds to security development. Hell, do that for four years! Many of us long-term users are held hostage by the fact that security updates (which we need) come bundled with this tosh.

runarberg• 4 years ago

May I suggest that our best effort in saving Firefox is to enforce existing pro-consumer laws which breaks up large companies like Google while promoting laws that protects our privacy.

Firefox’s biggest threat is a company with a really broad range of products that all coalesce into selling scary profitable ads.

jka• 4 years ago

Few device manufacturers and platform ecosystems appear incentivized to bundle Firefox, perhaps because it doesn't provide much in the way of competitive moat-building opportunities in return for the partnership (there is the Google sponsorship, which is probably helpful in their unique case because it provides a defence against allegations of monopolistic behaviour).

The cost of bundling for Chrome and Safari is low, because it's software -- so they are included with a large number of devices, especially where commercial partnerships can be formed (generally on favourable terms to Google and Apple, respectively, I'd expect).

I don't think that the average user notices much difference in terms of behaviour and functionality between any of these browsers. I'll admit that there are probably rare exceptions like vendor-pushed codecs where one or other browser tends to have an advantage (again, typically leveraged by partnerships with streaming content providers).

So: I don't know, but it's something to do with getting Firefox on more devices by default -- and that's not something that happens easily when supply chains are easily influenced by a small number of upstream "ecosystem providers".

zaptheimpaler• 4 years ago

While Firefox has many small imperfections compared to Chrome, the big point IMO is that Firefox is not preinstalled on any large consumer OS/device besides Linux.

It has many little details that aren't as good as Chrome but I don't know how much that affects adoption. Even if it does, that last bit of polish is very expensive to fix and they would need users or another mechanism to fund it.

I would focus heavily on getting Linux to be more mainstream. There is already growing momentum behind Linux and a lot of room for organizations (like Mozilla) that can typically execute on long multi year strategies better than the anarchy of FOSS. There's a lot of work to be done on all levels - partnerships, marketing, technical, finance etc. so people in all roles could contribute.

Maybe that would even play out outside Mozilla, like people leaving and joining other companies that push OSS ahead until it gains enough users for Mozilla to be relevant again.

thecrumb• 4 years ago

I'm really at the point if I see another stupid popup from Mozilla about something I can 0% about when my Firefox updates I'm going to switch to something. I use Firefox because I'm trying to support the little guy but honestly when the little guy doesn't care about supporting me back then it's time to move on.

tomxor3• 4 years ago

Why is Firefox losing marketshare

Can we validate that it is in fact losing market share first?

It's possible there are other factors such as the increased privacy capabilities and integrated tracker blocking and tendency for Firefox users to value and use these features and plugins, or even useragent string spoofing... I do the later so I look like a chrome/windows user because some sites will block features from Firefox for no reason (and also it's nice to be less trivially uniquely identifiable).

Where are the stats you are using and how are they collected?

sciurus3• 4 years ago

Those are all valid points, but Mozilla's own telemetry shows their userbase shrinking.

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

tomxor3• 4 years ago

many users turn off that telemetry, including me.

twblalock7• 4 years ago

Browsers aren’t a product anymore. Browsers are a feature and a commodity. Every platform is expected to have one out of the box.

Most people use the default browsers on their mobile devices and I’d bet many of the people who don’t use the default browser on their PCs have downloaded Chrome because it can sync bookmarks with Chrome on their phones.

Using the non-default browser takes effort and most people don’t care enough to try. For Firefox to overcome that basic barrier, it needs to be a lot more attractive than the default browser. For most users, it’s just not.

Other companies that only make browsers don’t have high market share for the same reason Firefox doesn’t.

happynacho• 4 years ago

They went woke.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK• 4 years ago

I would ask Google for more money. They will pay, because they don't want to be the only game in town.

olliej• 4 years ago

Firefox has a bunch of issues these days, but you cannot overlook Google's use of dominance in search, online docs, mail, and video to push people onto Chrome.

When you're hit with "you should use chrome" on all your most common sites, and the sites you use favor Chrome, it's hard for any browser to compete.

I know people like to bash Mobile Safari, some of which is reasonable, it's really important to realize it's pretty much the only reason sites aren't chrome only at this point.

snarfy• 4 years ago

Here's something you can do without being in charge - https://donate.mozilla.org/

ordx2• 4 years ago

You are donating to Mozilla Foundation. This doesn't fund Firefox development, since it's under Mozilla Corporation umbrella.

bugmen0t• 4 years ago

Write a popular web app. Make it work on Firefox only ;-) worked for Chrome at least…

gnicholas• 4 years ago

If Google goes through with the manifest V3 change, there are going to be a lot of people looking for a new browser. They've become accustomed to browsing with blockers (tracking and analytics) and won't want to use a browser that doesn't easily support blockers.

Firefox can scoop up a lot of these users if they don't force out blockers and other addons using manifest V2. I could see articles in Fast Company, Gizmodo, etc. with headlines like "Is Firefox the Hot New Browser (Again)?". It could lead to a huge wave — and hopefully to Google walking back their promises of a forced transition.

errantmind• 4 years ago

I'd save it by forking Firefox and trying to replace Mozilla as primary custodian. Mozilla cannot be saved and will not 'turn a new leaf'.

oiej2o3ij• 4 years ago

If Firefox doesn't want to fire their uncapable CEO, then it should die. Simple as that.

Graffur• 4 years ago

I haven't thought about this before. I would assess what Mozilla's current goals are and where Firefox market share fits into that.

pjerem• 4 years ago

My opinion is that Google deliberately "killed" Mozilla by giving them almost infinite cash.

Mozilla can’t go anywhere because as a business, they have no incentive nor any culture needed to survive. They are spoiled by Google whatever they do.

They are like someone so rich that they don’t have any more goals in life. They are still there but they goes nowhere.

Ofc I’m talking about the company, not the employees that did put hard work into the great product that Firefox still is.

It’s too bad because the web have a great need of a Mozilla-like company/foundation.

Mozilla could have been the anti-Google and they could make tons of money by just providing some cloud services (mail, calendar, storage,…) but they just can’t see it because anything will be harder to monetize than their deal with Google.

pygar• 4 years ago

They should do what Microsoft did with Edge and periodically fork Chromium.

Chromium is a better browser and it's open source (BSD, GPL etc). They should take advantage of the license. The argument for browser diversity doesn't make sense to me when chromium is open source and hard forks are always possible.

janfoeh• 4 years ago

Be the "User Agent" in the truest sense of the word that is sorely missing in the browser landscape nowadays. For that, two things are necessary:

1) become absolutely trustworthy again 2) become the power user's choice again

To me, 1) means absolute control over updates and network connections. Become the antithesis to the patronizing "Ask me again later" school of thought which has become so sickeningly widespread over the last few years, and instead accept that "no means no", whether you disagree or not.

And I don't have to mention "partnerships" with entities like Cliqz or sneaky downloads of marketing extensions.

2) - Firefox tried to appeal to average users and failed, losing a lot of what made it appealing to the power users and evangelists in the process. Reversing that will be painful, because it means allowing people to shoot themselves in the foot, and accepting that some people will do that occasionally.

Making a useful power user browser means accepting that a lot of its value will be created by other people, and supporting that with a deep and comprehensive extension system, instead of clinging to Googles table scraps. Having a useful extension system also means the ability to install from any source I want, no Ifs and Buts.

All of these are risky. Useful tools often are. Give Firefox back its USP and a reason to exist, because "it's not Blink" on its own simply isn't good enough... even if maybe it should.

biasedestimate• 4 years ago

Fully agree. Currently I can't even use custom keyboard shortcuts in FF.

eternityforest7• 4 years ago

Become a browser with privacy features, instead of a "privacy browser".

Enable battery status(Important for kiosks), web midi, web USB, web bluetooth, all of it. Just put it behind an option. Stop trying to keep useful web app functionality out of the web. I don't want to support that.

Start innovating and give us features nobody else has.

Integrate with Yggdrasil to trust 200: URLs on the tunnel as secure contexts(Or let people set a whole interface to be secure).

Bring back FlyWeb, immediately. When flyweb died was a key moment that made me lose all interest in FF.

Give us a way to package a website into a manually installable and redistributable "Box", that can be trusted as a secure context, with a manually selectable data folder, so it all just works like a traditional app. Like Web Bundles, but manually installed and treated as secure, with services that can run in the background all the time, etc.

Don't just lag behind or catch up to chrome, support everything they do, go past them and make web apps truly a replacement for desktop apps.

Stop trying to kill everything that can be used for tracking and let the user decide on a site by site or app by app basis.

selfhoster1153• 4 years ago

Also, people need to understand that Firefox is not the reason for Mozilla existence, Firefox is one of the tools that Mozilla has (and depends on) to fullfil its mission.

I can't see stopping work on that as a significant resource saving. Most power users want less tracking anyway.

gizmore• 4 years ago

Make breaking news once again for user privacy! Firefox once had problems with performance (and usability a bit) compared to chrome. They fixed that, i think.

tylerlarson• 4 years ago

The reason I used Firefox daily many years ago was because of the Firebug debugger. The more complicated pages became the more important it was to have an excellent debugger/browser combination. Chrome launched with a solid solution and has kept pushing but it isn't nearly as good as debuggers in other platforms. All the browsers are all pretty bad at debugging the lower level stuff like graphics. What is the GPU doing? Why was rendering this last frame slow? What is happening inside of this WASM blob? Is transferring information in and out of this worker the problem or was it the worker itself?

If Firefox had an amazing debugger I would use it every day. I focus on graphics so this is where my mind is at but there are plenty of things that would benefit everyone like a better memory profiler or maybe being better about explaining to users how to fix issues. Chrome's Lighthouse might focus on how google works but it will also provide solid tips for how to make most websites better. Sure it might be wrong if you really know your stuff but it is also a great place to learn if you don't think you know it all.

soapdog• 4 years ago

The amount of people in HN who think they can do a better job at being the CEO of every company; or being the president of any country; or being better than whoever is trying to something, astounds me.

Dudes, if saving Firefox was so easy that could be described in a single comment like that, it would have been saved already.

There are more people at Mozilla than the CEO, she is not responsible for all decisions. She is a quite nice person to be honest, has always been very kind to me while I was volunteering and later while I was working there. She is more into the Mozilla mission than many here.

Also, people need to understand that Firefox is not the reason for Mozilla existence, Firefox is one of the tools that Mozilla has (and depends on) to fullfil its mission. People need to wake up and realise that Firefox is the last remaining independent browser, and that fighting against Microsoft, Google, and Apple is damn hard.

There is a huge intersection between people who are often saying they know how to fix Mozilla and those using non-Firefox browsers. If people here who cares about Mozilla would volunteer, and also use the browser, Mozilla would be in a much better shape.

People who keep saying things like "cut their salaries", "cancel all projects", have absolutely no idea how all this works, or even how Mozilla works. I understand you're all frustrated, but you're going at it from the wrong direction. You need to remember that it was side projects that made Firefox. At that time the workhorse of Mozilla was the Mozilla Suite. It was also non-Firefox projects that brought up Rust and many other cool technologies.

Want to fix Mozilla? Take an active part in it.

skinkestek• 4 years ago

Also, people need to understand that Firefox is not the reason for Mozilla existence, Firefox is one of the tools that Mozilla has (and depends on) to fullfil its mission.

This is why I downvoted you. (edit: will undo, this misunderstanding needs to be discussed.)

This is the big misunderstanding.

If Mozilla can do something in addition to Firefox, fine.

But Firefox is simultaneously Mozillas biggest contribution to the open web and their main income source.

Sacrificing Firefox for a higher goal is almost literally to butcher the goose who laid the golden eggs.

Want to fix Mozilla? Take an active part in it.

Try that and get flagged for advocacy(!). Seriously: see the tab strip api to see it in action.

selfhoster1153• 4 years ago

Also, people need to understand that Firefox is not the reason for Mozilla existence, Firefox is one of the tools that Mozilla has (and depends on) to fullfil its mission.

No. This is arguing that the tail is wagging the dog. The only reason why people care about Mozilla at all is not their social projects, not the fact that they released a VPN, or the fact that they maintain Thunderbird (OK, fine, for some it is). The reason they care is because Mozilla is developing Firefox.

Subtract Firefox from Mozilla, and you get zero or less. And yes, we realise that Firefox is the last remaining independent browser - which is why it's alarming that they are focusing on anything else when the market share is so low. Their ship is sinking and they are debating whether the orchestra should play Bach or Mozart on the way down.

cartesius132• 4 years ago

There is a huge intersection between people who are often saying they know how to fix Mozilla and those using non-Firefox browsers. If people here who cares about Mozilla would volunteer, and also use the browser, Mozilla would be in a much better shape

I have to agree with this. You see everyone on HN talking about the importance of Firefox in the fight against Google's monopoly but yet when you read comments about anything web related many (maybe most) commenters say they use Chrome (Someone should do a HN Poll).

There is no excuse to use anything other than Firefox if you claim to care about things the open web, software freedom etc.

ThalesX• 4 years ago

There is no excuse to use anything other than Firefox if you claim to care about things the open web, software freedom etc.

What changes if I use it more with metrics disabled?

dleslie4• 4 years ago

If people here who cares about Mozilla would volunteer, and also use the browser, Mozilla would be in a much better shape.
Want to fix Mozilla? Take an active part in it.

Why would I volunteer for an organization that pays its CEO something like 70x the average American salary?

It doesn't operate itself like a nonprofit. I don't want to put my free time into a project that exists to pay for someone's private villas.

presentation2• 4 years ago

Not specifically about Firefox but: if nonprofits can’t pay for talent then you get what you pay for, crappy talent for important positions. That said many people have your mindset so that puts all nonprofits at a disadvantage against any for-profit initiative as far as getting talent goes. You shouldn’t need to martyr yourself to do something good.

hindsightbias• 4 years ago

If they fix their memory leak bugs on OSX or at least proactively id what in OSX is broken, I’ll consider it.

But after 4 months of crashing my mac every couple of hours, I’m done.

plzdontcancel• 4 years ago

For me at least, I switched away when they started shoving their political views in my face. I get enough of that from all other aspects of life, I don't think my browser should be telling me how to think.

jl6• 4 years ago

Firefox is losing market share because there is so little to differentiate it from its competitors.

In its heyday, Firefox grew popular as the browser that saved us from the manifestly inferior Internet Explorer.

Nowadays, Chrome, Edge & Safari are nowhere near as bad by comparison, meaning users have far less reason to switch from defaults. And I’m counting Chrome as a default just because it is pushed so hard.

What to do then? Find a point of differentiation that gets people excited.

Here’s an idea: a radical return to the idea of the browser being a user agent. That is, fully on the user’s side.

Ads blocked by default. AI to warn of potential native advertising. Auto-flagging of dark patterns. Auto-flagging of any form of deceptive practice. A database of sites known to engage in shady tactics. Reader mode that works everywhere.

Firefox: your personal internet bodyguard.

Sadly I don’t think it can happen until the organization is weaned off Ad money, and it can’t do that until it tackles the complexity of the web which demands so many developers. Which probably means making a stand against further scope expansion of HTML/CSS/JS.

eternityforest7• 4 years ago

FF is already taking a stand against JS scope expansion. That's exactly why I don't use them.

While AI tools would be great(I'd like to see a "content may be generated by deep learning" flag, I have very little interest in supporting a campaign against web bluetooth, battery status, keyboard layout detection, etc.

The user-respecting way is just to put them behind permissions.

chillingeffect• 4 years ago

I would like it if Firefox had a built-in website editor.

takeda4• 4 years ago

I'm trying to save it by continuing to use it, and everyone should do so as well. Once it is gone Google will have pretty much absolute control over the web (not that they don't already, but it will be official then).

selfhoster1153• 4 years ago

There's a point beyond which you're just beating a dead horse and turning it into a pulp. Firefox isn't dead yet, but... yet is the keyword.

takeda4• 4 years ago

Yes, but the reason it's losing market share is because people are stop using it, including technical people. I personally find it superior to Chrome.

JimA• 4 years ago

I've switched from Firefox to Edge in the past year and it's been a marked improvement. I like the cross platform compatibility and syncing works great among Mac/Windows/iOS. Edge started really poorly but has developed into a first class browser, and combining the privacy enhancements of Firefox with the performance of Chrome.

At this point, not sure why I would switch back to Firefox TBH, unless MS really screws something up. My advice would be to create a seamless cross platform browsing experience that has feature parity across all devices. Keep the privacy first strategy, and look at incorporating key add-ons (could they purchase a Bitward/1Password/LastPass?).

jacknews• 4 years ago

Do we understand why it's losing users? The first thing I'd do as CEO would be to find out.

rpnx• 4 years ago

My thoughts on this are that every time I see a news piece about Firefox it's about "social justice", some code of conduct controversy, or something else utterly unimportant to web browser selection.

Being "Open Source" does nothing for me when Firefox engages in the same crap as other closed source browsers, like Pocket. Mozilla also allowed social issues to take precedence over retaining good engineers. Whether you like it or not, even assholes have a basic right to exist and the more recent culture of shun and cancel has had negative consequences for society as a whole. Maybe they were assholes, but I don't give a shit how nice the developers who made my web browser are.

I suppose the problem with Mozilla is the CEO/people who make decisions about Firefox, replace them and maybe Firefox could be revived. But I have extraordinary doubts that Firefox is salvageable at this point. Mozilla's priorities have strayed so far from mine that I cannot see them becoming something I care about any time soon. I suspect it is similar for others.

There is not one issue with Firefox, the people in charge are not competent. It's mistake after mistake after mistake. These mistakes are a direct result of prioritizing diversity over talent.

meremortals4• 4 years ago

I agree with this sentiment -- Firefox should be a web browser first and foremost and not a social justice blog

spankalee3• 4 years ago

Can you point to the social justice blog part?

knob• 4 years ago

Here is my upvote. Although your post is "rough", the truth is quite often as such. Thanks for putting it out there.

tgsovlerkhgsel5• 4 years ago

A good time to remind everyone that when you donate to "Mozilla", you're donating to the Mozilla Foundation, which is the social justice part, not the Mozilla Corporation, which is the browser part.

ashwagary7• 4 years ago

even assholes have a basic right to exist
I don't give a shit how nice the developers who made my web browser are.

I dont either, but do their coworkers care? If so, they should be disciplined or fired depending on behavior.

account4230• 4 years ago

If the "asshole" is being an asshole on the job yes. If the problem is that the coworkers don't like the "asshole"'s beliefs or what he is doing in his free time then they should be told to deal with it.

eigenrick2• 4 years ago

I think this post assumes that Firefox is an inferior browser, and that the cause is mismanagement.

But is Firefox an inferior browser? I think it used to be, but over the last couple years, it has made massive improvements in features and performance. I use it in both desktop and mobile, and I prefer it over Chrome.

As a software engineer, I rely heavily on my browser for work. For me, the multi-account containers in Firefox are the must-have feature. No other browser can offer the ease of separating multiple test accounts, and multiple gmail/gsuite accounts for multiple enterprises separate.

Also, I like how Lockwise on mobile is divorced from the browser, making it easy to use it to manage passwords across websites and apps.

Maybe the problem with Mozilla, then, is marketing. Maybe not enough people know that Firefox is much, much better than it used to be. Or maybe the general sentiment is echoed in your post. People don't feel that Mozilla is focused on writing good software, so they don't expect Firefox to be good.

Personally, I think the biggest cause for the loss of market share is simple: Safari is the default on iOS and Chrome is the default on Android, and population of mobile devices is exploding, and there are no mainstream mobile devices that are carrying Firefox with it.

andoli• 4 years ago

Also, I like how Lockwise on mobile is divorced from the browser, making it easy to use it to manage passwords across websites and apps.

I liked that too. That was before they decided to shut it down...

tored3• 4 years ago

Firefox is inferior still.

It has problems with memory, performance, rendering and battery drainage.

Every year I switch to Firefox and use it as a main browser. It usually goes for a month and then I need to switch again because Firefox has too many glitches.

Firefox has had a bad policy of not fixing the basics first before new features.

I do use Firefox as my main development browser still but that is because I’m more used to the developer tools than the alternatives.

Melatonic6• 4 years ago

I agree - Firefox today is super solid. It blows away Chrome in terms of memory management and I have less compatibility issues with it than any other browser.

I agree with you on marketing and mobile - if the defaults are good enough on mobile then people are going to mostly use that. And while Firefox used to be hugely popular Chrome has really taken over its market share. Butnow Chrome has gone from a lean and simple browser to a bloated mess that chokes when you have too many tabs and starts using gigabytes of ram.

tgsovlerkhgsel5• 4 years ago

But is Firefox an inferior browser?

Several APIs that make powerful web applications possible are missing (e.g. WebUSB, various filesystem access APIs) and Firefox generally tends to lag behind Chrome when it comes to new APIs/web features.

The lower market share means that many web sites don't support it properly. For example, I need to keep a Chrome profile around for Zoom since the button doesn't even show up on Firefox, and when I tried to join a Teams meeting with Firefox, it failed in some non-obvious way, causing me to be late to a job interview (may have been due to some extension misbehaving or some config issue). I don't know if that's just because the sites don't test and do user agent sniffing, or whether Firefox is actually missing some APIs that would be required, but from a user perspective, it doesn't really matter, I can't use the browser for things I can do with Chrome.

I also still have occasional crashes.

panarky2• 4 years ago

I don't give a shit how nice the developers who made my web browser are

It sounds like you do give a shit that they care about "social justice" and you don't want to use their browser because of that?

Or are there specific features / functionality / performance / security issues that prevent you from using Firefox and are somehow caused by the worldview of the developers?

bostonsre3• 4 years ago

Just interpreting what the OP said and not really sure where I stand on the topic, but I think he means that "social justice" controversies have purged asshole devs that were competent developers producing good features and that firefox as a product is not as good due to that. Taking senior engineers off the roster will usually impact the product whether or not they were assholes.

ChristopherDrum• 4 years ago

I am someone who does give a shit about not wanting to reward assholes.

There is one thing I think is worth noting. There's always all of this talk about, "It's the talent that matters, not the social justice stance of a developer. Keep the talented assholes; don't hire for social justice posturing!"

Well, I'm waiting to see all of those displaced "talented assholes" band together to create a product so compelling it will *prove* they were replaced by inferior developers for "social justice" reasons. By now there should be so many uber-talented people who aren't given their fair shake because of their abhorent political/social beliefs.

Or maybe... just maybe... those assholes talk a big game (as assholes often do), but aren't as indispensible as they believe themselves to be?

soundnote10• 4 years ago

I give a shit that the people building my tools are injecting their politics into my tools in places where they don't belong. Browser makers being happy to decide what I should see on the web will make me bail.

Now, there are of course parts of politics that are pertinent to the tool in question - privacy issues for browser developers, for example, or tracking.

Both the Brave and Vivaldi teams have people I know I disagree with politically. But I like their products, and I like the companies? Why? Because whatever the companies' employees views, the two companies' politics are about user control and privacy, and they walk the talk. Both in their own ways that reflect the people making the tool, but insofar as the companies are political, they are political in a very, very narrow way.

Basically, they understand their job is to make hammers and not to sermon about flower arrangement. Mozilla (and much of the tech sphere, sadly) is increasingly the reverse.

BEEdwards• 4 years ago

"Maybe they were assholes, but I don't give a shit how nice the developers who made my web browser are."

There coworkers do though, assholes have a right to exist and others have a right to not want to work with them.

bostonsre3• 4 years ago

Yea, not having to work with assholes is pretty great. Maybe there is some tradeoff to be made and a balance where keeping a productive asshole around could be better for the product than purging said assholes, but I think a team with that toxicity can't be sustainable in the long run unless its a team full of assholes that are content.

throwaway9870• 4 years ago

Don't let the world see you dirty laundry. Every company has these problem, customers should never see it.

teawrecks2• 4 years ago

I agree that it is your prerogative as a consumer to decide how much you care about the integrity of the companies who make the products you use. Maybe it's just my inner Hank Hill talking, but I don't think a responsible consumer would ever say, "I don't give a shit how nice the developers who made my web browser are." The way I see it, if you're willing to be an asshole for profit to someone else, then you're willing to be an asshole for profit to me too. So I appreciate and support companies who make deliberate choices to treat humans better, especially ones made at the cost of profits.

pavlov2• 4 years ago

"even assholes have a basic right to exist"

The problem is when some assholes are actively engaged in denying basic rights from others. If you say "well those assholes have a right to exist", you're effectively saying "the assholes have more of a right to exist than the people they're trying to erase."

jwond• 4 years ago

Could you clarify what basic rights you are referring to, whose existence ”the assholes” are trying to erase, and what methods they are using to do so?

takeda4• 4 years ago

Not all assholes are denying rights from others, there is plenty of equal opportunity assholes.

openfuture2• 4 years ago

Came here to make this comment. Glad to see it is at the top. Moz://a has lost all trust. Yay for atlas engineering! :)

Melatonic6• 4 years ago

I use Firefox daily and I have no idea what the hell you are talking about. What does Mozilla have to do with "cancel" culture? Is there some huge news article I am missing out on or something?

travem• 4 years ago

Likely rooted in the experience with Brendan Eich who had a long history with Mozilla, was appointed as CEO and then (due to his personal political contributions, mainly Proposition 8 related) essentially forced to resign as CEO due to the accompanying backlash - https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/brendan-eich-steps-down-...

spankalee3• 4 years ago

every time I see a news piece about Firefox it's about "social justice", some code of conduct controversy, or something else utterly unimportant to web browser selection.

This can't be true, unless you have extremely unusual new reading habits.

dundarious• 4 years ago

The vast majority people who use web browsers have literally zero knowledge, awareness, or interest in these things. What actually seems to have happened, is that a long time ago now, their techy friends recommended they use Firefox instead of IE. Then those techy friends recommended Chrome because it was even better. Now it's arguably the case that Chrome and Firefox are equivalent from a non-techy standpoint, but non-techies don't want to move browsers over and over. That large audience is largely lost to Firefox until there there are big enough practical downsides to Chrome or upsides to Firefox.

As it stands now, even if techy people, who might be put off by the things you mention, were to be made perfectly happy again, if they recommend Firefox without a significant practical justification, non-techy people simply will not change from Chrome back to Firefox again.

Importantly, more and more people have just grown up with Chrome, never having used Firefox or IE even once. Even if Firefox stays as good as Chrome, more and more people will start their web browsing experience never having considered Firefox and just always having organically used Chrome. This alone will lead to Firefox losing market share over time, even if all existing Firefox users keep using it and loving it.

In my mind, it's clear that the reasons Firefox lost market-share are technical/practical, and the way it might regain market-share is also technical/practical improvements. That will be hard though, especially given Firefox would probably need technical/practical dominance on Android as well as on traditional computers.

lamontcg• 4 years ago

If Google shut all the doors making ad blockers on Chrome virtually impossible that'd be interesting. Ad blocker use is pretty high and might be as high as 40% and if those people all defected that'd do it. Probably why Google can't do that though even though they clearly want to.

liveoneggs• 4 years ago

So many "assholes" in this thread! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHNB8IHfHdU

Mandatum• 4 years ago

If someone implements containers and VPN-in-containers in another browser, I'd switch. But it's so core to how I do my work, I'm unable to move until a better option exists. Profiles in Chrome doesn't do the job.

henry_bone• 4 years ago

People should listen to Dr Robert Epstein [1] and never use a google product again. Google are an advertising company and master manipulators. They have unprecedented control over people very thoughts and opinions. They should be avoided at all costs by any thinking person.

Of course, none of this helps Firefox. If anything, it suggests that they are pretty much fucked.

[1] https://open.spotify.com/episode/4q0cNkAHQQMBTu4NmeNW7E

brimble• 4 years ago

I think it's too late for anything to save them now, but integrating a social overlay on the entire Web, built directly into the browser, is one play that I think might have kept them relevant if they'd started at least a decade ago and really nailed the execution.

It'd have to be something that gives you a reason to use FF over Chrome or Safari or IE/Edge. A social approach has "virality" to it. "Oh we're all posting on this Tweet in FF-Social, that's why you're not seeing the replies. Go get FF and join in. Here's the invite link for our group."

Some add-ons and (earlier) wrapper sites tried similar things, but I think FF is one of the few companies that might have wanted to try this, had (at one time) the critical mass & goodwill to pull it off, and had the right vehicle for it.

jokethrowaway2• 4 years ago

1) Quit the internal politics 2) Quit the "for the people, not for profit": money is how people in a society find consensus on what needs to happen 3) Build something useful and charge for it

More specifically, if I were Mozilla I would build a semantic web browser capable of understanding what's important on a page (it boils down to text, images, videos, comments and forms), extract it, render it in a NATIVE, CONSISTENT and LIGHTWEIGHT (as in CPU / Mem - no electron, no HTML, JS, CSS), user defined way. Nobody wants today's 10GB webpages and 300 popups. Test it on the most popular websites, sell on a subscription basis for people tired of interacting with crappy websites and modern frontend apps. And, of course, offer an option to see the real page in a normal browser for when things don't work or you actually care about seeing someone's design or about running someone's code.

farzher• 4 years ago

firefox doesn't work. every time i try to use it there's some issue. usually it's bad gaming performance.

nunez• 4 years ago

I don't know if Firefox _can_ be saved.

The only reason why Firefox even rose to prominence was because it was an arbitrage opportunity back when IE6 was "the Internet" and Mozilla already had a superior browser (remnants of Navigator) that they needed to remind users existed. Firefox has been on the down swing since Google released Chrome.

When the top web browsers being used today are completely funded and highly-prioritized by the biggest tech companies in the world and are defaults in their respective platforms (Edge on Windows, Chrome on Android, Safari on macOS and iOS), and when all of them are really, really good, there really isn't room for competition.

Additionally, I think browsers as a "thing that people use heavily" are on their way out. Most people are anchoring to platforms that, at best, take advantage of webviews. For many people, "The Internet" is Google, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and $STREAMING_SERVICES, all of which are mobile apps. This, along with significant hardware and bandwidth advancements and the crypto thing, is why I think the "metaverse" is going to really take hold. But that's another HN post.

Anecdotally, the _only_ thing keeping me on Firefox is Multi-Account Containers. That's _literally_ it. I have been wanting to use Safari since forever since it's so heavily optimized for macOS and, now, the M1 CPU architecture, but the isolation guarantees that MAC provides are amazing. That's not enough to build a huge browser userbase with, though, as most people don't give two shits about tracking cookies, fingerprinting, or whatever. (I only give one shit myself, as I've started using Safari on mobile now. Firefox on iOS is just too buggy, and many web sites don't even recognize it as a valid browser, which is insane to me.)

That said, Mozilla VPN is a really good product that is not free. Maybe it's in Mozilla's interest to pivot onto web-adjacent ventures that are profitable?

mrkramer• 4 years ago

Tough question. I think at this point Google is unstoppable; users care about UX not technology and Google has billions in cash to invest in UX(their UX still sucks from time time).

cartesius132• 4 years ago

I think Firefox is done. Not even the people who are the most enthusiastic about open web, software freedom etc. can be bothered to use Firefox. I still use it but I have a strong impression that a lot of people on HN and other tech spaces full of people who tend to care about this sort of thing are using Chrome.

I'm not sure how they can morally justify contributing to the death of the open web by helping Google's monopoly, but it seems inevitable at this point. Trully sad

account4230• 4 years ago

I'm not sure how they can morally justify contributing to the death of the open web by helping Google's monopoly, but it seems inevitable at this point. Trully sad

I agree, Mozilla should stop taking Google's money.

bitwize• 4 years ago

First of all I would structure Mozilla as a software development organization rather than a social justice organization. Current Mozilla leadership seems to believe they're running a UN NGO, rather than stewarding a software project; and the software itself has suffered because of this shift in priorities.

Secondly I wouldn't worry about browser market share. Mozilla's place is to supply browsers, and Web and internet tools, that are open source and free of corporate control. Market share is something for for-profit corporations to worry about; under my Mozilla so many other things would take priority: security, standards compliance, maintainability (the goal would be a "long now" browser that can exist and be maintained even if the foundation itself goes away), portability across platforms. Even with 5% market share, if Mozilla offers a viable alternative to corporate browsers for those who need one, that's a strong niche userbase to keep going on.

The current Mozilla organization is too unfocused to reliably provide a viable alternative to Chrome. That may ultimately be what kills Firefox.

dmead2• 4 years ago

sources on it losing marketshare?

I've used firefox since it was called pheonix and have no plans to switch away.

I'm unaware of the actions of the company though, outside of starting rust development.

Why do people pick up chrome? do you want to fund ad sales?

selfhoster1153• 4 years ago

Statcounter lists FF market share as sub-5%. I'm inclined to believe that, since a lot of people I know have switched to Chromium derivatives, or straight up grew up on Chrome. Heck, a person recently requested my assistance with moving to Chrome and named Firefox as the reason. And that's someone I put on Firefox many a year ago.

Firefox is getting unbearable for average users. It's getting unbearable for me, a geek who has infinite patience for FOSS as long as it serves my goals. Well, Firefox no longer serves my goals. I'll keep using it for as long as it remains usable, then I'm switching to Vivaldi. At least it cares about power user use cases.

dmead2• 4 years ago

brutal. the last figure I remember seeing was 30%. that must be ancient at this point.

is there a chrome derivative that isn't going to shed tracking data for everything? or is that what I should be looking to safari for?

gboone• 4 years ago

Just to add what I see as a positive move, there is progress regarding multiple mic selection in webrtc. This is the kind of thing that practically matters to me, and there is work being done as far as I can tell. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1238038

egberts12• 4 years ago

First step: ditch the CxO-suite payroll; Mozilla has turned into a giant C-suite sucking sound on its finance and has gone blind to its original tenet.

2. Revert to Redhat pre-IPO corporate model (and stay there)

3. Restart and fill up PAID development team

4. Massive support team in response to user-support/feature-request

5. ???

6. Profit!

humanwhosits• 4 years ago

Allow donations that explicitly go towards Firefox dev (rather than umbrella Mozilla).

thrower123• 4 years ago

I'd probably do what the current Mozilla leadership is doing: stack those checks before the gravy-train comes to an end.

Firefox passed the point of no return long ago.

pavlov2• 4 years ago

Reboot the project again, like in 2001.

Nobody wanted to use the original open source Mozilla browser because it was a weird groupware suite monstrosity derived from Netscape's code. A few clever people created a standalone browser using the Mozilla engine and called it Phoenix. It was eventually renamed Firefox in 2004.

Start another Phoenix that focuses on being a better, slimmer, faster browser than the Chromium ones, just like the original was a better, slimmer, faster browser than the Internet Explorer monoculture.

openfuture2• 4 years ago

They already did; it was called servo. Management killed the project and fired all the engineers. You may have heard of the rust programming language...

buzzwords• 4 years ago

Wow, there seem to be quite negative sentiment towards the CEO. How is was she selected? What would be a better way of selecting CEO for Mozilla?

Melatonic6• 4 years ago

I thought Firefox was making a come back but maybe I was wrong - personally I started using it again everywhere maybe a year ago. And of course I was all about Firefox way back in the day. Chrome going to shit led me straight back and it has been super solid with a decent array of extensions and themes and whatnot.

sumek83• 4 years ago

Can someone explain to me whats missing from Firefox feature or stability wise? I'm now using Chrome at $NEW_WORK and I can't see the single reason why I would prefer it. The only other time I've launched Chrome in the last 5+ years was to use some Google services like Stadia

Killer Firefox features for me are: sending pages to another browser to act on later on (and I use it a lot) and plugins in the Mobile Firefox.

troyvit2• 4 years ago

They need to add "Blockchain" to their name somewhere.

m3kw9• 4 years ago

Serve a niche instead banging against Chrome

pruthvishetty• 4 years ago

It's in Google's best interest to save Firefox and, in turn, save itself from anti-trust/monopoly allegations in the near future.

account4230• 4 years ago

Nah it's in Google's best interest to keep FF on life support and even for that they don't need FF specifically.

unabridged• 4 years ago

Hardware. If Firefox had a phone to compete with Android, even if was $1000+ it would gain ground. Also selling laptops to compete against Chromebooks.

The hardware has to be top of the line and work perfectly with the OS. Work with every major linux distro to make sure they are compatible with no fuss. Only make one or two models total. Rally the entire opensource openhardware community around a single high end model. No companies working on their own lines, but allow any manufacturer to release a phone or sell parts that match spec.

FinalBriefing• 4 years ago

I've always thought they should create their own Electron engine, or NodeJS variation. Should have reached out to the Deno team about using SpiderMonkey instead of V8.

Granted, users don't know or care which engine they're using, but it would allow Mozilla to "control" important infrastructure that apps are deployed on. Maybe it would turn into a revenue stream by providing official support, or maybe it just helps keep Google's fingers out of everything.

sgift• 4 years ago

At the end of the day the main problem of Firefox is that it fights against companies (ab)using their market power in one market to foster their browser on people.

- Google: Try to use anything made by them with another browser and without a blocker and see how long it takes until you get the "SURF BETTER WITH CHROME"-ads thrown into your face

- Microsoft: Edge is pre-bundled and you get little nags in the Google style noted above all the time. Various menus contain little "try out Edge, a browser made for Windows!"-ads

- Apple: Doesn't even allow other browsers on some of their platforms, deeply integrates the browser and the OS in others (i.e. exactly the behavior which got Microsoft in hot water in the 90s)

I don't think it's possible to fundamentally change the trend without intervention of government agencies that forbids Google, Microsoft and Apple from doing this and neither EU nor US show much interest in doing so. So, things will continue and at best Mozilla can hope for some stabilization at the bottom of the ladder.

Side note: Mozilla has done various things over time I'm not happy with, but all of these are at most accelerants. They didn't change the fundamental trajectory, so unlike other commentators I think they are not relevant to this topic, even though we could discuss day in or out if e.g. the pocket acquisition and all that came with it was a good thing.

account4230• 4 years ago

Mozilla was able to gain market share against Microsoft before by targeting power users who then recommended FF to others (or just installed it for them) so I disagree that Mozilla's current disdain for power users is not relevant. Even if they would have lost the average user anyway, their own decisions is what is going to lose them the rest that is keeping them from obscurity.

I agree that competing with these megacorporations on their playing field is unrealistic, which is why Mozilla needs to start competing in places where these megacorporations don't want to. Mozilla's marketing department has already realized that privacy is one such area, but their developers and culture still need to catch up with that.

dleslie4• 4 years ago

Part of the issue is that it's not attractive to volunteer for.

Simply put, why would I volunteer my free time to support a software project whose CEO makes somewhere in the ballpark of 70x the average American salary?

Mozilla likes to pretend that it's an egalitarian, collective endeavour; but it's really not so different than any other private software development company. It's not even all that unique in the licensing conditions that it places on its software.

throwingtt• 4 years ago

My biggest problem with Mozilla is that I pay them a monthly donation and it is real hard to cancel it. They had no problem accepting it. It's just a bit too nasty.

thrwawy283• 4 years ago

I will continue using Firefox because of tab containers, and the Temporary Containers extension. Nothing in Chrome comes close to that, even with extensions like it. It's not total privacy, but it's something every browser should support. I think Chrome has the ability to run separate user profiles from the command line, which is something I hope Firefox can do. I'd love to run "default settings" as one user profile, and my own settings as "here's this paranoid dude". Usually I jump to Chrome or Edge when my privacy extensions get in the way of using a banking website, and I don't want to tune umatrix.

There are 3 things I think Firefox needs to support: CEF, Rust, Dev Tools

Something that gets brought up over-and-over is the Chrome Embedding Framework (CEF?) or the API designed to embed Chrome. Firefox isn't as easy to embed as Chrome, and would benefit greatly if it could be oriented to interface with this API. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_Embedded_Framework Firefox needs to support being a fast and light applet. Forgive me for saying the words we do not use.

The 2nd is Rust. Rust was the best thing Mozilla could have supported, but instead they axed the dev team and gave it to the Linux Foundation. That's probably a good thing in the long-run. Rust is a really innovative paradigm shift in language design, and it will be so much bigger than Firefox. However, the development of Firefox technologies with Rust should have continued. We were so looking forward to Servo. Chrome is perceptibly faster, but we were on track to wipe the board with memory safety. I personally would use a "correct" browser over a fast one.

The 3rd is dev tools. People develop with Chrome for amazing dev tools. As an easy example, if you look in the Firefox Network dev tool/tab you can add a column to show the value returned with a common response header. In Firefox you can only choose to show these 6-8 headers. In Chrome you can add additional (custom) response headers, for things like X-Application-Whatever. It's very nice to show your application's custom headers in the dev tool window like that. I've been asking for it for a while on Mozilla's bugtracker. I don't know where to jump in and add it myself.

JoelJacobson• 4 years ago

I would prioritize fixing the support for WebAuthn resident keys:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1530370

jollybean• 4 years ago

Most of these comments focus on things like 'features'.

Chrome wins mostly because it has 'distribution'.

'WordPerfect' may have been better than 'MS Word' but it doesn't matter if every version of Windows comes with a link to 'MS Word'.

Google uses its dominance in Search to dominate adjacent spaces.

Firefox is simply not 'that much better' enough to convince consumers to switch, and/or they don't have the marketing budget to communicate that to the world.

It's a bit of a commodity product, and Google has significant leverage.

FF would have to work with a lot of partners to convince them to focus on FF for the thoughtful reasons we want them to, even then, it could be hard.

fleddr• 4 years ago

Almost 5 years ago, the ex-CTO of Mozilla blogged this: https://andreasgal.com/2017/05/25/chrome-won/

...and apparently, the conclusions still haven't landed. Firefox lost because it has no reach. They lost on mobile and they don't have billion user properties to push their browser in the way Google has.

Any and all discussions about Firefox UI choices, its engine, whatever...are completely irrelevant if you have near zero reach. This problem cannot be solved with engineering. Nor will it be solved with donations.

Firefox lost and lost a long time ago. It's over. It cannot compete with these market forces. The world in which Firefox was successful, before smartphones, massive online services and a stagnant IE, no longer exist.

With this in mind, what should happen to Firefox? Short term to mid term, keeping it alive and hoping Google keeps wiring Mozilla tons of money, because without it, Mozilla would soon cease to exist.

Long term? I don't know. I would hope that the technical product somehow can be preserved and kept functional, but maintaining a browser is a costly business. It's not the type of project to send to Github and say "best of luck".

The common narrative in the web community that having an extra independent browser engine around is great is mostly a "feel good" story. Having a slightly crappier engine does nothing for developers or users. Firefox also doesn't keep the web "honest" as it's so small now that it can be ignored entirely. There's a reason both Edge and Brave picked Chromium.

As for Mozilla, I have little confidence in their ability to reinvent themselves, with or without Firefox. One of their ex-employees expressed it well on Twitter: they got addicted to a fire-hose of free money which they largely pissed away on fruitless projects.

As counter point to that I would say that besides failed projects, Mozilla has made very meaningful contributions to foundational computing, think Rust and WebAssembly. It's extra painful that in particular the most useful part of Mozilla, the above, is scaled down.

Mozilla these days comes across as a woke blog. Preachy, deeply political, yet without actual impact. I follow the simple rule in life where if somebody is constantly telling you how virtuous they are, they are the opposite. Because good people don't need to tell the world that they're good. "Progressive" Mozilla is quite the fan of neoliberal economics, as they fire a huge amount of workers (even during COVID) whilst enriching themselves as reward for...running the company in the ground. They are THE privacy browser (nope) and build an advanced container to castrate Facebook, yet don't do the same for Google services (for well known reasons). It's all very hypocritical and hollow.

Preaching is not only tiresome, it also doesn't pay bills. So go an do something useful in establishing "revenue earning products". A bookmarking service and a rebranded VPN fail to impress.

oaf357• 4 years ago

I think it’s more a Mozilla’s losing mindshare problem. There’s a lot of upside at other places for the same skills Mozilla is looking for.

hemanr• 4 years ago

If mozilla could be written in Rust, maybe it will be the fastest and people love it? It got to be function based sale, nothing else. Free VPN with it, like Opera - that is why I use Opera event though it is limited in functionality. Add more features which people can use it beyond browsing. Change some thing fundamentally!

rntksi• 4 years ago

Firefox has Vertical Tab bar while Chrome does not. I use Firefox because of that.

MattyRad• 4 years ago

My 2 cents, I think the browser wars are lost, handily. We should start focusing on contingency plans.

I don't think we all agree on what the impact of Firefox market share evaporation is, but my main concern is Google having totalitarian control of the internet: the Browser and Search.

To combat that, I would focus on decreasing the reliance on browser specific tech (specifically: javascript, but also html/css, and maybe HTTP to a certain degree), ensuring that that the web can be browsed without being at the mercy of the client. Return to servers front-loading the entirety of web content. Obviously this would require a massive cultural shift.... The ethics of web dev would have to be shared by vegan-comparable evangelists. (I realize how unrealistic this is after typing it)

I would also try to produce a PoC search engine that mercilessly punishes the ad-driven web, which - we've all noticed- is becoming increasingly pervasive.

Accomplishing these two things, I wouldn't be too concerned about Firefox specifically. Obviously these are immense- perhaps unrealistic goals- but it's what comes to mind.

account4230• 4 years ago

To combat that, I would focus on decreasing the reliance on browser specific tech (specifically: javascript, but also html/css, and maybe HTTP to a certain degree), ensuring that that the web can be browsed without being at the mercy of the client. Return to servers front-loading the entirety of web content. Obviously this would require a massive cultural shift.... The ethics of web dev would have to be shared by vegan-comparable evangelists. (I realize how unrealistic this is after typing it)

I don't think it is an easy thing to accomplish but a cultural shift away from depending on the latest tech is exactly what me need. Make not having good backwards compatibility as shameful as "works best with IE". Make it acceptable to run "old" software again and laughable to force users onto new versions in order to get security updates.

I would also try to produce a PoC search engine that mercilessly punishes the ad-driven web, which - we've all noticed- is becoming increasingly pervasive.

Yes. There have been some search engines posted here for the old web, but I haven't yet seen one that primarily punishes based on ads.

joeyguerra• 4 years ago

Because everyone is using Chrome.

Make Firefox 5 times faster than Chrome.

5F7bGnd6fWJ66xN• 4 years ago

Firefox should stop taking money from Google. Instead get a consortium of FAANG companies to bid and pay for traffic and rotate the benefits on a regular basis. Attract best in breed developers by advertising their contributions in the webpage.Lobby government to have Firefox included in all operating systems shipped with OS

DarthNebo• 4 years ago

I'd focus on beating Safari in terms of power consumption, better native integration(iCloud sync) & using these as a springboard for anything else. It's very difficult to recommend Firefox/Chrome/Brave on a Mac over Safari unless someone really needs specific addons.

SamuelAdams• 4 years ago

Do people not use an ad blocking extension? I use a Mac and I tried using safari but the lack of UBlock Origin makes it very difficult.

peanut_worm• 4 years ago

Dissolve the Mozilla Foundation and put everything into browser development. I got some weird email about how valentines day sucks(?) from Mozilla this morning that was somehow supposed to convince me to donate or something. I don’t understand how a software company’s software became an afterthought. I almost think Google is paying them to purposely mismanage Firefox.

jakeogh• 4 years ago

Taking 2B+ from Goog does that.

didip• 4 years ago

This is just a comment from 1 guy so take it with a bucket full of salt.

In my opinion, the biggest error of Mozilla is not responding quickly to the computing trends.

Mozilla had a lot of great tech even in the early 2000s but it failed to realize how valuable they were.

Take XUL for example, what if they had expanded it to run on top of Linux directly? They could have become a player in OS market.

What if, after that, they expanded it to run on top of mobile phone when Android came out? They could have become a player in the smartphone market.

Number 3 player in browser, OS, and smartphone is not a bad thing. They surely would have been a much bigger company than what it is right now.

maxloh3• 4 years ago

I don't think it can be saved.

The last time I checkout Firefox was about a year ago. It still uses ugly lagacy windows UI elements in its history/bookmark manager, and switching between personal/school account was a pain in the ass.

I think it is too far away from Chrome and beyond saving.

xialvjun• 4 years ago

I don't think we should save Firefox. IE is not opensource, so Firefox is very important. Chromium is opensource, so we needn't to stick with multiple browser kernels. Once Google Chrome change bad, we can use Vivaldi, Brave, or Edge. But we should save Mozila. We need to gather such a group of idealists. They will act as the vanguard to explore the future: create rust, rewrite chromium...

zecg• 4 years ago

Firefox mobile can't save a webpage anymore. They took away essential features and each new release I have to learn new ways to turn off their money making initiatives.

samwillis2• 4 years ago

I feel like they need to get back to the place they were mentally in in 2004, fighting for their survival. They ran a two page ad in the NY Times:

https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2004/12/mozilla-foundation-pl...

This is the passion and marketing needed to save Firefox.

rank0• 4 years ago

Cater to power users. Remove as much bloat as possible Focus on extensibility. Setup stupid simple self hosting for things like bookmarks/pw manager.

Longshot: go all in on bringing mainline Linux to the desktop/mobile. Linux systems are the only place where Mozilla is the default. Hyper focus on high performance with Linux systems. Memory footprint and battery drain are abysmal. The way security controls for extensions are implemented requires stupid amounts of memory.

tie_• 4 years ago

I'm using Firefox fulltime, both on my work and my personal machine. The two things I'd love to see are: - Fix the ever-growing memory usage on Linux - Make it the best platform for using Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)

Despite PWAs not being a mainstream thing now, there are still a lot of them. Particularly on Linux, a PWA can be the best option for software that doesn't have a native client - e.g. Outlook 365. PWAs have a lot of untapped potential, mainly due to mobile software authors not being familiar with the approach.

With Firefox standing for the open, net-neutral web, it makes sense to me that they would also stand for web-based, cross-platfrom, appstore-neutral apps.

rolandog• 4 years ago

I think it's fine to hold Firefox to higher moral standards than its competitors, but what I don't like is the general negative vibe in which people criticize it (or Mozilla) for not being perfect. There is always a constructive manner in which we can suggest stuff and I sometimes feel that the criticisms are too derisive and maybe even toxic. We may need to reach a collective agreement that some things, like browsers, should not be tied down to business models, but rather to make them a public tool or utility. Sure, people working to improve it and maintain it should get properly compensated for it, but eventually we will reach a point where no more 'growth' can be squeezed out of a product, and that's when privacy-invasive measures start to creep in (as we've seen with Chrome). So, my argument to save Firefox is to stop trying to make money with it, and perhaps lobby governments around the world to mandate its usage or to add dedicated government IT workers to contribute patches and maintain localization and internationalization (not just for Firefox, but for other FLOSS stuff). It's not a crazy idea, since a lot of countries have rather efficient socialized postal services...

anizan• 4 years ago

Work on javascript engine more than anything else.Find a partner for this if you have to. I use some JS heavy websites and the difference between Chrome's V8 is wide enough to not switch back. Also there's this annoying bug typing in urls in the address bar face an unreasonable typing delay.

gigantecmedia• 4 years ago

for me, Firefox is nothing special. For privacy, I choose Safari. For extensions, I choose Chrome. Sometimes I use Brave as well. Firefox is the last option.

Berniek• 4 years ago

So many answers missed the fundamental point. It is open source. That means Google, Microsoft and anyone else is able to contribute and with enough contributions from these sources, the basic philosophy will be influenced by these sources. If you do the work you should get kudos & reward.... -Containers were / are brilliant -Containers with "some sponsor leakage" ( it's not called that but that is what it is) is shabby and so google. -Default search engine is Google is obscene, regardless of how much sponsorship you get. -Turning off telemetry should mean what it says. What it really means Firefox still stores it locally, just doesn't transmit it (for now?)-so Microsoft.

i386• 4 years ago

Mozilla lost the nerds.

Everything that made Mozilla cool or innovative was shafted.

fdewnijfwg• 4 years ago

Firefox' performance and battery life on laptops/mobile is horrendous when compared to Chromium-based alternatives. Especially on slower devices.

I've got an older laptop that I use for simpler stuff only. Video playback is horribly slow when compared to native clients, and the CPU fan sounds like a fighter jet if I try to open some of the heavier pages in Firefox. Chromium-based alternatives run just fine (albeit with twice the RAM usage, but that's not a problem for me).

hakfoo• 4 years ago

The focus shouldn't be Firefox per se, it should be Gecko.

In this market, we've got an army of secondary secondary browser players-- the Vivaldis, the Braves, Yandex's browser team, the smouldering wreckage of Opera, and yes even Microsoft's Edge and (to a lesser extent) Apple's Safari teams.

I'm sure every single one of those developers knows they're living with a belligerent landlord: they're going to spend too much of their careers having to unwind anti-competitive or just "we wouldn't want to include this in OUR browser" features in Blink.

Make sure you're a serious option for them. Make Gecko as embeddable as Webkit.

In this plan, the endgame actually has a fairly low Firefox market share, because it gradually evolves to be the "packed-in reference implementation" of the Gecko engine. Instead, we focused on building a healthier web ecosystem. More people end up using Gecko!Edge or Gecko!Vivaldi or whatever, and this breaks up market share enough that Google can't barge their way through the standards process by unilaterally cramming features into Blink. The individual vendors can more completely focus on their custom improvements while expecting that the core browser engine isn't going to be polluted to serve a specific (and not their own) commercial interest, and have a vested commercial interest in supporting Mozilla to do the heavy lifting for them.

In the short term, I think maybe they could start appealing to this market as a "too important to fail" concept. Think of AMD 10 years ago: the products are mediocre right now, but everyone knew if they went bankrupt, the industry would stagnate majorly for a long time. That might be a justification for soliciting foundation memberships or hackathons to encourage development work on their engine.

kathyreid• 4 years ago

This has been a really interesting debate. One of the assumptions underlying many of the comments here is that the web is still the default paradigm of the internet. This is still true to some extent - we consume content on web browsers on a range of user agents: laptops, desktops, mobile devices, embedded hardware, fridges, and a range of other IoT devices.

But how long is that going to be the case?

Will the web be the default paradigm in the age of the metaverse? What if Firefox was able to be a metaverse platform? There was some early work done on this in around 2014 by @vvuk, which integrated WebGL. VRML integration also progressed. At the moment, Facebook is changing its entire organisation to focus on the metavers (see also their Oculus acquisition), while Google and Apple own the hardware (mobile phones) that it will presumably run on, and have their own browsers. Microsoft's Hololens is also heading in this direction, but they already have Edge.

Facebook needs a web browser for the metaverse. Mozilla needs to remain relevant. Strange bedfellows?

WCityMike• 4 years ago

To me, they absolutely shunned their core audience -- people who wanted greater flexibility and configurability than existing browsers could give them. As a power user who used to have Firefox humming along exactly how I wanted it (thanks to things like Keyconfig, etc.), I now really perceive next to no difference between Firefox and Chrome. Yes, there's philosophical reasons that make them differ. But in terms of what they offer to the end user? There's no difference. They neutered themselves.

Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?

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