Mozilla thinks Apple, Google, Microsoft should play fair

https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/25/mozilla_apple_google_browser_wars/

by Stratoscope • 2 years ago

65 53 2 years ago

theregister.com

johnea• 2 years ago

Mozilla has big concerns about big tech!

As such: "Mozilla's concerns are documented" on a M$ platform?

They sure are standing up to monopolization of the net, aren't they...

kevingadd• 2 years ago

Apple puts their policy positions on GitHub too. It's just where this is done for some reason: https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions

tech234a• 2 years ago

They are also planning to move the Firefox source code to being primarily hosted on GitHub: https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/firefox-dev/c/Qnfy...

nulld3v• 2 years ago

OMG amazing! I am so done with the 20-minute clones from the mozilla-release repo.

I only compile and patch FF though so I'm not sure how the actual devs feel.

threeseed3• 2 years ago

From reading the technical issues Mozilla seems to care far more about itself than what is best for users.

Because allowing advertising-centric browsers like Chrome to read user's Messages data and import Browsing History data would be a nightmare for user's privacy. We already know Google uses browser history for advertising purposes.

Some of us just want our phone to be a phone. Not a computer that we have to constantly secure, manage and triage.

[1] https://www.scmagazine.com/news/google-chrome-will-disable-t...

sgift2• 2 years ago

Uh ... it's in the best interest of users to not be allowed to choose to import their history in a different browser? Yeah, that sounds reasonable. Not.

threeseed3• 2 years ago

Chrome today is categorising that browsing history for advertisers.

Who in turn are packaging it alongside other data to track you across the internet.

Which for Apple and me as well is not worth a mild UX inconvenience.

jampekka• 2 years ago

So comforting to have Big Brother keeping us save from ourselves.

serial_dev• 2 years ago

They are at 3%?! I didn't know I'm witnessing the death throes of the company. It looks like it will take a while, and I'm sure for some people, they will still benefit from it, but I don't see how they will come back.

LAC-Tech• 2 years ago

Yes. Their share has been declining since 2009. Or to put it into perspective, we are as far away from peak Firefox as peak Firefox was from the first release of Netscape in 1994.

dns_snek• 2 years ago

It's higher than 3%, probably around 10% on the desktop, per https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-usage

It doesn't have a super convenient breakdown, but Chrome Desktop is at 28.9% and Firefox is at 4%. If you remove the mobile shares you arrive at around 10%.

_heimdall2• 2 years ago

If I'm not mistaken, I saw that same 3% figure recently and didn't have much faith in the data. It was based on Google Analytics data and, for one thing, can't account for the fact that a decent number of Firefox users likely use it to avoid Google and would have GA blocked.

jwells893• 2 years ago

User agent strings should still be visible in server analytics though, no?

frozenport• 2 years ago

Apple not letting us use firefox is pretty big

CharlesW• 2 years ago

You can use Firefox, but not Gecko.

Tagbert• 2 years ago

That’s just Safari in drag

myaccountonhn• 2 years ago

Can’t even install plugins like Adblock

givemeethekeys• 2 years ago

Why did Mozilla not push harder for its own ecosystem where it owns the OS (ie. a compelling Linux alternative to Windows, Android, and Apple?).

FredFS456• 2 years ago

They tried with Firefox OS a while back https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_OS

bobmaxup• 2 years ago

An article on the topic:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/why-the-death-of-the-firefo...

2OEH8eoCRo02• 2 years ago

I've often wondered why companies like Red Hat, Canonical, or SUSE have no presence in mobile.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Handset_Alliance

toyg2• 2 years ago

Canonical tried pretty hard.

The reality is that you're going to fight with the two richest companies on Earth, on a field where commercial relationships with OEMs (phone manufacturers) matter more than anything else - and OEMs like to talk with big, reliable companies, not scrappy startups. Your competitors have a 15/20-year head-start, in a field where such head-starts are practically unsurmountable. Your OS will be judged on its first few releases, which means you better have it on a beefy flagship phone; except no decent OEM is going to bet their flagship on your unproven OS, so they're going to give you a second- or third-rate model instead, which will make your OS feel slow and glitchy. Oh, and you can't make any real money from the whole effort, because otherwise they will go Android.

toyg2• 2 years ago

Because they made all the mistakes that anyone trying to bootstrap a indie mobile OS tends to make.

Someone should take the "here's why your antispam plan won't work" form, and turn it into "here's why your non-Google/Apple mobile OS will never get traction".

jwells893• 2 years ago

Those mistakes chiefly being starting at the low end and not doing anything to make the platform particularly more interesting than what was already out there. Users don’t talk about budget devices and developers don’t talk about mediocre platforms, and so the positive dev-user feedback loop needed to kickstart a platform never materialized.

I think a third totally new platform could be established even today, but it’s going to take smart planning and flawless execution to make happen.

Turskarama• 2 years ago

Mobile OS's have the worst case of the chicken and egg problem. Nobody will buy a device with your OS unless there's apps for it, and nobody will make apps for it unless there's users.

How do you solve this problem? Mozilla is too small to do it, and even Microsoft has seemingly given up.

vfclists2• 2 years ago

Here is the company that mothballed development of its own phone, laid of a chunk of Servo developers, gets huge payments from Google, overpays it executives then whinges about unfair behaviour from the Big Three.

If it wasn't for the Firefox addons I've come to depend on whose developers have stuck with Mozilla inspite of their bullshit, I would have switched to Chrome ages ago.

I think I'm just too lazy to.

Yujf• 2 years ago

Mozilla might not be doing great for their users, at least they are not actively hostile. It is a low bar though

And they are absolutely right to complain about unfair behaviour

x0x0• 2 years ago

The issue that needs to be added, but might get my github account banned, is failing to fire Mitchell Baker.

She's overseen a disastrous plummet in marketshare and a deliberate move in strategy away from firefox -- ff was not mentioned in recent strategy updates [1], and they've now decided to play at AI and early-stage venture fund. Skills at which Mozilla has no demonstrable competence.

The only real value they have is a fig-leaf for Google to pretend they don't have a browser monopoly, and at some point I expect that value to expire.

Would new leadership have changed this? I don't know, but keeping your job after overseeing an utter disaster and not at least once trying new leadership is incompetent.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mark-surman-mozilla-25-y...

martin_drapeau• 2 years ago

Mozilla was awesome when I started Web programming in 2009. Remember Firebug? But then Chrome came out and the rest is history.

Nowadays Mozilla fumbles and complains. Maybe rightly so. I'm just tired of it.

echelon2• 2 years ago

Chrome had billions of advertising dollars to back it.

Then Chrome directed more people into their ad funnel as the default action.

Then Google started buying up more glass and real estate. More people to shove though.

Now websites don't run in Firefox. (One of my lawyer's websites doesn't!)

Now Cookies and web standards are changing so Google is the only arbiter of targeted online ads.

It's time for anti-trust!

jwells893• 2 years ago

Google bought their way into a lot of software bundling deals too. From time to time I still encounter Windows installers that try to install Chrome alongside whatever the main program is.

threeseed3• 2 years ago

People don't understand that Chrome is purpose built for advertising.

It allows first-party cookies to live for over a year which are used for re-targeting and building behavioural profiles. It recklessly incorporates every API under the sun which advertisers use for fingerprinting with 99% accuracy. And despite it being insidious and a major invasion of privacy Google still happily partners with companies who use it.

And now people who are completely ignorant about how their data is being used are jumping up and data for this behaviour to extend to all mobile devices.

clouddrover• 2 years ago

Remember Firebug?

What was Firebug is now built in to Firefox: https://getfirebug.com/

What are the compelling advantages of Chrome nowadays?

Chrome is working to limit the capabilities of ad blockers:

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2023/11/chrome-pushes...

Whereas a compelling advantage of Firefox is its support for uBlock Origin. uBlock Origin works best in Firefox:

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

Advertising networks have often been vectors for malware. Using an ad blocker is an important security measure. Even the FBI recommends ad blockers:

https://www.malwarebytes.com/malvertising

https://theconversation.com/spyware-can-infect-your-phone-or...

https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2022/PSA221221?=8324278624

poisonborz• 2 years ago

Wondering why there aren't more companies taking a more activist role like (former) Mozilla or maybe Signal? There's an abundance of successful mid-sized companies that have deep OS roots and would have the brainpower to step up. Dependence on key players shouldn't be a hindrance, Mozilla had that always. Epic would be a bad example, they took the fight for their own exploitative empire.

YetAnotherNick• 2 years ago

Epic would be a bad example, they took the fight for their own exploitative empire.

No, Epic is a good example, at least if they would have been successful in their objective. Financial motivation of companies or individuals is definitely the best cause for anti trust as it clearly shows someone is really affected rather than anti trust which just sounds good on paper.

p0w3n3d• 2 years ago

Everyone thinks Apple Google and Microsoft should play fair. Mozilla just expresses this desire loudly

jacooper• 2 years ago

Mozilla should be the last entity talking about playing at all, they do nothing and expect everything.

In the same timeframe from 2016, brave created a browser, which actually protects user privacy by blocking all trackers and ads, developed new privacy enhancing measures like cookie isolation, localhost access permission, and much more.

Then they created an independent search engine, with ai integrated using their own index and hardware, and now they have their own ai service which respects privacy.

In the same time Mozilla falls really short, yes they released Firefox quantum, but nothing major other than that, and of course nothing that actually protects users privacy because they are afraid of google.

And that's how they lost their passionate users, while also not realizing that the average user doesn't care since chrome just works and causes no major problems for them

IcyWindows• 2 years ago

Allowing browsers to set themselves as default should not be allowed, and I don't think that should be an issue that Mozilla is tracking to be "fixed".

echelon2• 2 years ago

Nor should default search engines be allowed, be it on browsers or on entire operating systems.

Defaults are a powerful mechanism of platform dominance.

Google should also not be allowed to dictate how cookies and tracking and web standards work. They're clearly trying to set themselves up as the only company that can do online advertising with measurable results.

It's actually insidious how Google can ride on the bandwagon of "cookies are scary" to get exactly the outcome they want.

Rapzid2• 2 years ago

If Mozilla worked as hard at making FireFox embeddable and finally allowing for scrollbar styling on par with Chrome/Safari.. Maybe FireFox wouldn't be at 3%.

Or they can just keep complaining and catering to relatively niche demographics.

vfclists2• 2 years ago

They've made it embeddedable on Android, but not on the desktop where most of their users are.

They get most of their income from their deal with Google which gets most of its income from Chrome, so why should they jeopardize that by creating an alternative to Chrome?

Rapzid2• 2 years ago

IDK what's their mission? Who knows anymore. Who cares. Fuck Mozilla and for the love of god don't donate money to them.

roenxi• 2 years ago

I agree with Mozilla, but they have bigger internal problems than external ones. They started losing market share back whenever and their response was to try and clone Chrome as closely as they could. So now the options are we can either use semi-Chrome with less resources behind it or real a Chrome-based browser (plug for Brave!).

They're in a strategic dead end, the reasons to pick Firefox are very slim. They should have committed harder to being extension-heavy. At least then they'd be interesting and even if niche they'd have a niche to operate in. Now it is just hard to see why they should be relevant. It is helpful to have someone complaining about what everyone else is doing wrong, but they don't need the budget they have to do that. I manage to fill that role on a pro-bono basis.

mrich• 2 years ago

What do you mean by extension heavy? In my experience, Firefox has the best extension ecosystem amongst all browsers. It took them quite long to get that to work on mobile, but even there you could use all extensions already on a developer build for years.

Especially with the manifest v3 changes, which will basically break adblockers on Chrome-based browsers, I can't imagine ever using something else than Firefox.

isaacremuant• 2 years ago

They're in a strategic dead end, the reasons to pick Firefox are very slim.

This is such a wrong statement and has nothing to back it up. Why is it first.

Firefox has: - much higher customization options (huge) - different features such as multi account containers - a different profit model not based on ads and intrusion. Mozilla is not acting like a monopoly and trying to force people to watch their ads. - A different engine. - a better strategy for Ram - a different UI - and much more.

Some of us, have enjoyed Firefox for aged and will keep doing so. We're power users and not people who act like popularity due to external marketing capabilities and default pushing is reason enough to say "other browsers should not be relevant".

Wtf is your comment, honestly.

Now, if you want to talk about Mozilla missing their money for US culture wars (Rep vs Dem) and issues unrelated to tech, then i agree. But technology wise, Firefox is a very easy case to make.

Mozilla thinks Apple, Google, Microsoft should play fair

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