I will make the same comment I made on another post regarding Firefox and Mozilla:
a few tips from from no one:
1. Rewrite the Mozilla mission statement. I read that and have no idea what your organization does. Mission statements seem like corporate naval gazing, but if it is honest and well written it keeps everyone focused on what you are working towards.
2. Refocus on Firefox R&D and core technologies - Firefox needs to be the best browser. It is the thing that makes the company money and makes it recognizable to the lay person. You will never be able to outspend Google, Microsoft, and Apple, but they are always going to have more competing priorities pulling their best engineers away and causing political infighting about what should be crammed into the browser. Mozilla does not have to have any of that.
3. Invest more in Thunderbird the application and develop Thunderbird the privacy focus email service for independent professionals and small businesses.
That is it. I like some of Mozilla's side projects and I agree with the business philosophy that they should be looking to diversify their revenue stream, but I think they should all be part of two core products: Firefox and Thunderbird. Why Thunderbird? Because I think there is an undeserved niche in the business email service provider space and I think Mozilla can have a universal client on desktop, phone, tablet, and browser that is the trojan horse to up sell that product.
> 3. Invest more in Thunderbird the application and develop Thunderbird the privacy focus email service for independent professionals and small businesses.
I know Mozilla's non-Firefox projects aren't popular here, but if Thunderbird really wanted a niche in the business world Mozilla would need to start an email service to go with it. The age of non-integrated email clients for the average user ended a while ago.
I think you're spot on here. The only people using desktop mail clients are techies with multiple accounts (such as us HN users), and business users (who all use Outlook).
As a counterpoint, the non-techies in my family have become so used to the iPhone and iPad mail client that they look for (and find, and use) the desktop mail client on their Macs. Even my mom knows she has to "find the mail and give it my GMail" when she gets a new device.
Agree. Mozilla should focus more on online services, nicely integrated in the browser. Online email, password management, vpn services, file storage and sharing, ... All privacy focused and with paid offerings, to make them more independent from Google.
I disagree - the feature they need is better calendar integration with Exchange based services and the Exchange address book (GAL). As a corporate user this is the Achilles heel and always has been for 20 years, like it or not Exchange is king of the hill in large sprawling companies and Thunderbird has always left it to 3rd party add-ons (some of which they just killed due to the extension redesign) to try and handle.
I recently had to buy an such an add-on (Owl), because my umiversity's IT department killed IMAP support and only offers Exchange (which is stupid, but what can you do?).
Solutions like Owl are actually kind of nice, I have been using a similar one on my phone (AquaMail) for many years and it's worked out great. Thanks for the tip, might give it a shot - I see it's by the same author as ExQuilla which has been around for awhile as well.
> The age of non-integrated email clients for the average user ended a while ago.
As someone currently beta testing Mimestream (3rd party Gmail desktop client for Mac), I couldn't disagree more. A good UI and a responsive interface makes an absolute world of difference. Gmail's web interface isn't bad, but a desktop client is just so much better to use.
Yes, it is integrated with Google, in that it uses the Google API.
However, relevant to this thread, it's not developed by Google, as Thunderbird would not be. And so Thunderbird could still provide value as such a client.
I think this was the key. No average user I know uses an email client on their PC, outside of the corporate one. It's one more thing to take care of and average users rarely want that.
It's easier on mobile where people are used with the "app" concept, not really on the PC. This is one reason why Thunderbird doesn't enjoy the kind of popularity browser based email does.
Of course it's not impossible. But also they must be tech savvy enough to go look for an email client where they already had the usual web interface, get to testing a few and settle on Thunderbird, then configure and stick with it.
But that obviously it doesn't happen that often or else Thunderbird would boast a lot more users than it actually does. Relatively few users use it at all, and it's a reasonable assumption that the usage is higher among the more tech savvy than the average user.
I'm a fairly average user, in reality. One personal email address. Few rules. No integrations.
I still find it to be a significant improvement, even if most of my interactions involve arrow keys and the backspace key (ironically the keys I can't use in their web interface).
Very much this. Gmail (well, all of Google properties anymore) is pretty terrible from a UI perspective. Not to mention the abject privacy considerations with anything Google related.
I would love for Mozilla to start a competing email service that focused on performance, UI, privacy and integrated well with not only Thunderbird but other desktop mail clients.
In my experience, the vast majority of corporate is hooked on Outlook, which is actually quite unreliable in its 365 version and constantly has annoying bugs and performance issues.
It still might be a good idea to host an e-Mail service or create an Exchange pendant.
I often wonder why there never has been a popular open pendant to domain controllers in Windows. I think there were multiple attempts, but I don't think anything really caught on.
What many don't realize is the reason open/free software doesn't easily make it in the corporate zone is that there's no company behind them to put their name behind an SLA. This and integration with the ecosystem (MS has an easier time selling Windows+365+Exchange+cloudstuff).
The jump from "providing an email client" to "providing a privacy focus email service for independent professionals and small businesses" is already quite large. Being able to sell that by giving some guarantees (in signed SLA form) is yet another jump on an entirely different scale.
Then look no further than public institutions, where (leaving everything else aside) almost every tender is public [0]. You'll never see Thunderbird in any of the submitted bids because there's no company behind it to write the bid and put its weight behind it.
It's a good canary to see if a service or product has anyone capable of supporting it, or if it can be monetized in any way. This doesn't have to be the developer, just any company that can realistically push it into the corporate world.
There is a ton of public procurement out there. It all has some level (sometimes an insane level) of hoop jumping and domain knowledge to be successful with. In my limited experience, the people who understand this don't have a lot of overlap with people who advocate and use open source solutions - although I have seen a few (e.g. CentOS rollouts).
Not to mention that companies like Google and Microsoft also offer different levels of technical support alongside their products.
For smaller companies, or companies that want to invest less in their technology stack IT department, it sounds like a better deal to have all services provided and backed by a larger computation corporation (even if that's not always actually cheaper in the long run).
For small/new companies, approx $15/head/mo for 365 (however it's branded now) is pretty hard to argue with. That gives you sharepoint/onedrive exchange & teams, and all the usual word/excel/outlook etc.
You can go quite a ways with that before you would get close to breaking even on even a single dedicated IT person. Assuming their cloud services etc. fit your business needs of course - but that's an awful lot of companies.
> there's no company behind them to put their name behind an SLA.
I agree that this is a sticking issue; most procurement offices have vendor/supplier questionnaires that ask about their cash flows etc., because companies want to deal with going concerns. FOSS without an org doesn't check that box.
BUT isn't this exactly the point of having a Mozilla Corporation, as separate from the nonprofit???
> isn't this exactly the point of having a Mozilla Corporation
This is the critical part. If I am using Thunderbird (or the hypothetical mail service discussed above) in my company today and have an issue or request (bug, configuration error, need assistance with a deployment, want additional features in the product, want additional integration with other products) can I contact someone directly and know that this will be treated according to my specific expectations?
In other words can I call someone at Mozilla Corporation now and ask for dedicated tech support, for a bug fix in a specified time frame, for a consultant to listen to my needs and come up with a solution? Because if my business relies on that product or service and I get no guarantees then I won't be happy to pay you just so I can queue up on Github and raise issues, and I'll go with %prominent software vendor% who gives me that.
RedHat doesn't sell you "Linux", they sell everything that comes with it, and create an entire ecosystem to go with that (partners that offer certification, training, consultancy and support, dev support, etc.).
Yeah, and Outlook is available on Android/iOS so it's something many business users are already accustomed to. Then there's the entire domain integration thing (ex. Intune) which is a bit more cumbersome to set up/manage for sysadmins for OSS.
Besides this rather serious bug, which does not allow you to accept Exchange meeting invites from within Thunderbird [1], everything else works perfectly with this extension.
If standalone email clients really are dead for the average user, that to me would suggest Thunderbird should focus on power-users and/or corporate deployments, not that it should shift its focus to being part of yet another "service". It's perfectly fine to make a product with an audience that isn't everyone on Earth.
It might be because it's searching using the IMAP server, for some reason those can't often deal with non-ASCII characters. Searching with diacritics seems to work for me in locally-downloaded folders.
Well, wasn’t email designed in a time when the only supported standards were everyone’s form of Extended ASCII? So it would make sense that IMAP only supports ASCII. Heck, attachments are encoded in some base## form before being sent because the entire standard is based on text.
Here I like to quote my favorite penguin:"don't give me excuses, give me results". MS products somehow can do it, and it is a big showstopper dor adaptation in (a lot of) countries with special characters if you cannot search for the product name/customer name/project. (But maybe I remember wronfly and MS also cannot do with IMAP, so exchange it is)
The parallel there would be giving away @mozilla.org addresses. @firefox.com to me feels somewhere closer to @gmail.com, both being products, not companies.
#3. I agree. Amd yet Ian has this to say under "Firefox was never enough" -
All encompassing: The web hosts most of our desktop applications. It should host even more of them, it should host mobile applications, it should be the universal platform. More APIs. More ways to package and present sites. (See Project Fugu)
I fundamentally disagree with this one. There's just too much of a bad security track record on all 6 of the first 6 levels of the OSI model for me to use web apps for office apps.
On 2, I actually think that the right sideproject does have the ability to market Firefox and grows its userbase better than making incremental gains in the browser. For example, Firefox Send was a clever way of putting the brand in front of many people who might never have seen it.
On 3, I too would love to see that happen, but, from the outside at least, the project has seen so much upheaval [1]. I don't really understand the significance of the latest change, at the start of the year [2], but hopefully it's a good sign.
Firefox is already the best browser and has been for a long time. The problem is that most laypeople don't even know it exists. Combined with dark patterns used by microsoft and google to steer users toward their own browsers, it's an uphill battle. I'll stick firefox and appropriate extensions on a friends computer so they can watch youtube etc completely ad free, which is a major tangible QOL improvement, but then find them watching ads in ms edge a few days later without having realized.
Agreed with you, the best Firefox experience is on Windows. Hardware acceleration is on point, always very snappy rendering with no lag. Can't say the same about FF on macOS or Linux, where the experience is worse.
Support for CoreAnimation compositing was added last year. Support for hardware acceleration on Linux was added this week.
It's so weird to me this type of comment pops up on every firefox discussion, but I use firefox on mac everyday and it's rock solid, never run into any problems.
I don't know about Windows or Linux, but on Mac it's far from the best browser. It uses more resources (power/battery, memory, etc) than Safari (and sometimes Chrome[ium]), the UI is a mix of old and new code, and system integration is worse than Safari and Chrome.
I use it, but both Chromium and Safari are better on this platform.
It's not that Firefox isn't an excellent browser on its own, but on macOS Safari rises the bar very high if you care about details (most people don't).
Yes, Safari is the most buggy browser in common use other than IE11. It's also the one that uses the least battery life, it's standards-compliant enough to render most web pages, and it's the only option on iOS.
It's somewhat a myth that Safari is less standard-compliant. True, Safari's release cycle is slower and Apple has the motivation to prevent PWAs to become too good, but in many things Safari has always been very innovative browser.
Built on top of KHTML foundation, it then became webkit and later the most successfull engine. It was the first to implement full ES6 support, and basically invented CSS transformations/transitions (really amazing stuff back then but not really used until all major browsers caught up years later), was the first to ditch Flash support, has argueably the best privacy policy, has superb font rendering, etc.
Internet explorer is also a very innovative browser. It introduced XHR and a bunch of other stuff. But that is a different measure from standards-compliant.
Yes, IE was very innovative in its heyday (up to version 4). But back then there was no strong standard body (sort of status quo) like we have today, and due to Windows monopoly they could come up with stuff which was never even intented to be implemented by other vendors (well, Mozilla). You cannot really compare that era to today's situation.
Well, at least for me, Safari is often still the fastest browser and has long been the best at power management (important when you're running on battery power). And I like its UI a little more; its tabs, for instance, are native macOS tabs. Firefox and Chrome both make up their own stuff.
As far as "least standards-compliant," I understand that when it comes to supporting progressive web apps, Safari has largely dropped the ball, but in day-to-day practice there just aren't many sites that I have trouble with on Safari. (The biggest one seems to be new Reddit, and I am not entirely convinced that issue is on Safari's end.)
I disagree with this. Safari and Chrome are both noticeably better than Firefox on OSX.
I'm a Firefox fanboy, still use it on OSX because it's important to me, but the amount of random pauses, crashes, etc is just painful on OSX. It's like none of the Firefox developers use it on OSX or something.
And before someone says "oh it's your extensions", that IMO leads to two talking points
1. It's 2020 and major extensions still cause memory leaks in Firefox. Debugging them isn't easy at all. Almost all of the resources say something like "Run in safe mode and see if it fixes things" and then lots of posts of "post your about:memory here and I'll analyze it." I'm a software engineer by trade and it's been difficult for me to diagnose...
2. Nah because I don't run any extensions on my OSX firefox install
This. I was a FireFox long time supporter, but switched off when I started using Mac as my daily driver. It crashed more, used more resources, etc than Safari, Chrome, and Brave.
I also stopped recommending it to randos when they started coming back and complaining about weird behavior. Now if I don’t know someone and want them to just have the simplest working experience I recommend Safari on Mac and Brave on windows.
There's some kind of longstanding bug with non-default scaling on Mac apparently. It's great on Linux, but it's hard to get Mac friends to switch over.
For me Firefox has been chasing the Chrome market share by trying to replicate the Chrome user experience for so long it's no longer distinct from Chrome in a meaningful way. Give me the Firefox experience from ten years ago and I'll drop Chrome on the spot.
Speaking from personal experience doing user support in firefox IRC channel on freenode and formerly moznet, the vast majority of "resource hog" complaints are due to the user running AdBlock with a million block rules (or some similar addon). Occasionally it is a particular long running website with JS memory leaks though. Like a gmail pinned tab.
In terms of performance, until recently a common issue was lack of default graphics acceleration on linux, requiring manually enabling layers.acceleration.force-enabled
Firefox has a suite of `about:` URLs[1], one of them is about:performance which will show you the Task Manager (their name) which has a sort of CPU and RAM column. It even shows you when it's javascript on a tab chewing up resources and not the extension.
I don't know if the situation has improved, but at least in past it seems about:performance has a problem picking out problems created by an addon doing a ton of DOM manipulation that chews up resources in the tab. Bisecting addons or my preference, a clean profile or safe mode, was usually what I suggested, but YMMV.
On my aarch64 devices, Chromium in a Docker image loads faster, never dominates the CPU, renders video and websites faster, and has working DRM. Firefox is slower in every respect and can't render Netflix.
I don't think you can make a blanket statement like this. My experience has been almost the opposite, Chrome always uses significantly more CPU for me.
I think it really depends on hardware, drivers etc.
>Firefox is already the best browser and has been for a long time.
I used FF for years before switching to chrome when it came out. Every attempt I've made since to switch back (windows and macOS) as been a disaster. Hogging resources, pages that skip around while scrolling, and rendering issues (perhaps GPU related) are a few of the numerous issues I've run into.
I try to switch back to FF about twice a year. I'm going on about a eight years with no success.
Using Firefox every day, somewhat on principle. The experience is nowhere as good as Chrome.
It takes FOREVER after starting Firefox to load saved tabs -- like 30 seconds to 1 minute of delay before the first tab starts to load.
Recently, it also has been updating quietly in the background and FORCING me to restart Firefox to view any content. I'm sure there's a setting I can change somewhere that makes it require manual updates. That should be the default.
I agree with points 1 and 2. I also think it's a reasonable idea for Mozilla to focus on Thunderbird the email client since there aren't a lot of great alternatives.
However, when it comes to a hosted email service, there are plenty of good options already out there (e.g. Fastmail and Protonmail). The same goes for VPNs.
I would much prefer Mozilla spend that money making Firefox better, or putting that money in some sort of mutual fund, the proceeds of which would fund browser development if Google ever stopped paying Mozilla.
The reason is, VPN services are not hard to build. Email services are not hard to build. Browsers are hard to build, and if Firefox development ever stalled it would probably go away forever.
Maybe not hard to build, but they are decidedly non-trivial to maintain. Their whole purpose is to get around the business/political decisions of one organization or another, and those organizations are making it increasingly difficult to be got around. A "real" VPN company has to deal with service providers on both ends of the tunnel trying to detect and block them, compliance with complicated legal situations in every country (and state) they have a presence in, law enforcement demanding access to logs and traffic, fraudsters trying to create accounts with stolen payment methods, attackers trying to make their way into the system for a variety of nefarious reasons, and semi-regular zero-day vulnerabilities being discovered and patched throughout the whole service stack. To name just a few of the most obvious hurdles.
No, I would not want to be responsible for running a VPN service in this day and age.
Email hosting is not much better, for most of the same reasons as above, except that spam filtering is also a whole full-time profession unto itself as well.
But yes, I agree with your point on Mozilla's lack of focus. And management competency, I would argue.
But I couldn't disagree more with number 3. Thunderbird is always going to be a niche product with a much smaller potential user base than Firefox.
More or less every corporation and every individual user out there is a potential consumer of Firefox--every single one who uses the web.
Thunderbird? Not so much. Many consumers prefer web-based e-mail clients or e-mail clients tied directly to the e-mail platform they are using (Gmail, Outlook.com, etc.). And Thunderbird is never going to replace Outlook for corporate mail. Thunderbird is only useful when you want a generic feature set, and it mostly competes with other niche mail clients.
Basically, every dollar invested in Thunderbird is a dollar that could be better spent on Firefox (or MDN). If anything, they should spin off development of Thunderbird into a separate company with its own independent funding structure.
> If anything, they should spin off development of Thunderbird into a separate company with its own independent funding structure.
They already did that.
- In 2012 Mozilla (the corporation) started this move by announcing that "Thunderbird was not a priority for Mozilla" [1]. At this point Mozilla (corp) stopped actively investing in Thunderbird.
- In 2015, Mitchel Baker made it clear that the Mozilla (corp) wanted to get rid of Thunderbird [2]. At this point the Mozilla corp started shutting down support services for the Thunderbird project.
- In 2017 Thunderbird was legally moved to the Mozilla Foundation (instead of the corporation) and started surviving mostly on its own, with some minor help from the Mozilla Foundation [3]. Here Mozilla (corp), the company responsible for Firefox, already got rid of Thunderbird entirely.
- In 2020, it became clear that Thunderbird can survive entirely on its own donations and could even try to provide commercial services. Thus, the Mozilla Foundation created a new "MZLA Technologies Corporation" that is now the legal entity responsible of Thunderbird [4]. MZLA Tech is not responsible for any other product that I know of.
I don't think any of this fundamentally beats the main problem.
That being platform control and advertising.
Google advertises chrome with it's services and is the incumbent. It's also preloaded and unremovable on Android.
Microsoft advertises edgium on Windows and makes it unremovable.
Apple only allows webkit and safari clones on their platform.
Firefox even if it's the best browser in the world would have the same problem that Linux has. Namely that Linux may be better and fit the needs, but people aren't going to bother installing it. Just look at Windows 10 and how many people are pissed at various aspects from telemetry, updates, ads and still these same people can't be bothered to flash Linux. Linux has something like 1-2% of the desktop market.
The other issue with (2) is that R&D into Firefox will not return money. Not unless they choose to basically switch to blink and offload the R&D costs onto Google. Heck Microsoft themselves did the same because they realized the R&D costs weren't worth it.
If Mozilla wants to stay alive, it needs to diversify and find a niche not dominated/controlled by Google, Microsoft and Apple.
Chrome didn't dethrone IE and displace FF because google advertised it, it was legitimately the best browser at the time. FF was awful, and so was IE.
I keep trying FF, but I honestly haven't found it sufficiently compelling to go back. I don't mix work hardware and personal business, so I don't need multiple profiles. I prefer chrome's debug tools.
Maybe we will see how manifest v3 plays out with uBlock, that might actually be enough.
There were definitely enough dark patterns and advertisements around Chrome to increase its market share. Chrome may have been faster, but it was also had more rendering issues early on.
Chrome was also bundled with Adobe's Flash installer, which is ironic because Chrome bundles its own Flash plugin. So a Firefox user wanting Flash would download Adobe's Flash installer and (if they didn't watch the installer's default settings carefully) would be switched to Chrome. If a Firefox user wanted to switch to Chrome, they would have downloaded Google's Chrome installer, not Adobe's Flash installer.
Adobe had no incentive to change this relationship because they got paid by Google twice: for bundling Chrome in Flash and bundling Flash in Chrome.
Yes enthusiasts care about adblock, manifest v3 and performance. That is a very tiny minority of users.
>Chrome didn't dethrone IE and displace FF because google advertised it.
This I almost heavily disagree with. Surprisingly, marketing and advertising is far, far more effective than product performance. Performance helps retain users, but advertising is what moves users. That is nearly always the case.
> Chrome didn't dethrone IE and displace FF because google advertised it, it was legitimately the best browser at the time. FF was awful, and so was IE.
It started that way, then it dominated because every google search not using chrome popped up “Better with Chrome” or “Try Chrome.” Same with all of Google’s properties. There’s no way to disable this. That’s billions of free adverts every day. It adds up.
I think similarly back in the 90s that IE4 took off because Netscape4 was horrible and then stagnated, but dominated because Windows bundled and required it. They had bundled and required IE2/3 but those were inferior to NN3.
So being good gets them to critical mass and then anticompetitive forces got them to owning.
Firefox got to 30% by being a good browser. An alternative take on why it is now lower: not because of dark patterns but because Google genuinely built a better product. I'm a Firefox user, but because of stubbornness. In all honesty, I find Chrome easier to use and less cluttered.
yes, back when browsers sucked. Performance is hardly the reason of choosing a browser these days, personal preferences, what you are used to, what is given to you, etc...its a good argument for why Google needs to be broken up.
Chrome/Chromium/Edge has more features, does more things. Why would I use Firefox except for being stubborn?
I personally moved to Edge from Chrome after they forked Chromium because of better integration with Windows. I wouldn't have before, because it was lacking. Now with feature parity, the integration with Windows has a value.
Chromium can be configured for all of the privacy things Firefox has. There is no inherent other difference. Normal people will always value utility over privacy.
Mozilla can chose to fork Chromium, and come ahead. Chromium/Blink was a fork of WebKit. They made it better. Mozilla can chose a better starting point with Chromium.
I still remember moving from Internet Explorer to Firefox to Chrome now to Edge.
I was blown away by Chrome when it came out. It was just better. Way better.
Yea from the old MacOS sure. However, now that iOS apps are looking to be pushed to desktop, do you really think that is gonna continue in the future?
As soon as universal binaries/iOS apps becomes fully fledged on ARM Mac I can imagine Apple just removing support completely. It's almost inevitable the way Apple is progressing to basically move to the iOS style platform control to OS X.
Even from Mozilla's economics perspective, it doesn't make sense for Mozilla to be spending engineering effort maintaining both the iOS and OS X variants for something like 4% of desktop. If it was up to me, I would have just migrated/maintained the Firefox Wrapper iOS and called it a day.
Yes. I do really think that is gonna continue in the future.
I've said this before and I'll probably say it in increasingly irascible tones, but "next year macOS is gonna become just like iOS" is becoming the new "next year is the year of Linux on the desktop."
Yes, Apple will almost certainly keep making security decisions people (including me) don't like, but there's no compelling business decision for trying to lock the Mac down to only App Store installs. Yes, I know Apple gets 30% of software sales that way. No, that is not enough of a reason for them to take the hit to their hardware profits that would undoubtedly entail. Even if it were just a loss of a few percent of Mac sales -- which I think is extremely optimistic -- it'd be coming out of the sales of the most expensive Macs, and making up one lost Mac sale literally requires hundreds of sales on the App Store to make up for it. Any executive at Apple who suggested that would be beat senseless by their accounting department.
There are plenty of compelling business decisions including from the developer houses themselves.
Development houses now have an opportunity to bring their software to a larger market share (iPad, iOS and MacOS) whilst maintaining just one code base.
Development houses would also have much stronger piracy prevention (same kind of benefit that enables console games to function).
Development houses would have much stronger control over the running environment (preventing adblock, preventing VPN region bypass etc...).
Development houses would have much more control over updates.
Surprisingly just like the now defunct Mac Servers, Apple doesn't really care about the high end hardware Mac platforms. They only care for those graphic designers/video editor/MS office crowd and their software is coming in iOS forms.
The developers that I hear from have different opinions than what you're expressing here. Many want direct relationships with their customers, for a start, and if you want that, the App Store is right out. And I can't think of a single developer who would say they "would have much more control over updates" if they delivered them through the App Store. (They'd say "oh, honey, no," after they finally caught their breath after the laughing fit.)
As for "Apple doesn't really care about the high end hardware Mac platforms," well. It's possible that they rolled out the Mac Pro just last year as an elaborate ruse to distract us from how much they don't care about the Mac Pro, but it strikes me as relatively unlikely. (And if you think the "graphic designer/video editor" crowd, either users or developers, is on board with moving everything to the App Store, oh, honey, no.)
That's also a great point! Apple has not been doing too well at reading the room on this one for a while now, granted, but in a year they've literally been called before Congress over concerns about their control over the iOS application market, "and now we're going to do the same thing for macOS!" would not go over very well.
Of course it would be stupid to cut it out suddenly.
The real successful strategy is to do it very slowly and gradually. With each release make it a tiny bit more annoying to install and run non-store apps. Make them slower - "this app is not trusted so it needs to be monitored for your safety which might negatively affect its performance". Users will prefer store apps and will put pressure on app developers to publish on app store.
If they do it well then hardly anybody will even notice they finally killed the non-store apps.
For all the reasons I've elucidated in other replies, I simply don't buy this. Also: this year has seen the move, after nearly two decades, from OS X/macOS 10.x to macOS 11.0, a new UI redesign clearly modeled on iOS, and a change to Apple's own processors derived from the ones they use for iPhones and iPads. There would have been no better year to make such a move than this year. It would have been the absolute perfect cover.
If and when both iOS and macOS are replaced by one unified operating system, this would be back on the table. But personally, I wouldn't bet a whole lot of money on it happening even then.
It's not that we can't be bothered to flash Linux, but that we can't be bothered to deal with the incompatibility issues we will have after we have flashed it.
Again if you are talking about words like 'incompatability' then you are probably closer to the enthusiast techie type 5% than the 95% majority.
That majority doesn't even know about Linux or what flashing even is. They just bought a box from bestbuy/amazon so they can access the internet and email. They stick to the manufacturer defaults and would be stuck with Chrome, Edgium or Safari.
I was indeed talking about normie stuff like games or simple applications. Those are the reasons why I will happily be staying on Windows for the next few years.
I agree. I also think they should own the Privacy/Security/Confidentiality niche as well. Inventing and rebasing on Rust put them in a good position to provide reliable and provably-correct privacy-focused communications platforms as well. Double down on that, and pitch enterprises, govts, and other potential customers on that angle. Secure comms is an increasingly top-of-mind concern these days.
Nothing wrong with "We're Building a Better Internet", but they should up their game a bit by actively participating in privacy and projects to decentralize the web (again). For example, I have once envisioned a so-called 'privacy box': A physical box one put's in their own house and provides user friendly decentralized functions by installing extra software (ie using containers) for the local residents. Think filestore (like NC), mail, pihole, contacts, calender, pw vault (like bitwarden_rs), etc, etc. Mozilla could activily participate in the software and get a cut from the selling of those boxes or the sw subscriptions on top, which is probably even better.
I mean, I don't think (2) is controversial -- the issue is that there are many dimensions you can measure to determine "best". There's not a settled single definition.
You won't be able to beat Chrome by technology alone. I actually don't know how Mozilla can beat Chrome.
Google has an extremely strong incentive to capture the web client market. Whatever Mozilla can do to make Firefox more popular, Google can outspend them by a factor 10 and do more, or better, or both.
I want Firefox to win but unfortunately I just don't see a path for it. My mindset at the moment is "I'm going to use Firefox for as long as it's possible, and then I'll find the least crappy Chromium fork available".
I don't know if it'll take 6 months or 6 years to get to that point but I really don't have faith in Mozilla righting the ship.
> Whatever Mozilla can do to make Firefox more popular, Google can outspend them by a factor 10 and do more, or better, or both.
Firefox isn't struggling on technical grounds though. It's not a charity case, it's a perfectly competent browser. Whether Firefox outperforms Chromium depends on which benchmark you use. As far as the user is concerned, they're both technically solid browsers.
I wasn't talking solely about technical merits. I was also talking about marketing and everything else. Google can (and does) push Chrome aggressively through a multitude of channels. How can Mozilla beat that?
I wonder why Firefox even has to beat Chrome. Wouldn't it be enough to have 30% marketshare again? Or even 10% would be enough to consider Firefox a serious competitor.
Somewhere along the line we got this idea that if you're not #1 you've failed. You don't need to crush every single competitor into oblivion to be successful, you just need to succeed at what you set out to do, and in Firefox's case, isn't that just to build a good browser?
The only way to beat Chrome, is the same way Firefox beat IE: Someone else will have to do it.
On some level, Firefox has to 'beat' Chrome in order to get/keep a significant level of marketshare. It needs people to see it as better in some way if they're to choose to use it, especially on mobile where Chrome is the default.
For some of us, it still 'beats' Chrome on some kind of principle - I'm not giving Google yet more control. But are there enough people like me to actually keep a modern browser going?
In that sense, Firefox's competition is not Chrome: it's the other "non-mainstream" browsers like Chromium Edge, Brave, or Opera. What can Mozilla do to attract those users to Firefox? Google doesn't want to crush Firefox to 0% because Google profits from Firefox searches and presumably wants a non-Chromium browser to exist to avoid antitrust scrutiny regulating Chrome.
I'm probably a niche user, but better crypto and web3 support (still cannot make firefox recognize my hardware wallet on Linux). That's the singular most important reason I switched, after many years.
... It'll raise trust if they follow through their promises. Open source Pocket, yet?
One big area where Firefox could win is privacy. The problem is that currently most of their money comes from Google, which means privacy will always be pretty limited. Perhaps £5/yr fees would fund an alternative?
> 3. Invest more in Thunderbird the application and develop Thunderbird the privacy focus email service for independent professionals and small businesses.
While I agree that Thunderbird as a standalone Windows/MacOS/Linux desktop email client is a very important project, and needs to be continued, maintained and refined, the paradigm of email has moved on somewhat since 2003.
People need to be able to do more than just access email on a desktop or laptop.
I'd like to see two new things under the Thunderbird/Mozilla name:
a) a fully open source GPL licensed, self-hostable, webmail server application that fulfills the same functions as rainloop or roundcube, implemented in the Thunderbird name. Maybe it could have its own new GUI to run inside the browser, or it could offer an optional "traditional" GUI that is similar to the Thunderbird desktop client. This has a possibility for a natural symbiotic relationship with Firefox, as the best and most optimal web browser client to view the webmail.
b) a Thunderbird Android email client. There should be no reason why people should be locked into the default Android google/gmail email client. I can't even view message headers on it. I want a full featured "power user" IMAP-over-TLS + SMTP email client for Android that is also open source.
> b) a Thunderbird Android email client. There should be no reason why people should be locked into the default Android google/gmail email client. I can't even view message headers on it. I want a full featured "power user" IMAP-over-TLS + SMTP email client for Android that is also open source.
K-9 mail should satisfy these requirements. It's been slow moving development wise the last two years, but it is not dead:
> a Thunderbird Android email client. [...] I want a full featured "power user" IMAP-over-TLS + SMTP email client for Android that is also open source.
I've been using Thunderbird for close to 15 years and 2021 is probably the year I'll stop because of how poorly it works with Office 365. It's kind of a bummer but hard to get that upset about it because I really don't like email to start with.
> a fully open source GPL licensed, self-hostable, webmail server application that fulfills the same functions as rainloop or roundcube, implemented in the Thunderbird name. Maybe it could have its own new GUI to run inside the browser, or it could offer an optional "traditional" GUI that is similar to the Thunderbird desktop client. This has a possibility for a natural symbiotic relationship with Firefox, as the best and most optimal web browser client to view the webmail.
If this shares neither the thunderbird feature set or UX, why does it have to be called thunderbird? I still use thunderbird because it's UX efficiency for dealing with large volumes of mail blow away the Gmail and Fastmail web interfaces.
I really like a). More broadly, I’ve thought for a long time that we should to make it turnkey-easy for people to deploy their own services, to start re-decentralizing a lot of the services that have trended toward centralization - email, blog/personal news hosting, photo sharing. Like built-into-their-router easy, to avoid the need to set up port forwarding. Mozilla seems like a great place for a lot of this to start, given their focus on the open web, privacy, etc. Many of the details involved in hosting this stuff can be a bit messy for laymen, but I think defaults could be chosen and a minimum subset of the features could be polished to the point of user friendliness.
Sort of. Google basically is what makes the company money, which is more or less indentured servitude. If it were to break away and find another way to monetize I think it becomes a very different browser.
I really like the idea of businesses focused on their core value proposition. However, in tech, these businesses get crushed by larger platform plays see for example Firefox vs. chrome, slack vs teams, Aws vs digital ocean.
There are a few factors at play here, but I’ll call out a few I’ve observed.
1) If you hire good engineers and give them autonomy, branching into new markets is cheaper than you think. “Focusing” engineers tends to just cut back on autonomy, both lowering productivity as well as limiting the quality of engineering talent one can attract.
2) Unified, integrated solutions, with great default options are preferred by nearly everyone on the market. Sure lastpass let people store passwords easily, but how many consumers bother changing the default password manager in their browser?
3) Investors recognize this pattern and funnel money to the biggest “platform” they can in any given market.
I never understood how bad point solutions were from a business standpoint until I worked in the application performance monitoring space. For any given monitoring feature there are dozens to hundreds of small, high quality point solutions targeting one market niche or another - but most customers will simply purchase their preferred all in one solution and forget about the other options.
I hate to bring it to you, but every single one of your priorities have been long rejected: Thunderbird was officially discontinued like ten years ago, Mozilla had just let go a large number of devs in early 2020 and then again a couple weeks ago, among them all Servo developers.
Even if you wanted to financially support Firefox or Thunderbird development through donations, there would be no way to. Your money will go to the Moz foundation, and end up in all sorts of endeavors except the ones you care about: Moz spends money on discontinued mobile operating systems and new languages and language runtimes (Rust, WASM) nobody needs (sorry Rustees). Above all, your money likely goes to salaries and pension plans for CEOs and upper management.
When it has been suggested many times that Moz just needed to put the money they got from Google into a fund to finance FF development.
As to TFA's point about "sitting on the table to decide about web standards", that also hasn't worked out. It hasn't helped to keep "web standards" in check, nor did Mozilla's own contributions become part of them. All in all, Moz just acts as a fig leaf for the web end-game, pretending there's a community or some such.
With respect to "web standards", our best bet could be to demand that W3C, WHATWG clear up their shit and publish formal standards (possibly in an executable language to base a new formal browser/viewer app on). The way it is now helps no-one except Google.
Agree with all points except Rust and “standards”. The performance and stability of Firefox Quantum was largely driven by Rust. W3C standards are just out-of-date documentation. Do what’s good for the Web and the W3C will eventually document it.
W3C published editorialized snapshots of WHATWG HTML5 specs only until 2017; they're now just redirecting to WHATWG github's HEAD. SVG2 (part of HTML5) has reached CR status in 2018, and ended up to include only minor amendments vs 1.1/1.2 anyway.
W3C is mostly involved in CSS specs today, with significant influence on this past decade's advances, and also source of a lot of the complexity of browsers. CSS is a primary candidate for a formal spec among web standards IMO, since HTML5 the markup language is sufficiently covered by either the procedural spec or SGML.
> demand that W3C, WHATWG clear up their shit and publish formal standards
WHATWG was founded explicitly to avoid that, i.e. "let's get shit done without ceremony, and whatever comes out is the actual standard". Going back to W3C-like processes would remove the very reason for its existence. Google has been very good at leveraging this, but that's mostly because other players seem unwilling to dedicate as many resources to browser-dev as they do (even when, like in Apple's and Microsoft's case, they have more than enough money to spend).
> Your money will go to the Moz foundation, and end up in all sorts of endeavors except the ones you care about: Moz spends money on discontinued mobile operating systems and new languages and language runtimes (Rust, WASM) nobody needs (sorry Rustees). Above all, your money likely goes to salaries and pension plans for CEOs and upper management.
This is simply incorrect. The Mozilla Foundation is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, which have strict laws delineating how they are allowed to spend money. "Education" is one endeavor where charities can spend money, which IIRC is where most of the foundation money goes: to educating people about the web and web development. Notably, "software development" is not an endeavor for which such a charity can spend its funds. Donations don't go to Rust, or even Firefox, because they legally can't.
> As to TFA's point about "sitting on the table to decide about web standards", that also hasn't worked out. It hasn't helped to keep "web standards" in check, nor did Mozilla's own contributions become part of them.
This is also simply incorrect. Enormous swaths of the web spec have been authored by Mozilla representatives, and we can point to plenty of instances where Mozilla has torpedoed proposals from other organizations (e.g. WebSQL, PNaCL).
> Notably, "software development" is not an endeavor for which such a charity can spend its funds. Donations don't go to Rust, or even Firefox, because they legally can't.
Not OP, but I think the comment was saying that donating to Mozilla will result in them using the funds on all sorts of stupid shit not FireFox related. Not to literally donate to FireFox as a stand-alone software dev endeavor. Mozilla could easily accept funds in a legally compliant way if they had some sort of “please direct my funds primarily on FireFox” if they wanted to do so. This is similar to how many charities take donations from donors (eg “Here’s some money, only use it to build a building with my name on it.”)
But I want to donate to Firefox development and Mozilla is straight up telling me to eff off. That sucks and should be changed. Let me GitHub Sponsor or whatever FF development not throw money at a foundation that doesn't put the money where I want it to go.
Why in God's name did Mozilla even do this to themselves? Sitting up Mozilla into a Corp and a Foundation. The Corp which is supposed to be a money-printing machine has been shanghaied by a person who has gone on the record saying it would be unfair to reduce their salary because of dependants yet has consistently run this machine into red.
Why isn't Mozilla taking any action? Why is Baker continuing to be allowed to destroy the dream of a multiplicity of browser engines? It kills me.
1. Were a very tiny part of the overall Mozilla budget
2. Were also employees of Moco, not Mofo, and so donations could not go towards them either.
> nobody needs (sorry Rustees)
Industry adoption says otherwise, see for example, the CTO of Amazon's comments during re:Invent yesterday.
(That being said, you could absolutely suggest that it's not Mozilla's job to help the industry in this way. That's a much better argument than "nobody needs Rust.")
Also, the main executive pay people complain about is paid by the Corporation, not the Foundation, so, suggesting your donations would go towards that is also incorrect.
> That being said, you could absolutely suggest that it's not Mozilla's job to help the industry in this way. That's a much better argument than "nobody needs Rust."
Exactly what I mean, of course.
> Also, the main executive pay people complain about is paid by the Corporation, not the Foundation, so, suggesting your donations would go towards that is also incorrect.
Mozilla absolutely has been helping to keep web standards in check. Maybe not to the degree that you would like, but if it were up to Google, we'd all have some ancient under-specified version of SQLite and LLVM encoded in web standards, as they tried to just drop those in for database storage and NaCL.
Mozilla pushed back on those, demanding documented standards that could have independent implementations.
WASM is the cross-browser, much better specified alternative to NaCL.
Formal standards in an executable language are by far the exception rather than the norm. For something with as big a surface area as web browsers, I'm sure they would cost an ungodly amount of time and money to complete. And while you may prefer to reduce the surface area to deal with this, no one wants to break compatibility with existing sites.
I'm a bit puzzled by what you actually want. Mozilla did scale back its investment in Rust, WASM, and the experimental browser engine Servo, to focus more on its core browser, in the recent round of layoffs. But the existing investment has paid off; a number of projects that started off in Servo, and were written in Rust, like the CSS parser and Webrender, are now part of Firefox, providing safe, parallel styling and GPU rendering. WASM is widely supported across browsers, providing an efficient compilation target which is much better specified and easier to work with than JavaScript as a compilation target, or something like NaCL.
And some of the other efforts, like Rust and WASM, have now achieved sufficient industry adoption that other companies are picking up the slack; Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Fastly, and others are all hiring and paying people to work on Rust and WASM full time.
It seems that other than funding Thunderbird development, Mozilla is doing what you want, but you somehow still seem unhappy with it. Why is that?
I've been using Thunderbird for years probably since it was created. I was going to write a message about wishing they would invest more in Thunderbird and fix a particular bug.
As I was typing this it made me starting looking a bug I've found using it. So then I started Googling around to see if someone else found it. Looking at it, it appears it's been open for 3 years. But in the bug ticket they had steps to fix it. I now know few more menus in Thunderbird that I never considered clicking on. The bug now seem to be resolved and happier.
But then I also wish they would trim it down or at least give me the option to turn stuff off. I don't want an events and task organiser and all this stuff. I just want a mail client. I also wish their spam filter would be more consistent and stuff keeps getting through that I've flagged and is clearly spam as it's the same message I've been receiving for the last couple of months.
I think that Mozilla partnership with Google has made these goals difficult to achieve. Mozilla gets its money from Google, so it is implicitly part of the monopolist game played by them. What this means is that they're happy to be second in the browser development game, and are richly rewarded for doing so.
Please don't copy-paste comments on HN. These threads are repetitive enough without literal repetition.
If you want to refer to what you wrote before, a link is the way to do it. And of course you're welcome to add information that's specific to what's new in this article. There should be something different somewhere...
Ostensibly, they pay Firefox for eyeballs, but....
Google certainly values the eyeballs they get via Firefox, but Firefox could disappear tomorrow and that barely affect Google one bit from a pure "eyeballs" perspective. How much traffic would Google lose? People would just use those same Google services through Chrome, Safari, native apps, whatever.
So, I believe Google funds Firefox mainly as a hedge against monopoly charges.
If Chrome ever dominated the browser market entirely with 95%+ marketshare like Internet Explorer back in the bad old days of IE5/6, they'd be painting a large target on their backs for various governments to step in and make life difficult.
If we think about it, Chrome/Chromium's current ~70% market share is pretty ideal for Google. They get to kinda sorta mostly control the web, without a bunch of pesky governments on their backs.
I guess the choice for google isn't either keep firefox alive or let it die. It's probably more be th standard search engine in firefox or not. Mozilla would probably still be able to sell that spot to s/o else, albeit for a lower price, but not so low to get Firefox fully out of the picture. I guess the revenue stream from firefox users is still big enough that it is worth it for google.
When I was there, we speculated Google was using Mozilla as antitrust lawyer repellant, but it's a weak argument. Google pushed Chrome onto Firefox users repeatedly, by accident or on purpose doesn't matter.
Now that Google is in antitrust court, I think the Mozilla deal is mainly for PR, both positive while it lasts, and negative sense (to avoid being the Firefox killer by not renewing the deal this year -- Google preannounced renewal after Mozilla's August layoffs, and let others repeat the too-high-by-now $400M/year number).
My impression is that Google is simply having to play the same game their own advertising business makes others play; in order to keep getting customers (eyeballs for adsense+doubleclick) they have to pay for it because the competition also advertises (via paid default search).
Firefox switching to Yahoo for default search was probably an eye opener for them; 30% of global search traffic (at whatever fraction of users didn't change their search engine) is a boatload of money and from public estimates at least an order of magnitude more than they pay Mozilla for the traffic.
From a business perspective Google might benefit if Firefox disappeared but there's no guarantee. Opera, Brave, Safari, Edge, etc. could take up Firefox's install-base without significantly increasing Chrome's. At least Firefox is a known entity for them and they would probably rather have a guaranteed platform with Google as the default search engine than having to negotiate with whatever sprang up to replace Firefox.
The Yahoo deal failed badly in first year, as Firefox users who were shocked by the change of default search from G to Y overrode default back to G. This caused Marissa Mayer's Yahoo to bleed money, as rumors supported by Mozilla statements say the deal was fixed-payment-per-year, not traffic-based. IIRC searchengineland cracked Yahoo's 10Q to show the blood loss. We also know the deal bled money because of Verizon getting out of it in 2017, when Mozilla went back to Google.
Firefox market share is now in the danger zone where Google can replace it with more Chrome promotion and still save on TAC vs. Chrome-eng+mktg. Also the danger zone where webdevs do not test in Gecko and break Firefox, even on such properties as AirBNB.
I dont think I understood the point about mozilla wanting to influence the web being bad for firefox.
Particlulalry if having lots of users is how you influence things, since then you need to provide a good product (or lock users in via some external ecosystem).
Maybe some recent EU legislation moves can help them in the same way the browser choice thing helped.
The goals have a lot of compatibility, but occasionally come in conflict. And example may illustrate.
If you care about making Firefox good for users, you will work to improve current performance, and prioritize compatibility with badly coded websites. Even if it makes it harder to adopt future standards coming down the pipeline.
If you care about pushing standards, you'll put more energy into those future standards, even at the cost of performance and compatibility with badly coded websites.
Firefox has consistently chosen to prioritize standards that are someone's idea about how to do things better over the real world that exists right now.
Well thats the thing... Firefox is not particularly good in anything and this is the point of the article. When Firefox becomes more unpopular than Mozilla fails its mission aside from Firefox, which is to set open web standards.
The situation for Firefox is that bad, that even enterprise users - ESR - are moving to MS Edge since its offering support together with MS Office.
I think Firefox needs something drastic to become relevant again, which is very unlikely taking into account the last years history.
Myself as a FF user i'm more and more tempted to switch to some other multiplatform-chrome-compatible browser.
> Now it’s focused on technological pessimism in the form of a security and privacy emphasis.
First time I've seen this phrased that way. If all you can think of with regards to tech is security and privacy, you are the EU: "technological pessimism".
Yes that might be a better general term. However the perspective is the same: no optimism, no enablement, no vision. Instead control and contain the negative aspects. I'm not saying that in itself is bad, its just not sufficient to build a prosperous civilisation.
In the pursuit of better technology, don't forget that we have already built and are living in a prosperous civilization. The browser doesn't exist to "create" a civilization. It exists to enable the one that already exists, and is evolving every day.
> don't forget that we have already built and are living in a prosperous civilization
I don't think thats true for the west. The only impressive progress we have made for the last 50 years was in computer hardware and software. Sure, we are somewhat comfortable, we got a bit better at producing things, but if compare that with 1850-1950? Its not even a competition.
I don't know how you can look at plummeting rates of illiteracy, child mortality, polio(!) and countless other scourges on humanity and conclude that no impressive progress has been made since 1950 outside of computers.
The first (internal) organ transplant was only in 1954. The amount of progress made in medicine and pharmaceuticals alone is staggering.
Firefox lacks in the default UX area, just from the top of my head:
Print to PDF is better in Chrome, comes with a preview.
Search marks matches in the scroll bar.
Opening a recently closed tab opens a new tab in Chrome instead of replacing the existing one.
There were probably 5-10 more annoyances in Firefox for me that I don't recall right now. Maybe it was my familiarity with Chrome but overall I still think Chrome has better UX defaults.
I like the bookmark tags feature of Firefox though, which Chrome lacks.
I just switched a bit on mobile from Firefox to Chrome. I was annoyed by the fact that the address bar is at top in there and I think it's unfair to say at all points that the UX is better on Chrome.
I have it there by default on FF, I was talking about chrome having a worse UX on Android. Reading the original post, I admit I phrased it in a confusing way.
That's an interesting feature, I'd like it if that was implemented. I see some add-ons do something to simulate this.
> Opening a recently closed tab opens a new tab in Chrome instead of replacing the existing one.
This opens a new tab for me, no settings I've changed that I could find.
> There were probably 5-10 more annoyances in Firefox for me that I don't recall right now. Maybe it was my familiarity with Chrome but overall I still think Chrome has better UX defaults.
There will probably always be differences, that's why different browsers exist after all, and it'll be different annoyances for different people. Personally I think generally the UX of Chrome (that Firefox has tried to copy) is the worst thing about all current browsers. The new add-on API made me start using custom UX CSS to make it tolerable instead of a "fix add-on", but the only serious alternative (Chrome) always felt worse to me. Has many nifty features though.
> Print to PDF is better in Chrome, comes with a preview
Wait, isn't this something the OS print dialog is supposed to provide?
> Search marks matches in the scroll bar.
I'd like to see this implemented as well (just as another commenter mentioned).
> There were probably 5-10 more annoyances in Firefox for me that I don't recall right now. Maybe it was my familiarity with Chrome but overall I still think Chrome has better UX defaults.
Which is mostly because you're more familiar with Chrome overall (and it's also a matter of taste). As an example, I strongly dislike the downloads "bar" in chrome and the fact that bookmark/history/downloads pages are pages and not dialogs. Many people dislike dialogs tho, because they seem bloated and difficult to use to them.
One small UI gimmick I'd like to see implemented in major browsers (at least on macOS) is an option to use the fluent/vibrant blur tab bar background instead of the default white/gray/black. Firefox already kinda does that (at least when using the dark theme), but I still have to write my own userchrome.css to get the full effect.
And that Eich went on to create the privacy focused Brave browser based on Chromium.
Yet, these mistakes didn’t really change the downward trajectory. Apple and Google are the dominant mobile platforms and I can’t see how an independent desktop browser can grow against competent conglomerates.
The article discusses four strategies and I think your (assuming you are the Brendan Eich) strategy for Brave falls under 3. Technological pessimism, though it needs a better name.
You are correct, growth for a desktop browser is possible, I misspoke, but I think the general browser market is a tough nut to crack. Good luck. Your (Brendan Eich's) past and present work is greatly appreciated.
I reject Ian's categories. Brave is not only about "pessimism" and never was. Of course this makes us hard to categorize.
Main point is we grew and grow. Firefox shrinks, it's dying. I'm not saying that a bigger browser in decline would be easy to turn around, but Mozilla has not done right by Firefox.
I do agree with Ian that loss of Firefox founders hurt. We made brevet promotions and hires who did not hit the heights of hyatt, blake, joehewitt, and bengoodger. This is an oft-told tale, often requiring restart via a different codebase while maintaining the extant one.
Since I have your ear, in hindsight do you think the promotion of IndexedDB over SQLite/WebSQL was a good move?
I think persistent SQLite is on the verge of returning to the browser via WebAssembly but it needs a proper POSIX-like WASI [1] (WebAssembly System Interface) implementation in the browser. If you are looking for (very) small footholds in the market for Brave, a WASI implementation supporting a SQLite VFS [2] extension has my vote.
Safari is definitely in the technological pessimism camp as that's Apple's party line on the open web.
Safari has continuously caused "headache" to businesses that rely on tracking user behavior for years now, as Apple is very bent on protecting your privacy from every other company outside or inside their walled garden.
They claim to be in the technological pessimism camp. I don't believe their poor support for progressive web apps is truly about privacy and security, but rather to force apps to go through their App Store so they get a cut of the revenue.
These aren't mutually exclusive but rather well aligned goals.
I find it odd to ask whether any non-monetary goals are "truly" their goals. They are a listed company. Of course they want to make profit. But they do so in part by means of providing privacy and security.
I think Firefox is like some banks in that it is too big to fail [0]. Not that Firefox is a financial institution, but something that has embedded and woven itself so deeply into the web in general that I can't imagine the web without it. If it dies in some fantastical way, something else (hopefully better and evolved) will fill its place. We can't have the Chromes of the world slurping up all our data in the near future. Firefox is a privacy tool as well as a browser.
Firefox can trace its history back to Netscape Navigator, released in 1994. It has failed and come back before. Even if the Mozilla Foundation fails, Firefox would likely survive in some form.
Nowadays most browsing is mobile, and all mobile devices come with a high quality browser component which is effectively part of the operating system already, used pervasively by applications on the device as a component rather than a standalone browser.
Installing a browser, any browser, is already a niche thing to do for the majority of internet users today.
Another thing working against Firefox on mobile is that it seems like every software update for Samsung phones resets the default browser/URL handler to Samsung Internet. Anyone not paying close attention will just click through the EULA and suddenly no longer be using Firefox.
I have a Samsung phone, and it's updated quite recently, but I've never noticed this.
I virtually never open Samsung Internet only because I virtually never open any web browser. Browsers launch as a side effect of something else. For example clicking on a link inside LinkedIn, Telegram, bank app help, etc.
When that happens, if a separate app gets opened it's usually Firefox Focus that opens for me, so I guess that means the default URL handler is Firefox Focus (must have set it years ago) and it's not being changed by software updates.
I have a history of being unlucky with technology, which is why I worked in QA before becoming a software engineer. I've noticed lots of jank w.r.t. Firefox and phone updates. YMMV. Firefox desktop updates have reset privacy preferences at least once in the last month or two, and Samsung Internet has made itself my default on top of Firefox at least two or three times in the last few months.
>all mobile devices come with a high quality browser component which is effectively part of the operating system already, used pervasively by applications on the device as a component rather than a standalone browser.
that sounds a lot like M$'s IE before the antitrust case, no ?
It may be true that a particular company has a stranglehold on browser choice on your particular phone, but that is completely different from having an anticompetitive strangehold on the market as a whole, which is what matters from an antitrust standpoint. I'm not the biggest fan of capitalism but the market seems to be functioning rather well. Not perfectly but well.
Just a refresher: IE had 96% market share at its peak, and Microsoft were guilty of quite a few other anticompetitive practices as well w.r.t. Windows itself, more or less literally penalizing OEMs from shipping any other desktop OS.
Competition is thriving in the mobile space. Safari, Chrome, and derivatives of Chrome are competing with each other and they are well-performing, aggressively maintained and updated pieces of software.
Sure, there are plenty of technical reasons to be annoyed with either one of them. Mobile Safari sure is slow to adopt certain standards, etc. And don't get me wrong -- it is extremely regrettable whenever browser choice is restricted. It sucks, I hate it.
>Installing a browser, any browser, is already a niche thing to do for the majority of internet users today.
And yet there are a range of choices for terminal only browsers. You've overall right, but I doubt that minority of users would let Firefox totally die any time soon.
But it's not that big, comparatively. 2/3 people are using Chrome, 1/6 are using Safari, and ~1/28 are using Firefox. If you look at a trend line over the last 10 years Firefox has fallen from its peak around ~30% in a steady decline toward 3% (and eventually 0%). It's not big, it's barely hanging onto numbers on the chart, alongside Internet Explorer and Edge. Some data: https://caniuse.com/usage-table
I think Safari is going to have the market cornered on technology pessimism (aka privacy features) and browser performance per watt on macOS and iOS.
Google is rapidly locking down enterprise by building in tight integrations with Google Workspace/G-Suite (see: context aware authentication).
In 10 - 15 years the web should be better than it is today. The first step in their recovery is to convey what their vision of the web looks like in 2035 and commit to Firefox being the first browser to make it a reality by 2025.
>In 10 - 15 years the web should be better than it is today.
Is the web better now than it was in 2005-2010? I don't think it is and I don't see the trend arbitrarily reversing. Tons of regular people (and even tech-savvy folks who should know better) voluntarily use, love, and advocate for using a browser (and email service!) made by the modern equivalent of DoubleClick.
Are there things that have gotten worse? Yes
Are things way more complicated? Yes
But net overall? I believe it's better than 2005 and even 2010. Meaning, I would not want to revert back to 2010 and start building back up from there. There is too much good we would lose in the process.
I have no idea if my opinion is shared by the majority, but I am very optimistic about the future of the web.
I would not characterize people's choice of web browsers, or people's choice of which websites they want to interact with as "the web".
The characteristics of the web from 20+ years ago are still there. Many or most people just prefer not to use that type of web from 20+ years ago.
Everyone is still free to use whichever browser they want to access whichever website they want (in the US at least) in the same manner they did in the previous decades.
Were you actually alive in 2005-2010 or are you just guessing? Flash-based unskippable intros on fixed 640x480 centered viewports are the reality of the 2005 web, regardless of whatever nostalgia you suffer from.
Flash was easy to avoid unless you needed certain sites for work or for school; I kept it disabled by deleting some files starting about 2006 or 2007. HTML5 on the other hand is impossible to avoid unless you want to restrict yourself to a few familiar sites. And web fonts are getting harder to avoid because more and more sites are using them to draw icons and other small UI elements. For people whose tastes are sufficiently like my own, the web has been getting worse.
I used lynx as my daily driver for most of the 1990s and through 2005. In contrast, these days it is impractical for the average person to use a browser that is not maintained by an organization employing many hundreds of full-time developers. This dependency on money (to pay the developers) limits a person's options.
I never wanted to be able to replace my desktop apps with apps that run on the web, so I don't consider web apps to be compensation for the constant stream of annoyances (e.g., the moral equivalent of pop-up windows asking me to give the site my email address) that HTML5, web fonts, et cetera, enabled.
We've replaced "waiting for unskippable Flash intros" with:
- a web that is thoroughly unusable without an ad-blocker (ad-blocking was pretty optional in 2005)
- waiting for 20 megs of minified JS to load over 3G
- waiting for Google web fonts to load because apparently shipping more than 4 fonts in common is beyond the ability of plucky upstarts like Microsoft, Apple, and Google
- web "apps" with worse performance characteristics than programs that ran on 66 MHz machines
You have to look at the web's good and not just it's bad. It's kind of tiring to read comments that act like nobody else is capable of enumerating the downsides of something.
Why own a dog? You spend money on it, it shits, it makes noise, you have to find a caretaker when you go on vacation, it bites, it needs walks, it needs to go to the vet, your next girlfriend might be allergic to it, and after all that, it dies.
Do people who own dogs not know these things? Or is it that they own one despite those things and there's a more interesting conversation to be had?
Comments like this make me wonder if you, yourself, are capable of seeing anything that's improved about the web which is a much more illuminating exercise to do than enumerating just bad things, something anyone can do.
You're replying several comments deep in a chain where we've already discussed this. Sometimes things do in fact get worse over time and "look on the bright side" is not a universally useful strategy.
In fact, I submit blind optimism is in fact more tiring, look at any comment thread about Tesla or Bitcoin. It's as if these two things are perfect and you had better buckle up if you dare criticize either one.
Just imagine how boring the web would have been without Flash - at that time. Or did you prefer crashing Java applets? Yes, you had the annoying unskippable intros, but some jaw dropping websites were made with Flash, something you barely see these days. I still remember sites like heavy.com, music bands and movies mini-sites, ...
I think you're right to push back on the association of Flash with just negativity.
Flash is an important quirk of internet history and a stepping stone that created expectations of what the web could one day be: a rich, open, cross-device application platform accessible by URL.
And that's what the web achieved with only a few exceptions.
Firefox is a great deal more privacy focused than Safari when you start factoring in containers. I also wouldn’t trust Apple to stick to their privacy mission long term. It’s a marketing strategy that they seemingly care about at the moment but it’s supplementary to their core demographics so who’s to say they stick with this vision long term? I’m less concerned about the same happening with Firefox.
> In 10 - 15 years the web should be better than it is today.
That doesn’t align with the trends we’ve seen:
- tracking getting ever more sophisticated (like using WebRTC to probe open ports)
- large scale data mining sites like Facebook ignoring government regulations and getting away with it
- bloat getting worse. So many sites don’t even render without JS enabled. The fact that people have to run things like PiHole and browser plugins to filter out some of that crap is telling. And how long is that going to last? Some sites are now proxying that crap behind their own domain and DoH will prevent users from running PiHole
- The web slowly converting on a single rendering engine: Blink. It’s starting to feel a bit like the IE 5 days with everyone targeting the same browser. Just last week I couldn’t log into a pretty low tech website because their UA filtering said I was on an unsupported browser and greyed out the login button (I was on Firefox).
Apple can try to swing around the privacy bat right now because they have alternate revenue streams.
It will be interesting how long their shareholders will buy the premise that "we can earn more by using privacy to convince people to buy our high-margin kit and run Safari than we would by casting off the privacy mantle and getting deep into the data-grab business."
The other side of the coin is that I really believe there's a bubble waiting to burst in that exact industry. The price of building and feeding hyper-targeted, data-bloated marketing machines is far out of scale with their utility for most use cases, but people are throwing silly money at it right now. (Compare the Smart TV/IoT device model, where they believe that peddling usage data is enough to justify an increased BoM AND frequently selling the product near or under cost). If they expect the bubble to burst (either through marketers coming to their senses or heavy-duty GDPR style regulation), they might be just "passively" pushing the privacy angle-- don't bother building out an infrastructure that will be worthless as soon as the bubble bursts, and you come out of it with a huge branding/goodwill win when everyone else reinvents their business model and invents privacy.
I was surprised Chromium!Edge ended up being such a mess with privacy because, somewhat like Apple, MS has associated businesses that let them subsidize its development without having to leverage user data. They could have come out looking good-- weren't they the only ones who tried to make a go of Do Not Track headers?
That issue genuinely doesn’t come up often. I’ve ran into it once in a year of using FF containers and even then, that was because of a weird DIY SSO solution I’m running on my home LAN (certainly not something most folk are going to run into).
Don’t get me wrong, the issue was highly annoying but it’s definitely not a frequent bug bare.
There are existing extensions for managing some popular cloud platforms and that goes a long way in terms of convenience.
The bigger annoyance is sites that intentionally cross talk (like “deploy stacks” buttons where 3rd party sites can run Cloudformation scripts against your AWS console). But in those cases it’s an annoyance I’m willing to manage considering they’re blocked by Temporary Containers doing exactly what it’s intended to do.
> The problem with Firefox containers is that it requires micromanaging your web browsing. I'm sure it's nice for people who obsess about privacy, but it's not something that the general user population is going to adopt.
Yeah I completely agree. There are extensions that make managing containers easier but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I still run into regular problems.
That said, the Facebook and Google extensions don’t require micromanaging. They only cover those two respective clouds but it’s still a really strong starting point.
> I think the right approach, ultimately, would be compartmentalize all web sites, but that's not feasible right now
It is possible with the Temporary Containers extension in Firefox. In fact this is exactly how I’ve been browsing the web for around a year now.
I've long wondered why Mozilla hasn't worked on a embeddable Gecko engine as an alternative to Electron. The Mozilla alternative could be promoted as a modular, cross-platform component but in a stripped-down, faster and less memory hungry form than Electron (assuming these features can be achieved).
The traction that Electron has gained as a cross-platform option for building apps is huge. It's only set to get bigger (whether for better or worse).
Imagine if Gecko was in this space competing with Electron. Imagine if thousands of developers place their trust in Mozilla because they have built their cross-platform apps using Gecko. They'd want to see Mozilla grow and succeed - they have a stake in seeing Gecko development continue. Is it too late (or too unrealistic) for this to happen?
A very long time ago, Mozilla did have the option to embed Gecko into apps. It was never well-documented and what remains of the documentation is out-of-date and untouched:
> I've long wondered why Mozilla hasn't worked on a embeddable Gecko engine as an alternative to Electron.
They have. Several times, in fact. There was the old embedding, then XULRunner, then Firefox apps (I'm not sure if that's the same as webapprt). But these efforts generally only lasts a couple of years before Mozilla decides it's the wrong approach and kills off the embedding.
Although unfortunately at the same time increasing your app size by dozens of MBs just so you can use Gecko doesn't seem like an easy sell for mobile apps, especially when you have to compete with the Webview provided by the OS for free.
What I would like is to be able to use Firefox as a UI for my local projects. Now if I want to do it, I have to run a server and duplicate code.
The ability to create extensions for my personal use that can interact in local with my computer would be great.
I understand that a browser have to be sandboxed but there are ways that could work without being unsafe. Maybe even two separate downloads, one for people that want to use the browser UI capabilities but work in local.
This would not solve Mozilla problems, so it's a little tangent to the current discussion.
I think it might lead to growth or "mind share" among app developers (and indirectly to end-users who use the apps built by devs).
The Chrome engine now powers the Edge and Brave browsers. Electron is used to built desktop apps by companies everyone recognises e.g. Microsoft, Slack, Figma. The appetite among companies and devs to build Electron apps shows no slowdown.
Mozilla is nowhere to been seen in ths important space. In my opinion, this is a missed opportunity.
I'll always take a good opportunity to shit on Mozilla. I was disgusted when Eich was outed and still am. Haven't used a Mozilla product since.
What is happening to them now is a function of poor management and even poorer judgment. It's what happens when you solely rely on a cash cow and fail to innovate meaningfully.
I have a love hate relationship with Firefox, its only major trick left is that it’s not Chromium. Making it a monopoly of the non-monopoly browsers. I tried for a while to use Waterfox and Pale Moon but they just aren’t accepted by too many websites and now even mainstream websites are locking out Firefox too.
Some things lock out Firefox as an accident of implementation.
I don't recall which site it was for me recently, perhaps Sainsbury's, but I reached a card payment screen and it just would not accept payment - it kept getting stuck with a spinner making no progress at the payment stage. Opened exactly the same page in Safari and it worked fine quickly. Next time it happened again, and I remembered that I needed to switch browser.
There's also no way to be sure it was FF in general and not the particular version(s) of FF Beta I was running at the time.
There is no way to know which of numerous factors might contribute without running from a blank profile, which isn't something anyone would do unless really keen on investigating a problem, as it's easier to just run a different browser instead.
If a payment process gets stuck due to an FF-specific adblocker, I'd still count that as an accident of implementation affecting FF users, because final stage payment processes don't have any reason to call up ad-blocked services, and most FF users use an adblocker, don't they?
I periodically see sites broken in Firefox until I turn off uBlock and/or Privacy Badger - including issues with paying like you describe. But I've always assumed that the same would happen in Chrome if I had the same extensions installed there. This seems more like 'locking out people with adblockers' than 'locking out Firefox', even if there's substantial overlap.
It's distressingly common for JS developers to just throw something like "t.track('payment')" in the onclick handler for the last button (or every button) in a payment flow, where "t" is some analytics package you've blocked. No exception handling, of course, so when the analytics package isn't loaded, nothing happens when you click the button. If you're lucky, there will be a console message logged saying something like "unable to call method track on undefined".
>The problem? Firefox’s founders are all long, long gone. Brendan and Mitchell are Mozilla’s founders.
Well then, you should have thought about that before you forcibly kicked out founder Brendan Eich because you disliked his unrelated politics.
You can be a woke company that belittles everyone who doesn't share your narrow ideology or a company that makes a good web browser with a sound business model. You can't be both.
Firefox has been a shitty web browser for many years now. I've largely abandoned it for Brave (interestingly created by Eich) and Chrome. Good riddance.
You're misinterpreting the statement in your search for a soapbox. Brendan was one of "Mozilla's founders," not "Firefox's founders," so he was the wrong person for the job anyway.
I actually missed that too, I guess because it wasn't where it seemed he was going after the previous paragraph.
So looking at that section again, his argument seems weak on that point. He is promoting founders as leaders because they have innate clout and don't have to engage in consensus building, but that should apply to Mozilla's founders too.
You're right, founder effect wears off in terms of consensus-free authority, and it should. Founder effects in code style and culture last practically forever, in my experience. But with Mitchell pulling $3M/year, the top job needs leadership and consensus around what to do to save Mozilla, not resting on laurels from a couple of decades ago. (BTW Mitchell was not on founding staff @ mozilla dot org; she was on Netscape's legal team and wrote the NPL and MPL.)
I think the poster is making a distinction between Firefox and Mozilla founders, but it could be more clear. Mitchell, a Mozilla founder, is still around. The Firefox founders, who are Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross, and possibly Joe Hewitt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_version_history only states the first two, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox#History all three), have not been at Mozilla since the early 2000s.
Most blockers these days use the same lists; this includes Brave. Brave also does additional work, liking inspecting the CNAME to see if the domain is an alias for a third-party, known tracker. One area where Brave is a little behind is in the aesthetic blocking, things like clearing elements off a page. We have that ability as well, but it's not quite as mature and well-rounded as you would see in something like uBO. Our work is not complete :)
>forcibly kicked out founder Brendan Eich because you disliked his unrelated politics
>belittles everyone who doesn't share your narrow ideology
Wake up to the present. People who actively try to ban same-sex marriage are just as bad as segregation was back in the day.
Calling this "narrow ideology" is preposterous.
There is nothing wrong with homosexuality and they should be given the same rights as everyone else. It's NOT a debate. So if someone is actively trying to campaign against equality then they are flat out wrong and deserve the backlash.
(I work for Mozilla and was there when this all happened)
That is false. Only one of them quit "because of" him. You don't need to take my word for it: Stephen Shankland's piece [1] is the least-inaccurate account of what happened there.
And in fact, your statement is not even logical. Think about it: Who hires a CEO? A company's board. Now you're saying that a huge chunk of the board quit because of a hire that they themselves were responsible for making? That makes no sense.
You forgot to mention the most important and commonly misstated fact that Brendan Eich was NOT fired, and was NOT asked to resign, and was NOT "kicked out".
The false narratives that the board fired him, and also that half the board quit because of him, both directly contradict the official statement published on the Mozilla Blog, and Brendan's own words he published on Twitter:
>On April 3, 2014 Brendan Eich voluntarily stepped down as CEO of Mozilla. [...]
>Q: Was Brendan Eich fired?
>A: No, Brendan Eich resigned. Brendan himself said:
>“I have decided to resign as CEO effective April 3rd, and leave Mozilla. Our mission is bigger than any one of us, and under the present circumstances, I cannot be an effective leader. I will be taking time before I decide what to do next.”
>Brendan Eich also blogged on this topic.
>Q: Was Brendan Eich asked to resign by the Board?
>A: No. It was Brendan’s idea to resign, and in fact, once he submitted his resignation, Board members tried to get Brendan to stay at Mozilla in another C-level role.
Despite that irrefutable proof of Mozilla's and Brendan's own words that he resigned of his own free will, and the Board actually wanted him to stay, GamerGate followers love to spread conspiracy theories based on those false narratives, framing Brendan as a victim and martyr, instead of respecting the human rights of the people whose marriages Brendan donated his money to destroy.
Indeed. This is very true, but I've become exhausted from repeating it ad infinitum. Six+ years is a long time in tech, and yet we're still talking about this nonsense.
It's weird how consistent this claim is when the ad stuff (which I personally never used when I tried Brave) was always opt-in and always an advertised feature part of Brave's (possibly misguided) mission to change the landscape of internet advertising.
It's not weird. A lot of people (especially on HN) repeat false claims they hear that "sound right" to them, especially where they have some animus against someone involved (me, in Brave's case). Brave was inspired by All Advantage, but we knew going in that Gator and worse examples of personal ad systems would be used to dismiss or disparage. Marketing challenge, not a reason to give up.
“A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots.” —Mark Twain
Their entire business model is sketchy. They'll collect payments on your behalf whether you're signed up to them or not while removing your ad revenue.
This is incorrect, and based on misinformation from 2018. In 2018, Brave users could tip unverified content creators with BAT. Those tokens would go into a settlement wallet until claimed by the intended recipient. This was a bad design.
Within 48 hours we had a new build of Brave out which held the tips locally, in the browser. The tip would be attempted for up to 90 days; if the unverified publisher were to verify within that time, the tip would be sent to their wallet. If the 90 days passed, the user's BAT would be released within the browser to be distributed elsewhere.
> This is incorrect, and based on misinformation from 2018.
Great, I love being incorrect and learning something new.
> In 2018, Brave users could tip unverified content creators with BAT. Those tokens would go into a settlement wallet until claimed by the intended recipient. This was a bad design.
So it wasn't incorrect or misinformation then?
Glad you've fixed that shitty practice but that doesn't expunge it from history or make the fact anyone in a decision making position thought that was in any way ethical/acceptable.
You're missing quite a bit of context here. Brave distributed tokens to users (from our User-Growth Pool of 300M BAT) as a means of ramping-up this new support model. Users then, in turn, could send received tokens to verified creators. If they wished to send the tokens to an unverified creator, the tokens would go [back to Brave] (in a settlement wallet), where they would reside until claimed by the publisher. Meanwhile, at Brave, we would reach out to unverified creators who had a growing balance waiting.
The change we made kept the tokens on the user's device. We also introduced better UI/UX as well, with many thanks to our community for helping us spot some areas for improvement. Although I'm part of the team, I still stand in awe of those few days in December, 2018. A great, yet flawed, system was radically improved in a matter of hours with a few small (yet profound) changes. And it wouldn't have been possible without Brave's incredibly engaged community.
You're mistaken, or simply misleading. Brave has never inserted affiliate links into any content. What you may be referring to was the offering of affiliate links within the suggestions-dropdown in the browser itself. We wrote about this back in June of this year: https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/.
When a user searched (e.g. 'binance'), the browser would check to see if an affiliate link existed. If it did, it would be displayed as a suggested URL. If the user were to press Enter at that point, they would be sent to the domain, with Brave's affiliate code in tow. We did make a mistake, however. We unintentionally matched against a fully-qualified URL as well (e.g. binance.us). We were able to fix that within a couple of days, however.
This is not in any way "sketchy". Open Firefox, Opera, Vivaldi, or Edge and perform a search for "Hacker News". You'll note that in Firefox, and Opera (IIRC) you're sent to Google with an affiliate-identifier in the URL. In Edge and Vivaldi, I believe you're sent to Bing, but with the same type of identifier.
> I remember when Brendan Eich was briefly the Mozilla CEO. It was noted that a founder has a special place and ability as a leader. We never got to find out, but there was some sense to it: a founder has particular authority, without getting that authority through consensus-building. If you bring in a decisive outsider they will probably fail, lacking the authority (and probably the wisdom) to guide the company. If you bring in or promote someone appropriate for a more mature company, then the company may be operated well but the choices made will be more conservative.
When FireFox Quantum first came out, I was amazed. All the speed and performance problems started to fade and I was so happy to use Firefox again, switching back from Vivaldi. I also noticed a lot of bad information going on about Eich at the time. People were claiming he wasn't very competent, that he didn't put priority on multi-thread/cpu/quantum support (he did) .. lot's of stuff to discredit him.
I do think it was sad that Mozilla forced him out. Diversity of ideas? Not at Mozilla. Diversity based on identity and not thought has become the focus at many companies and it feels insane.
I will not use Brave. Their crypto stuff and ad injection and privacy concerns bother me. However, Firefox has continually gotten more and more unstable. I may switch back to Vivaldi, which I do not really want to do. Diversity in the browser eco system is pretty critical to an open web.
Mozilla didn't fire Brendan Eich. He resigned of his own free will, against the Mozilla board's request that he stay. His own words and the Mozilla FAQ quoted below, I'm not just making this up.
Down the following thread, Brendan suggested googling "constructive separation" -- but I'm not sure if he meant for that euphemism to apply to how he left his job at Mozilla, or to how he wanted to cancel and destroy existing happy same sex marriages in California against their consent. All of the google results have to do with marriage, not employment. Brendan, care to clarify?
DonHopkins 3 months ago | on: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses ...
Eich was not forced out or fired. In fact, just the opposite: the board actually tried to get Eich to stay, but he decided to leave all on his own. Don't try to rewrite history to make an ideological point. It's all very well and unambiguously documented what really happened, and there's no excuse for you spreading that misinformation.
A: No, Brendan Eich resigned. Brendan himself said:
“I have decided to resign as CEO effective April 3rd, and leave Mozilla. Our mission is bigger than any one of us, and under the present circumstances, I cannot be an effective leader. I will be taking time before I decide what to do next.”
Brendan Eich also blogged on this topic.
Q: Was Brendan Eich asked to resign by the Board?
A: No. It was Brendan’s idea to resign, and in fact, once he submitted his resignation, Board members tried to get Brendan to stay at Mozilla in another C-level role.
In the 2nd link you posted Brendan Eich himself replies to you tell you to search for "constructive separation". So while he "quit" it didn't sound like he had much of an option.
I disagree with his views and believe Mozilla did the right thing in severing ties but I don't think it's as cut and dry as you're making it sound. It definitely comes across as a "We expect your resignation by the end of the day or shit will get messy for everyone" situation.
"Constructive Separation" is completely voluntary with both parties. Of course he had an option: the board ASKED HIM TO STAY! Not anything like being fired or asked to leave -- just the opposite.
The irony is that Brendan wanted to "Destructively Separate" his victims who were legally joined together in same sex marriages, so it's especially hurtful that Brendan would throw that term around about his voluntary separation with Mozilla, after he maliciously wanted to DESTRUCTIVELY SEPARATE many other human beings in marriage from their loved ones, against their will.
Brendan and the Mozilla board both explicitly denied that he was fired or asked to leave. And the Mozilla Board actually tried to get Brendan to stay. According to your theory, they are both liars in collusion.
Is that what you really believe or just magically "feel"? Do you have any evidence for your feelings? What more proof of fact do you need than their own widely published words? A long form birth certificate?
Are Brendan and the Mozilla board conspiring to both publish a false narrative in lockstep that he was not fired or asked to leave? Then why is he still cooperating with the conspiracy if he was fired or asked to resign? Do you theorize that Mozilla gave him millions of dollars of Google ad blood money that should have gone to open source software development, just to keep his mouth shut?
That was the GamerGate conspiracy narrative. Do you believe it too, in spite of all the hard proof to the contrary?
It is my position that he should have resigned for the good of the Mozilla community (which he did, because what he did was hurtful and mean, and the consequences of his actions make him a poor leader), or justified his homophobic beliefs and kept his job (which I believe are unjustifiable, unless he has some new information that is news to me, which is why I think he should have spoken up instead of resigning if he had some special insight into why same sex marriage should be illegal, or simply admitted he was wrong and sincerely apologized, instead of clinging to an indefensible position).
Even anti-gay born-again Christian Gervase Markham certainly didn't hold back trying to defend his indefensible position against same sex marriage, and Mozilla never fired him or asked him to leave as he continued to speak out, until the day he died. And he too testified that Brendan wasn't asked to leave, either. Do you accuse him of being in on the conspiracy, too? How do you theorize they bought him off, a presumably morally upright born-again Christian?
>Hi. My name is Gervase Markham. I’m a supporter of traditional marriage, and I work for Mozilla. In fact, as far as being on the record goes, I believe I’m now the only one.
>Many people who agree with me on this issue are very upset about what happened to Brendan Eich, our co-founder and, for two weeks, CEO of the Mozilla Corporation. Brendan was appointed and then, after 10 days under the Internet’s lens of anger based on his donation in opposition to the redefinition of marriage, stepped down and stepped away from Mozilla – to our great loss.
>I am assured by sources I trust that Brendan decided to leave of his own accord – he was not forced out. My understanding is that the senior management of Mozilla (many of whom disagree with him on this issue) worked very hard to support him, even if I would not agree with all the actions they took in doing so. However, he eventually felt that it was impossible for him to focus on leading if he was spending all of his time dealing with the continued, relentless news and social media storm surrounding the donation he made. In other words, he wasn’t forced out from the inside – he was dragged out from the outside.
Who in their right mind pushed the Fenix upgrade for release while absolutely breaking compatibility with the whole universe of Firefox add-ons?
The whole point of using firefox is the control that add-ons and the about:config actually give you. Failing to realize that is failing to understand who you're user are.
I hope that Mozilla the company fail as fast as possible, so that Mozilla the foundation is allowed to carry on Firefox's purpose and fund actual work from people like the author, instead of ivory tower board and C-levels.
If you're lucky, you traveled back in time and disabled Firefox updates before Fenix rolled out. If you're unlucky, you later visit a site with an exploit for that old version.
It's a matter of perspective. I found the previous generation intolerably slow compared to Chrome, but the new version is now my daily driver. I wasn't using any addons which makes the difference, but still, boy am I happy to use Firefox instead.
Can't say that I agree. I've been using Firefox on Android for years now and it just keeps getting better IMO. I'm satisfied with the performance and the UI, but what I really love the extensions.
I know they rejiggered the UI a bit recently, but it seems like a moderate improvement to me.
Also, I use Firefox to sync across all of my devices. I know you can do that with Chrome, but I trust Mozilla more than Google with my data.
About:config is essential to fix rendering of text. As an example, Reddit renders smaller than full screen view.
Not to mention the loss of critical add-ons.
I loved Firefox on desktop, and for mobile the tradeoffs of slower load were acceptable for a secure browser. That got taken away, forcibly, and left a bad taste in the mouth of virtually every review you read on Play app store.
It was way more than a UI reskin, it was a complete overhaul. It makes me lose trust in having them maintain things like passwords knowing they can produce instability like they did here.
I mean, I do. The 2-3 that I mainly use work fine. The only one that ever gave me trouble was some "youtube download" kind of thing, but there are a hundred of those.
I know there were some breaking changes, but I assume they were for a good reason, and Mozilla obviously left a path forward.
That's where you're wrong. The reason they gave is "we don't want to confuse casual users with comiplcated functionality" or something along those lines, which is absurd because there has always been power user functionality available to those that need it without hurting the casual user experience, and installation of extensions is up to the user, casual users don't need to do it.
So since their explanation doesn't add up, tell me, why do you think Mozilla, who gets most of it's funding from Google, decided to make add-ons such as Privacy Badger and umatrix and cookie autodelete unavailable to us to use?
Never just assume someone does something for a good reason. Never assume malicious intent either, but don't just take it laying down when a tool you use no longer works for you. If a tool keeps getting worse and worse from a user perspective, it is because the changes being made aren't made with the user in mind.
For what it's worth, Privacy Badger is currently one of the top recommended add-ons for me in Firefox for Android. I just installed it and it seems to work fine.
So someone has updated me in this thread somewhere that Mozilla has backtracked on their solid "recommended extensions program" and begun to work towards implementing more. I'm glad to see that, for the sake of those who will continue to use Firefox. I won't, because the trust is gone for me at this point.
ooh! Really cool to see Amna get a mention in this post. Amna lets you use your browser as part of to-do list. Though, it in in itself is not a browser.
How I long for a funding model where eyeballs=$, but NOT because of advertising or tracking. I pay money every month to be connected. I wish some of this money ended up in the hands of the software companies that created the software I used, and some of it in the hands of the content providers. I can only dream....
I just don't know if 8% of desktop browser share is enough. It's creeping down into Opera range, and at that point, you're not a real option, you're a niche enthusiast brand.
Unfortunately and unavoidably, all browsers won’t be 100% compatible so web devs need to do browser specific fixes. If the browser is sufficiently unpopular, it won’t get specific fixes. If it doesn’t get specific fixes, then it breaks websites and users are forced to try another browser. Eventually customers may just give up on the incompatible browser. Increasing the drop In market share, increasing the likelihood that a website doesn’t get specific fixes... [spiral]
I agree, they’re currently locked in a negative spiral, the share needs to be higher to be stable, otherwise maintaining compatibility will not be a high enough priority for web developers. 8% on desktop means 3-4% on all platforms and less in selected markets.
To regain market share they need to be the unambiguously better browser. I thought there was a really solid path to do that with their parallelising efforts, in particular a fully parallel layout engine in combination with their other work would have meant drastically improved UI speeds, notably on Android, but elsewhere as well, it would have eliminated a lot of development difficulty and allowed a much more native-equivalent level of performance. That would have made a good basis for an embedded engine to compete with electron.
That path seems to have been closed off with the Servo team being fired. I’m not sure where Mozilla is going now, it’s not enough to tread water.
If I understand this correctly. Mozilla let the author go, and the author still went out of their way to write a comprehensive and clear minded article full of feedback and honest recommendations.
If I see one big problem with Mozilla, is that they chose to let go people like the author. Engineering & product culture only follows.
It's rare to find someone who worked for them that's dissatisfied with the experience. They employ nowhere near the amount of people that FAANG employs, but people that work there are usually really passionate about their work and receive good benefits in return.
Point being that the author is more of a rule than an exception.
Disclaimer: Was a Mozilla fellow a few years back.
Mozilla was both an amazing and a highly frustrating company to work for, when I was there from 2010 to 2015.
It was also a very different place when I started (before Fx4) from when I ended (just before FxOS was killed).
When I started it was a place full of passion, with a lot of technical vision going on (Fx4 was a major reboot and there were a number of side projects going on that showed promise), albeit not necessarily a lot of obvious strategic vision. I'm sure there was more behind the scenes with John Lilly, whose leadership I hired into, but I lost confidence after he left and suddenly it seemed like the message was "desktop is dying, mobile is everything."
Wasn't our mission success based on having enough market share to win a seat at the standards tables and win a place on the "supported browsers" test plan for major websites? Getting a significant part of the shrinking desktop market we'd already executed well on in the past and that competitors were idling on might be better than getting a little of the mobile market that companies with greater resources were bouncing off of left and right, no?
Intranets and SaaS apps are still a thing, and offices still use desktop, so there'd still be a core audience right? Maybe mobile browsers can be different and less standardized than desktop browsers and that's OK? Maybe it has to be? Maybe it even should be while mobile browsing incubates? Maybe browsers won't even be the primary way websites interact on mobile and they'll use client apps instead?
That was a confusing pivot for me at the time, and Mozilla's strategy was to both put all the momentum on mobile and to kneejerk to a rapid update model for the desktop browser, inspired by Chrome. Problem was that destroyed the desktop add-ons community because it turns out you can't do that when you have a monkeypatch/binary extension model with high coupling, and Jetpack/Add-Ons SDK wasn't mature enough or powerful enough yet to replicate most existing add-ons.
It also exhausted the users because the existing flow of having to explicitly approve updates on launch still remained, only now it was frequent enough to disrupt workflows--you never knew when launching a web page meant having to navigate the updates dialog first. Google had designed their browser ecosystem and usability around that update model, it wasn't something you could just graft on. By the time we figured it out Chrome had picked up a decent chunk of the community.
The company then more or less doubled in size, in no small part bringing in a bunch of people from mobile and related sectors that didn't have the FOSS culture in their backgrounds. That culminated in the development of FxOS, which I always felt like was treated as an unwelcome fork by the platform team. Maybe it was because of the need to support two fundamentally different forms of interaction, two different models of security, two different distribution and update models, two different lots of things in wrapping Gecko with an application vs. wrapping it with an OS. That also divided the company, since there were now two broadly different technical missions going on, albeit sharing code.
When considering the success of FxOS vs. KaiOS, it's worth thinking about the drag having two competing priorities in the same company causes, and how that might clarify when the 3rd party is doing the fork instead. Conflicts like "how do you release a fix for Fx the browser when it'd zero-day FxOS the phone and you can't get an update through the carrier for two months" may not be so much of a problem to figure out without that tension. I'm extremely impressed with what Fabrice and co. have able to pull off with KaiOS, and I bet lightening that load helped a lot.
When I left, after it was plain FxOS was not going to succeed at that time, in that environment, it was still a place full of passion--but it was now also a place equally full of frustration, and not with a lot...
> Google had designed their browser ecosystem and usability around that update model
I don’t know why more Windows software doesn’t use Google’s approach. A low priority scheduled updater is more user friendly than update on launch, and it doesn’t kill boot times like an update on reboot.
Ian Bicking left Mozilla something like a year ago, if I'm not mistaken. Already in March he was talking about it in terms of "what I would have wanted to do but didn't get to". This post appeared last month in the context of the big layoff round.
What would happen if Firefox took away a significant number of users away from Chrome? Wouldn't Google just stop paying for search placement, removing Mozilla's main source of income?
I get that Chrome isn't Google's direct source of income, ads are. But, it seems like controlling the web in order to facilitate serving advertisements (e.g. AMP, Extension Manifest v3) is part of its strategy. If Mozilla made a more successful browser, and Mozilla hewed to its stated values, it would just become a threat to Chrome, rather than a harmless surface area for serving ads, and a small opportunity to earn a little good will.
From that perspective, it made perfect sense to me that Mozilla has tried to diversify its revenue. The fact that it hasn't been successful at doing that doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad idea.
> Wouldn't Google just stop paying for search placement, removing Mozilla's main source of income?
They would haggle a bit more but they would still pay. That's because Firefox's very existence is their insurance against accusations of monopolistic practices in a field where antitrust caselaw actually exists.
Also, it's not like chrome is googles main source of income or anything. I don't think google really would be impacted all that much anymore in todays market if chrome shrank, especially if they lost market share to firefox (as opposed to say, apple, and maaayybe microsoft). Why would they care?
Can anyone from/formerly of Mozilla explain why XUL had to die? When I was a kid it seemed utterly fascinating, I wonder now if we'd ever needed Electron if there was a modern XULRunner
Mozilla should launch a stripped-down version of Firefox, with all the past 20 years' legacy support removed. No quirk mode etc. Just bare minimum implementation of modern core web tech. How fast would it be?
It's probably true that it's difficult to decide what should be removed without breaking the browsing experience too much. Still, I bet that the engine still contains lot of code for legacy stuff from the era when we wrote HTML such as <table cellpadding="0"> etc.
The real problem of course is that the web specs itself have become too complex and expensive to implement. But a stripped-down version of browser could point out why we need to reboot the whole technology. It would be a long shot, I admit.
I had been using Firefox as the primary browser since before it was v1.0 until some time in 2016, which is when I switched to Chrome. The reason was mostly usability related. Chrome felt faster and easier to use.
With the reach of Google, Firefox had to be that much better to keep up, like it was compared to any version of IE. Unfortunately, Firefox kind of remained the same while Chrome became better and better.
In hindsight, they could have done what Opera did. But then they didn't. I don't think they did anything particularly wrong. Firefox just aged beyond its usefulness and will die, just because it's not needed anymore.
I see Brave as the spiritual successor of Firefox. Just like Firefox challenged the then status quo and made way for better browsers to come, Brave is challenging the current status quo Chrome and Google's business model at the same time.
Unless Brave is forking Chromium, Google owns them. Google controls what gets merged into Chromium. Brave can talk the talk all they want, but they merely exist as a Chrome skin with crypto added in and a few privacy features included.
I know they are committed to supporting Manifest v2 (I think), but more and more decisions are going to have to be made where they differ from upstream Chromium. I have doubts this will be sustainable forever.
Google doesn't own us (Hello, I'm Sampson from Brave). We don't have to get anything merged back into Chromium (though we do contribute up-stream, and have landed commits). We do a soft-patch on top of Chromium, removing that which is against our commitment to privacy-by-default, and user control. If we never land another commit in Chromium, that would be okay. We continue maintain our patches (as does Microsoft and others who build upon Chromium).
Firefox made a mistake of getting paid by Google and getting too comfortable with it. I think they won't have much happening for them.
I mean something could still happen, who knows? Maybe Huawei or Xiaomi or Canonical or IBM will see some value in it and make something out of it, but I fear it might be too late for them.
And Brave is not Chrome. It's based on Chromium. Many other companies depend upon Chromium codebase for their browsers, companies like Microsoft, Samsung, Amazon, Tesla. If Google does stop the development, there is a good chance that someone else will pick it up and keep it shared and open to distribute the work required to develop and maintain it.
Out of these, only Microsoft could reasonably develop a browser enginge - and they stopped doing so, decreasing the available web implementations by one.
I’m not worried about google stopping chrome, it is way too big for that - just firefox is unique in what they are doing, and is irreplaceble from a freedom of web perspective.
612 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 341 ms ] threada few tips from from no one:
1. Rewrite the Mozilla mission statement. I read that and have no idea what your organization does. Mission statements seem like corporate naval gazing, but if it is honest and well written it keeps everyone focused on what you are working towards.
2. Refocus on Firefox R&D and core technologies - Firefox needs to be the best browser. It is the thing that makes the company money and makes it recognizable to the lay person. You will never be able to outspend Google, Microsoft, and Apple, but they are always going to have more competing priorities pulling their best engineers away and causing political infighting about what should be crammed into the browser. Mozilla does not have to have any of that.
3. Invest more in Thunderbird the application and develop Thunderbird the privacy focus email service for independent professionals and small businesses.
That is it. I like some of Mozilla's side projects and I agree with the business philosophy that they should be looking to diversify their revenue stream, but I think they should all be part of two core products: Firefox and Thunderbird. Why Thunderbird? Because I think there is an undeserved niche in the business email service provider space and I think Mozilla can have a universal client on desktop, phone, tablet, and browser that is the trojan horse to up sell that product.
I know Mozilla's non-Firefox projects aren't popular here, but if Thunderbird really wanted a niche in the business world Mozilla would need to start an email service to go with it. The age of non-integrated email clients for the average user ended a while ago.
As someone currently beta testing Mimestream (3rd party Gmail desktop client for Mac), I couldn't disagree more. A good UI and a responsive interface makes an absolute world of difference. Gmail's web interface isn't bad, but a desktop client is just so much better to use.
However, relevant to this thread, it's not developed by Google, as Thunderbird would not be. And so Thunderbird could still provide value as such a client.
I think this was the key. No average user I know uses an email client on their PC, outside of the corporate one. It's one more thing to take care of and average users rarely want that.
It's easier on mobile where people are used with the "app" concept, not really on the PC. This is one reason why Thunderbird doesn't enjoy the kind of popularity browser based email does.
But that obviously it doesn't happen that often or else Thunderbird would boast a lot more users than it actually does. Relatively few users use it at all, and it's a reasonable assumption that the usage is higher among the more tech savvy than the average user.
I still find it to be a significant improvement, even if most of my interactions involve arrow keys and the backspace key (ironically the keys I can't use in their web interface).
I would love for Mozilla to start a competing email service that focused on performance, UI, privacy and integrated well with not only Thunderbird but other desktop mail clients.
It still might be a good idea to host an e-Mail service or create an Exchange pendant.
I often wonder why there never has been a popular open pendant to domain controllers in Windows. I think there were multiple attempts, but I don't think anything really caught on.
The jump from "providing an email client" to "providing a privacy focus email service for independent professionals and small businesses" is already quite large. Being able to sell that by giving some guarantees (in signed SLA form) is yet another jump on an entirely different scale.
Then look no further than public institutions, where (leaving everything else aside) almost every tender is public [0]. You'll never see Thunderbird in any of the submitted bids because there's no company behind it to write the bid and put its weight behind it.
It's a good canary to see if a service or product has anyone capable of supporting it, or if it can be monetized in any way. This doesn't have to be the developer, just any company that can realistically push it into the corporate world.
[0] https://ted.europa.eu/TED/main/HomePage.do
For smaller companies, or companies that want to invest less in their technology stack IT department, it sounds like a better deal to have all services provided and backed by a larger computation corporation (even if that's not always actually cheaper in the long run).
You can go quite a ways with that before you would get close to breaking even on even a single dedicated IT person. Assuming their cloud services etc. fit your business needs of course - but that's an awful lot of companies.
I agree that this is a sticking issue; most procurement offices have vendor/supplier questionnaires that ask about their cash flows etc., because companies want to deal with going concerns. FOSS without an org doesn't check that box.
BUT isn't this exactly the point of having a Mozilla Corporation, as separate from the nonprofit???
That's just the "smaller" half the story.
> isn't this exactly the point of having a Mozilla Corporation
This is the critical part. If I am using Thunderbird (or the hypothetical mail service discussed above) in my company today and have an issue or request (bug, configuration error, need assistance with a deployment, want additional features in the product, want additional integration with other products) can I contact someone directly and know that this will be treated according to my specific expectations?
In other words can I call someone at Mozilla Corporation now and ask for dedicated tech support, for a bug fix in a specified time frame, for a consultant to listen to my needs and come up with a solution? Because if my business relies on that product or service and I get no guarantees then I won't be happy to pay you just so I can queue up on Github and raise issues, and I'll go with %prominent software vendor% who gives me that.
RedHat doesn't sell you "Linux", they sell everything that comes with it, and create an entire ecosystem to go with that (partners that offer certification, training, consultancy and support, dev support, etc.).
[1] https://github.com/jobisoft/TbSync/issues/54
Rust to solve the problem with memory and runtime safety a super important issue for browsers that run code from anyone
Deepspeech - so Firefox can support web speech api, extremely useful api to enable accessibility
There are so many more as the web as a platform grows to support an increasingly complex web...
WebRTC is massive having software tools to exercise the use cases is important
Just my 2 cents
All encompassing: The web hosts most of our desktop applications. It should host even more of them, it should host mobile applications, it should be the universal platform. More APIs. More ways to package and present sites. (See Project Fugu)
I fundamentally disagree with this one. There's just too much of a bad security track record on all 6 of the first 6 levels of the OSI model for me to use web apps for office apps.
And so, as I said, I strongly agree with your #3.
On 3, I too would love to see that happen, but, from the outside at least, the project has seen so much upheaval [1]. I don't really understand the significance of the latest change, at the start of the year [2], but hopefully it's a good sign.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Thunderbird#History [2] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/
Support for CoreAnimation compositing was added last year. Support for hardware acceleration on Linux was added this week.
I use it, but both Chromium and Safari are better on this platform.
Battery life has always been very top priority for Apple. That's the reason why Apple stopped supporting Flash and basically killed it (thank gosh).
Built on top of KHTML foundation, it then became webkit and later the most successfull engine. It was the first to implement full ES6 support, and basically invented CSS transformations/transitions (really amazing stuff back then but not really used until all major browsers caught up years later), was the first to ditch Flash support, has argueably the best privacy policy, has superb font rendering, etc.
As far as "least standards-compliant," I understand that when it comes to supporting progressive web apps, Safari has largely dropped the ball, but in day-to-day practice there just aren't many sites that I have trouble with on Safari. (The biggest one seems to be new Reddit, and I am not entirely convinced that issue is on Safari's end.)
I'm a Firefox fanboy, still use it on OSX because it's important to me, but the amount of random pauses, crashes, etc is just painful on OSX. It's like none of the Firefox developers use it on OSX or something.
And before someone says "oh it's your extensions", that IMO leads to two talking points
1. It's 2020 and major extensions still cause memory leaks in Firefox. Debugging them isn't easy at all. Almost all of the resources say something like "Run in safe mode and see if it fixes things" and then lots of posts of "post your about:memory here and I'll analyze it." I'm a software engineer by trade and it's been difficult for me to diagnose...
2. Nah because I don't run any extensions on my OSX firefox install
And wow. Has it really been that long? I thought it was like 2 years ago, so when I first saw your comment, I had to go check myself!
Most people don't care about battery life?
I also stopped recommending it to randos when they started coming back and complaining about weird behavior. Now if I don’t know someone and want them to just have the simplest working experience I recommend Safari on Mac and Brave on windows.
Disclaimer: For my use-case, which did not include having 1000 tabs open forever.
I've had so many issues with the Firefox Developer edition I stopped using it and have switched to Opera for my browsing needs.
Way more reliable, doesn't constantly hang and time out, and isn't a total resource hog like Firefox has become.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/The...
On my aarch64 devices, Chromium in a Docker image loads faster, never dominates the CPU, renders video and websites faster, and has working DRM. Firefox is slower in every respect and can't render Netflix.
I think it really depends on hardware, drivers etc.
It is for me and many others. Emacs works great under XWayland but Chromium HW video acceleration doesn't.
Emacs is a community project whereas Chromium has billions poured into it. Even Wine's getting Wayland support now and that ran under XWayland fine.
I don't think it's that unfair. Firefox on Linux is just better. Leaves some to be desired, sure, but a lot less than Chromium.
How can most people not know it exists, when it had a majority user share at some point?
I used FF for years before switching to chrome when it came out. Every attempt I've made since to switch back (windows and macOS) as been a disaster. Hogging resources, pages that skip around while scrolling, and rendering issues (perhaps GPU related) are a few of the numerous issues I've run into.
I try to switch back to FF about twice a year. I'm going on about a eight years with no success.
It takes FOREVER after starting Firefox to load saved tabs -- like 30 seconds to 1 minute of delay before the first tab starts to load.
Recently, it also has been updating quietly in the background and FORCING me to restart Firefox to view any content. I'm sure there's a setting I can change somewhere that makes it require manual updates. That should be the default.
However, when it comes to a hosted email service, there are plenty of good options already out there (e.g. Fastmail and Protonmail). The same goes for VPNs.
I would much prefer Mozilla spend that money making Firefox better, or putting that money in some sort of mutual fund, the proceeds of which would fund browser development if Google ever stopped paying Mozilla.
The reason is, VPN services are not hard to build. Email services are not hard to build. Browsers are hard to build, and if Firefox development ever stalled it would probably go away forever.
Maybe not hard to build, but they are decidedly non-trivial to maintain. Their whole purpose is to get around the business/political decisions of one organization or another, and those organizations are making it increasingly difficult to be got around. A "real" VPN company has to deal with service providers on both ends of the tunnel trying to detect and block them, compliance with complicated legal situations in every country (and state) they have a presence in, law enforcement demanding access to logs and traffic, fraudsters trying to create accounts with stolen payment methods, attackers trying to make their way into the system for a variety of nefarious reasons, and semi-regular zero-day vulnerabilities being discovered and patched throughout the whole service stack. To name just a few of the most obvious hurdles.
No, I would not want to be responsible for running a VPN service in this day and age.
Email hosting is not much better, for most of the same reasons as above, except that spam filtering is also a whole full-time profession unto itself as well.
But yes, I agree with your point on Mozilla's lack of focus. And management competency, I would argue.
But I couldn't disagree more with number 3. Thunderbird is always going to be a niche product with a much smaller potential user base than Firefox.
More or less every corporation and every individual user out there is a potential consumer of Firefox--every single one who uses the web.
Thunderbird? Not so much. Many consumers prefer web-based e-mail clients or e-mail clients tied directly to the e-mail platform they are using (Gmail, Outlook.com, etc.). And Thunderbird is never going to replace Outlook for corporate mail. Thunderbird is only useful when you want a generic feature set, and it mostly competes with other niche mail clients.
Basically, every dollar invested in Thunderbird is a dollar that could be better spent on Firefox (or MDN). If anything, they should spin off development of Thunderbird into a separate company with its own independent funding structure.
They already did that.
- In 2012 Mozilla (the corporation) started this move by announcing that "Thunderbird was not a priority for Mozilla" [1]. At this point Mozilla (corp) stopped actively investing in Thunderbird.
- In 2015, Mitchel Baker made it clear that the Mozilla (corp) wanted to get rid of Thunderbird [2]. At this point the Mozilla corp started shutting down support services for the Thunderbird project.
- In 2017 Thunderbird was legally moved to the Mozilla Foundation (instead of the corporation) and started surviving mostly on its own, with some minor help from the Mozilla Foundation [3]. Here Mozilla (corp), the company responsible for Firefox, already got rid of Thunderbird entirely.
- In 2020, it became clear that Thunderbird can survive entirely on its own donations and could even try to provide commercial services. Thus, the Mozilla Foundation created a new "MZLA Technologies Corporation" that is now the legal entity responsible of Thunderbird [4]. MZLA Tech is not responsible for any other product that I know of.
[1] https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/07/06/thunderbird-stabi...
[2] https://groups.google.com/g/mozilla.governance/c/kAyVlhfEcXg...
[3] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2017/05/thunderbirds-future-hom...
[4] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/
That being platform control and advertising.
Google advertises chrome with it's services and is the incumbent. It's also preloaded and unremovable on Android.
Microsoft advertises edgium on Windows and makes it unremovable.
Apple only allows webkit and safari clones on their platform.
Firefox even if it's the best browser in the world would have the same problem that Linux has. Namely that Linux may be better and fit the needs, but people aren't going to bother installing it. Just look at Windows 10 and how many people are pissed at various aspects from telemetry, updates, ads and still these same people can't be bothered to flash Linux. Linux has something like 1-2% of the desktop market.
The other issue with (2) is that R&D into Firefox will not return money. Not unless they choose to basically switch to blink and offload the R&D costs onto Google. Heck Microsoft themselves did the same because they realized the R&D costs weren't worth it.
If Mozilla wants to stay alive, it needs to diversify and find a niche not dominated/controlled by Google, Microsoft and Apple.
I keep trying FF, but I honestly haven't found it sufficiently compelling to go back. I don't mix work hardware and personal business, so I don't need multiple profiles. I prefer chrome's debug tools.
Maybe we will see how manifest v3 plays out with uBlock, that might actually be enough.
For a time, chrome was bundled along side JRE updates. I went over to my mother's multiple times and saw that Chrome had, yet again, replaced Firefox.
Not to mention the constant advertising/banners to switch to Chrome on all of Google's web properties.
Adobe had no incentive to change this relationship because they got paid by Google twice: for bundling Chrome in Flash and bundling Flash in Chrome.
>Chrome didn't dethrone IE and displace FF because google advertised it.
This I almost heavily disagree with. Surprisingly, marketing and advertising is far, far more effective than product performance. Performance helps retain users, but advertising is what moves users. That is nearly always the case.
It started that way, then it dominated because every google search not using chrome popped up “Better with Chrome” or “Try Chrome.” Same with all of Google’s properties. There’s no way to disable this. That’s billions of free adverts every day. It adds up.
I think similarly back in the 90s that IE4 took off because Netscape4 was horrible and then stagnated, but dominated because Windows bundled and required it. They had bundled and required IE2/3 but those were inferior to NN3.
So being good gets them to critical mass and then anticompetitive forces got them to owning.
I personally moved to Edge from Chrome after they forked Chromium because of better integration with Windows. I wouldn't have before, because it was lacking. Now with feature parity, the integration with Windows has a value.
Chromium can be configured for all of the privacy things Firefox has. There is no inherent other difference. Normal people will always value utility over privacy.
Mozilla can chose to fork Chromium, and come ahead. Chromium/Blink was a fork of WebKit. They made it better. Mozilla can chose a better starting point with Chromium.
I still remember moving from Internet Explorer to Firefox to Chrome now to Edge.
I was blown away by Chrome when it came out. It was just better. Way better.
Firefox runs on macOS
As soon as universal binaries/iOS apps becomes fully fledged on ARM Mac I can imagine Apple just removing support completely. It's almost inevitable the way Apple is progressing to basically move to the iOS style platform control to OS X.
Even from Mozilla's economics perspective, it doesn't make sense for Mozilla to be spending engineering effort maintaining both the iOS and OS X variants for something like 4% of desktop. If it was up to me, I would have just migrated/maintained the Firefox Wrapper iOS and called it a day.
I've said this before and I'll probably say it in increasingly irascible tones, but "next year macOS is gonna become just like iOS" is becoming the new "next year is the year of Linux on the desktop."
Yes, Apple will almost certainly keep making security decisions people (including me) don't like, but there's no compelling business decision for trying to lock the Mac down to only App Store installs. Yes, I know Apple gets 30% of software sales that way. No, that is not enough of a reason for them to take the hit to their hardware profits that would undoubtedly entail. Even if it were just a loss of a few percent of Mac sales -- which I think is extremely optimistic -- it'd be coming out of the sales of the most expensive Macs, and making up one lost Mac sale literally requires hundreds of sales on the App Store to make up for it. Any executive at Apple who suggested that would be beat senseless by their accounting department.
Development houses now have an opportunity to bring their software to a larger market share (iPad, iOS and MacOS) whilst maintaining just one code base.
Development houses would also have much stronger piracy prevention (same kind of benefit that enables console games to function).
Development houses would have much stronger control over the running environment (preventing adblock, preventing VPN region bypass etc...).
Development houses would have much more control over updates.
Surprisingly just like the now defunct Mac Servers, Apple doesn't really care about the high end hardware Mac platforms. They only care for those graphic designers/video editor/MS office crowd and their software is coming in iOS forms.
As for "Apple doesn't really care about the high end hardware Mac platforms," well. It's possible that they rolled out the Mac Pro just last year as an elaborate ruse to distract us from how much they don't care about the Mac Pro, but it strikes me as relatively unlikely. (And if you think the "graphic designer/video editor" crowd, either users or developers, is on board with moving everything to the App Store, oh, honey, no.)
The real successful strategy is to do it very slowly and gradually. With each release make it a tiny bit more annoying to install and run non-store apps. Make them slower - "this app is not trusted so it needs to be monitored for your safety which might negatively affect its performance". Users will prefer store apps and will put pressure on app developers to publish on app store.
If they do it well then hardly anybody will even notice they finally killed the non-store apps.
If and when both iOS and macOS are replaced by one unified operating system, this would be back on the table. But personally, I wouldn't bet a whole lot of money on it happening even then.
That majority doesn't even know about Linux or what flashing even is. They just bought a box from bestbuy/amazon so they can access the internet and email. They stick to the manufacturer defaults and would be stuck with Chrome, Edgium or Safari.
Mozilla is already too bloated, too rotten and too stuck in it's ridiculous ways to salvage.
Google has an extremely strong incentive to capture the web client market. Whatever Mozilla can do to make Firefox more popular, Google can outspend them by a factor 10 and do more, or better, or both.
I want Firefox to win but unfortunately I just don't see a path for it. My mindset at the moment is "I'm going to use Firefox for as long as it's possible, and then I'll find the least crappy Chromium fork available".
I don't know if it'll take 6 months or 6 years to get to that point but I really don't have faith in Mozilla righting the ship.
Firefox isn't struggling on technical grounds though. It's not a charity case, it's a perfectly competent browser. Whether Firefox outperforms Chromium depends on which benchmark you use. As far as the user is concerned, they're both technically solid browsers.
Somewhere along the line we got this idea that if you're not #1 you've failed. You don't need to crush every single competitor into oblivion to be successful, you just need to succeed at what you set out to do, and in Firefox's case, isn't that just to build a good browser?
The only way to beat Chrome, is the same way Firefox beat IE: Someone else will have to do it.
For some of us, it still 'beats' Chrome on some kind of principle - I'm not giving Google yet more control. But are there enough people like me to actually keep a modern browser going?
In that sense, Firefox's competition is not Chrome: it's the other "non-mainstream" browsers like Chromium Edge, Brave, or Opera. What can Mozilla do to attract those users to Firefox? Google doesn't want to crush Firefox to 0% because Google profits from Firefox searches and presumably wants a non-Chromium browser to exist to avoid antitrust scrutiny regulating Chrome.
... It'll raise trust if they follow through their promises. Open source Pocket, yet?
While I agree that Thunderbird as a standalone Windows/MacOS/Linux desktop email client is a very important project, and needs to be continued, maintained and refined, the paradigm of email has moved on somewhat since 2003.
People need to be able to do more than just access email on a desktop or laptop.
I'd like to see two new things under the Thunderbird/Mozilla name:
a) a fully open source GPL licensed, self-hostable, webmail server application that fulfills the same functions as rainloop or roundcube, implemented in the Thunderbird name. Maybe it could have its own new GUI to run inside the browser, or it could offer an optional "traditional" GUI that is similar to the Thunderbird desktop client. This has a possibility for a natural symbiotic relationship with Firefox, as the best and most optimal web browser client to view the webmail.
b) a Thunderbird Android email client. There should be no reason why people should be locked into the default Android google/gmail email client. I can't even view message headers on it. I want a full featured "power user" IMAP-over-TLS + SMTP email client for Android that is also open source.
K-9 mail should satisfy these requirements. It's been slow moving development wise the last two years, but it is not dead:
https://k9mail.app/2020/06/01/Whats-Up-With-K-9-Mail
https://github.com/k9mail/k-9
Here it is: https://email.faircode.eu/
Unlike K-9, it is very actively developed.
If this shares neither the thunderbird feature set or UX, why does it have to be called thunderbird? I still use thunderbird because it's UX efficiency for dealing with large volumes of mail blow away the Gmail and Fastmail web interfaces.
You should definitely check out mutt for this.
Sort of. Google basically is what makes the company money, which is more or less indentured servitude. If it were to break away and find another way to monetize I think it becomes a very different browser.
There are a few factors at play here, but I’ll call out a few I’ve observed.
1) If you hire good engineers and give them autonomy, branching into new markets is cheaper than you think. “Focusing” engineers tends to just cut back on autonomy, both lowering productivity as well as limiting the quality of engineering talent one can attract.
2) Unified, integrated solutions, with great default options are preferred by nearly everyone on the market. Sure lastpass let people store passwords easily, but how many consumers bother changing the default password manager in their browser?
3) Investors recognize this pattern and funnel money to the biggest “platform” they can in any given market.
I never understood how bad point solutions were from a business standpoint until I worked in the application performance monitoring space. For any given monitoring feature there are dozens to hundreds of small, high quality point solutions targeting one market niche or another - but most customers will simply purchase their preferred all in one solution and forget about the other options.
4. Pocket, add daily news to it.
Pocket already knows what I like, has one of the best reader mode, TTS, has millions of mobile users already and is deeply integrated within Firefox.
Mozilla's values could even help it sign some deals with independent news media.
Even if you wanted to financially support Firefox or Thunderbird development through donations, there would be no way to. Your money will go to the Moz foundation, and end up in all sorts of endeavors except the ones you care about: Moz spends money on discontinued mobile operating systems and new languages and language runtimes (Rust, WASM) nobody needs (sorry Rustees). Above all, your money likely goes to salaries and pension plans for CEOs and upper management.
When it has been suggested many times that Moz just needed to put the money they got from Google into a fund to finance FF development.
As to TFA's point about "sitting on the table to decide about web standards", that also hasn't worked out. It hasn't helped to keep "web standards" in check, nor did Mozilla's own contributions become part of them. All in all, Moz just acts as a fig leaf for the web end-game, pretending there's a community or some such.
With respect to "web standards", our best bet could be to demand that W3C, WHATWG clear up their shit and publish formal standards (possibly in an executable language to base a new formal browser/viewer app on). The way it is now helps no-one except Google.
W3C is mostly involved in CSS specs today, with significant influence on this past decade's advances, and also source of a lot of the complexity of browsers. CSS is a primary candidate for a formal spec among web standards IMO, since HTML5 the markup language is sufficiently covered by either the procedural spec or SGML.
WHATWG was founded explicitly to avoid that, i.e. "let's get shit done without ceremony, and whatever comes out is the actual standard". Going back to W3C-like processes would remove the very reason for its existence. Google has been very good at leveraging this, but that's mostly because other players seem unwilling to dedicate as many resources to browser-dev as they do (even when, like in Apple's and Microsoft's case, they have more than enough money to spend).
This is simply incorrect. The Mozilla Foundation is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, which have strict laws delineating how they are allowed to spend money. "Education" is one endeavor where charities can spend money, which IIRC is where most of the foundation money goes: to educating people about the web and web development. Notably, "software development" is not an endeavor for which such a charity can spend its funds. Donations don't go to Rust, or even Firefox, because they legally can't.
> As to TFA's point about "sitting on the table to decide about web standards", that also hasn't worked out. It hasn't helped to keep "web standards" in check, nor did Mozilla's own contributions become part of them.
This is also simply incorrect. Enormous swaths of the web spec have been authored by Mozilla representatives, and we can point to plenty of instances where Mozilla has torpedoed proposals from other organizations (e.g. WebSQL, PNaCL).
Not OP, but I think the comment was saying that donating to Mozilla will result in them using the funds on all sorts of stupid shit not FireFox related. Not to literally donate to FireFox as a stand-alone software dev endeavor. Mozilla could easily accept funds in a legally compliant way if they had some sort of “please direct my funds primarily on FireFox” if they wanted to do so. This is similar to how many charities take donations from donors (eg “Here’s some money, only use it to build a building with my name on it.”)
Why in God's name did Mozilla even do this to themselves? Sitting up Mozilla into a Corp and a Foundation. The Corp which is supposed to be a money-printing machine has been shanghaied by a person who has gone on the record saying it would be unfair to reduce their salary because of dependants yet has consistently run this machine into red.
Why isn't Mozilla taking any action? Why is Baker continuing to be allowed to destroy the dream of a multiplicity of browser engines? It kills me.
1. Were a very tiny part of the overall Mozilla budget
2. Were also employees of Moco, not Mofo, and so donations could not go towards them either.
> nobody needs (sorry Rustees)
Industry adoption says otherwise, see for example, the CTO of Amazon's comments during re:Invent yesterday.
(That being said, you could absolutely suggest that it's not Mozilla's job to help the industry in this way. That's a much better argument than "nobody needs Rust.")
Also, the main executive pay people complain about is paid by the Corporation, not the Foundation, so, suggesting your donations would go towards that is also incorrect.
Exactly what I mean, of course.
> Also, the main executive pay people complain about is paid by the Corporation, not the Foundation, so, suggesting your donations would go towards that is also incorrect.
Thx for clearing that up.
Mozilla absolutely has been helping to keep web standards in check. Maybe not to the degree that you would like, but if it were up to Google, we'd all have some ancient under-specified version of SQLite and LLVM encoded in web standards, as they tried to just drop those in for database storage and NaCL.
Mozilla pushed back on those, demanding documented standards that could have independent implementations.
WASM is the cross-browser, much better specified alternative to NaCL.
Formal standards in an executable language are by far the exception rather than the norm. For something with as big a surface area as web browsers, I'm sure they would cost an ungodly amount of time and money to complete. And while you may prefer to reduce the surface area to deal with this, no one wants to break compatibility with existing sites.
I'm a bit puzzled by what you actually want. Mozilla did scale back its investment in Rust, WASM, and the experimental browser engine Servo, to focus more on its core browser, in the recent round of layoffs. But the existing investment has paid off; a number of projects that started off in Servo, and were written in Rust, like the CSS parser and Webrender, are now part of Firefox, providing safe, parallel styling and GPU rendering. WASM is widely supported across browsers, providing an efficient compilation target which is much better specified and easier to work with than JavaScript as a compilation target, or something like NaCL.
And some of the other efforts, like Rust and WASM, have now achieved sufficient industry adoption that other companies are picking up the slack; Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Fastly, and others are all hiring and paying people to work on Rust and WASM full time.
It seems that other than funding Thunderbird development, Mozilla is doing what you want, but you somehow still seem unhappy with it. Why is that?
With Rust and WASM being funded and pushed by MS, Amazon, Google, Nature, and many others, I'm afraid you're dead wrong.
As I was typing this it made me starting looking a bug I've found using it. So then I started Googling around to see if someone else found it. Looking at it, it appears it's been open for 3 years. But in the bug ticket they had steps to fix it. I now know few more menus in Thunderbird that I never considered clicking on. The bug now seem to be resolved and happier.
But then I also wish they would trim it down or at least give me the option to turn stuff off. I don't want an events and task organiser and all this stuff. I just want a mail client. I also wish their spam filter would be more consistent and stuff keeps getting through that I've flagged and is clearly spam as it's the same message I've been receiving for the last couple of months.
Mozilla takes way too much of Google's search money for them to stand up to Google. [0]
If only another investor could save Firefox from the clutches of Google's dependency.
[0]: https://hothardware.com/news/mozilla-firefox-google-doj-anti...
If you want to refer to what you wrote before, a link is the way to do it. And of course you're welcome to add information that's specific to what's new in this article. There should be something different somewhere...
It's amazing how valuable eyeballs are -- that you can fund an entire software project just that way.
Google certainly values the eyeballs they get via Firefox, but Firefox could disappear tomorrow and that barely affect Google one bit from a pure "eyeballs" perspective. How much traffic would Google lose? People would just use those same Google services through Chrome, Safari, native apps, whatever.
So, I believe Google funds Firefox mainly as a hedge against monopoly charges.
If Chrome ever dominated the browser market entirely with 95%+ marketshare like Internet Explorer back in the bad old days of IE5/6, they'd be painting a large target on their backs for various governments to step in and make life difficult.
If we think about it, Chrome/Chromium's current ~70% market share is pretty ideal for Google. They get to kinda sorta mostly control the web, without a bunch of pesky governments on their backs.
Though I do think there is some truth to the monopoly hedge as well.
200 million monthly users is still a lot of people.
https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
Now that Google is in antitrust court, I think the Mozilla deal is mainly for PR, both positive while it lasts, and negative sense (to avoid being the Firefox killer by not renewing the deal this year -- Google preannounced renewal after Mozilla's August layoffs, and let others repeat the too-high-by-now $400M/year number).
Firefox switching to Yahoo for default search was probably an eye opener for them; 30% of global search traffic (at whatever fraction of users didn't change their search engine) is a boatload of money and from public estimates at least an order of magnitude more than they pay Mozilla for the traffic.
From a business perspective Google might benefit if Firefox disappeared but there's no guarantee. Opera, Brave, Safari, Edge, etc. could take up Firefox's install-base without significantly increasing Chrome's. At least Firefox is a known entity for them and they would probably rather have a guaranteed platform with Google as the default search engine than having to negotiate with whatever sprang up to replace Firefox.
Firefox market share is now in the danger zone where Google can replace it with more Chrome promotion and still save on TAC vs. Chrome-eng+mktg. Also the danger zone where webdevs do not test in Gecko and break Firefox, even on such properties as AirBNB.
Particlulalry if having lots of users is how you influence things, since then you need to provide a good product (or lock users in via some external ecosystem).
Maybe some recent EU legislation moves can help them in the same way the browser choice thing helped.
If you care about making Firefox good for users, you will work to improve current performance, and prioritize compatibility with badly coded websites. Even if it makes it harder to adopt future standards coming down the pipeline.
If you care about pushing standards, you'll put more energy into those future standards, even at the cost of performance and compatibility with badly coded websites.
Firefox has consistently chosen to prioritize standards that are someone's idea about how to do things better over the real world that exists right now.
The situation for Firefox is that bad, that even enterprise users - ESR - are moving to MS Edge since its offering support together with MS Office.
I think Firefox needs something drastic to become relevant again, which is very unlikely taking into account the last years history.
Myself as a FF user i'm more and more tempted to switch to some other multiplatform-chrome-compatible browser.
First time I've seen this phrased that way. If all you can think of with regards to tech is security and privacy, you are the EU: "technological pessimism".
I don't think thats true for the west. The only impressive progress we have made for the last 50 years was in computer hardware and software. Sure, we are somewhat comfortable, we got a bit better at producing things, but if compare that with 1850-1950? Its not even a competition.
I don't know how you can look at plummeting rates of illiteracy, child mortality, polio(!) and countless other scourges on humanity and conclude that no impressive progress has been made since 1950 outside of computers.
The first (internal) organ transplant was only in 1954. The amount of progress made in medicine and pharmaceuticals alone is staggering.
Like Theranos?
Print to PDF is better in Chrome, comes with a preview.
Search marks matches in the scroll bar.
Opening a recently closed tab opens a new tab in Chrome instead of replacing the existing one.
There were probably 5-10 more annoyances in Firefox for me that I don't recall right now. Maybe it was my familiarity with Chrome but overall I still think Chrome has better UX defaults.
I like the bookmark tags feature of Firefox though, which Chrome lacks.
That's an interesting feature, I'd like it if that was implemented. I see some add-ons do something to simulate this.
> Opening a recently closed tab opens a new tab in Chrome instead of replacing the existing one.
This opens a new tab for me, no settings I've changed that I could find.
> There were probably 5-10 more annoyances in Firefox for me that I don't recall right now. Maybe it was my familiarity with Chrome but overall I still think Chrome has better UX defaults.
There will probably always be differences, that's why different browsers exist after all, and it'll be different annoyances for different people. Personally I think generally the UX of Chrome (that Firefox has tried to copy) is the worst thing about all current browsers. The new add-on API made me start using custom UX CSS to make it tolerable instead of a "fix add-on", but the only serious alternative (Chrome) always felt worse to me. Has many nifty features though.
Hm? I reopen closed tabs all the time in Firefox and have never encountered this. They open in a new tab. Maybe you changed an about:config pref?
Wait, isn't this something the OS print dialog is supposed to provide?
> Search marks matches in the scroll bar.
I'd like to see this implemented as well (just as another commenter mentioned).
> There were probably 5-10 more annoyances in Firefox for me that I don't recall right now. Maybe it was my familiarity with Chrome but overall I still think Chrome has better UX defaults.
Which is mostly because you're more familiar with Chrome overall (and it's also a matter of taste). As an example, I strongly dislike the downloads "bar" in chrome and the fact that bookmark/history/downloads pages are pages and not dialogs. Many people dislike dialogs tho, because they seem bloated and difficult to use to them.
One small UI gimmick I'd like to see implemented in major browsers (at least on macOS) is an option to use the fluent/vibrant blur tab bar background instead of the default white/gray/black. Firefox already kinda does that (at least when using the dark theme), but I still have to write my own userchrome.css to get the full effect.
Odd phrasing that glosses over how he was ousted by the early days "woke" mob (before they self-identified as such).
Yet, these mistakes didn’t really change the downward trajectory. Apple and Google are the dominant mobile platforms and I can’t see how an independent desktop browser can grow against competent conglomerates.
Google distributing and marketing Chrome definitely hurts Firefox, and yet Brave grows. A mystery to discuss another time.
The article discusses four strategies and I think your (assuming you are the Brendan Eich) strategy for Brave falls under 3. Technological pessimism, though it needs a better name.
You are correct, growth for a desktop browser is possible, I misspoke, but I think the general browser market is a tough nut to crack. Good luck. Your (Brendan Eich's) past and present work is greatly appreciated.
Main point is we grew and grow. Firefox shrinks, it's dying. I'm not saying that a bigger browser in decline would be easy to turn around, but Mozilla has not done right by Firefox.
I do agree with Ian that loss of Firefox founders hurt. We made brevet promotions and hires who did not hit the heights of hyatt, blake, joehewitt, and bengoodger. This is an oft-told tale, often requiring restart via a different codebase while maintaining the extant one.
I think persistent SQLite is on the verge of returning to the browser via WebAssembly but it needs a proper POSIX-like WASI [1] (WebAssembly System Interface) implementation in the browser. If you are looking for (very) small footholds in the market for Brave, a WASI implementation supporting a SQLite VFS [2] extension has my vote.
[1] https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI
[2] https://www.sqlite.org/vfs.html
Safari has continuously caused "headache" to businesses that rely on tracking user behavior for years now, as Apple is very bent on protecting your privacy from every other company outside or inside their walled garden.
I find it odd to ask whether any non-monetary goals are "truly" their goals. They are a listed company. Of course they want to make profit. But they do so in part by means of providing privacy and security.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_big_to_fail
Nowadays most browsing is mobile, and all mobile devices come with a high quality browser component which is effectively part of the operating system already, used pervasively by applications on the device as a component rather than a standalone browser.
Installing a browser, any browser, is already a niche thing to do for the majority of internet users today.
I virtually never open Samsung Internet only because I virtually never open any web browser. Browsers launch as a side effect of something else. For example clicking on a link inside LinkedIn, Telegram, bank app help, etc.
When that happens, if a separate app gets opened it's usually Firefox Focus that opens for me, so I guess that means the default URL handler is Firefox Focus (must have set it years ago) and it's not being changed by software updates.
that sounds a lot like M$'s IE before the antitrust case, no ?
It may be true that a particular company has a stranglehold on browser choice on your particular phone, but that is completely different from having an anticompetitive strangehold on the market as a whole, which is what matters from an antitrust standpoint. I'm not the biggest fan of capitalism but the market seems to be functioning rather well. Not perfectly but well.
Just a refresher: IE had 96% market share at its peak, and Microsoft were guilty of quite a few other anticompetitive practices as well w.r.t. Windows itself, more or less literally penalizing OEMs from shipping any other desktop OS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars
Competition is thriving in the mobile space. Safari, Chrome, and derivatives of Chrome are competing with each other and they are well-performing, aggressively maintained and updated pieces of software.
Sure, there are plenty of technical reasons to be annoyed with either one of them. Mobile Safari sure is slow to adopt certain standards, etc. And don't get me wrong -- it is extremely regrettable whenever browser choice is restricted. It sucks, I hate it.
And yet there are a range of choices for terminal only browsers. You've overall right, but I doubt that minority of users would let Firefox totally die any time soon.
Google is rapidly locking down enterprise by building in tight integrations with Google Workspace/G-Suite (see: context aware authentication).
In 10 - 15 years the web should be better than it is today. The first step in their recovery is to convey what their vision of the web looks like in 2035 and commit to Firefox being the first browser to make it a reality by 2025.
Is the web better now than it was in 2005-2010? I don't think it is and I don't see the trend arbitrarily reversing. Tons of regular people (and even tech-savvy folks who should know better) voluntarily use, love, and advocate for using a browser (and email service!) made by the modern equivalent of DoubleClick.
Nitpick: they are DoubleClick:
> DoubleClick was a company acquired by Google in 2007
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoubleClick
But net overall? I believe it's better than 2005 and even 2010. Meaning, I would not want to revert back to 2010 and start building back up from there. There is too much good we would lose in the process.
I have no idea if my opinion is shared by the majority, but I am very optimistic about the future of the web.
The characteristics of the web from 20+ years ago are still there. Many or most people just prefer not to use that type of web from 20+ years ago.
Everyone is still free to use whichever browser they want to access whichever website they want (in the US at least) in the same manner they did in the previous decades.
I used lynx as my daily driver for most of the 1990s and through 2005. In contrast, these days it is impractical for the average person to use a browser that is not maintained by an organization employing many hundreds of full-time developers. This dependency on money (to pay the developers) limits a person's options.
I never wanted to be able to replace my desktop apps with apps that run on the web, so I don't consider web apps to be compensation for the constant stream of annoyances (e.g., the moral equivalent of pop-up windows asking me to give the site my email address) that HTML5, web fonts, et cetera, enabled.
- a web that is thoroughly unusable without an ad-blocker (ad-blocking was pretty optional in 2005)
- waiting for 20 megs of minified JS to load over 3G
- waiting for Google web fonts to load because apparently shipping more than 4 fonts in common is beyond the ability of plucky upstarts like Microsoft, Apple, and Google
- web "apps" with worse performance characteristics than programs that ran on 66 MHz machines
I don't use Slack.
It was still pretty sweet to run a transparent Squid proxy with an ads blacklist.
Why own a dog? You spend money on it, it shits, it makes noise, you have to find a caretaker when you go on vacation, it bites, it needs walks, it needs to go to the vet, your next girlfriend might be allergic to it, and after all that, it dies.
Do people who own dogs not know these things? Or is it that they own one despite those things and there's a more interesting conversation to be had?
Comments like this make me wonder if you, yourself, are capable of seeing anything that's improved about the web which is a much more illuminating exercise to do than enumerating just bad things, something anyone can do.
In fact, I submit blind optimism is in fact more tiring, look at any comment thread about Tesla or Bitcoin. It's as if these two things are perfect and you had better buckle up if you dare criticize either one.
Take a look at The Web Design Museum, Gallery of Flash Websites: https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/flash-websites/ . Beautiful visuals, terrible SEO.
Flash is an important quirk of internet history and a stepping stone that created expectations of what the web could one day be: a rich, open, cross-device application platform accessible by URL.
And that's what the web achieved with only a few exceptions.
> In 10 - 15 years the web should be better than it is today.
That doesn’t align with the trends we’ve seen:
- tracking getting ever more sophisticated (like using WebRTC to probe open ports)
- large scale data mining sites like Facebook ignoring government regulations and getting away with it
- bloat getting worse. So many sites don’t even render without JS enabled. The fact that people have to run things like PiHole and browser plugins to filter out some of that crap is telling. And how long is that going to last? Some sites are now proxying that crap behind their own domain and DoH will prevent users from running PiHole
- The web slowly converting on a single rendering engine: Blink. It’s starting to feel a bit like the IE 5 days with everyone targeting the same browser. Just last week I couldn’t log into a pretty low tech website because their UA filtering said I was on an unsupported browser and greyed out the login button (I was on Firefox).
It will be interesting how long their shareholders will buy the premise that "we can earn more by using privacy to convince people to buy our high-margin kit and run Safari than we would by casting off the privacy mantle and getting deep into the data-grab business."
The other side of the coin is that I really believe there's a bubble waiting to burst in that exact industry. The price of building and feeding hyper-targeted, data-bloated marketing machines is far out of scale with their utility for most use cases, but people are throwing silly money at it right now. (Compare the Smart TV/IoT device model, where they believe that peddling usage data is enough to justify an increased BoM AND frequently selling the product near or under cost). If they expect the bubble to burst (either through marketers coming to their senses or heavy-duty GDPR style regulation), they might be just "passively" pushing the privacy angle-- don't bother building out an infrastructure that will be worthless as soon as the bubble bursts, and you come out of it with a huge branding/goodwill win when everyone else reinvents their business model and invents privacy.
I was surprised Chromium!Edge ended up being such a mess with privacy because, somewhat like Apple, MS has associated businesses that let them subsidize its development without having to leverage user data. They could have come out looking good-- weren't they the only ones who tried to make a go of Do Not Track headers?
I'm sure it's nice for people who obsess about privacy, but it's not something that the general user population is going to adopt.
I think the right approach, ultimately, would be compartmentalize all web sites, but that's not feasible right now.
Don’t get me wrong, the issue was highly annoying but it’s definitely not a frequent bug bare.
There are existing extensions for managing some popular cloud platforms and that goes a long way in terms of convenience.
The bigger annoyance is sites that intentionally cross talk (like “deploy stacks” buttons where 3rd party sites can run Cloudformation scripts against your AWS console). But in those cases it’s an annoyance I’m willing to manage considering they’re blocked by Temporary Containers doing exactly what it’s intended to do.
Yeah I completely agree. There are extensions that make managing containers easier but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I still run into regular problems.
That said, the Facebook and Google extensions don’t require micromanaging. They only cover those two respective clouds but it’s still a really strong starting point.
> I think the right approach, ultimately, would be compartmentalize all web sites, but that's not feasible right now
It is possible with the Temporary Containers extension in Firefox. In fact this is exactly how I’ve been browsing the web for around a year now.
It’s really liberating.
The traction that Electron has gained as a cross-platform option for building apps is huge. It's only set to get bigger (whether for better or worse).
Imagine if Gecko was in this space competing with Electron. Imagine if thousands of developers place their trust in Mozilla because they have built their cross-platform apps using Gecko. They'd want to see Mozilla grow and succeed - they have a stake in seeing Gecko development continue. Is it too late (or too unrealistic) for this to happen?
A very long time ago, Mozilla did have the option to embed Gecko into apps. It was never well-documented and what remains of the documentation is out-of-date and untouched:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embed...
They have. Several times, in fact. There was the old embedding, then XULRunner, then Firefox apps (I'm not sure if that's the same as webapprt). But these efforts generally only lasts a couple of years before Mozilla decides it's the wrong approach and kills off the embedding.
The ability to create extensions for my personal use that can interact in local with my computer would be great.
I understand that a browser have to be sandboxed but there are ways that could work without being unsafe. Maybe even two separate downloads, one for people that want to use the browser UI capabilities but work in local.
This would not solve Mozilla problems, so it's a little tangent to the current discussion.
I think it might lead to growth or "mind share" among app developers (and indirectly to end-users who use the apps built by devs).
The Chrome engine now powers the Edge and Brave browsers. Electron is used to built desktop apps by companies everyone recognises e.g. Microsoft, Slack, Figma. The appetite among companies and devs to build Electron apps shows no slowdown.
Mozilla is nowhere to been seen in ths important space. In my opinion, this is a missed opportunity.
What is happening to them now is a function of poor management and even poorer judgment. It's what happens when you solely rely on a cash cow and fail to innovate meaningfully.
Fuck Mozilla!
I don't recall which site it was for me recently, perhaps Sainsbury's, but I reached a card payment screen and it just would not accept payment - it kept getting stuck with a spinner making no progress at the payment stage. Opened exactly the same page in Safari and it worked fine quickly. Next time it happened again, and I remembered that I needed to switch browser.
That payment problem is fixed now though. It was broken for a few months and is fine now.
There's also no way to be sure it was FF in general and not the particular version(s) of FF Beta I was running at the time.
There is no way to know which of numerous factors might contribute without running from a blank profile, which isn't something anyone would do unless really keen on investigating a problem, as it's easier to just run a different browser instead.
If a payment process gets stuck due to an FF-specific adblocker, I'd still count that as an accident of implementation affecting FF users, because final stage payment processes don't have any reason to call up ad-blocked services, and most FF users use an adblocker, don't they?
I couldn’t determine why; I have customized perhaps a dozen variables within Firefox so it is hard to know wether iCloud depends on any of them.
Well then, you should have thought about that before you forcibly kicked out founder Brendan Eich because you disliked his unrelated politics.
You can be a woke company that belittles everyone who doesn't share your narrow ideology or a company that makes a good web browser with a sound business model. You can't be both.
Firefox has been a shitty web browser for many years now. I've largely abandoned it for Brave (interestingly created by Eich) and Chrome. Good riddance.
So looking at that section again, his argument seems weak on that point. He is promoting founders as leaders because they have innate clout and don't have to engage in consensus building, but that should apply to Mozilla's founders too.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail//ogfcmafjalglgifnm...
>belittles everyone who doesn't share your narrow ideology
Wake up to the present. People who actively try to ban same-sex marriage are just as bad as segregation was back in the day.
Calling this "narrow ideology" is preposterous.
There is nothing wrong with homosexuality and they should be given the same rights as everyone else. It's NOT a debate. So if someone is actively trying to campaign against equality then they are flat out wrong and deserve the backlash.
That is false. Only one of them quit "because of" him. You don't need to take my word for it: Stephen Shankland's piece [1] is the least-inaccurate account of what happened there.
And in fact, your statement is not even logical. Think about it: Who hires a CEO? A company's board. Now you're saying that a huge chunk of the board quit because of a hire that they themselves were responsible for making? That makes no sense.
[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-under-fire-inside-the-9-da...
The false narratives that the board fired him, and also that half the board quit because of him, both directly contradict the official statement published on the Mozilla Blog, and Brendan's own words he published on Twitter:
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat...
>On April 3, 2014 Brendan Eich voluntarily stepped down as CEO of Mozilla. [...]
>Q: Was Brendan Eich fired?
>A: No, Brendan Eich resigned. Brendan himself said:
>“I have decided to resign as CEO effective April 3rd, and leave Mozilla. Our mission is bigger than any one of us, and under the present circumstances, I cannot be an effective leader. I will be taking time before I decide what to do next.”
>Brendan Eich also blogged on this topic.
>Q: Was Brendan Eich asked to resign by the Board?
>A: No. It was Brendan’s idea to resign, and in fact, once he submitted his resignation, Board members tried to get Brendan to stay at Mozilla in another C-level role.
Despite that irrefutable proof of Mozilla's and Brendan's own words that he resigned of his own free will, and the Board actually wanted him to stay, GamerGate followers love to spread conspiracy theories based on those false narratives, framing Brendan as a victim and martyr, instead of respecting the human rights of the people whose marriages Brendan donated his money to destroy.
“A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots.” —Mark Twain
Within 48 hours we had a new build of Brave out which held the tips locally, in the browser. The tip would be attempted for up to 90 days; if the unverified publisher were to verify within that time, the tip would be sent to their wallet. If the 90 days passed, the user's BAT would be released within the browser to be distributed elsewhere.
You can read more about these changes in our blog post from December of 2018: https://brave.com/rewards-update/.
Great, I love being incorrect and learning something new.
> In 2018, Brave users could tip unverified content creators with BAT. Those tokens would go into a settlement wallet until claimed by the intended recipient. This was a bad design.
So it wasn't incorrect or misinformation then?
Glad you've fixed that shitty practice but that doesn't expunge it from history or make the fact anyone in a decision making position thought that was in any way ethical/acceptable.
The change we made kept the tokens on the user's device. We also introduced better UI/UX as well, with many thanks to our community for helping us spot some areas for improvement. Although I'm part of the team, I still stand in awe of those few days in December, 2018. A great, yet flawed, system was radically improved in a matter of hours with a few small (yet profound) changes. And it wouldn't have been possible without Brave's incredibly engaged community.
When a user searched (e.g. 'binance'), the browser would check to see if an affiliate link existed. If it did, it would be displayed as a suggested URL. If the user were to press Enter at that point, they would be sent to the domain, with Brave's affiliate code in tow. We did make a mistake, however. We unintentionally matched against a fully-qualified URL as well (e.g. binance.us). We were able to fix that within a couple of days, however.
This is not in any way "sketchy". Open Firefox, Opera, Vivaldi, or Edge and perform a search for "Hacker News". You'll note that in Firefox, and Opera (IIRC) you're sent to Google with an affiliate-identifier in the URL. In Edge and Vivaldi, I believe you're sent to Bing, but with the same type of identifier.
> I remember when Brendan Eich was briefly the Mozilla CEO. It was noted that a founder has a special place and ability as a leader. We never got to find out, but there was some sense to it: a founder has particular authority, without getting that authority through consensus-building. If you bring in a decisive outsider they will probably fail, lacking the authority (and probably the wisdom) to guide the company. If you bring in or promote someone appropriate for a more mature company, then the company may be operated well but the choices made will be more conservative.
When FireFox Quantum first came out, I was amazed. All the speed and performance problems started to fade and I was so happy to use Firefox again, switching back from Vivaldi. I also noticed a lot of bad information going on about Eich at the time. People were claiming he wasn't very competent, that he didn't put priority on multi-thread/cpu/quantum support (he did) .. lot's of stuff to discredit him.
I do think it was sad that Mozilla forced him out. Diversity of ideas? Not at Mozilla. Diversity based on identity and not thought has become the focus at many companies and it feels insane.
I will not use Brave. Their crypto stuff and ad injection and privacy concerns bother me. However, Firefox has continually gotten more and more unstable. I may switch back to Vivaldi, which I do not really want to do. Diversity in the browser eco system is pretty critical to an open web.
That is total bullshit. Get your facts straight, and stop pushing your batshit crazy GamerGate conspiracy theories that are based on lies.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25303513
Mozilla didn't fire Brendan Eich. He resigned of his own free will, against the Mozilla board's request that he stay. His own words and the Mozilla FAQ quoted below, I'm not just making this up. Down the following thread, Brendan suggested googling "constructive separation" -- but I'm not sure if he meant for that euphemism to apply to how he left his job at Mozilla, or to how he wanted to cancel and destroy existing happy same sex marriages in California against their consent. All of the google results have to do with marriage, not employment. Brendan, care to clarify?
As JavaScript proves, Brendan Eich never really understood the concept of equality: https://dorey.github.io/JavaScript-Equality-Table/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24127716
DonHopkins 3 months ago | on: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses ...
Eich was not forced out or fired. In fact, just the opposite: the board actually tried to get Eich to stay, but he decided to leave all on his own. Don't try to rewrite history to make an ideological point. It's all very well and unambiguously documented what really happened, and there's no excuse for you spreading that misinformation.
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat...
Q: Was Brendan Eich fired?
A: No, Brendan Eich resigned. Brendan himself said:
“I have decided to resign as CEO effective April 3rd, and leave Mozilla. Our mission is bigger than any one of us, and under the present circumstances, I cannot be an effective leader. I will be taking time before I decide what to do next.”
Brendan Eich also blogged on this topic.
Q: Was Brendan Eich asked to resign by the Board?
A: No. It was Brendan’s idea to resign, and in fact, once he submitted his resignation, Board members tried to get Brendan to stay at Mozilla in another C-level role.
I disagree with his views and believe Mozilla did the right thing in severing ties but I don't think it's as cut and dry as you're making it sound. It definitely comes across as a "We expect your resignation by the end of the day or shit will get messy for everyone" situation.
The irony is that Brendan wanted to "Destructively Separate" his victims who were legally joined together in same sex marriages, so it's especially hurtful that Brendan would throw that term around about his voluntary separation with Mozilla, after he maliciously wanted to DESTRUCTIVELY SEPARATE many other human beings in marriage from their loved ones, against their will.
Brendan and the Mozilla board both explicitly denied that he was fired or asked to leave. And the Mozilla Board actually tried to get Brendan to stay. According to your theory, they are both liars in collusion.
Is that what you really believe or just magically "feel"? Do you have any evidence for your feelings? What more proof of fact do you need than their own widely published words? A long form birth certificate?
Are Brendan and the Mozilla board conspiring to both publish a false narrative in lockstep that he was not fired or asked to leave? Then why is he still cooperating with the conspiracy if he was fired or asked to resign? Do you theorize that Mozilla gave him millions of dollars of Google ad blood money that should have gone to open source software development, just to keep his mouth shut?
That was the GamerGate conspiracy narrative. Do you believe it too, in spite of all the hard proof to the contrary?
Even anti-gay born-again Christian Gervase Markham certainly didn't hold back trying to defend his indefensible position against same sex marriage, and Mozilla never fired him or asked him to leave as he continued to speak out, until the day he died. And he too testified that Brendan wasn't asked to leave, either. Do you accuse him of being in on the conspiracy, too? How do you theorize they bought him off, a presumably morally upright born-again Christian?
http://blog.gerv.net/2014/04/your-ire-is-misdirected/
>Hi. My name is Gervase Markham. I’m a supporter of traditional marriage, and I work for Mozilla. In fact, as far as being on the record goes, I believe I’m now the only one.
>Many people who agree with me on this issue are very upset about what happened to Brendan Eich, our co-founder and, for two weeks, CEO of the Mozilla Corporation. Brendan was appointed and then, after 10 days under the Internet’s lens of anger based on his donation in opposition to the redefinition of marriage, stepped down and stepped away from Mozilla – to our great loss.
>I am assured by sources I trust that Brendan decided to leave of his own accord – he was not forced out. My understanding is that the senior management of Mozilla (many of whom disagree with him on this issue) worked very hard to support him, even if I would not agree with all the actions they took in doing so. However, he eventually felt that it was impossible for him to focus on leading if he was spending all of his time dealing with the continued, relentless news and social media storm surrounding the donation he made. In other words, he wasn’t forced out from the inside – he was dragged out from the outside.
Surely we're not going to be repeating the same angry arguments all the way until we die?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Who in their right mind pushed the Fenix upgrade for release while absolutely breaking compatibility with the whole universe of Firefox add-ons?
The whole point of using firefox is the control that add-ons and the about:config actually give you. Failing to realize that is failing to understand who you're user are.
I hope that Mozilla the company fail as fast as possible, so that Mozilla the foundation is allowed to carry on Firefox's purpose and fund actual work from people like the author, instead of ivory tower board and C-levels.
I know they rejiggered the UI a bit recently, but it seems like a moderate improvement to me.
Also, I use Firefox to sync across all of my devices. I know you can do that with Chrome, but I trust Mozilla more than Google with my data.
Not to mention the loss of critical add-ons.
I loved Firefox on desktop, and for mobile the tradeoffs of slower load were acceptable for a secure browser. That got taken away, forcibly, and left a bad taste in the mouth of virtually every review you read on Play app store.
It was way more than a UI reskin, it was a complete overhaul. It makes me lose trust in having them maintain things like passwords knowing they can produce instability like they did here.
I know there were some breaking changes, but I assume they were for a good reason, and Mozilla obviously left a path forward.
That's where you're wrong. The reason they gave is "we don't want to confuse casual users with comiplcated functionality" or something along those lines, which is absurd because there has always been power user functionality available to those that need it without hurting the casual user experience, and installation of extensions is up to the user, casual users don't need to do it.
So since their explanation doesn't add up, tell me, why do you think Mozilla, who gets most of it's funding from Google, decided to make add-ons such as Privacy Badger and umatrix and cookie autodelete unavailable to us to use?
Never just assume someone does something for a good reason. Never assume malicious intent either, but don't just take it laying down when a tool you use no longer works for you. If a tool keeps getting worse and worse from a user perspective, it is because the changes being made aren't made with the user in mind.
Not sure about the other two
Feel free to try it out and drop feedback! (https://getamna.com)
To regain market share they need to be the unambiguously better browser. I thought there was a really solid path to do that with their parallelising efforts, in particular a fully parallel layout engine in combination with their other work would have meant drastically improved UI speeds, notably on Android, but elsewhere as well, it would have eliminated a lot of development difficulty and allowed a much more native-equivalent level of performance. That would have made a good basis for an embedded engine to compete with electron.
That path seems to have been closed off with the Servo team being fired. I’m not sure where Mozilla is going now, it’s not enough to tread water.
If I see one big problem with Mozilla, is that they chose to let go people like the author. Engineering & product culture only follows.
Point being that the author is more of a rule than an exception.
Disclaimer: Was a Mozilla fellow a few years back.
It was also a very different place when I started (before Fx4) from when I ended (just before FxOS was killed).
When I started it was a place full of passion, with a lot of technical vision going on (Fx4 was a major reboot and there were a number of side projects going on that showed promise), albeit not necessarily a lot of obvious strategic vision. I'm sure there was more behind the scenes with John Lilly, whose leadership I hired into, but I lost confidence after he left and suddenly it seemed like the message was "desktop is dying, mobile is everything."
Wasn't our mission success based on having enough market share to win a seat at the standards tables and win a place on the "supported browsers" test plan for major websites? Getting a significant part of the shrinking desktop market we'd already executed well on in the past and that competitors were idling on might be better than getting a little of the mobile market that companies with greater resources were bouncing off of left and right, no?
Intranets and SaaS apps are still a thing, and offices still use desktop, so there'd still be a core audience right? Maybe mobile browsers can be different and less standardized than desktop browsers and that's OK? Maybe it has to be? Maybe it even should be while mobile browsing incubates? Maybe browsers won't even be the primary way websites interact on mobile and they'll use client apps instead?
That was a confusing pivot for me at the time, and Mozilla's strategy was to both put all the momentum on mobile and to kneejerk to a rapid update model for the desktop browser, inspired by Chrome. Problem was that destroyed the desktop add-ons community because it turns out you can't do that when you have a monkeypatch/binary extension model with high coupling, and Jetpack/Add-Ons SDK wasn't mature enough or powerful enough yet to replicate most existing add-ons.
It also exhausted the users because the existing flow of having to explicitly approve updates on launch still remained, only now it was frequent enough to disrupt workflows--you never knew when launching a web page meant having to navigate the updates dialog first. Google had designed their browser ecosystem and usability around that update model, it wasn't something you could just graft on. By the time we figured it out Chrome had picked up a decent chunk of the community.
The company then more or less doubled in size, in no small part bringing in a bunch of people from mobile and related sectors that didn't have the FOSS culture in their backgrounds. That culminated in the development of FxOS, which I always felt like was treated as an unwelcome fork by the platform team. Maybe it was because of the need to support two fundamentally different forms of interaction, two different models of security, two different distribution and update models, two different lots of things in wrapping Gecko with an application vs. wrapping it with an OS. That also divided the company, since there were now two broadly different technical missions going on, albeit sharing code.
When considering the success of FxOS vs. KaiOS, it's worth thinking about the drag having two competing priorities in the same company causes, and how that might clarify when the 3rd party is doing the fork instead. Conflicts like "how do you release a fix for Fx the browser when it'd zero-day FxOS the phone and you can't get an update through the carrier for two months" may not be so much of a problem to figure out without that tension. I'm extremely impressed with what Fabrice and co. have able to pull off with KaiOS, and I bet lightening that load helped a lot.
When I left, after it was plain FxOS was not going to succeed at that time, in that environment, it was still a place full of passion--but it was now also a place equally full of frustration, and not with a lot...
I don’t know why more Windows software doesn’t use Google’s approach. A low priority scheduled updater is more user friendly than update on launch, and it doesn’t kill boot times like an update on reboot.
I get that Chrome isn't Google's direct source of income, ads are. But, it seems like controlling the web in order to facilitate serving advertisements (e.g. AMP, Extension Manifest v3) is part of its strategy. If Mozilla made a more successful browser, and Mozilla hewed to its stated values, it would just become a threat to Chrome, rather than a harmless surface area for serving ads, and a small opportunity to earn a little good will.
From that perspective, it made perfect sense to me that Mozilla has tried to diversify its revenue. The fact that it hasn't been successful at doing that doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad idea.
They would haggle a bit more but they would still pay. That's because Firefox's very existence is their insurance against accusations of monopolistic practices in a field where antitrust caselaw actually exists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfox
The real problem of course is that the web specs itself have become too complex and expensive to implement. But a stripped-down version of browser could point out why we need to reboot the whole technology. It would be a long shot, I admit.
With the reach of Google, Firefox had to be that much better to keep up, like it was compared to any version of IE. Unfortunately, Firefox kind of remained the same while Chrome became better and better.
In hindsight, they could have done what Opera did. But then they didn't. I don't think they did anything particularly wrong. Firefox just aged beyond its usefulness and will die, just because it's not needed anymore.
I see Brave as the spiritual successor of Firefox. Just like Firefox challenged the then status quo and made way for better browsers to come, Brave is challenging the current status quo Chrome and Google's business model at the same time.
I know they are committed to supporting Manifest v2 (I think), but more and more decisions are going to have to be made where they differ from upstream Chromium. I have doubts this will be sustainable forever.
Firefox is a treasure we should keep alive, because otherwise the web would turn into the same closed source walled garden, as most other things do.
I mean something could still happen, who knows? Maybe Huawei or Xiaomi or Canonical or IBM will see some value in it and make something out of it, but I fear it might be too late for them.
And Brave is not Chrome. It's based on Chromium. Many other companies depend upon Chromium codebase for their browsers, companies like Microsoft, Samsung, Amazon, Tesla. If Google does stop the development, there is a good chance that someone else will pick it up and keep it shared and open to distribute the work required to develop and maintain it.