Ask HN: Can Firefox be revived?

I believe there will be more options but not sure where from…

Mozilla is funded by Google.

It seems to me that as the count of various causes that some government adapts as its own rises, the overall quality of services tends to go down. Perhaps the total # of competing interests overwhelms the ability of the top level politicians to coordinate. Perhaps it goes down to just not having enough money and reliable people for everything.

Just a small observation. Austria-Hungary, a long defunct empire that ruled the place that I now live in, was considered fairly bureaucratic and ossified, and somewhat corrupt and inefficient. Comedians routinely satirized it as a clumsy state.

But it was able to keep the city streets cleaner than now and if you read up on various projects, they moved extremely fast compared to today's standards. Planning and building a tram track in several months was absolutely normal. Nowadays the planning and building takes several years.

> As a full stack developer I've battled so many times with weird implementations or unexpected behaviors across browsers that knowing that I can assume that the user will be on chromium is just piece of mind.

If webkit/blink is the only game in town, web standards will become standards only in name. The weird implementations and unexpected behaviors you see on webkit/blink will become the de-facto standards.

Why would webkit/blink developers (or the companies who fund them) bother with the inconvenience of the process of standardization and involve multiple stakeholders and collect feedback from users when they can just ship new web features or break existing ones when it's in their best interest?

You can already see this playing out with webkit and Apple's neutering of web capabilities on iOS in the interest of keeping it from becoming a threat to its walled garden.

With all that said, we're already on the collision course to this world, given the prevailing sentiment in the web community is to build only for webkit/blink and leave other engines as an afterthought due to their low market share, resulting in a vicious self-reinforcing cycle. Like the OP I'm not sure if there's much that can be done about it at this point.

Really? I prefer there are a few, but mostly compatible techs in that space. This is the VM that runs almost all desktop (client) software these days. Having only one implementation would IMHO be a disaster.

In my opinion if there is only chromium left it is the sign that http/html/css/js needs to be replace with something new that would allow healthy competition without being funded by a multi billion company

I disagree. Monocultures never work out well for users.

Having been using Firefox and Chrome side by side for 10+ years, I don't think the difference (or preference) between the two worth the effort putting into making two (mostly) duplicate implementations of the same thing for such complex thing. And my experience in observing the development of Firefox is that they are already too short-handed to keep up.

Mozilla does a lot of cool stuff aside of the browser, but what annoys me about ads in the address bar, shamelessly pushing pocket (a icon which for some reason I have to remove over and over again from the GUI) and similar things is not that they try to monetize their browser. What annoys me is that they don't have the trust in their own product that people would be willing to support them if they just asked. What annoys me is that they try those borderline dark-patterns and still try to sell it as a great feature for the user.

Just be honest to your users and if they understand your reasons they will support you, if they trust your decisions. Firefox was once a browser whos users bought T-shirts on it after all.

I prefer it to Chromium due to its more native feel, the quality of the multi-device password and history sync, and the ability to zap tabs to and from my laptop.

adblock also works wonderfully.

I don't trust Google to implement these features or honour my privacy.

I use FF almost exclusively on a desktop but can't afford luxury of running it on a laptop.

Vivaldi supports it, but it's too slow.

So not trying to excuse anything, just would like the focus to be redirected. Everyone always touts Pocket and the salary as these big things here on HN. But the masses don't care. It's not where the problem is.

This imaginary company will have bills to pay. What search business will cover that company's costs? :)

3. Firefox fades into obscurity/irrelevance, Chromium becomes the platform of the web, people realize this and forks abound, and eventually someone makes it into an ECMA standard and Google de facto loses control of it.

Oh also, another one:

4. The Linux Foundation or some other entity steps in and just builds a new GPL'd browser, which can mimic the success story of the Linux kernel (where the copyleft license will ensure that the vast number of open-source hackers prefer to contribute to it over something like the BSD-licensed Chromium).

4. The Zuckaverse becomes the primary way people interact with the Internet. Both Firefox and Chrome fade into obscurity. Everything is propriety and behind walled gardens.

However to my astonishment, these isn't even one Gecko-based alternative. I've found a few based on WebKit (I've ended up using Qt5 in Python), a few based on Chromium (including Electron / nwjs), but zero for Gecko...

If perhaps Gecko would be easily embedable (and perhaps used less resources than Chromium), it could start appearing in other applications, and thus at least get some market-share in that segment.

A long time ago, Mozilla did have the option to embed Gecko into apps. It was badly-documented and difficult to use.

A modern embeddable Gecko engine could be promoted as a modular, cross-platform alternative to Electron. The Gecko advantages: stripped-down, faster and less memory hungry than Electron (assuming these features can be achieved).

The traction that Electron has gained as a cross-platform option for building apps is huge and is only set to get bigger (whether for better or worse). And yet, Mozilla is completely absent from this space dominated by Chromium/Electron.

Imagine if thousands of developers place their trust in Mozilla because they have built their cross-platform apps using Gecko. They want to see Mozilla grow and succeed because they have a stake in seeing Gecko development succeed too. (And that could include large corporates sponsoring Mozilla to sustain development of Gecko.) Unfortunately, it is probably too late (or too unrealistic) for this to happen.

Would any of the above revive Firefox? Possibly not. However, an embeddable Gecko engine may give Mozilla new opportunities.

You mean Facebook? No thanx.

There are plenty of aging Firefox forks like Pale Moon withering away with years old Firefox source and open security vulnerabilities.

Mostly, it was horrible old sites that were designed for IE.

Of course ymmv

And this is not an isolated case... Each time I've had to submit a complaint about issues encountered while using a webapp / website (including for payment systems, utility companies, local government, etc.) I often get the same response: "try it with Chrome" or "we support only Chrome".

I still remember the "works best with Internet Explorer", which then changed to "works best with Firefox", and now it seems "works best with Chrome"... :)

For my day to day use everything works fine. I don't remember anything that didn't except the vscode.dev thing that appeared in the front page yesterday. Apparently the local file access is not supported/enabled in Firefox yet.

And when I was messing with CSS a few months ago there was... background-blur? Or something like that, not supported in Firefox. But pretty minor things.

Don't remember anything else where I had to switch to chromium lately.

Ditto for GMail, Microsoft Office, Windows etc.

I know your designers tell you that we need to look "fresh" but you can do that with minimal tweaks, most people would rather a stable codebase that just works and doesn't cause surprises or bugs imho.

But they don’t sell the vpn in my country and they give lockwise away for free but leave it broken on iOS.

People might praise Microsoft for moving Edge to Chromium but ultimately it's because Microsoft couldn't compete on web standards and security and didn't want to invest further resources in to something not earning them money.

That's exactly how qt-webengine is packaged. And qutebrowser (based on qt-webengine) is fantastic for a volunteer effort, but memory leaks and other issues, too much stuff for one volunteer to realistically address, make it difficult to use as a daily driver. And that's just building a UI around an existing rendering engine!

The root of the issue is: W3C specifications are >100 million words, and growing at a rate of hundreds of new standards per year. So even if the Chromium code base were forked from its current state, a team of full-time developers would be required just to keep up with new W3C standards.

What I find tragic about the Mozilla mismanagement is, if one guy is willing to develop and maintain qutebrowser as a volunteer, then surely Mozilla can find developers who would be willing to work on Firefox at sub-FAANG-but-reasonable salaries without the waterfront San Francisco office.

1. The social justice stuff and "this lady" is clearly the poster's personal view and politics coming to bear. And regardless of it being an illogical argument, it's obviously sexist and culture wars-y etc.

2. Having said that, bosses taking pay rises while workers is laid off is shit, and when they say it's to remain "competitive" I want to scream. Competetive to who? Who's to say that the same pool of people have to be interchangable between any one job at the same time? Who says we need these people running organisations anyway, especially non profits?

3. Seriously though, hope FF pulls through. But also I'm so so sad about MDN, and would want Mozilla foundation to shape up and be ok too so that they could bring MDN back.