Firefox would fit neatly in the corporate world in my opinion. You can have a centrally administered configuration file and Firefox is indeed able to just use certificated from your OS. It is just a small toggle. Still, a bit of effort and maybe advertising would do wonders, because there are companies critical of Chrome that think data protection is worth more than personal advertising. I think Edge is trying to fit in here.
Sure, Edge can be configured by domain policies and that is easy too. For example disallowing https exceptions is a popular recent policy (that gets reverted pretty quickly).
It would be easier for companies (who aren't anti Google) to administer Chrome policy via their existing Google/Gmail accounts and Google Workspace. Profiles, sync, extensions, etc. can all be centrally administered. And also deployed to Chromebooks for certain users. All without having to manage the overhead of a minority browser with < 5% marketshare. The "I can't get this web app to work in Firefox, how do I install Chrome?" support calls probably outweigh any ideological preference for a libre browser.
Especially for any web shop... Firefox is even less relevant than Microsoft now and forcing it as a primary internal browser is a great way to alienate your company from end user experiences.
I couldn't name you a single webapp that requires Chrome and it wouldn't fit our quality p expectations and would get booted. Apps that require a certain browser will cause problems in the future or force Chrome to become IE. Can you centrally administrate Google accounts? Because employees certainly aren't allowed to use their privat ones.
Small business/government sites in the US sadly are very guilty of breaking. Esp. for payments, which makes me feel like I'm back in the late 90's with form submissions...
Outside of corps ideologically opposed to using Office, like IBM and Oracle, I've almost never seen anybody that didn't run on Outlook. At least since Notes became abandonware anyway.
People still use Microsoft? My experience is largely in small medium biz and academia, both of which use a lot of Google. I haven't seen a Microsoft shop in decades. But that's just my own limited spheres of work.
(edit: to be clear, wasn't trying to be snarky. Genuinely surprised. Thought Microsoft intranets were a thing of legacy dinosaur companies, didn't know that modern enterprises still did that. But I don't work in enterprise, only in small biz, where nobody can afford dedicated sys admins and everything is in the cloud. From what I hear though, the UX of Outlook these days is better than Gmail and gcal (which isn't saying much, I know). Might be worth trying again someday...)
It depends heavily on the industry, but in my experience the vast majority of the business world runs on Microsoft products. For a lot of businesses (think more accountants or law firms than devs), Outlook, Excel and Word are must-haves. That means Windows is a must-have. That means if you don't have the supporting infrastructure (Azure or Active Directory) then administration becomes a nightmare, so those are a must-have. And at that point, since everything else is Microsoft, Teams gets used for comms and OneDrive gets used for filesharing.
In the small dev world it's kinda the opposite. Linuxy servers beget Mac dev machines, so AD is mostly out, leaving Apple enterprise stuff (shitty) or Google (OK, but nowhere near as powerful as Microsoft).
GDocs becomes the lowest common denominator and many people don't have Word anymore. Data is either cloud native (json, csv) or else imported into Gsheets.
I suspect some of this is due to the modern educational pipeline too, with gsuite (or Google Workspace, or whatever it's called these days) producing a generation of young workers who grew up on that stuff. It's caused quite a generation gap at my current workplace, where the older workers use Microsoft and the younger ones use Google and stuff keeps getting converted back and forth. And once in a while someone sends a PDF and both sides go nooooo...
I know several security professionals who do incident response and therefore see a lot of IT setup across multiple domains since ransomwares are endemic nowadays, and according to them 99% of the shops they intervene run Office or Outlook(365) in some capacity.
Also, I'd be willing to believe your average Google Workspace, preconfigured by Google, is more secure out of the box than your average Microsoft LAN administered by somebody who once took a certification course twenty years ago.
But when something breaks on self-hosted Microsoft stuff, at least you can hire someone to fix it. When something breaks on Google Workspace, hey, it's a free vacation day for the whole staff!
Not, not any big ones, but I've seen a lot of Firefox specific bugs for smaller sites in the last 2 or 3 years. I've had to debug Firefox issues for my coworkers more than anything else. Sometimes Safari breaks too but that's important because of iOS. Firefox is only used by the ideologues and we don't bother officially supporting it anymore...
I found Amazon unstable on FF for a while a few years ago, it would randomly go off and spin the CPU or eat a pile of RAM, sometimes recovering and sometimes needing to be killed. It was one of the things that pushed me towards using Chrome more. Chrome has since started to have a few issues (occasionally dying and not remembering a chunk of my open tabs being the big recent one) so I'm starting to move back the other way ATM.
M$ teams web doesn't work in Firefox. I was forced to install Chromium under Kubuntu just to use teams at work, as I avoid to install the crappy full teams application like the plague, given it is proprietary, resource heavy and tries to auto-launch whenever it can.
> Firefox would fit neatly in the corporate world in my opinion.
Lack of corp support is one of the things that harmed FF from what I saw. Until a few years ago it was not as easy to control FF via group policy¹ as it was Chrome, so FF didn't get a look in. Telling infrastructure managers “but you can do X instead and it is just as easy or easier” would fall on deaf ears because while as convenient in isolation it is still something different instead of integrating with what they did for everything else they permitted on their user machine builds.
Among the points missing under the "I can attribute this decline to various factors" section is IMO that Moz/FF have managed to alienate their original user base/plugin developers to become "more like Chrome". Maybe that's an unfair thing to say, but I guess it doesn't matter anymore anyway.
Which is hilarious since extensions are clearly something Chrome barely cares about at all as is obvious from the Chrome extension page where one can’t even search for extensions to install.
It's not unfair to say, and the more they tried to do it the more they lost any differentiating feature they had to normal users and just became "slow Chrome".
What's wrong with using Chromium though? I understand most of the work being done on it is by Google, but do they control the direction of the project?
I've started using it as my main browser both in daily use and dev.
In the past I had trouble with client projects or dev tools only working in chrome, but I decided that the only way things get freer is to make myself fix those pain points when I come across them.
Firefox is not a (serious) alternative and it is quite frankly irrelevant.
It is either Chrome (Blink) or Safari (WebKit) and I would much prefer WebKit-based browsers over Chromium-based ones and the market-share tells the full story on where to target the most users and it is not Firefox.
Why do you think that these web developers stick banners everywhere to force you to run their apps in several Chromium-based browsers?
Market-share and global user usage says otherwise. [0] [1] [2]
I know it is painful to admit, but the truth is that Firefox usage and market share is in constant decline and the users still do not care about it enough to use it. The decline started since the 2010s and continues to this decade with them still far behind.
So to recycle your sentence: 'Firefox is not even close to being a contender since Chrome, Safari, Edge and Brave have successfully replaced and overtaken it'.
It is clear that the data is painful for you to accept, but it is what it is. Mac users are still using Safari or Chrome-based browsers over Firefox. Even when the users aren't on macOS, it is evident that Firefox has been totally replaced by Chrome, Brave, Edge on Windows.
As for 'Linux' on the Desktop, using the same sources, the data is insignificant for any browser as the usage numbers are extremely low. In fact, its so small that it is not even on the Top 10 global user usage data and is thus irrelevant to all browser market share for the Linux Desktop.
But sure, Firefox on the Linux Desktop has never been more popular than ever as evidently shown by the HN commenters on this post and is even used more than Chrome. /s
This kind of response is just mystifying to me. You can see for yourself that Firefox has a sizeable share of the market, so clearly it is "a serious alternative" and is not "irrelevant". What's the point in making these statements? Is it just a way of saying "boo Firefox, I don't like Firefox"?
> You can see for yourself that Firefox has a sizeable share of the market...
Since when was a single digit of 3% (and declining) a 'sizeable share' of the market?
> What's the point in making these statements? Is it just a way of saying "boo Firefox, I don't like Firefox"?
The evidence is already out there [0] and it is based on the obvious fact that Firefox market share and usage is still declining. Even the comments in this whole post are saying the same thing about Firefox becoming increasingly more irrelevant.
> Since when was a single digit of 3% (and declining) a 'sizeable share' of the market?
That site is counting mobile browsers too, which eat up a lot of market share. It's 3.9% (so more like 4% than 3%) counting mobile, and 7.9% if you don't. Considering the number of web users, that's absolutely a sizeable share. It represents hundreds of millions of people.
> it is based on the obvious fact that Firefox market share and usage is still declining
And that would have been a reasonable statement to make.
I have no idea how someone can get so stuck up their assumptions as to say something like that.
I have been using Firefox since circa 2010, and can count on my fingers how many websites do not work properly in it.
Most of the time it's just some CYA "I am a lazy/underpaid-subcontractor dev and didn't bother opening my website on a non-majority browser to check if it is broken" banner asking me to switch (which nowadays I mostly don't see thanks to uBlock's Annoyances list); the website was an actual tech demo of something that only Chrome had at the time; or it was an incredibly convoluted government website best browsed with Mosaic or some shit like that.
> I have no idea how someone can get so stuck up their assumptions as to say something like that.
The entire comments section of this post painfully admits the decline of Firefox as it has been quickly replaced by Chrome and the users do not care about Firefox's features or even its privacy features. Perhaps the 'assumptions' are backed by the market share and global usage mentioned in the article's website and the original source [0] assuming you have read both.
On top of that which wasn't mentioned is that Firefox cannot possibly counter Chrome's dominance since its creator Mozilla is still being kept on financial life support by Google themselves. Even with Mozilla receiving millions from Google, they are still failing behind.
To reuse this quote from the article: 'Soon Google are going to be in complete control of web standards, unless something drastically changes.'
Well if Firefox is the so-called 'alternative' to the Chrome hegemony, then they are doing a very poor job at convincing the end users to switch back to Firefox and stop Chrome's dominance given the global browser usage and market share.
I prefer typing to pointing -- and I like clean interfaces --, so I use the VIm-inspired but Chromium-based Qutebrowser; but maybe I should just use Firefox and let the inconvenience of pointing inspire me to browse less. Qutebrowser would -- at least alternatively -- use the Firefox backend if it could, but Mozilla has chosen not to make it usable by other browsers than Firefox.
I feel the article misses how Firefox's inability to get a foothold on the mobile platform contributed to its decline. There are more people today using web browsers via mobile then desktop. In many poorer countries the first and only access to the open internet for the people is through chrome on Android.
I don't blame Mozilla for this though since they did not have a monopoly on a platform to capitalize on unlike the other players.
Sadly Safari seems to be the only other option.
For a long time Firefox has been dependent on Google for sponsorship. This is a toxic dependency that Firefox hasn't been able to rid itself of and is seeming increasingly less plausible as time goes by.
I'd use FireFox in iOS if I had my extensions and containers available. Sadly FireFox isn't even able to make proper use of the system wide ad blocking method iOS offers (probably due to iOS). I found DDG browser to block stuff a lot better (and I like the UI more).
But FireFox on Android was perfect, at least it was until the latest UI update when suddenly they lost the notion of favorites (or, they were now hidden under "new tab" instead of available on touching the address bar) and you needed to open a new tab for just about anything. I'd still prefer it over Safari or Chrome though.
Personally I didn't really like the latest changes in the Firefox mobile UI, especially with how it's managing tabs, but I'm sticking with it. I have also to recognize that with recent updates, it has stopped crashing (or at least the frequency is way reduced).
The "jump back in" feature and the "new tab" button not actually opening a new tab until you tell it where to go are what annoys me the most right now. I wish I could go back to the old, saner behavior, which was in Fenix (the "redesign") for a while.
I use Firefox on Android, it works pretty good. Having dark reader and uBlock Origin on mobile is a big plus. But I do hate the lack of configuration options, pull-to-refresh, and their need to 'approve' extensions and in particular not allowing any kind of sideloading of extensions. For this reason I can't use some of the extensions I like (because they won't allow them in the firefox store either). This is in particular one that bypasses paywalls. I assume the google deal has a lot to do with that.
I wish they would just charge for Firefox sync. The users that are left mostly use it for privacy reasons and they know that privacy costs money.
Safari is not an option for me, I use all platforms but I want the same browser on every platform which means no safari :)
Hmm... so it hasn't. I would swear I've used it, but it's not working for me if I test it now. I'm mainly on ios now, so maybe that's what confused me.
Recent Nightly releases have pull-to-refresh, and you can jump through hoops to install all extensions on the mozilla site (not sure about side-loading).
I was surprised Mozilla gave up on Servo before realising its potential, particularly for a parallel layout engine, because that could have been a massive advantage on mobile, especially on cheap smartphones which have many cores but each low performance.
> they did not have a monopoly on a platform to capitalize on unlike the other players
Considering how poorly pretty much every vendor who wasn't named "Apple" was fumbling around trying to layer negative value added customizations on top of Android in the early days (and continued doing so for years), there was a ripe opportunity to ship a "Mozilla mobile" consisting of a stock Android device + Firefox. Of course, the powers that be predictably blew it.
Firefox on Android is absolutely excellent these days, but it still shows how Mozilla is really hesitant to embrace it. It's the only mobile browser with really adequate ad-blocking, thanks to extension support. There are a lot of other extensions which are really useful on mobile that aren't on the recommended list, though. I can understand why they restrict extensions (some don't have a viable UI for mobile or would require significant changes), but I recently went through the hoops to install non-approved extensions, and having Privacy Redirect and Stylus are life-changers.
Both Vivaldi and Brave have adblockers built in by default, and Brave's both won't get fucked over by Manifest v3 (since they're part of the browser) and do CNAME uncloaking, the thing that makes uBO better on Firefox than Chromium.
> Clearly, that market share was lost solely to Chrome & co.3 I can attribute this decline to various factors:
>Google’s massive development resources and marketing machine.
>Most people not thinking about the long-term ramifications of ending up in a market with a single vendor in it.
>Firefox losing its status of a shiny new thing over the years.
>Mozilla’s inability to capitalize on the popularity of Firefox in the past. I think almost all of their revenue came from a search deal with Google.
The true reasons Firefox lost market share are:
1. Firefox has become a mess
2. Mozilla is terribly mismanaged
To see Firefox thrive, we have to push towards management change while there's still something to be saved or by forking Firefox
The true reasons Firefox lost market share is because we, developer & tech people started to install Chrome on family computers instead of Firefox because it was safer & faster (way way faster). And we never came back from it.
Why would I even want to install Firefox on my families computer? The thing is, I want them to have a long term, good working solution that doesn't become a pain in my ass. Firefox isn't very stable for non-tech people, that's the sad truth. Mozilla is badly missmanaged, they are killing Mozilla and specially Firefox. Things need to change, badly.
Firefox just pushed yet another pointless UI change six months ago. People using their software just to go about with their lives don't like pointless UI changes.
This. I don't want to have my family asking to teach them how to use the browser everytime Mozilla decides to do a pointless UI change.
Chrome pretty much barely changes where things are and how things behave and it's a pretty fast browser. If you want to fix Firefox go complain with their management.
>If you want to fix Firefox go complain with their management.
Despite being an open source project, Firefox management seems to be much less in touch with and responsive to their user's feedback compared to other browsers. As an example, both Safari and Firefox had the same bad idea at about the same time - converting tabs into floating buttons (although in the case of Safari the bad at least served a useful purpose: increasing vertical real estate for the browser). Both got negative feedback. The difference? Firefox management dug their heels deeper and told their users, "suck it up, this is the future of web browsing", whereas Apple listened to the feedback and killed the bad idea during the beta itself.
Yet another example: killing off single site browsing or progressive web apps.
Yeah there's need to be changes around Mozilla, something like it happened to AMD I guess, otherwise the latest of us still using Firefox will get tired of it and change to any Chromium-based browser (or Safari...).
Always latest - it updates itself everywhere. So if there was a change, it was so minor I haven't even noticed it, less complain about it. But either way: what was the breaking UI change months ago again?
On the whole, people using their software just to go about with their lives don't notice pointless UI changes of the scale you're talking about (changing the appearance of tabs). They don't even know what parts of the window are controlled by the application and which parts are controlled by the web page (if they even understand that distinction), and web pages change their UIs a lot faster than Firefox does.
To be fair, he does have a point. Firefox constantly nags you about new "features", the vast majority of which are bullshit (and even if they were useful, ultimately it's still getting in the way at the worst possible time). I could see this throwing less technical users off.
I'm not sure whether Chrome is any worse on this front, but either way Firefox is terribly annoying. I think it's the most user-hostile open source software I know of.
It is pretty annoying. I tried daily driving Firefox for some time, and found it inferior to chrome, though if you'd ask me to define exactly why, I wouldn't be able to do so. However, when an update wiped my profile, requiring manual fixing, that was it. I did restore it, but that shouldn't have been an issue to begin with.
I use firefox exclusively. Every few weeks, it installs an update and refuses to open a new tab until a restart. It frequently fails to restart. It occasionally nukes my session so I can't restore my tabs. It seems to occasionally forget/unset my preference to not auto-update. If it just had a status indicator to show that an update is available, I'd happily update at the end of a workday. Instead, it's interrupted a talk I was giving at work because it silently updated and spontaneously wouldn't let me open a new tab. It's not even stable for tech people.
Are you using Firefox on Linux, installed via a package manager? What you describe is the behaviour when your package manager updates Firefox in the background from under its feet - not the fault of Firefox. Firefox's own updater will not automatically update without warning.
Only, I don't experience anything like this behavior on any other application. This is a Firefox problem, even if Ubuntu is to blame for overriding my setting.
And, no, I just checked. I don't have any auto-updates in Ubuntu either.
It's really a you problem. The market share of Linux desktops is low enough that in reality it doesn't matter, and you're pulling the rug(binaries) from underneath a web browser (one of the most complex software projects known to man) and expect it to keep running flawlessly.
I'm using NixOS where every version of every dependency of every program I install will be saved until I cleanup the garbage (1 command) so I don't have your issue.
If this was Windows you wouldn't be able to update Firefox while it was running because Windows doesn't support overwriting open files (technically you can rename them and insert new ones with the same name, but that's not the point).
You're holding it wrong and blaming the project, close the software you update before you update and you might have more success.
It's not Firefox's default settings, It's a technical challenge that they haven't solved. But that I would argue shouldn't really be solved. _YOU_ chose to update your browser while it was running, you're on a non-mainstream platform (Linux Desktop) and you're unable to grasp that pulling binaries and replacing them with others could cause issues.
No, Firefox's default setting is to upgrade even more aggressively than I'm experiencing. And, it's worth pointing out, the browser works fine, except that I'm prevented from opening a new tab. Sometimes I really don't want the interruption, and I just copy URLs and recycle tabs. That goes fine, it's just an annoyance considered by the developers to be a feature.
When the distro updates Firefox out from underneath it Firefox's options are; crash because API call does not match, detect the API incompatibility and prompt the user to do a clean restart, or spend a monumental amount of engineering work to maintain API compatibility while running mixed Gecko versions.
Using the Mozilla build in /opt, the Snap [1] or Flatpack [2] versions will avoid the distro updating Firefox out from underneath it.
Linux also does not allow you to overwrite a running program; you'll get ETXTBSY.
The difference to Windows is that Linux allows you to delete (unlink) files that are in use. The inode actually owning the data continues to exist until the program is dead.
Yes the file still exists physically in disk, but if you were to execute the binary path again, would that give you the old or new result? I'm not sure how Firefox process isolation works, but it could be (armchair guess) that they just spawn the binary with inputs, which would be a possible cause of incompability.
>The true reasons Firefox lost market share is because we, developer & tech people started to install Chrome on family computers instead of Firefox because it was safer & faster (way way faster). And we never came back from it.
Which comes down to the reasons I've already stated.
When Chrome came out, it was way better. Now I don't really see big difference in performance, they have similar extensions, frequent updates, sync, etc.
I prefer Firefox but I don't really need to install it on family computers because whatever browser they use is probably good enough.
I recently moved back to chromium from Firefox. FF tended to waste a lot more cpu; and, I tend not to restart my machines for days on end, and those memory leaks were killer.
Firefox sync and Chrome sync came out about the same time if I remember correctly. The first release was in Firefox 4.0, but Mozilla Weave (the addon that eventually developed into the first version of Firefox Sync) existed since 2007, before Chrome's first release.
"developer & tech people started to install Chrome on family computers instead of Firefox..."
I'm not so certain those numbers compare with the 10s of millions of people(100s?) who's default browser was hijacked by nefarious bundles in every 3rd party installer under the sun back in the 2000s and early 2010s.. Those people knew no better and have been conditioned(or just don't care) to continue whatever gets them interneting.
Those reasons might have applied half a decade ago. I was one of the early adopters of chrome and I've since switched back to Firefox for a better experience
Do you truly, honestly believe that being preinstalled on Android and ChromeOS, advertised specifically to Firefox users on the homepage of the #1 most visited website in the world (google.com, and it was literally the only ad that has ever been allowed there), and shoved into all kinds of installers for Antivirus, Adobe, Java and so on with the "make Chrome my default browser" button automatically checked --- all of that had nothing to do with the "true reason" Firefox has been trending down?
The marketing campaign for Chrome alone, if it is even possible to assign a dollar value to it, would have cost billions of dollars for anyone other than Google.
End users don't care about the management of firefox being messy or not. They install the web browsers that are advertised at them. Every time they go to a youtube link or to their gmail inbox there is a banner ad to install google chrome. Corporate IT now installs google chrome by default on work hardware at a lot of organizations because it works out of the box with their google business products, so you are familiar with google chrome from the workplace or even in schools with chromebooks now too. Google has millions of dollars more to blow than Mozilla at this sort of arms race and its shown in the market share.
There is one thing I don't understand from the article. What is that he is so afraid of?that the website becomes more standarized and developers don't need to make a website for 5 different browsers? Or that because of that users will have less problems? Is that such a big deal to make most of the browsers dependent on chromium? Isn't chromium open source and tomorrow anyone could create a better browser? I use Vivaldi, can't be happier.... Some people seem to be worry about a lot of stuff
"Chromium would likely die if Google abandoned it."
I believe that is highly unlikely. At root the Blink engine is actively supported by several big tech heavyweights. Microsoft Edge is based on it. A rarely mentioned but important derivative browser is Silk (Fire tablets etc.) that Amazon develops. Then there are a bunch of smaller fish with Brave leading that pack.
I think the engine would survive just fine without Google. There was a time when you're view held, but that time has past.
As someone who lived through the previous browser monopoly (MSIE), let me assure you that giving control over the entire web to one company is bad for everyone. Google didn't make Chrome out of the goodness of their hearts.
Just as a data-point, I forced myself to use Firefox on Mobile and Desktop in my personal life, and Chrome at work.
* Firefox is fine, the sync works well, I don't see any of the drama around management or new-tab or search being an issue, and I get a pile of benefits like sandboxing and better ad-control.
* Chrome is faster, but it also has literal billions of investment.
There really isn't that much drama about this? Sure I wish Firefox had more market share, but it also runs on a fraction of Chrome's budget, so it's never going to be as good, and I can't judge people for not caring about helping Google.
I've held the same view as the author for some time now. The popularity of "ungoogled-chromium" in some corners of the internet has always struck me as trading the data collection aspect of chrome for furthering the chromium hegemony even further. Same goes for Vivaldi and Brave.
I really love Firefox still.. Though they are starting to annoy me. Especially with GUI changes and the lack of customisation thereof. Like Compact mode disappearing. For the most used app on most desktops, customisation is super important. I think they're jumping on the 'opinionated software' bandwagon too much.
It still has some powerful features though, like E2E encrypted sync, multi-account containers etc. I'll keep using it. But they're aiming at the mainstream too much which has already given up on them. They need to win back the enthusiasts first instead of alienating us. Only then does it make sense to thing about mainstream adoption again.
I know and I've done this, but the writing is on the wall.. It may disappear at some point and that just annoys me because it's really valuable IMO. It makes me unsure if I want to keep using it when that happens. If they aren't planning to remove it, why remove the UI button for it?
And it just looks so bulky with compact mode off. I tried to get used to it but no. I actually used it without compact mode before, but with the latest version the compact mode is using about the same vertical space as the old normal mode :)
As long as Chrom(e|ium) isn't limited to one architecture/platform like MSIE was, I don't see this as a problem. I'm using Chromium on my Raspberry Pi right now to post this. I could never dream of doing such a thing 20 years ago. I'd have to hope someone hadn't broken the site for Mozilla and that it wouldn't crash repeatedly. The MSIE-dominant days were bad, but we're nowhere near that now.
I think part of this discussion needs to be that Firefox, while open source, doesn't provide footing for the community to build browser forks the way Chromium does. This sort of open usage, ironically, feels very fitting to the spirit of Firefox, but they're not even close to Chrom(e|ium).
I've been building a browser full time the past year+ (synth.app) and FF core wasn't really even an option. They've done very little to make the engine usable outside of Firefox.
Now I'm sure there are a variety of savory and unsavory things that led here, but building that stuff out seems like a good way to grow the ecosystem. At least they would've had a chance at capturing the Brave/Opera/Edge/etc market and those seats at the committees.
This isn't to say that I'm not worried about these standards merging like this. I've spent many hours working out weird chromium only behaviors that websites rely on these days to do things (and egregiously so if they detect an agent remotely resembling chrome).
> ... weird chromium only behaviors that websites rely on these days to do things (and egregiously so if they detect an agent remotely resembling chrome).
oh man. I need to find some time to write about how bad it is.
The gnarliness spans the whole stack. From weird java-applet like API escalation behavior if chrome is detected (e.g. Google properties feature gate a ton around this) to how there is not even a clear way to get a DRM license for a custom browser without waiting for Google indefinitely [1].
Here's a challenge: fire up a chromium fork and get it to run a relaxed DRM website like Netflix. If you get that far now try loading HBOMax with their fingerprinting/DRM protection on top. I'm not even sure it'd be possible in FF (at least without some DRM piggy backing if there isn't one).
Yup, as someone who worked on fixing issues with IE5/IE6/IE7 behaviours I definitely feel the slow burning fire of Chrome repeating that whole saga once again. And probably in a much more painful way given the explosive growth of the internet and browsers since the early 2000s (I started working with web dev around 2005).
I wonder how difficult would be an open source community project whose explicit aim would be to take the Firefox code base and make it more modular and embeddable, like Chromium? Would it be too much work for a community effort?
They also had XULRunner… I was even lucky enough to have been using it in a professional context. Unfortunately it wasn't well supported; trying to submit patches was always painful, and framing issues as a Firefox bug was slightly more likely to get things merged. I imagine it's easier than landing changes in Chromium (because Electron is a completely separate project), at least.
Even if possible, such an initiative could only be successful if Mozilla supports it otherwise the “new” code will quickly go out of sync with the Firefox codebase.
Servo wasn't a fork, nor was it meaningfully a "community" project - sure there were community contributors (it was a fun project to hack on) but most of the meaty work was being done by Mozilla employees.
That's a real missed opportunity. Firefox would have made a fantastic embedded webview, and could have plausibly become the core of Electron. Back when webviews were IE, with atrocious Javascript support and all the usual IE quirks, Firefox was a superior product and interconnecting with other software is very in line with the open source ethos.
Enough features to distinguish on, enough political/managerial reasons for choosing an independent FLOSS engine over one controlled by Google.
Sure, Edge/MS won't move to this engine anywhere soon. Nor will Brave switch over tomorrow, or electron rebuild around their tooling. But the world is full or "HTML-2-PDF renderers, headless testing toolkits, (embedded) webview-libraries or electron-alike toolkits, which are now almost all exclusively Chromium based.
I think that is a problem many open source programs have, and could improve.
A lot of GUI based programs should think of implementing parts of it as a library others can use. I remember early Git implementations in IDEs where they just ran git commands in the background and parsed the command line output. Imagine if the same had been done with SQLite, would it still be as popular today?
I don't have much experience with creating desktop software, but it seems to me that separating the GUI from the "engine" would bring other benefits too.
I have often looked at OSS and wanted to use parts of it myself. An email client might have a really good mail parser that handles encoding, attachments etc. But decoupling it from the rest of the program would take too much time.
> Firefox, while open source, doesn't provide footing for the community to build browser forks the way Chromium does.
This reminds that Wine uses Mozilla code for their Internet Explorer replacement (wine-gecko). I wonder how far behind Firefox's rendering engine that code is, and how much effort is involved for the Wine maintainers.
This seems to be a repeat of the GNOME issues years and years and years ago where people would complain that donations were used to try and encourage women to program instead of spending it on infrastructure etc. I seem to remember people who complained about it were shouted down as mysogenist.
It seems the organisations forget why they're here - to write software, not to try and solve all of mankind's issues and injustices. The scope becomes too broad and unfocused.
The Mozilla Foundation has seen their role as much larger than that for a long time. The first Mozilla manifesto came out in 2008 [1] and includes:
The Mozilla Foundation pledges to support the Mozilla Manifesto in its activities. Specifically, we will:
- build and enable open-source technologies and communities that support the Manifesto's principles;
build and deliver great consumer products that support the Manifesto's principles;
- use the Mozilla assets (intellectual property such as copyrights and trademarks, infrastructure, funds, and reputation) to keep the Internet an open platform;
- promote models for creating economic value for the public benefit; and
- promote the Mozilla Manifesto principles in public discourse and within the Internet industry
It still seems to hinge around consumer products and communities to support the products.
Perhaps the cart has now been put in front of the horse somewhat and they think that a great community (or being involved in issues entirely separate to software) will somehow magically create great software.
Ah interesting. I wasn't aware of the bankruptcy claims later on. I just remember the original issue where people were complaining about the focus on outreach programs instead of just software in general.
The only direct way currently is to pay for associated products like Firefox VPN, assuming it's available in your region. That money will go directly to Mozilla Corporation, which develops Firefox. Donations go to Mozilla Foundation, which does advocacy and various world-improving things (IMO). Mozilla Corporation cannot legally accept direct donations IIUC. I think it'd be a money laundering loophole or something?
Servo was never going to grow into a complete browser, and much of it was absorbed into Gecko (the Firefox codebase). But I agree, it would be great to have the Servo idea pushed further forward.
I've been using Firefox exclusively on desktop and mobile for a few years now, and it is quite good. Lighter that Chrome (good because I'm a bit of a cheapskate when it comes to hardware), everything works, and it is quick. And they finally got their Linux support up to par (in the late 00s early 10s, Firefox for Linux was a forgotten stepchild, missing most of the newer features and integration present in the other platforms).
I used to hold the same opinion: Google controls the world because everything is Blink/Chromium based! Must use Firefox to protest!
Then I looked closer look at the history of Chromium and Blink.
The reality is that a lot of the other "Chromium-based" browsers actually only use the Blink renderer. They don't use many (if any) other Chromium components other than probably V8.
In ancient times, Blink itself was a fork of Webkit. So, does that mean Apple controls everything?? But Webkit actually came from KDE's KHTML, didn't it.. Linux wins...
The kicker for me is: Blink and V8 are open source, and anyone can fork them at any time. Because of this, Microsoft, Oracle, Brave - every "Chromium" based browser vendor is contributing code. So does Google really control us that much? Blink and V8 make a rock solid browser core and are being worked on by a lot of companies, not just Google. It's like the Linux kernel - kind of a marvel of open source. Not something we need to fight against so viciously, in my opinion.
(Edit: "rock solid" might sound extreme to some... The HTML and JS specs are absurdly complex to the point where there's basically no hope of anyone implementing them from 0. There's a lot of bloat in modern web, no doubt. But if you're really worried about crazy JS features cluttering your browsing experience, you can go clone the Chromium source and pull out the crap you don't like.)
True. People forgot that Microsoft had been developing its own browser for years before they moved to Chromium. That team and expertise didn't just disappear. They've been doing significant work in that code base. See https://twitter.com/ericlaw/status/1329200077517295618 from a year ago. Having that technical power does give them quite a lot of control over the code base which can help balance the political power here.
I have not forgotten, but Gates and Ballmer are gone and the market situation for MS is totally different. People don't have to take their Evil Empire monopolist crap of the past.
That doesn't stop them from trying though, and there are plenty of examples from recent times that prove that the difference between the old MS and the new MS are much smaller than their PR department would like you to believe.
The biggest difference is that the new MS is no longer selling you software but access to software.
> People don't have to take their Evil Empire monopolist crap of the past.
Advertising in the Start Menu enters the room
Often enough, it feels as if there are two brains inside Microsoft - shiny new MS with Azure, WSL, VSCode on the one side, and old, schoolyard bully MS with advertising, telemetry, forcing cloud everywhere on the other side.
Yes. Contributing code to something doesn't mean that you suddenly control the direction of that thing. Google still makes the big decisions about what gets to enter the codebase: which web features to support, which ones to deprecate, how to interpret standards, and how to slowly align the web with their own financial incentives.
>Yes. Contributing code to something doesn't mean that you suddenly control the direction of that thing.
I think the idea of gp's point about others forking code means the forkers can also influence the code because they control the fork.
Otherwise, if we take your comment at face value, we'd conclude that Google's contributions to Webkit means it can't "suddenly control the direction" of Apple's Webkit. That's true, but also becomes irrelevant because Google controls its fork of "Blink".
In other words, does Apple's Webkit control us that much? No, because it seems like Google's Blink/Chromium is sufficiently independent. If we go back farther in the timeline, are we concerned that KHTML controls us? No, because it seems like Apple's fork of Webkit is independent and not beholden to KHTML decisions.
If Microsoft really wanted to, it seems like they have the resources to do what Apple did to KHTML and what Chrome did to Webkit.
There are forks, and there are forks. If you take a codebase like Blink, fork it, and commit to maintaining that fork entirely by yourself independent of the upstream then yeah, what the upstream does at that point is kinda irrelevant. If, however, you're still relying on upstream for important patches and you're just rebasing your small changeset on top of that every so often, then there are limits to how far you can diverge from upstream before pulling in those necessary changes becomes impractical.
If I understand correctly, Edge, Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, etc are all running on the later type of Blink "fork".
Does Google still contribute to Webkit? I was under the impression that stopped a long time ago after Blink and Webkit sufficiently diverged.
This makes no sense because it ignores the reality that unlike KHTML, or WebKit, the vast majority of browsers were not based on those rendering engines. There was never a time where a web app developer saw your browser was not Webkit or KHTML based and told you to upgrade to them on every platform. There was never a time where KHTML or Webkit completely dominated browser share.
There was also a much wider array of browser engines at the time (MS had 2, Opera had 1, Firefox had much higher market share than it does today).
So KHTML/Webkit hardly had control over the web the way Chromium might because they never had the market share Chromium did, and further, they were never the dominant engine embedded in nearly every browser the way Chromium/Blink are now.
I guess the question I'd ask here is: why does it matter that Chromium has massive market share?
The usual answer I see is along the lines of "because Google is too big, has too much control". To reiterate the original argument in this thread: Chromium being open source makes this a hard sell.
> They care about having a simple, fast browser who just works.
And the "just works" part won't happen without the other browsers' competition. It will become "just works with other Google products, for those who hold the same values as Google holds".
Case in point: on a fresh install of Ubuntu googling for adblock using Firefox (yes, I know, stupid) leads straight to Google ramming Chrome down your throat.
In fact, what's often forgotten is that even before MS's illegal monopolization, IE dominated Netscape because it was genuinely better.
But a few short years later it was regular end users who were suffering due to IE and it's lack of competition, which led to MS sleeping on it and letting security issues (both technical and social) pile up.
Exactly. So what if Google controls the internet experience through Chromium. The user will have to pay someone eventually. Firefox is not a free magic bullet.
On the other hand, much bigger problems in the world, so we go build something else instead of reinventing what Google has already built.
KDE relies heavily on the Qt libraries and Qt is using Blink in their QtWebEngine[1]. There's even a web browser called Falkon (The KDE browser, kind of) that uses this library[2].
Totally agree. I was using Firefox until recently. After they announced their Rust based parallel engines I started using it.
But i stopped using it now the Mozilla Foundation is having hard times surviving....
The big problem is the fact that Google has sooo much money... We need a Twitter, a Facebook, or another company with a big cash cow to seriously support a different browser engine.
I use Firefox and am pretty happy with. It seems a lot of people are complaining/obsessing about its market share or insisting that chrome is the way to go. All not that relevant. It's fine. It has more than enough market share that most companies can't afford to ignore it. That's all that matters. As long as that's the case you can choose to use it or not. The point is that you still have a choice.
Also market share varies by region. Chrome and Safari are a bit over represented in the US and under represented in e.g. Germany.
And if people want to use edge, chromium, brave, or get their Chrome experience straight from Google, also fine. IMHO you are dependent on Google either way because it's mostly them doing the heavy lifting on the internals and setting the agenda/roadmap for that. I hear good things about Safari too. Though, I mostly use it to figure out why stuff that works in Firefox and Chrome doesn't work there. That seems to be a recurring annoyance I have to deal with.
From my point of view, having three browser engines (Chrome, Safari, and Firefox) is better than just having Chrome and Safari. At worst, it keeps the other two a bit more honest. Especially Google seems to need to have their arm twisted a lot more to actually do the right things.
If people don't like their browsers, maybe go and fix them? If you can't, pick the one that best caters to your need and be grateful for what you get for free.
Doesn't Safari have the same relationship to WebKit as Chrome to Chromium? What's preventing other browsers to use WebKit instead of Chromium and make the open source browser engine competition a bit more lively?
I would assume that the answer is that the incentives for competing that way are small and maintaining a browser is expensive?
You would have to rely on donations. Which gives me an idea that probably already exists: a kickstarter/patreon alternative for recurring donations. Recurring donations won't start until there are enough for continuous funding of the project.
I wonder when Google will finally pull the plug on Mozilla. At 4.0% market share they can't deliver that much search volume to justify spending millions on their incredibly bad management.
Firefox is compromised by the fact it’s core active users are also its largest liability. It’s the innovators dilemma. They want it to (more or less) stay the same and not move forward and make changes to compete with Chrome. Whereas for them to achieve a larger market share it needs a radical overhaul. Really what Mozilla need to do is build a “new browser” called something different and put their weight behind that. I thought they were on that path with Servo and the HTML based UI they were developing for it, but I think they bit off more than they could chew and did not move quickly enough.
The tight relationship between rendering engine and browser has been broken by Chrome and its “children” (and in some way also by Apples enforced usage of their WebKit implementation in ios). Mozilla need to follow suit in order to survive, rip that rendering engine out, build a new browser and a “browser toolkit” to let other people build their own.
This sounds like a broad generalization. I have been a Firefox user for many years and I'm happy to see it compete with updates. I like seeing it change.
> They want it to (not or less) stay the same and not move forward
I don't think this is true at all. Anecdotally, a lot of Firefox users have been very receptive towards recent changes. Quantum was a huge success and I know very few people that miss the old Firefox with all of its jank.
> Mozilla need to follow suit in order to survive, rip that rendering engine out, build a new browser and a “browser toolkit” to let other people build their own
This is precisely what Servo is: https://servo.org/. Mozilla know what they're doing.
I believe they laid off the Servo development team?
Also they moved way to slowly with Servo, starting it as a research project was correct. But they should have gone all in on it years ago.
I know they have taken parts of it and folded them into Firefox, but it should have been the the other way round. Take the bits of Firefox they could and combine them into something new with Servo.
I think it’s probably easier said than done. Servo did work somewhat for some hardware but there is a very long tail of web and hardware compatibility issues that needs to be chased down.
As the Reddit thread quoted in that Twitter thread explains, Servo was not originally intended meant to replace Gecko. It was a research platform to explore new techniques which could be used in Gecko, and it successfully did that. Indeed, i think it was a pleasant surprise when it turned out WebRender could be ported, rather than rewritten in Gecko.
It is a shame that Servo was shut down, because now there isn't a codebase focused on developing new technology; innovation has to happen in Gecko, alongside being a production system.
What makes Firefox seem less polished to you than chrome? When I use chrome, the feeling I get is one of standing in an unfurnished office space with white walls and few windows. To me, that is the opposite of polished.
Firefox in comparison feels like being in a grand old house that was built before plumbing and electricity. You can tell that it used to be beautiful and polished, but the luster has faded over time.
Maybe we should better ask the question why a browser dupoly is bad and what we expect from a competing browser.
I think the core goal is influence: The ability to meaningfully change the web ecosystem or counteract changes that would be harmful.
Of course market share is necessary for influence, but I don't think it's sufficient: If Firefox gained a larger market share but at the cost permanently catching up to Chrome, I don't think a lot would be won.
> Firefox is compromised by the fact it’s core active users are also its largest liability. It’s the innovators dilemma. They want it to (more or less) stay the same
How much of the users are actually technical?
The Firefox user share is frequently seen through the lens of technical features, however, I have the suspicion that the vast majority of the audience is regular users who have no idea of anything technical.
> Really what Mozilla need to do is build a “new browser” called something different and put their weight behind that
Mozilla brand has value in privacy, not browsers. It could start VPN, cloud services, remote backups, smart home, security cameras... Even Android phones with stamp from Mozilla would be great.
There are no money in browsers, it is basically a feed tube from big corporation to its drones. Mozilla should not sponsor large corporations.
> The tight relationship between rendering engine and browser has been broken by Chrome and its “children” (and in some way also by Apples enforced usage of their WebKit implementation in ios). Mozilla need to follow suit in order to survive, rip that rendering engine out, build a new browser and a “browser toolkit” to let other people build their own.
Exactly. I would really like to use something google-free, but the interface
of Qutebrowser is too good, and Qutebrowser can't use Mozilla's rendering
engine, even though the developers would like to.
The problem is that XUL just didn't work very well. It was one of the reasons Apple decided to go with forking KHTML for the basis of webkit, and Google decided to with forking webkit for the basis of Chromium.
> They want it to (more or less) stay the same and not move forward and make changes to compete with Chrome.
Most of the negative feedback from users comes from two paths, changes that break add-ons, changes that remove customization. Either of those two effectively reduce the value proposition, so I think negative feedback is granted.
The problem most 'core' users have is this UX ethos that some how we are not having more MAUs because we fail to "make changes to compete with Chrome". This has penetrated the Firefox team and has lead to a copy cat of UX features from Chrome and a 'dummyfication' of UX.
The reason Firefox is unable to compete with Chrome or Edge is not because of missing features or performance. Both Firefox and Edge have million dollar advertisement and OEM agreements. Talk to anybody on the street and everyone and their dog will know Chrome, Firefox not so much. The average users will use whatever is pre-installed. They will not go out of their way because of Chrome-like features.
This causality that somehow Firefox is missing market share because of features or UX is flawed. Firefox is playing a Goliath and David game, with billion dollar revenue companies. Accepting and embracing it's niche nature is a necessary first step.
I can see that, I was using fairly broad strokes in first part of my original comment.
I think it’s the second part that is more important than my initial (potentially unfair) generalisation.
In order to fund further development of gecko it needs to become a competitor to WebKit/blink and grab that market share in this new world of many browser front ends that are cropping up. Explore new business models, for example sign revenue share agreements with new browser developers in exchange for supporting (or even helping with initial funding) their development.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 346 ms ] threadNoting, however, that I use Firefox and Thunderbird as my daily-driver applications, and Edge + Safari when I must.
Sure, Edge can be configured by domain policies and that is easy too. For example disallowing https exceptions is a popular recent policy (that gets reverted pretty quickly).
Especially for any web shop... Firefox is even less relevant than Microsoft now and forcing it as a primary internal browser is a great way to alienate your company from end user experiences.
It already has, sadly.
> Can you centrally administrate Google accounts? Because employees certainly aren't allowed to use their privat ones.
Yes, definitely. For non Microsoft shops, Google is a very common option (eg academia).
I use chrome for important stuff for that reason.
From personal experience I know that Teams definitely has some Firefox-only bugs.
Outside of corps ideologically opposed to using Office, like IBM and Oracle, I've almost never seen anybody that didn't run on Outlook. At least since Notes became abandonware anyway.
(edit: to be clear, wasn't trying to be snarky. Genuinely surprised. Thought Microsoft intranets were a thing of legacy dinosaur companies, didn't know that modern enterprises still did that. But I don't work in enterprise, only in small biz, where nobody can afford dedicated sys admins and everything is in the cloud. From what I hear though, the UX of Outlook these days is better than Gmail and gcal (which isn't saying much, I know). Might be worth trying again someday...)
In the small dev world it's kinda the opposite. Linuxy servers beget Mac dev machines, so AD is mostly out, leaving Apple enterprise stuff (shitty) or Google (OK, but nowhere near as powerful as Microsoft).
GDocs becomes the lowest common denominator and many people don't have Word anymore. Data is either cloud native (json, csv) or else imported into Gsheets.
I suspect some of this is due to the modern educational pipeline too, with gsuite (or Google Workspace, or whatever it's called these days) producing a generation of young workers who grew up on that stuff. It's caused quite a generation gap at my current workplace, where the older workers use Microsoft and the younger ones use Google and stuff keeps getting converted back and forth. And once in a while someone sends a PDF and both sides go nooooo...
Also, I'd be willing to believe your average Google Workspace, preconfigured by Google, is more secure out of the box than your average Microsoft LAN administered by somebody who once took a certification course twenty years ago.
But when something breaks on self-hosted Microsoft stuff, at least you can hire someone to fix it. When something breaks on Google Workspace, hey, it's a free vacation day for the whole staff!
Sounds like they ported over all the best features from Skype! ;)
Lack of corp support is one of the things that harmed FF from what I saw. Until a few years ago it was not as easy to control FF via group policy¹ as it was Chrome, so FF didn't get a look in. Telling infrastructure managers “but you can do X instead and it is just as easy or easier” would fall on deaf ears because while as convenient in isolation it is still something different instead of integrating with what they did for everything else they permitted on their user machine builds.
¹ This has changed since, but too late.
Google is also not known as the company as the company that just has the best for you in mind.
In the past I had trouble with client projects or dev tools only working in chrome, but I decided that the only way things get freer is to make myself fix those pain points when I come across them.
It is either Chrome (Blink) or Safari (WebKit) and I would much prefer WebKit-based browsers over Chromium-based ones and the market-share tells the full story on where to target the most users and it is not Firefox.
Why do you think that these web developers stick banners everywhere to force you to run their apps in several Chromium-based browsers?
I know it is painful to admit, but the truth is that Firefox usage and market share is in constant decline and the users still do not care about it enough to use it. The decline started since the 2010s and continues to this decade with them still far behind.
So to recycle your sentence: 'Firefox is not even close to being a contender since Chrome, Safari, Edge and Brave have successfully replaced and overtaken it'.
[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
[1] https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php
[2] https://hexus.net/tech/news/software/148095-microsoft-edge-c...
Ah great. Thanks to Safari's market share I can now run it on Windows/Linux. Thanks that helps me a lot! :D
As for 'Linux' on the Desktop, using the same sources, the data is insignificant for any browser as the usage numbers are extremely low. In fact, its so small that it is not even on the Top 10 global user usage data and is thus irrelevant to all browser market share for the Linux Desktop.
But sure, Firefox on the Linux Desktop has never been more popular than ever as evidently shown by the HN commenters on this post and is even used more than Chrome. /s
Since when was a single digit of 3% (and declining) a 'sizeable share' of the market?
> What's the point in making these statements? Is it just a way of saying "boo Firefox, I don't like Firefox"?
The evidence is already out there [0] and it is based on the obvious fact that Firefox market share and usage is still declining. Even the comments in this whole post are saying the same thing about Firefox becoming increasingly more irrelevant.
Why? Because everyone knows it is a clear fact.
[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
That site is counting mobile browsers too, which eat up a lot of market share. It's 3.9% (so more like 4% than 3%) counting mobile, and 7.9% if you don't. Considering the number of web users, that's absolutely a sizeable share. It represents hundreds of millions of people.
> it is based on the obvious fact that Firefox market share and usage is still declining
And that would have been a reasonable statement to make.
I have been using Firefox since circa 2010, and can count on my fingers how many websites do not work properly in it.
Most of the time it's just some CYA "I am a lazy/underpaid-subcontractor dev and didn't bother opening my website on a non-majority browser to check if it is broken" banner asking me to switch (which nowadays I mostly don't see thanks to uBlock's Annoyances list); the website was an actual tech demo of something that only Chrome had at the time; or it was an incredibly convoluted government website best browsed with Mosaic or some shit like that.
The entire comments section of this post painfully admits the decline of Firefox as it has been quickly replaced by Chrome and the users do not care about Firefox's features or even its privacy features. Perhaps the 'assumptions' are backed by the market share and global usage mentioned in the article's website and the original source [0] assuming you have read both.
On top of that which wasn't mentioned is that Firefox cannot possibly counter Chrome's dominance since its creator Mozilla is still being kept on financial life support by Google themselves. Even with Mozilla receiving millions from Google, they are still failing behind.
To reuse this quote from the article: 'Soon Google are going to be in complete control of web standards, unless something drastically changes.'
Well if Firefox is the so-called 'alternative' to the Chrome hegemony, then they are doing a very poor job at convincing the end users to switch back to Firefox and stop Chrome's dominance given the global browser usage and market share.
[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
I don't blame Mozilla for this though since they did not have a monopoly on a platform to capitalize on unlike the other players.
Sadly Safari seems to be the only other option.
For a long time Firefox has been dependent on Google for sponsorship. This is a toxic dependency that Firefox hasn't been able to rid itself of and is seeming increasingly less plausible as time goes by.
But FireFox on Android was perfect, at least it was until the latest UI update when suddenly they lost the notion of favorites (or, they were now hidden under "new tab" instead of available on touching the address bar) and you needed to open a new tab for just about anything. I'd still prefer it over Safari or Chrome though.
I actually do not enjoy using Chrome on my Android compared to the feel of the new Firefo client.
For most people the internet, Google and Chrome are one and the same.
I wish they would just charge for Firefox sync. The users that are left mostly use it for privacy reasons and they know that privacy costs money.
Safari is not an option for me, I use all platforms but I want the same browser on every platform which means no safari :)
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/find-and-install-add-on...
Considering how poorly pretty much every vendor who wasn't named "Apple" was fumbling around trying to layer negative value added customizations on top of Android in the early days (and continued doing so for years), there was a ripe opportunity to ship a "Mozilla mobile" consisting of a stock Android device + Firefox. Of course, the powers that be predictably blew it.
>Google’s massive development resources and marketing machine. >Most people not thinking about the long-term ramifications of ending up in a market with a single vendor in it. >Firefox losing its status of a shiny new thing over the years. >Mozilla’s inability to capitalize on the popularity of Firefox in the past. I think almost all of their revenue came from a search deal with Google.
The true reasons Firefox lost market share are:
1. Firefox has become a mess
2. Mozilla is terribly mismanaged
To see Firefox thrive, we have to push towards management change while there's still something to be saved or by forking Firefox
I would say:
The true reasons Firefox lost market share is because we, developer & tech people started to install Chrome on family computers instead of Firefox because it was safer & faster (way way faster). And we never came back from it.
Performance is a feature.
What are you talking about? It's been working flawlessly for many years, without any maintenance for me and my non-technical relatives.
Chrome pretty much barely changes where things are and how things behave and it's a pretty fast browser. If you want to fix Firefox go complain with their management.
Despite being an open source project, Firefox management seems to be much less in touch with and responsive to their user's feedback compared to other browsers. As an example, both Safari and Firefox had the same bad idea at about the same time - converting tabs into floating buttons (although in the case of Safari the bad at least served a useful purpose: increasing vertical real estate for the browser). Both got negative feedback. The difference? Firefox management dug their heels deeper and told their users, "suck it up, this is the future of web browsing", whereas Apple listened to the feedback and killed the bad idea during the beta itself.
Yet another example: killing off single site browsing or progressive web apps.
I'm not sure whether Chrome is any worse on this front, but either way Firefox is terribly annoying. I think it's the most user-hostile open source software I know of.
And, no, I just checked. I don't have any auto-updates in Ubuntu either.
I'm using NixOS where every version of every dependency of every program I install will be saved until I cleanup the garbage (1 command) so I don't have your issue.
If this was Windows you wouldn't be able to update Firefox while it was running because Windows doesn't support overwriting open files (technically you can rename them and insert new ones with the same name, but that's not the point).
You're holding it wrong and blaming the project, close the software you update before you update and you might have more success.
Also, I like that you think that Firefox's default settings is "holding it wrong." That's rather the point, isn't it?
Reddit will have you back now.
Using the Mozilla build in /opt, the Snap [1] or Flatpack [2] versions will avoid the distro updating Firefox out from underneath it.
[1] https://snapcraft.io/firefox [2] https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.mozilla.firefox
The difference to Windows is that Linux allows you to delete (unlink) files that are in use. The inode actually owning the data continues to exist until the program is dead.
What does this mean?
Which comes down to the reasons I've already stated.
When Chrome came out, it was way better. Now I don't really see big difference in performance, they have similar extensions, frequent updates, sync, etc.
I prefer Firefox but I don't really need to install it on family computers because whatever browser they use is probably good enough.
Chromium is just much better built.
An old Ars Technica article comparing the two protocols (much has changed since then): https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/10/ars-e...
I'm not so certain those numbers compare with the 10s of millions of people(100s?) who's default browser was hijacked by nefarious bundles in every 3rd party installer under the sun back in the 2000s and early 2010s.. Those people knew no better and have been conditioned(or just don't care) to continue whatever gets them interneting.
Unfortunately I don't think this will help. If their market share is already low, creating multiple forks makes it even harder for devs to target.
Simply look at desktop software support on Linux for an example of why this doesn't work.
The marketing campaign for Chrome alone, if it is even possible to assign a dollar value to it, would have cost billions of dollars for anyone other than Google.
I believe that is highly unlikely. At root the Blink engine is actively supported by several big tech heavyweights. Microsoft Edge is based on it. A rarely mentioned but important derivative browser is Silk (Fire tablets etc.) that Amazon develops. Then there are a bunch of smaller fish with Brave leading that pack.
I think the engine would survive just fine without Google. There was a time when you're view held, but that time has past.
* Firefox is fine, the sync works well, I don't see any of the drama around management or new-tab or search being an issue, and I get a pile of benefits like sandboxing and better ad-control.
* Chrome is faster, but it also has literal billions of investment.
There really isn't that much drama about this? Sure I wish Firefox had more market share, but it also runs on a fraction of Chrome's budget, so it's never going to be as good, and I can't judge people for not caring about helping Google.
It still has some powerful features though, like E2E encrypted sync, multi-account containers etc. I'll keep using it. But they're aiming at the mainstream too much which has already given up on them. They need to win back the enthusiasts first instead of alienating us. Only then does it make sense to thing about mainstream adoption again.
Meaning X will be removed within ~three versions.
And it just looks so bulky with compact mode off. I tried to get used to it but no. I actually used it without compact mode before, but with the latest version the compact mode is using about the same vertical space as the old normal mode :)
Instructions: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/compact-mode-workaround...
Now I have some extra vertical pixels :)
I've been building a browser full time the past year+ (synth.app) and FF core wasn't really even an option. They've done very little to make the engine usable outside of Firefox.
Now I'm sure there are a variety of savory and unsavory things that led here, but building that stuff out seems like a good way to grow the ecosystem. At least they would've had a chance at capturing the Brave/Opera/Edge/etc market and those seats at the committees.
This isn't to say that I'm not worried about these standards merging like this. I've spent many hours working out weird chromium only behaviors that websites rely on these days to do things (and egregiously so if they detect an agent remotely resembling chrome).
This sounds like the IE6 disaster all over again.
The gnarliness spans the whole stack. From weird java-applet like API escalation behavior if chrome is detected (e.g. Google properties feature gate a ton around this) to how there is not even a clear way to get a DRM license for a custom browser without waiting for Google indefinitely [1].
Here's a challenge: fire up a chromium fork and get it to run a relaxed DRM website like Netflix. If you get that far now try loading HBOMax with their fingerprinting/DRM protection on top. I'm not even sure it'd be possible in FF (at least without some DRM piggy backing if there isn't one).
[1] https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/google-widevine-blocked...
Not the most appealing idea, but an interesting one. Might help move more people to essentially using Firefox.
https://github.com/mozilla/positron
Say hello to https://servo.org/.
Enough features to distinguish on, enough political/managerial reasons for choosing an independent FLOSS engine over one controlled by Google.
Sure, Edge/MS won't move to this engine anywhere soon. Nor will Brave switch over tomorrow, or electron rebuild around their tooling. But the world is full or "HTML-2-PDF renderers, headless testing toolkits, (embedded) webview-libraries or electron-alike toolkits, which are now almost all exclusively Chromium based.
A lot of GUI based programs should think of implementing parts of it as a library others can use. I remember early Git implementations in IDEs where they just ran git commands in the background and parsed the command line output. Imagine if the same had been done with SQLite, would it still be as popular today?
I don't have much experience with creating desktop software, but it seems to me that separating the GUI from the "engine" would bring other benefits too.
I have often looked at OSS and wanted to use parts of it myself. An email client might have a really good mail parser that handles encoding, attachments etc. But decoupling it from the rest of the program would take too much time.
This reminds that Wine uses Mozilla code for their Internet Explorer replacement (wine-gecko). I wonder how far behind Firefox's rendering engine that code is, and how much effort is involved for the Wine maintainers.
https://wiki.winehq.org/Gecko
It seems the organisations forget why they're here - to write software, not to try and solve all of mankind's issues and injustices. The scope becomes too broad and unfocused.
The Mozilla Foundation pledges to support the Mozilla Manifesto in its activities. Specifically, we will:
- build and enable open-source technologies and communities that support the Manifesto's principles; build and deliver great consumer products that support the Manifesto's principles;
- use the Mozilla assets (intellectual property such as copyrights and trademarks, infrastructure, funds, and reputation) to keep the Internet an open platform;
- promote models for creating economic value for the public benefit; and
- promote the Mozilla Manifesto principles in public discourse and within the Internet industry
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20081218222911/http://www.mozill...
Perhaps the cart has now been put in front of the horse somewhat and they think that a great community (or being involved in issues entirely separate to software) will somehow magically create great software.
Yes, that would be because the whole story was basically lies.
https://fortintam.com/blog/outrageous-outreach/
Interesting, thanks.
Servo was never going to grow into a complete browser, and much of it was absorbed into Gecko (the Firefox codebase). But I agree, it would be great to have the Servo idea pushed further forward.
Then I looked closer look at the history of Chromium and Blink.
The reality is that a lot of the other "Chromium-based" browsers actually only use the Blink renderer. They don't use many (if any) other Chromium components other than probably V8.
In ancient times, Blink itself was a fork of Webkit. So, does that mean Apple controls everything?? But Webkit actually came from KDE's KHTML, didn't it.. Linux wins...
The kicker for me is: Blink and V8 are open source, and anyone can fork them at any time. Because of this, Microsoft, Oracle, Brave - every "Chromium" based browser vendor is contributing code. So does Google really control us that much? Blink and V8 make a rock solid browser core and are being worked on by a lot of companies, not just Google. It's like the Linux kernel - kind of a marvel of open source. Not something we need to fight against so viciously, in my opinion.
(Edit: "rock solid" might sound extreme to some... The HTML and JS specs are absurdly complex to the point where there's basically no hope of anyone implementing them from 0. There's a lot of bloat in modern web, no doubt. But if you're really worried about crazy JS features cluttering your browsing experience, you can go clone the Chromium source and pull out the crap you don't like.)
The biggest difference is that the new MS is no longer selling you software but access to software.
Advertising in the Start Menu enters the room
Often enough, it feels as if there are two brains inside Microsoft - shiny new MS with Azure, WSL, VSCode on the one side, and old, schoolyard bully MS with advertising, telemetry, forcing cloud everywhere on the other side.
Yes. Contributing code to something doesn't mean that you suddenly control the direction of that thing. Google still makes the big decisions about what gets to enter the codebase: which web features to support, which ones to deprecate, how to interpret standards, and how to slowly align the web with their own financial incentives.
I think the idea of gp's point about others forking code means the forkers can also influence the code because they control the fork.
Otherwise, if we take your comment at face value, we'd conclude that Google's contributions to Webkit means it can't "suddenly control the direction" of Apple's Webkit. That's true, but also becomes irrelevant because Google controls its fork of "Blink".
In other words, does Apple's Webkit control us that much? No, because it seems like Google's Blink/Chromium is sufficiently independent. If we go back farther in the timeline, are we concerned that KHTML controls us? No, because it seems like Apple's fork of Webkit is independent and not beholden to KHTML decisions.
If Microsoft really wanted to, it seems like they have the resources to do what Apple did to KHTML and what Chrome did to Webkit.
If I understand correctly, Edge, Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, etc are all running on the later type of Blink "fork".
Does Google still contribute to Webkit? I was under the impression that stopped a long time ago after Blink and Webkit sufficiently diverged.
There was also a much wider array of browser engines at the time (MS had 2, Opera had 1, Firefox had much higher market share than it does today).
So KHTML/Webkit hardly had control over the web the way Chromium might because they never had the market share Chromium did, and further, they were never the dominant engine embedded in nearly every browser the way Chromium/Blink are now.
The usual answer I see is along the lines of "because Google is too big, has too much control". To reiterate the original argument in this thread: Chromium being open source makes this a hard sell.
Maybe there's another reason I've missed, though!
The end users don't care about who controls what. They care about having a simple, fast browser who just works.
In fact, what's often forgotten is that even before MS's illegal monopolization, IE dominated Netscape because it was genuinely better.
But a few short years later it was regular end users who were suffering due to IE and it's lack of competition, which led to MS sleeping on it and letting security issues (both technical and social) pile up.
On the other hand, much bigger problems in the world, so we go build something else instead of reinventing what Google has already built.
[1]: https://wiki.qt.io/QtWebEngine
[2]: https://www.falkon.org/about/
and almost all of Webkit has been rewritten from the time of the fork from khtml.
That's actually being done in the Serenity OS project! HTML renderer, JS interpreter, and Web Browser, from scratch:
https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMOpZvQB55beChggmvk-s...
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMOpZvQB55be0Nfytz9q2...
But i stopped using it now the Mozilla Foundation is having hard times surviving....
The big problem is the fact that Google has sooo much money... We need a Twitter, a Facebook, or another company with a big cash cow to seriously support a different browser engine.
Also market share varies by region. Chrome and Safari are a bit over represented in the US and under represented in e.g. Germany.
And if people want to use edge, chromium, brave, or get their Chrome experience straight from Google, also fine. IMHO you are dependent on Google either way because it's mostly them doing the heavy lifting on the internals and setting the agenda/roadmap for that. I hear good things about Safari too. Though, I mostly use it to figure out why stuff that works in Firefox and Chrome doesn't work there. That seems to be a recurring annoyance I have to deal with.
From my point of view, having three browser engines (Chrome, Safari, and Firefox) is better than just having Chrome and Safari. At worst, it keeps the other two a bit more honest. Especially Google seems to need to have their arm twisted a lot more to actually do the right things.
If people don't like their browsers, maybe go and fix them? If you can't, pick the one that best caters to your need and be grateful for what you get for free.
You would have to rely on donations. Which gives me an idea that probably already exists: a kickstarter/patreon alternative for recurring donations. Recurring donations won't start until there are enough for continuous funding of the project.
The tight relationship between rendering engine and browser has been broken by Chrome and its “children” (and in some way also by Apples enforced usage of their WebKit implementation in ios). Mozilla need to follow suit in order to survive, rip that rendering engine out, build a new browser and a “browser toolkit” to let other people build their own.
I don't think this is true at all. Anecdotally, a lot of Firefox users have been very receptive towards recent changes. Quantum was a huge success and I know very few people that miss the old Firefox with all of its jank.
> Mozilla need to follow suit in order to survive, rip that rendering engine out, build a new browser and a “browser toolkit” to let other people build their own
This is precisely what Servo is: https://servo.org/. Mozilla know what they're doing.
Also they moved way to slowly with Servo, starting it as a research project was correct. But they should have gone all in on it years ago.
I know they have taken parts of it and folded them into Firefox, but it should have been the the other way round. Take the bits of Firefox they could and combine them into something new with Servo.
That being said, Servo resulted in the creation of all sorts of technologies.
Great example - because Mozilla binned Servo!
https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/1295771633320448001
It is a shame that Servo was shut down, because now there isn't a codebase focused on developing new technology; innovation has to happen in Gecko, alongside being a production system.
one vote for the old FF because tabKitv2 is unsurpassed
In fact, switching to Chrome is agonizing because I lose my adblocker.
Firefox in comparison feels like being in a grand old house that was built before plumbing and electricity. You can tell that it used to be beautiful and polished, but the luster has faded over time.
I think the core goal is influence: The ability to meaningfully change the web ecosystem or counteract changes that would be harmful.
Of course market share is necessary for influence, but I don't think it's sufficient: If Firefox gained a larger market share but at the cost permanently catching up to Chrome, I don't think a lot would be won.
How much of the users are actually technical?
The Firefox user share is frequently seen through the lens of technical features, however, I have the suspicion that the vast majority of the audience is regular users who have no idea of anything technical.
Mozilla brand has value in privacy, not browsers. It could start VPN, cloud services, remote backups, smart home, security cameras... Even Android phones with stamp from Mozilla would be great.
There are no money in browsers, it is basically a feed tube from big corporation to its drones. Mozilla should not sponsor large corporations.
Exactly. I would really like to use something google-free, but the interface of Qutebrowser is too good, and Qutebrowser can't use Mozilla's rendering engine, even though the developers would like to.
And it could have take succeeded before Electron arrived if Mozilla didn't decide to let the project die.
Most of the negative feedback from users comes from two paths, changes that break add-ons, changes that remove customization. Either of those two effectively reduce the value proposition, so I think negative feedback is granted.
The problem most 'core' users have is this UX ethos that some how we are not having more MAUs because we fail to "make changes to compete with Chrome". This has penetrated the Firefox team and has lead to a copy cat of UX features from Chrome and a 'dummyfication' of UX.
The reason Firefox is unable to compete with Chrome or Edge is not because of missing features or performance. Both Firefox and Edge have million dollar advertisement and OEM agreements. Talk to anybody on the street and everyone and their dog will know Chrome, Firefox not so much. The average users will use whatever is pre-installed. They will not go out of their way because of Chrome-like features.
This causality that somehow Firefox is missing market share because of features or UX is flawed. Firefox is playing a Goliath and David game, with billion dollar revenue companies. Accepting and embracing it's niche nature is a necessary first step.
I think it’s the second part that is more important than my initial (potentially unfair) generalisation.
In order to fund further development of gecko it needs to become a competitor to WebKit/blink and grab that market share in this new world of many browser front ends that are cropping up. Explore new business models, for example sign revenue share agreements with new browser developers in exchange for supporting (or even helping with initial funding) their development.