All they had to do was keep making a decent browser.
They engaged in what I can only describe as deliberate and systematic sabotage of the brand and any competitive advantages they might have had.
That being said, I'm not sure the outcome could have been averted. Like you said, since Google was the hand that fed them and Google has their own browser, Mozilla could have only slowed down the inevitable, not prevented it.
Yeah but many opt out of telemetry so the amount of users would be substantially higher. Also I can just spoof my useragent to Chrome to use certain sites that require chrome-only users.
I and many others agree. But the pesky problem of needing to pay the people who want to make a difference sadly still persists.
I'd work on idealistic causes starting tomorrow if I didn't live in a world that mandates me to spend most of my energy on commercial work just so I can eat and have where to sleep.
Oh, the idea of my comment is to put it clearly and unambiguously that the problem is open, and the most commonly discussed "solutions" are complete bullshit, so we need to find a way to solve it.
And we won't find any solution within the main view of letting the market solve it. The market doesn't solve this kind of problem.
I never understood why we don't have more indie browsers. Individual developers love implementing their own take on anything: from the most simple projects to crazy ones like booting Linux from JavaScript or entire operating systems. Why are those talented individuals not implementing their own browsers?
Because a browser is very complex and does many things simultaneously. Not going to list them here. We all know the many things a browser has to do right. It’s a bundling of many separate components.
> I never understood why we don't have more indie browsers. Individual developers love implementing their own take on anything: from the most simple projects to crazy ones like booting Linux from JavaScript or entire operating systems. Why are those talented individuals not implementing their own browsers?
My understanding is it's been a long time since a browser was a cool little thing a single person could hack up in a reasonable amount of time. Now web standards are such that it's like some massive line-of-business app with a million requirements that all have to be implemented (and be fast, and be memory efficient) or something will break/someone will complain.
Well, there is the web browser engine that the SerenityOS folks are making for their OS and IIRC their goal for it is to be advanced enough to be able to visit their Discord using it.
I mean I love serenity OS and its community. A perfect mix of passion and talent. But let's get real here, implementing a usable browser implementing all the specs at half the speed of chrome is an undertaking that would requires a huge amount of work.
Don't get me wrong I would love for this happen, just don't count on it.
And please, when SerenityBrowser have 80% market share in 10 years, don't hesitate to parade that comment all over HN or whatever cool website we'll be on.
You might already know though, a lot of chrome's Blink is enrooted in the KHTML project. So I at least feel optimistic that open source has a chance to fight back, I just don't know how or when....
A browser these days is a mini-OS running inside an OS. A browser that tried to be just an HTML/JS rendering engine with a basic UI would fail just like FF is failing, despite getting glowing reviews from HN/reddit.
I thought Ekioh Flow was promising because it’s multithreaded. Believe it or not, Blinks KHTML’s roots are single threaded, so that’s apparently a big deal. Then I read their blog post where they proudly claimed to finally get Google Docs to work….yikes.
They are a small team of I think 20 people, but it goes to show how complex and exhausting writing a modern browser truly is.
In terms of talented individuals, I actually emailed Fabrice Bellard on the topic because he wrote QuickJS along with everything else he’s known for. Even he admits writing a browser is a very complicated task because a lot of information is not correctly specified. He did however write QuickEmacs 20 years ago which supported html and css rendering.
It’s sad, even when W3C and other committees try their best to keep the web strictly standard, it truly isn’t. And like I said, it hasn’t been enough of an issue to raise any concern outside of bubbles like here.
I think the masses need to learn about the importance of keeping fundamental software free and standard as a whole before they can learn why browsers and OS’s should be. But it’s tough because the average user doesn’t know what a library is. A lot of people think that even in app development, the programmer does it all from scratch.
I don't know why people are downvoting you you're right. The firefox engine has been struggling to keep up with chrome. We'd just be losing a worse browser engine which, while sad, isn't really that terrible. If we need a new engine someone can fork Chrome or write a new engine from scratch if chrome is a lost cause. The firefox foundation has stopped innovating and it isn't worth trying to keep them alive for a worse browser
Firefox is a great browser engine and has a hell of a lot less bugs than Chrome.
That's not the problem. The problem is that Firefox is funded by their direct competitor, who incidentally also is a monopoly with a bottomless marking budget.
> The advice, or rather the plea, from both Hacker News and Reddit is not to abandon Firefox - but on the other hand there is also mounting evidence that MBNA isn't the only company writing Firefox off.
I don't know about this. Almost every thread about Firefox has someone recommending Brave. Firefox is solving a problem users don't know they will miss until it's gone: browser consolidation. The problems that needs solving now are privacy related and Mozilla's absolutely poor management of Firefox on this front causes others to look for other solutions.
Firefox should be the most privacy centric browser available. However it doesn't seem like management gets the memo. For example, not too far in the past, they made news for putting ads in the search bar and providing a config option (in about:config) to even allow personalization. This kind of thing just destroys the brand and trust with users. If someone asked me to rank browsers based on privacy, I don't think I could give you a rank order, other than the fact that Chrome (and I'm assuming IE) would be near the bottom.
> Firefox should be the most privacy centric browser available.
They could also be the most power-user browser available.
Unfortunately, it seems like they've gotten absolutely high off of telemetry, and seem like they're just itching to cut features and break things.
They need to stop thinking like they're some lowest-common-denominator browser. That's Chrome, and nothing is going to change that in the short or medium term.
> Firefox is solving a problem users don't know they will miss until it's gone: browser consolidation.
This is what kept me using Firefox long past the point where it became unpleasant to use. Last year, I finally gave up and switched to Brave. I don't love Brave, but there isn't a lot of viable options anymore.
I tried sticking with Firefox, I really did. I'd been using Firefox from way back in day 1. But, in the end, it just stopped being a good browser for me and all of the changes Mozilla made just kept making it worse.
Why is browser consolidation such a big problem? If the current market leader starts to fall behind, then whoever does it better will gain adoption. Isn't this how Chrome grew a following?
Browsers consolidated down to basically one and then that one just sat and didn't advance anymore. And why should it? It's not like users could go elsewhere.
For years the world was subjected to the absolute crap that ie6 ossified on and wouldn't fix.
We need viable competition to keep a fire lit under the leader to stay ahead.
Scarier is that Google controls Chrome/Blink and will continue to push "features" that make the web better for Google, not better for users. Mozilla are one of very, very few organisations that are in a position to push back against this at standards bodies - and for all the flak they get, they regularly do.
I don't think the problem with IE was necessarily consolidation as much as letting Microsoft be the only ones with the ability to modify or extend the engine. In my mind there would be nothing wrong with Mozilla joining Microsoft in basing their browser on Blink+V8. In fact it might even be a better way to ensure Google can't steer Chrome the same way Microsoft did since no matter how great they make it the competition will always be dragged along with it, there to become the better drop in option should Google decide to stop leading the push.
Honestly using Edge has been a great experience for me. When they adopted Chromium over sticking with _another_ browser engine I was happy. MS has contributed a great amount to the Chromium project so far and I really don't think there's an issue with standardizing on an engine as long as innovations can still happen. It seems like being able to have vendor skins on top of Chromium has been a net positive in light of what's happened in the past. I'm a bit of a Microsoft shill as of late so take my experiences with a grain of salt.
Another issue I ran into recently is that `Symbol.for(str)` will cause the entirety of `str` to be allocated forever in Chromium, but not in Firefox. (It's inevitable that `Symbol.for()` will have some memory impact, as a global allocation, but it's possible to mitigate it somewhat.)
IMO it's too bad that the effort to create a Node-alike driven by Spidermonkey instead of V8 never got anywhere.
I was there for it, but I don't recall it being THAT bad and I jumped to Chrome as soon as it hit the scene. It was only once there was an alternative to compare it too that it was obvious how bad IE was.
I jumped to Firefox 1.5 as soon as it was out and had my entire friend circle in on it within a few months.
When Chrome eventually came out I added it to my arsenal because it was new and there was an expectation that it would be as revolutionary as Firefox had been. And it was pretty good, much faster than ff was by that time. Never did give up ff entirely but Chrome ended up open more and more. Contrast to ie6 that I never opened again as soon as ff was available. I did check out ie7 when it came out but there was no reason to stay with it. Very much a catch up move.
The irony is the CEO of Brave (Brendan Eich, creator of JavaScript and a founder of the firefox foundation) was briefly the CEO of firefox before he got pushed out in a power struggle and these power struggles have continued to plague firefox, preventing them from doing anything worthwhile
I think a good solution though is to let a better organization like Brave grow, and if we need to create a new competing web engine let them fork it when the time comes
I really don't understand the mentality of engineers - or businesspeople! - who block certain browsers. Not supporting a browser with low marketshare, while sad, is at least understandable, but going out of your way to prevent people from using your website who otherwise might have had a perfectly good experience is ridiculous. At worst, just put a banner at the top that says "your browser is not supported, if the site looks broken try Chrome."
If I were to make a bank transfer, and the process hanged in the final step because of an incompatible browser, I'd be furious, even if I had been warned about the risk using FF. In the worse case, I could be wondering if I need to repeat the operation with Chrome, or if the failure occurred after the transfer and repeating would duplicate...
If they don't test their website with FF, there's a higher risk of bugs. A FF user might not even realize that they're hindered by bugs: the site could be much slower, or some blocks would not refresh, or some transactions fail silently. If it doesn't clearly look broken, and just behaves badly, the user will probably blame the website instead of switching to a Chromium-based browser.
I don't have the skills for that, but I can't be without some of the Firefox addons, so I have been happy to support by using Firefox and other alternatives.
Look, I know we won't agree that booting the guy who created JavaScript for political reasons had anything to do with the further decline of Firefox, but can we at least agree that your best business strategy after that decision isn't going to be marketing yourselves as some sort of privacy crusaders?
I've given up on Apple about-facing and driving hard on PWA support with a privacy focus (e.g. allowing push notifications in PWAs only, requiring the apple "dev tax" be paid to get push keys that are tied to such a site so it's used properly etc and doing that to other "problematic" PWA APIs as well).
And I don't see Firefox picking that up either; their management seems content to funnel money into their own pockets with bonuses and shutter projects like Servo or MDN to do so..
Yeah with Apple - I can still see that as expected, but the way Firefox has been going these last few years.. has been truly disappointing. I mean they'd have created half these features themselves during their Firefox OS days...
I am beginning to see why Brave adopted Blink instead of Gecko.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 53.1 ms ] threadThey engaged in what I can only describe as deliberate and systematic sabotage of the brand and any competitive advantages they might have had.
That being said, I'm not sure the outcome could have been averted. Like you said, since Google was the hand that fed them and Google has their own browser, Mozilla could have only slowed down the inevitable, not prevented it.
If you want caring, you need to get it outside of the industry.
I'd work on idealistic causes starting tomorrow if I didn't live in a world that mandates me to spend most of my energy on commercial work just so I can eat and have where to sleep.
And we won't find any solution within the main view of letting the market solve it. The market doesn't solve this kind of problem.
My understanding is it's been a long time since a browser was a cool little thing a single person could hack up in a reasonable amount of time. Now web standards are such that it's like some massive line-of-business app with a million requirements that all have to be implemented (and be fast, and be memory efficient) or something will break/someone will complain.
That is why. A browser engine today is TOO complex.
Don't get me wrong I would love for this happen, just don't count on it.
And please, when SerenityBrowser have 80% market share in 10 years, don't hesitate to parade that comment all over HN or whatever cool website we'll be on.
They are a small team of I think 20 people, but it goes to show how complex and exhausting writing a modern browser truly is.
In terms of talented individuals, I actually emailed Fabrice Bellard on the topic because he wrote QuickJS along with everything else he’s known for. Even he admits writing a browser is a very complicated task because a lot of information is not correctly specified. He did however write QuickEmacs 20 years ago which supported html and css rendering.
It’s sad, even when W3C and other committees try their best to keep the web strictly standard, it truly isn’t. And like I said, it hasn’t been enough of an issue to raise any concern outside of bubbles like here.
I think the masses need to learn about the importance of keeping fundamental software free and standard as a whole before they can learn why browsers and OS’s should be. But it’s tough because the average user doesn’t know what a library is. A lot of people think that even in app development, the programmer does it all from scratch.
https://twitter.com/vladquant/status/1525168129784938496
That war has been lost decisively ten years ago.
That's not the problem. The problem is that Firefox is funded by their direct competitor, who incidentally also is a monopoly with a bottomless marking budget.
I don't know about this. Almost every thread about Firefox has someone recommending Brave. Firefox is solving a problem users don't know they will miss until it's gone: browser consolidation. The problems that needs solving now are privacy related and Mozilla's absolutely poor management of Firefox on this front causes others to look for other solutions.
Firefox should be the most privacy centric browser available. However it doesn't seem like management gets the memo. For example, not too far in the past, they made news for putting ads in the search bar and providing a config option (in about:config) to even allow personalization. This kind of thing just destroys the brand and trust with users. If someone asked me to rank browsers based on privacy, I don't think I could give you a rank order, other than the fact that Chrome (and I'm assuming IE) would be near the bottom.
They could also be the most power-user browser available.
Unfortunately, it seems like they've gotten absolutely high off of telemetry, and seem like they're just itching to cut features and break things.
They need to stop thinking like they're some lowest-common-denominator browser. That's Chrome, and nothing is going to change that in the short or medium term.
This is what kept me using Firefox long past the point where it became unpleasant to use. Last year, I finally gave up and switched to Brave. I don't love Brave, but there isn't a lot of viable options anymore.
I tried sticking with Firefox, I really did. I'd been using Firefox from way back in day 1. But, in the end, it just stopped being a good browser for me and all of the changes Mozilla made just kept making it worse.
Browsers consolidated down to basically one and then that one just sat and didn't advance anymore. And why should it? It's not like users could go elsewhere. For years the world was subjected to the absolute crap that ie6 ossified on and wouldn't fix.
We need viable competition to keep a fire lit under the leader to stay ahead.
Another issue I ran into recently is that `Symbol.for(str)` will cause the entirety of `str` to be allocated forever in Chromium, but not in Firefox. (It's inevitable that `Symbol.for()` will have some memory impact, as a global allocation, but it's possible to mitigate it somewhat.)
IMO it's too bad that the effort to create a Node-alike driven by Spidermonkey instead of V8 never got anywhere.
When Chrome eventually came out I added it to my arsenal because it was new and there was an expectation that it would be as revolutionary as Firefox had been. And it was pretty good, much faster than ff was by that time. Never did give up ff entirely but Chrome ended up open more and more. Contrast to ie6 that I never opened again as soon as ff was available. I did check out ie7 when it came out but there was no reason to stay with it. Very much a catch up move.
Exactly why Google is effectively funding Mozilla. They need to keep firefox alive to avoid Monopoly status.
I think a good solution though is to let a better organization like Brave grow, and if we need to create a new competing web engine let them fork it when the time comes
If I were to make a bank transfer, and the process hanged in the final step because of an incompatible browser, I'd be furious, even if I had been warned about the risk using FF. In the worse case, I could be wondering if I need to repeat the operation with Chrome, or if the failure occurred after the transfer and repeating would duplicate...
If they don't test their website with FF, there's a higher risk of bugs. A FF user might not even realize that they're hindered by bugs: the site could be much slower, or some blocks would not refresh, or some transactions fail silently. If it doesn't clearly look broken, and just behaves badly, the user will probably blame the website instead of switching to a Chromium-based browser.
I don't want to live in a world where google is in complete control of the web.
The market will weed out those that are not competitive
* uBlock Origin (Chrome based browsers don't seem to block ads as good as Firefox, especially on mobile)
* Treestyle Tab
But Firefox is falling way behind when it comes to rendering my bank websites properly, supporting little standards I use like WebSerial/WebUSB...
I've given up on Apple about-facing and driving hard on PWA support with a privacy focus (e.g. allowing push notifications in PWAs only, requiring the apple "dev tax" be paid to get push keys that are tied to such a site so it's used properly etc and doing that to other "problematic" PWA APIs as well).
And I don't see Firefox picking that up either; their management seems content to funnel money into their own pockets with bonuses and shutter projects like Servo or MDN to do so..
I am beginning to see why Brave adopted Blink instead of Gecko.
There are many subtleties, but the actionable takeaway is we need to, as users, demand management that places privacy and security above profit.