4 ms·

Thanks for the lengthy explanation, but my impression is that most people's assessments in here are of the form "Firefox is slow, but it has better addons". The

by 4bpp 10y ago

Thanks for the lengthy explanation, but my impression is that most people's assessments in here are of the form "Firefox is slow, but it has better addons". The choice you present therefore actually boils down to A) Continue being slow and have better addons; B) Become fast at the expense of worse addons (probably worse than Chrome rather than merely the same, as more users generally means more developers). Is it really sensible for FF to give up its advantage with the stable minority of users who care about addons enough that they would weigh FF's addon advantage higher than its speed deficit and try to beat Chrome on its home field? Certainly, other FOSS projects that tried to do similar things (Gnome 3) have only managed to garner vitriol in exchange for no meaningful increase in adoption. It's also worth keeping in mind if you hope for FF to compete with Chrome over users with the same value function that especially in the US, there are now many websites that actually only have been tested with Chrome and perhaps Safari and IE, and hence are broken in Firefox.

jdlshore 10y ago
> Is it really sensible for FF to give up its advantage...? That's the bet-the-company question, isn't it? Only history will tell, but I think the judgement of Mozilla in this matter is better than that of the commenters on this website, who have less data, represent a minority of users, and are prone to complaining.
- 4bpp 10y ago
  What evidence, short of Mozilla going ahead with it and Firefox market share tanking over the course of a few months, would be sufficient to persuade you that this is a bad move? (I do imagine that there should at least be ample precedent out there for the "management of ~10% market share company decides to sacrifice strong point of its own product to pursue the strong point of the market leader instead" pattern. I can think of several failed examples, but no successful ones - are there any? If not, I believe that should count as evidence that this is a common bias in company judgement.)
  - jdlshore 10y ago
    Market data from a reputable source, preferably one with extensive experience in the browser market, showing: a) Favoring extensions over browsing experience (rendering speed, jank, etc) is likely to improve Mozilla's market share. b) Market-relevant extensions are not going to be ported to WebExtensions. Speculation and personal preference is not persuasive.
    - 4bpp 10y ago
      Regarding b): at least the author of DownThemAll!, which has ~1.2m users per [1] (which makes it the non-adblocker plugin with the highest number of users I can find), has come out saying they won't [2]. ...and regarding a), I don't think that's all there is - FOSS projects at this point have a quite long track record of changes that were championed by the marketing crowd over the skepticism and outright opposition of the "fanatic techies" of the kind found here, such as KDE's Plasma Mobile and Mozilla's own phone OS, which turned out dead in the water exactly as the "unrepresentative" crowd expected. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/downthemall/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/downthemall/ [2] https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/dev-addons/2016-December/002367.html https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/dev-addons/2016-December/...
- alphapapa 10y ago
  > I think the judgement of Mozilla in this matter is better than that of the commenters on this website, who have less data, represent a minority of users, and are prone to complaining. This is the same as saying, "The judgment of the company is better than the judgment of their customers who say they will stop using their product if the company follows through on their plans."

by 4bpp 10y ago

jdlshore 10y ago

> Is it really sensible for FF to give up its advantage...? That's the bet-the-company question, isn't it? Only history will tell, but I think the judgement of Mozilla in this matter is better than that of the commenters on this website, who have less data, represent a minority of users, and are prone to complaining.

4bpp 10y ago
What evidence, short of Mozilla going ahead with it and Firefox market share tanking over the course of a few months, would be sufficient to persuade you that this is a bad move? (I do imagine that there should at least be ample precedent out there for the "management of ~10% market share company decides to sacrifice strong point of its own product to pursue the strong point of the market leader instead" pattern. I can think of several failed examples, but no successful ones - are there any? If not, I believe that should count as evidence that this is a common bias in company judgement.)
- jdlshore 10y ago
  Market data from a reputable source, preferably one with extensive experience in the browser market, showing: a) Favoring extensions over browsing experience (rendering speed, jank, etc) is likely to improve Mozilla's market share. b) Market-relevant extensions are not going to be ported to WebExtensions. Speculation and personal preference is not persuasive.
  - 4bpp 10y ago
    Regarding b): at least the author of DownThemAll!, which has ~1.2m users per [1] (which makes it the non-adblocker plugin with the highest number of users I can find), has come out saying they won't [2]. ...and regarding a), I don't think that's all there is - FOSS projects at this point have a quite long track record of changes that were championed by the marketing crowd over the skepticism and outright opposition of the "fanatic techies" of the kind found here, such as KDE's Plasma Mobile and Mozilla's own phone OS, which turned out dead in the water exactly as the "unrepresentative" crowd expected. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/downthemall/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/downthemall/ [2] https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/dev-addons/2016-December/002367.html https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/dev-addons/2016-December/...
alphapapa 10y ago
> I think the judgement of Mozilla in this matter is better than that of the commenters on this website, who have less data, represent a minority of users, and are prone to complaining. This is the same as saying, "The judgment of the company is better than the judgment of their customers who say they will stop using their product if the company follows through on their plans."