6 ms·

Considering Edge is improving steadily on Windows, and Chrome is pretty good and cross-platform, what is the niche of Firefox at this point?

dbaupp 9y ago
There is, at least, the political niche of being truly open source, and not built by a for-profit corporation.
- penpapersw 9y ago
  I'm always a bit skeptical when someone defends an organization by saying it's non-profit. AFAIK, the only difference between non-profit and for-profit is that the owners of a non-profit don't get to keep them money for themselves per se, although they're just like for-profits in all other ways, including the ability to name their own salaries and waste money frivolously and use their resources inefficiently. I don't know how Mozilla works internally, but I'm not about to give them the benefit of the doubt without cause. Also, where is Mozilla getting money from in the first place? They only offer free products. The last time I checked, they're getting most of their money from Google. That doesn't automatically mean Google has Mozilla in their pocket, but it's definitely a red flag.
  - steveklabnik 9y ago
    To be clear, "Mozilla" is two entities; the Mozilla Foundation ("Mofo"), which is a non-profit, and the Mozilla Corporation ("Moco"), which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Foundation. (I am an employee of Moco.) This is more of a tax/legal thing than it is a different mission between the two entities, as [1] says: "The Mozilla Corporation is guided by the principles of the Mozilla Manifesto." The Google deal changed in 2014, at which point it became a five-year deal with Yahoo! in the US, and other partnerships (I don't remember the details to be honest) elsewhere, IIRC Yandex in Russia and Baidu in China? 1. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/moco/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/moco/
  - hackuser 9y ago
    > the only difference between non-profit and for-profit is that the owners of a non-profit don't get to keep them money for themselves per se, although they're just like for-profits in all other ways, including the ability to name their own salaries and waste money frivolously and use their resources inefficiently ... That overlooks the most important difference, the reason non-profits exist: For-profit companies exist to make money for their owners; non-profits exist to serve a public mission, such as protecting and furthering the free and open web (or feeding the starving or promoting peace or etc.). Also, the salaries are not at all comparable. If the founders of Mozilla had made it a for-profit company, they'd be among the Silicon Valley billionaires (and the founders of Mozilla's predecessor, Netscape, are indeed among them or at least extremely wealthy). There are many very talented people who gave their careers to the free and open web, when I expect they could have been making a lot more money elsewhere. I doubt Mozilla competes with Google on salary.
  - dbaupp 9y ago
    I wasn't defending Mozilla so much as comparing, and specifically comparing a non-profit with two definitely-for-profit corporations. To me, it seems like even without knowing anything about Mozilla or the for-profits the balance of probability for which is least likely to be "evil" falls on the non-profit side. Additionally, the point about Google paying Mozilla is a little silly (even if it were still true): one of the corporations we're comparing here is literally Google, so whatever Mozilla is doing is rather unlikely to be worse than what Google is. Of course, for this specific case of non-profit and for-profit, there's a decade and more of history bearing out the sense that Mozilla is far better than the corporations from this particular political/privacy/no-ulterior-motives stance. Additionally, I don't see why monetary/resource efficiency is relevant: the thing that actually matters is the product, and while being efficient/nonfrivilous is likely to help make a good product, it doesn't actually seem like a relevant end goal. Everything else equal, I'm still going to buy from a company that "wastes" 99% of its money if its product is better than the one that doesn't "waste" anything.
nothis 9y ago
Not being owned by a billion-dollar company interested in data mining? I also feel that the add-on library is still stronger, even if a lot of newer ones are sadly Chrome-only.
overshard 9y ago
Last I tried to customize Edge I got held up at simple things like installing an AdBlocker. Once I got that installed, which I had to do through the Windows Store, it seemed to still load ads but not display them for multiple AdBlockers tested which defeats the purpose for me. I block ads to improve page load speeds. I also didn't have any customization of the bar that the URL block resides on. I wanted to remove basic things like the share button which I never use and could not. Chrome is developed and maintained by an ad company that actively doesn't allow extensions on the mobile version. It also uses significantly more RAM on my small laptops than Firefox. I like to use Firefox on Android and my desktop computers/laptops so I can sync them all and have a browser that allows me to install extensions on mobile (like AdBlockers). This is less of an issue on iOS due to the native content blocking API which Google will never add to Android because they are an ad company. This seems a bit anti-ad now that I reread it but I'm going to go ahead and post it anyways, replace AdBlocker with any extension or customization. So the answer is choice and freedom, if you don't see a problem with Edge and Chrome then use Edge and Chrome. You should support content creators and use what you like to use. I like to use Firefox because it uses less RAM, allows extensions across all platforms, and is developed by a company that I trust a lot more than the alternatives.
ancarda 9y ago
I prefer Firefox's developer tools & inspector. What's the niche of Chrome, honestly? "It's fast"? That doesn't matter to everyone and long term, I can see Firefox getting as fast, if not faster, with all the recent work on overhauling the add-on system and porting bits of Servo over.
- michel-slm 9y ago
  A bit of vendor lock-in as well at times (pragmatic reason for using Chrome and ideological reason to stay away from it). YouTube TV, for instance, currently only works on Chrome -- not on Safari and Firefox.
flyinghamster 9y ago
One thing I really like about Firefox is that the search bar is separate from the address bar. I don't necessarily want to be doing an online search when I type a URL into the address bar, especially when the URL goes to an internal LAN host.
- twobyfour 9y ago
  It is separate? I haven't seen a separate search and address bar in about 5 years. Or at least, the address bar will always run a search if you don't enter a real URL. How does one get back the separate functions?
  - rvern 9y ago
    It is separate. You can disable searches for the Awesome Bar by setting keyword.enabled to false on about:config.
  - bzbarsky 9y ago
    The address bar in Firefox will run a search if you enter something that doesn't look like a URL. But it won't send whatever you're typing to the search engine looking for search suggestions, for example. You need to use the search field to get search suggestions. In contrast, in Chrome, you can either have search suggestions and your search engine seeing every URL you type, or no search suggestions at all, depending on how you set your prefs.
Crespyl 9y ago
Though it seems increasingly too 'niche' to be viable, being fully open source and putting the end users interests first by default is pretty valuable.
Grue3 9y ago
XUL plugins that can modify the browser's interface and open up infinite possibilities to improve the user's experience... Oh, wait, Firefox's removing that too.
- _pmf_ 9y ago
  XUL based applications were so much nicer than the current Electron abominations.
domenicd 9y ago
Apart from the (fairly valid IMO) political reasons, Firefox is still the king of UI customizability and good add-ons. Even without the old XUL system, there are add-ons like those at https://testpilot.firefox.com/ https://testpilot.firefox.com/ which modify the browser in pretty drastic ways. I can't really use a browser without some form of tabs-on-the-side these days.
- smacktoward 9y ago
  Me neither. I am really hoping that Tab Center "graduates" from Test Pilot into core FF sometime soon.
- dsrajapaksha 9y ago
  Test Pilot Containers is the best innovation in a browser for me lately. I used to create separate profiles in Chrome to have multiple logins for a single website. Now I can just create another container and have a new profile side by side in the same window. Containers are supported in Firefox Nightly without the Test Pilot Addon.
Retr0spectrum 9y ago
Personally, I use Firefox because I'd rather support Mozilla than Google. Also, I have it set up exactly how I like it, and I know how everything works, despite the fact that Chromium does seem to be faster in most cases.
SimeVidas 9y ago
Mozilla is only company I feel fairly confident won’t sell my data or do other things that violate my privacy. This is more than a niche, but most users don’t care enough about privacy.
- noja 9y ago
  "Trust". Edit: thanks for the downvotes! The parent basically described trust, so I summarised.
  - aluhut 9y ago
    It's still better then google or MS and as you see, this is important to FF users. So it's in their own interest not to fuck up here.
    - scholia 9y ago
      Indeed. Firefox is the only major browser that where the rendering engine isn't owned by a large manufacturer, ie Apple, Google or Microsoft. It's also genuinely open source.
  - aorth 9y ago
    > Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
digitalnalogika 9y ago
It has lower memory requirements, great developer tools and once Servo is integrated in Firefox, I think it has potential to really beat Chrome performance-wise. Of course, until that happens Mozilla needs enough funding from search engines to keep the lights running so it's my main browser.
izacus 9y ago
It's the only browser on Android with AdBlock support that can seamlessly sync with desktop.
- austinsharp 9y ago
  This is my use case too. It makes such a difference.
- jbmorgado 9y ago
  Opera does all that as well.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Yes, if you don't mind contributing your usage data to Qihoo's new "Big Data Analytics" platform, which will be "leveraging [Qihoo's] large user base, which consists of 514 million PC users and nearly 800 million mobile users to gather a tremendous amount of demographic and geographic data as well as search and behavioral patterns for data mining purpose"[1]. And surely they won't use it for anything nefarious, like their subsidiary's emission of backdated certificates[2]. [1] http://www.marketing-interactive.com/qihoo-360-expands-its-big-data-tool-and-search-engine-offerings/ http://www.marketing-interactive.com/qihoo-360-expands-its-b... [2] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1C6BlmbeQfn4a9zydVi2UvjBGv6szuSB4sMYUcVrR8vQ/preview# https://docs.google.com/document/d/1C6BlmbeQfn4a9zydVi2UvjBG...
    - jbmorgado 9y ago
      My answer was to: "It's the only browser on Android with AdBlock support that can seamlessly sync with desktop." Not to weather it collects your data or not.
      - icebraining 9y ago
        It seamlessly syncs, alright!
krzyk 9y ago
I'm not sure about Edge (I stay away from IEs, just out of habit), but comparing to Chrome Firefox uses less memory (I use 100+ tabs). And it has nicer UI than Chrome. EDIT: And as others mentioned it has adblockers on the mobile version (which syncs with my desktop one).
interfixus 9y ago
If you look real close, you may notice how Edge is a closed source application limited to use on one platform, and how Chrome, albeit being nominally open source, is utterly under the control of one major corporation for which it functions mainly as an aggressive marketing platform. Firefox has a niche as a uniquely customizable web browsing application until later this year, by which time Mozilla has decided it should self-immolate. Some of us are far too close to running out of browsing options.
nnethercote 9y ago
Mozilla is the only company that builds a browser because it genuinely wants to, rather than as a market defense tactic.

dbaupp 9y ago

There is, at least, the political niche of being truly open source, and not built by a for-profit corporation.

penpapersw 9y ago
I'm always a bit skeptical when someone defends an organization by saying it's non-profit. AFAIK, the only difference between non-profit and for-profit is that the owners of a non-profit don't get to keep them money for themselves per se, although they're just like for-profits in all other ways, including the ability to name their own salaries and waste money frivolously and use their resources inefficiently. I don't know how Mozilla works internally, but I'm not about to give them the benefit of the doubt without cause. Also, where is Mozilla getting money from in the first place? They only offer free products. The last time I checked, they're getting most of their money from Google. That doesn't automatically mean Google has Mozilla in their pocket, but it's definitely a red flag.
- steveklabnik 9y ago
  To be clear, "Mozilla" is two entities; the Mozilla Foundation ("Mofo"), which is a non-profit, and the Mozilla Corporation ("Moco"), which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Foundation. (I am an employee of Moco.) This is more of a tax/legal thing than it is a different mission between the two entities, as [1] says: "The Mozilla Corporation is guided by the principles of the Mozilla Manifesto." The Google deal changed in 2014, at which point it became a five-year deal with Yahoo! in the US, and other partnerships (I don't remember the details to be honest) elsewhere, IIRC Yandex in Russia and Baidu in China? 1. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/moco/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/moco/
- hackuser 9y ago
  > the only difference between non-profit and for-profit is that the owners of a non-profit don't get to keep them money for themselves per se, although they're just like for-profits in all other ways, including the ability to name their own salaries and waste money frivolously and use their resources inefficiently ... That overlooks the most important difference, the reason non-profits exist: For-profit companies exist to make money for their owners; non-profits exist to serve a public mission, such as protecting and furthering the free and open web (or feeding the starving or promoting peace or etc.). Also, the salaries are not at all comparable. If the founders of Mozilla had made it a for-profit company, they'd be among the Silicon Valley billionaires (and the founders of Mozilla's predecessor, Netscape, are indeed among them or at least extremely wealthy). There are many very talented people who gave their careers to the free and open web, when I expect they could have been making a lot more money elsewhere. I doubt Mozilla competes with Google on salary.
- dbaupp 9y ago
  I wasn't defending Mozilla so much as comparing, and specifically comparing a non-profit with two definitely-for-profit corporations. To me, it seems like even without knowing anything about Mozilla or the for-profits the balance of probability for which is least likely to be "evil" falls on the non-profit side. Additionally, the point about Google paying Mozilla is a little silly (even if it were still true): one of the corporations we're comparing here is literally Google, so whatever Mozilla is doing is rather unlikely to be worse than what Google is. Of course, for this specific case of non-profit and for-profit, there's a decade and more of history bearing out the sense that Mozilla is far better than the corporations from this particular political/privacy/no-ulterior-motives stance. Additionally, I don't see why monetary/resource efficiency is relevant: the thing that actually matters is the product, and while being efficient/nonfrivilous is likely to help make a good product, it doesn't actually seem like a relevant end goal. Everything else equal, I'm still going to buy from a company that "wastes" 99% of its money if its product is better than the one that doesn't "waste" anything.

nothis 9y ago

Not being owned by a billion-dollar company interested in data mining? I also feel that the add-on library is still stronger, even if a lot of newer ones are sadly Chrome-only.

overshard 9y ago

Last I tried to customize Edge I got held up at simple things like installing an AdBlocker. Once I got that installed, which I had to do through the Windows Store, it seemed to still load ads but not display them for multiple AdBlockers tested which defeats the purpose for me. I block ads to improve page load speeds. I also didn't have any customization of the bar that the URL block resides on. I wanted to remove basic things like the share button which I never use and could not. Chrome is developed and maintained by an ad company that actively doesn't allow extensions on the mobile version. It also uses significantly more RAM on my small laptops than Firefox. I like to use Firefox on Android and my desktop computers/laptops so I can sync them all and have a browser that allows me to install extensions on mobile (like AdBlockers). This is less of an issue on iOS due to the native content blocking API which Google will never add to Android because they are an ad company. This seems a bit anti-ad now that I reread it but I'm going to go ahead and post it anyways, replace AdBlocker with any extension or customization. So the answer is choice and freedom, if you don't see a problem with Edge and Chrome then use Edge and Chrome. You should support content creators and use what you like to use. I like to use Firefox because it uses less RAM, allows extensions across all platforms, and is developed by a company that I trust a lot more than the alternatives.

ancarda 9y ago

I prefer Firefox's developer tools & inspector. What's the niche of Chrome, honestly? "It's fast"? That doesn't matter to everyone and long term, I can see Firefox getting as fast, if not faster, with all the recent work on overhauling the add-on system and porting bits of Servo over.

michel-slm 9y ago
A bit of vendor lock-in as well at times (pragmatic reason for using Chrome and ideological reason to stay away from it). YouTube TV, for instance, currently only works on Chrome -- not on Safari and Firefox.

flyinghamster 9y ago

One thing I really like about Firefox is that the search bar is separate from the address bar. I don't necessarily want to be doing an online search when I type a URL into the address bar, especially when the URL goes to an internal LAN host.

twobyfour 9y ago
It is separate? I haven't seen a separate search and address bar in about 5 years. Or at least, the address bar will always run a search if you don't enter a real URL. How does one get back the separate functions?
- rvern 9y ago
  It is separate. You can disable searches for the Awesome Bar by setting keyword.enabled to false on about:config.
- bzbarsky 9y ago
  The address bar in Firefox will run a search if you enter something that doesn't look like a URL. But it won't send whatever you're typing to the search engine looking for search suggestions, for example. You need to use the search field to get search suggestions. In contrast, in Chrome, you can either have search suggestions and your search engine seeing every URL you type, or no search suggestions at all, depending on how you set your prefs.

Crespyl 9y ago

Though it seems increasingly too 'niche' to be viable, being fully open source and putting the end users interests first by default is pretty valuable.

Grue3 9y ago

XUL plugins that can modify the browser's interface and open up infinite possibilities to improve the user's experience... Oh, wait, Firefox's removing that too.

_pmf_ 9y ago
XUL based applications were so much nicer than the current Electron abominations.

domenicd 9y ago

Apart from the (fairly valid IMO) political reasons, Firefox is still the king of UI customizability and good add-ons. Even without the old XUL system, there are add-ons like those at https://testpilot.firefox.com/ https://testpilot.firefox.com/ which modify the browser in pretty drastic ways. I can't really use a browser without some form of tabs-on-the-side these days.

smacktoward 9y ago
Me neither. I am really hoping that Tab Center "graduates" from Test Pilot into core FF sometime soon.
dsrajapaksha 9y ago
Test Pilot Containers is the best innovation in a browser for me lately. I used to create separate profiles in Chrome to have multiple logins for a single website. Now I can just create another container and have a new profile side by side in the same window. Containers are supported in Firefox Nightly without the Test Pilot Addon.

Retr0spectrum 9y ago

Personally, I use Firefox because I'd rather support Mozilla than Google. Also, I have it set up exactly how I like it, and I know how everything works, despite the fact that Chromium does seem to be faster in most cases.

SimeVidas 9y ago

Mozilla is only company I feel fairly confident won’t sell my data or do other things that violate my privacy. This is more than a niche, but most users don’t care enough about privacy.

noja 9y ago
"Trust". Edit: thanks for the downvotes! The parent basically described trust, so I summarised.
- aluhut 9y ago
  It's still better then google or MS and as you see, this is important to FF users. So it's in their own interest not to fuck up here.
  - scholia 9y ago
    Indeed. Firefox is the only major browser that where the rendering engine isn't owned by a large manufacturer, ie Apple, Google or Microsoft. It's also genuinely open source.
- aorth 9y ago
  > Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

digitalnalogika 9y ago

It has lower memory requirements, great developer tools and once Servo is integrated in Firefox, I think it has potential to really beat Chrome performance-wise. Of course, until that happens Mozilla needs enough funding from search engines to keep the lights running so it's my main browser.

izacus 9y ago

It's the only browser on Android with AdBlock support that can seamlessly sync with desktop.

austinsharp 9y ago
This is my use case too. It makes such a difference.
jbmorgado 9y ago
Opera does all that as well.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Yes, if you don't mind contributing your usage data to Qihoo's new "Big Data Analytics" platform, which will be "leveraging [Qihoo's] large user base, which consists of 514 million PC users and nearly 800 million mobile users to gather a tremendous amount of demographic and geographic data as well as search and behavioral patterns for data mining purpose"[1]. And surely they won't use it for anything nefarious, like their subsidiary's emission of backdated certificates[2]. [1] http://www.marketing-interactive.com/qihoo-360-expands-its-big-data-tool-and-search-engine-offerings/ http://www.marketing-interactive.com/qihoo-360-expands-its-b... [2] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1C6BlmbeQfn4a9zydVi2UvjBGv6szuSB4sMYUcVrR8vQ/preview# https://docs.google.com/document/d/1C6BlmbeQfn4a9zydVi2UvjBG...
  - jbmorgado 9y ago
    My answer was to: "It's the only browser on Android with AdBlock support that can seamlessly sync with desktop." Not to weather it collects your data or not.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      It seamlessly syncs, alright!

krzyk 9y ago

I'm not sure about Edge (I stay away from IEs, just out of habit), but comparing to Chrome Firefox uses less memory (I use 100+ tabs). And it has nicer UI than Chrome. EDIT: And as others mentioned it has adblockers on the mobile version (which syncs with my desktop one).

interfixus 9y ago

If you look real close, you may notice how Edge is a closed source application limited to use on one platform, and how Chrome, albeit being nominally open source, is utterly under the control of one major corporation for which it functions mainly as an aggressive marketing platform. Firefox has a niche as a uniquely customizable web browsing application until later this year, by which time Mozilla has decided it should self-immolate. Some of us are far too close to running out of browsing options.

nnethercote 9y ago

Mozilla is the only company that builds a browser because it genuinely wants to, rather than as a market defense tactic.