6 ms·

> Firefox’s decline is not an engineering problem. Its a market disruption (Desktop to Mobile shift) and monopoly problem. There are no engineering solutions to

> Firefox’s decline is not an engineering problem. Its a market disruption (Desktop to Mobile shift) and monopoly problem. There are no engineering solutions to these market problems. The only way to escape this is to pivot to a different market [...] Privacy is the one problem that Mozilla/Firefox can address, which Google and Microsoft will be fundamentally conflicted about addressing. It is also a growing market; that is the market Firefox should be aiming for! It seems to me that Mozilla/Firefox folks don't appreciate this at a deep level. They are eroding user trust in the attempt to gather data for engineering better features. Eg. see the recent controversy regarding Firefox's usage of Google Analytics: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14753546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14753546 . I made some comments on that thread, on how Mozilla/Firefox could try to win the privacy market. I don't want to repeat those comments, so I'll just link to them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14754672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14754672

Glyptodon 9y ago
Pretty much this drives my Firefox usage... I use it on mobile because I can still use various adblock/privacy extensions without trouble. Use it on the desktop, too, because Google being deeply linked into my browser creeps me out.
drdaeman 9y ago
No reason to do so when world clearly shows all one need to do is to stick "private", "secure", "end-to-end encrypted", "anonymous" etc labels (and keep buzzwords up-to-date with current year's trends) and just don't do something too obviously contradicting that. That's really sad but seem to be true. Too many examples out there.
tedmielczarek 9y ago
Note that Mozilla is working more closely with the Tor project with an eye towards making it easier for more people to get the privacy enhancing benefits of browsing over the Tor network.
- Endy 9y ago
  Just as a thought, would it be impossible for Firefox to render the Tor browser bundle unnecessary, by making every release of Firefox feature Tor functions (and other privacy controls) by default?
  - bzbarsky 9y ago
    Here are some Tor privacy controls that might be a bit hard to ship by default: 1) Various navigator.* APIs all claim you're on Windows. Some people on non-Windows platforms may have issues with this. 2) Various window-sizing APIs lie about sizing, so pages that use them will end up making windows too small for their content. 3) Geolocation is disabled altogether. 4) The performance API is effectively disabled (claims pretty much everything took 0 time). 5) Media queries on the device pixel ratio lie and claim it's 1, no matter what it actually is. 6) All timing functions are clamped to the nearest 100ms. That means Date.now(), performance.now(), etc. If nothing else, shipping this by default will make all benchmark results _very_ weird. There's also various other functionality that gets disabled (gamepad API, orientation API, etc, etc). These are generally not used much yet, so might be ok to remove, if people think these should actually not exist as web APIs.
    - Endy 9y ago
      1) So make a request that Tor-like functions tell servers that our OS is Ubuntu. Perhaps I'm obtuse here, but who gives a darn if it's a matter of privacy - isn't the issue to hide under the most common OS? 2) So we send (through a Tor-backed PGP/GPG-encrypted message) a message saying "hey dev.dork, your minimuum window size is unrealistic". 3) Yay! 4) Yay! 5) And...? maybe it'd be wise to declare 4:3, but otherwise I see no issue. 6) Well, obviously we should have a button of "This page is requesting private data - Share for this page load? Y/N" And I really, really don't mind if literally everything called an "API" were to go out the bloody window. Sure, it's throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but there's too much bathwater and the baby's a squalling jerkface anyhow.
      - bzbarsky 9y ago
qovv 9y ago
Excellent point about privacy. This is why Firefox is (still?) the top browser in Germany (think history, GDR and before). There is actually a huge majority of people who want to have control over their own data. Firefox should make this a real priority, in actions, not just in words. This really matters, especially to a lot of tech people who understand the issues, and who will translate this to regular users if Firefox makes a real effort (which they have not done to date).
hyperdunc 9y ago
Mozilla have recently released Firefox Focus, which is a stripped down, privacy enhanced version of the browser. So it seems they are somewhat aware that they need to be targeting privacy conscious users.
frik 9y ago
> Privacy is the one problem that Mozilla/Firefox can address could address, unfortunately Firefox default settings are no better than Chrome nowadays - what a shame. Every time the Firefox settings dialog gets changed, privacy related settings get less, and default options changed for the worse. One has to dig through the about:config mess, and even there the settings get renamed. It feels like their new devs learned their work at Microsoft, with Win10 as shameful disrespectful highlight of user hostile behavior.

Glyptodon 9y ago

Pretty much this drives my Firefox usage... I use it on mobile because I can still use various adblock/privacy extensions without trouble. Use it on the desktop, too, because Google being deeply linked into my browser creeps me out.

drdaeman 9y ago

No reason to do so when world clearly shows all one need to do is to stick "private", "secure", "end-to-end encrypted", "anonymous" etc labels (and keep buzzwords up-to-date with current year's trends) and just don't do something too obviously contradicting that. That's really sad but seem to be true. Too many examples out there.

tedmielczarek 9y ago

Note that Mozilla is working more closely with the Tor project with an eye towards making it easier for more people to get the privacy enhancing benefits of browsing over the Tor network.

Endy 9y ago
Just as a thought, would it be impossible for Firefox to render the Tor browser bundle unnecessary, by making every release of Firefox feature Tor functions (and other privacy controls) by default?
- bzbarsky 9y ago
  Here are some Tor privacy controls that might be a bit hard to ship by default: 1) Various navigator.* APIs all claim you're on Windows. Some people on non-Windows platforms may have issues with this. 2) Various window-sizing APIs lie about sizing, so pages that use them will end up making windows too small for their content. 3) Geolocation is disabled altogether. 4) The performance API is effectively disabled (claims pretty much everything took 0 time). 5) Media queries on the device pixel ratio lie and claim it's 1, no matter what it actually is. 6) All timing functions are clamped to the nearest 100ms. That means Date.now(), performance.now(), etc. If nothing else, shipping this by default will make all benchmark results _very_ weird. There's also various other functionality that gets disabled (gamepad API, orientation API, etc, etc). These are generally not used much yet, so might be ok to remove, if people think these should actually not exist as web APIs.
  - Endy 9y ago
    1) So make a request that Tor-like functions tell servers that our OS is Ubuntu. Perhaps I'm obtuse here, but who gives a darn if it's a matter of privacy - isn't the issue to hide under the most common OS? 2) So we send (through a Tor-backed PGP/GPG-encrypted message) a message saying "hey dev.dork, your minimuum window size is unrealistic". 3) Yay! 4) Yay! 5) And...? maybe it'd be wise to declare 4:3, but otherwise I see no issue. 6) Well, obviously we should have a button of "This page is requesting private data - Share for this page load? Y/N" And I really, really don't mind if literally everything called an "API" were to go out the bloody window. Sure, it's throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but there's too much bathwater and the baby's a squalling jerkface anyhow.
    - bzbarsky 9y ago

qovv 9y ago

Excellent point about privacy. This is why Firefox is (still?) the top browser in Germany (think history, GDR and before). There is actually a huge majority of people who want to have control over their own data. Firefox should make this a real priority, in actions, not just in words. This really matters, especially to a lot of tech people who understand the issues, and who will translate this to regular users if Firefox makes a real effort (which they have not done to date).

hyperdunc 9y ago

Mozilla have recently released Firefox Focus, which is a stripped down, privacy enhanced version of the browser. So it seems they are somewhat aware that they need to be targeting privacy conscious users.

frik 9y ago

> Privacy is the one problem that Mozilla/Firefox can address could address, unfortunately Firefox default settings are no better than Chrome nowadays - what a shame. Every time the Firefox settings dialog gets changed, privacy related settings get less, and default options changed for the worse. One has to dig through the about:config mess, and even there the settings get renamed. It feels like their new devs learned their work at Microsoft, with Win10 as shameful disrespectful highlight of user hostile behavior.