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"Perhaps Mozilla's biggest blunder was its decision to add support for the closed-source DRM W3C standard Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) in Firefox." It's ha

by jaas 8y ago

"Perhaps Mozilla's biggest blunder was its decision to add support for the closed-source DRM W3C standard Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) in Firefox." It's hard to imagine a perspective from which this is true that isn't very narrowly constrained to anti-DRM activism. If anything, implementing DRM was a significant positive for Firefox market share, unpleasant as the decision was. The article says: "Despite Mozilla's kowtowing to the video streaming industries, Firefox users have continued to switch to other browsers anyway" Yes - and Mozilla would have lost even more users, faster, if they didn't integrate DRM capabilities. The fact that Mozilla continued to lose users after DRM is not evidence that DRM was bad for market share. DRM stemmed the bleeding a bit. I understand why people don't like DRM, and I'm sympathetic, but almost nobody actually wants to use a browser without DRM because they'd be cut off from doing what they want to do (e.g. watch Netflix, YouTube). Before Mozilla added DRM directly, it supported Flash, which almost everyone had installed, and that was DRM plus a myriad of stability and security nightmares. Firefox didn't "add" DRM so much as they retained it while throwing the rest of Flash out the window. Firefox is clearly better off now. Mozilla's biggest mistake is simply that after Firefox 3, Firefox was significantly surpassed in quality for many years by at least Chrome, maybe also Safari. Luckily Mozilla has closed the quality gap and is shipping a great browser today, but that painful period is probably going to continue to haunt them for a long time. They lost a lot of users because they weren't shipping a browser that met modern quality standards. That was probably their single biggest mistake, and that's why their market share is what it is today.

abdullahkhalids 8y ago
I don't think the quality factor is the _most_ significant factor in the decline of Firefox's market share - though it might be a significant factor. Firefox simply lost out to Google doing all they can to push Chrome onto people. Its advertised on their pages, its pushed onto organizations using google tools, etc etc. Even if Chrome was marginally worse than Firefox, it would have a similar market share.
- Merem 8y ago
  Exactly. People seem to forget the effect it has when Google promotes something on their search engine as well as Youtube (where they also forced you to get a Gmail-account eventually after taking over) etc.
- jaas 8y ago
  I disagree, though that was certainly a big factor, particularly in speeding up the pace of user loss. In any case, it's probably not a healthy perspective for Mozilla or its community to just write this off as Firefox being the victim of a big ad campaign for another browser. Mozilla had real problems and missed opportunities, and that's where their focus rightfully should have been.
  - captain_perl 8y ago
    I'm ex-Netscape, and have been using the various Mozilla browsers primarily since around 2000. The browser has always worked fine in daily use. I also use the developer tools, and they're also adequate for vanilla-js development. So based on 2 decades of experience with Mozilla, I'd go with Chrome surpassing it in market share as more to do with promotion than Mozilla not being good enough.
    - SamReidHughes 8y ago
      Browser user here. Chrome was way better. Everybody else copied its UI for a reason.
    - mercer 8y ago
      I consider myself concerned enough about Google, and supportive enough of having Firefox as an alternative, that I feel somewhat guilty for giving up on switching to Firefox about once a year (at least). And yet I keep doing so, because for whatever inexplicable reason I prefer Chrome enough, or dislike Firefox enough, to keep switching back to the former. While your comment prompts me to try again and figure out why this is the case exactly, Google's marketing is not the reason for me (and, unfortunately, others too). If I had to guess, I'd say it usually boils down to a feeling of clunkiness and weird hogging of memory/processing, whether true or just perceived. I've read some threads that indicate this is a problem for Mac users in particular, but I don't know if this is actually true.
      - basic1 8y ago
        The Mac/Linux Firefox ports have never been good, their success was unearned and they were quickly replaced when a competitor came along.
apostacy 8y ago
Regardless of user count, adopting EME was a terrible move for Firefox. Does this mean that whatever terrible idea corporations push, Firefox must adopt? I'm glad that Firefox used to simply not implement things that were not a good idea. And in the long term, I think that by legitimizing DRM like they have, they will still be at a disadvantage, because they've helped give the green light to this class of technologies, where Mozilla will always be at a disadvantage. The biggest mistake that Mozilla is making is adopting the for-profit paradigm that their competitors have. Mozilla is not a business, and they don't need to convince people who don't care about web browsers or privacy to use their web browser. It would frankly be better if they just used Chrome. Mozilla's vain obsession with their brand and with being popular with people who don't care is frankly toxic to them. We need to stop using the term marketshare when talking about Firefox, because that implies that there is a market, and there isn't. There might be differing levels of usage between browsers, but comparing usage of Firefox to Chrome or Safari is apples and oranges, because Mozilla's goal is not to open an app store and build a monopolistic for-profit closed platform, as Google and Apple's are. And I think that this pseudo-capitalist mentality is causing them to overcompensate in harmful ways. Imagine if other staples of OSS started acting this way (some of them already do). Imagine if Ubuntu adopted a Microsoft-style forced updates model. I could honestly see them doing that. And I bring this up in many of my comments, but I'm so glad that when Firefox first came out, they didn't worship at the feet of Microsoft and try to emulate IE6 the way that they worship at the feet of Google. I'm glad that a decade ago they didn't consider themselves failures because they couldn't win over the AOL users. > Before Mozilla added DRM directly, it supported Flash, which almost everyone had installed, and that was DRM plus a myriad of stability and security nightmares. Yes, exactly. I think DRM is conceptually incompatible with an open web browsing ecosystem, so of course it should require ugly hacks to pull off. If a company wants to introduce closed and hostile code to their users, they should be on their own. It is not our job to facilitate them doing bad things. > Mozilla's biggest mistake is simply that after Firefox 3, Firefox was significantly surpassed in quality for many years by at least Chrome, maybe also Safari. Luckily Mozilla has closed the quality gap and is shipping a great browser today, but that painful period is probably going to continue to haunt them for a long time. That's highly subjective and I strongly disagree. Chrome's UX is AWFUL. It is constantly doing things behind my back, and I can never rely on it for anything. And thanks to Chrome popularizing forced destructive updates, interfaces have become very unstable, and you cannot rely on a feature in your browser even being there when you wake up in the morning. It could just be silently erased. Their app store is so terrible and filled with so many misleading low quality or outright hostile extensions it is barely useful. And even if they were better, I couldn't rely on them not dissapearing. Soon, we won't have address bars and URLs will mostly be used for internal use. Ads will be rendered server-side and stitched into content. Our computers will be completely out of our control and run whatever code Google feels like. And Chrome will be an accomplice. We are truly entering a dark age of technology.
majewsky 8y ago
> Mozilla's biggest mistake is simply that after Firefox 3, Firefox was significantly surpassed in quality for many years by at least Chrome, maybe also Safari. Luckily Mozilla has closed the quality gap and is shipping a great browser today, but that painful period is probably going to continue to haunt them for a long time. There is a surprising amount of parallel here to how IE was surpassed in quality by Mozilla/Firefox after IE 6, and that painful period is still haunting IE/Edge. Not saying it's exactly the same situation, but history rhymes.
amaccuish 8y ago
I was glad they included DRM. I was one of those who switched to other browsers to watch Netflix etc.

by jaas 8y ago

abdullahkhalids 8y ago

I don't think the quality factor is the _most_ significant factor in the decline of Firefox's market share - though it might be a significant factor. Firefox simply lost out to Google doing all they can to push Chrome onto people. Its advertised on their pages, its pushed onto organizations using google tools, etc etc. Even if Chrome was marginally worse than Firefox, it would have a similar market share.

Merem 8y ago
Exactly. People seem to forget the effect it has when Google promotes something on their search engine as well as Youtube (where they also forced you to get a Gmail-account eventually after taking over) etc.
jaas 8y ago
I disagree, though that was certainly a big factor, particularly in speeding up the pace of user loss. In any case, it's probably not a healthy perspective for Mozilla or its community to just write this off as Firefox being the victim of a big ad campaign for another browser. Mozilla had real problems and missed opportunities, and that's where their focus rightfully should have been.
- captain_perl 8y ago
  I'm ex-Netscape, and have been using the various Mozilla browsers primarily since around 2000. The browser has always worked fine in daily use. I also use the developer tools, and they're also adequate for vanilla-js development. So based on 2 decades of experience with Mozilla, I'd go with Chrome surpassing it in market share as more to do with promotion than Mozilla not being good enough.
  - SamReidHughes 8y ago
    Browser user here. Chrome was way better. Everybody else copied its UI for a reason.
  - mercer 8y ago
    I consider myself concerned enough about Google, and supportive enough of having Firefox as an alternative, that I feel somewhat guilty for giving up on switching to Firefox about once a year (at least). And yet I keep doing so, because for whatever inexplicable reason I prefer Chrome enough, or dislike Firefox enough, to keep switching back to the former. While your comment prompts me to try again and figure out why this is the case exactly, Google's marketing is not the reason for me (and, unfortunately, others too). If I had to guess, I'd say it usually boils down to a feeling of clunkiness and weird hogging of memory/processing, whether true or just perceived. I've read some threads that indicate this is a problem for Mac users in particular, but I don't know if this is actually true.
    - basic1 8y ago
      The Mac/Linux Firefox ports have never been good, their success was unearned and they were quickly replaced when a competitor came along.

apostacy 8y ago

Regardless of user count, adopting EME was a terrible move for Firefox. Does this mean that whatever terrible idea corporations push, Firefox must adopt? I'm glad that Firefox used to simply not implement things that were not a good idea. And in the long term, I think that by legitimizing DRM like they have, they will still be at a disadvantage, because they've helped give the green light to this class of technologies, where Mozilla will always be at a disadvantage. The biggest mistake that Mozilla is making is adopting the for-profit paradigm that their competitors have. Mozilla is not a business, and they don't need to convince people who don't care about web browsers or privacy to use their web browser. It would frankly be better if they just used Chrome. Mozilla's vain obsession with their brand and with being popular with people who don't care is frankly toxic to them. We need to stop using the term marketshare when talking about Firefox, because that implies that there is a market, and there isn't. There might be differing levels of usage between browsers, but comparing usage of Firefox to Chrome or Safari is apples and oranges, because Mozilla's goal is not to open an app store and build a monopolistic for-profit closed platform, as Google and Apple's are. And I think that this pseudo-capitalist mentality is causing them to overcompensate in harmful ways. Imagine if other staples of OSS started acting this way (some of them already do). Imagine if Ubuntu adopted a Microsoft-style forced updates model. I could honestly see them doing that. And I bring this up in many of my comments, but I'm so glad that when Firefox first came out, they didn't worship at the feet of Microsoft and try to emulate IE6 the way that they worship at the feet of Google. I'm glad that a decade ago they didn't consider themselves failures because they couldn't win over the AOL users. > Before Mozilla added DRM directly, it supported Flash, which almost everyone had installed, and that was DRM plus a myriad of stability and security nightmares. Yes, exactly. I think DRM is conceptually incompatible with an open web browsing ecosystem, so of course it should require ugly hacks to pull off. If a company wants to introduce closed and hostile code to their users, they should be on their own. It is not our job to facilitate them doing bad things. > Mozilla's biggest mistake is simply that after Firefox 3, Firefox was significantly surpassed in quality for many years by at least Chrome, maybe also Safari. Luckily Mozilla has closed the quality gap and is shipping a great browser today, but that painful period is probably going to continue to haunt them for a long time. That's highly subjective and I strongly disagree. Chrome's UX is AWFUL. It is constantly doing things behind my back, and I can never rely on it for anything. And thanks to Chrome popularizing forced destructive updates, interfaces have become very unstable, and you cannot rely on a feature in your browser even being there when you wake up in the morning. It could just be silently erased. Their app store is so terrible and filled with so many misleading low quality or outright hostile extensions it is barely useful. And even if they were better, I couldn't rely on them not dissapearing. Soon, we won't have address bars and URLs will mostly be used for internal use. Ads will be rendered server-side and stitched into content. Our computers will be completely out of our control and run whatever code Google feels like. And Chrome will be an accomplice. We are truly entering a dark age of technology.

majewsky 8y ago

> Mozilla's biggest mistake is simply that after Firefox 3, Firefox was significantly surpassed in quality for many years by at least Chrome, maybe also Safari. Luckily Mozilla has closed the quality gap and is shipping a great browser today, but that painful period is probably going to continue to haunt them for a long time. There is a surprising amount of parallel here to how IE was surpassed in quality by Mozilla/Firefox after IE 6, and that painful period is still haunting IE/Edge. Not saying it's exactly the same situation, but history rhymes.

amaccuish 8y ago

I was glad they included DRM. I was one of those who switched to other browsers to watch Netflix etc.