10 ms·

As a Mozilla employee, speaking from my own limited perspective, it seems the company as a whole broadly agrees with this analysis even if it isn't vocalized qu

As a Mozilla employee, speaking from my own limited perspective, it seems the company as a whole broadly agrees with this analysis even if it isn't vocalized quite this succinctly. Chrome started out being force-installed alongside Flash, and there is no solution to the bundling problem -- the problem is even larger in scale than the article suggests because of Chromebooks affecting desktop. People who use Firefox in the future will increasingly be people who do so consciously, presumably because they view Mozilla as helping them protect their privacy. Chrome is and will continue to be the default. Eventually, Google will do something that is an abuse of their monopoly power. Either there will eventually be a privacy/creepiness fiasco, or Google will attempt to use Chrome as leverage to squeeze a competitor out of a market. When that happens, Mozilla will be well-positioned as an alternative. The path forward in this view would look more like Mozilla as a constellation of disaffected companies and users attempting to free themselves from Google. It won't look like Mozilla on the side doing something by itself. We will largely be defined in opposition to Google. The article correctly points out that a wiser Microsoft could have gotten a head-start on this inevitability by partnering with us early.

zamadatix 8y ago
I really don't think the general population cares about any of that enough to incite the change you are referring to. People stopped using IE because it was hilariously bad to use compared to Firefox and then Chrome. Until Chrome becomes hilariously worse for an average user to use it'll remain a near monopoly.
Reinmar 8y ago
You say that Mozilla will be well-positioned as an alternative to Google. That sounds realistic and I hope it will be able to team up with bigger companies which would like to compete with Google (instead of helping it). However, that made me think about Brave (https://brave.com/ https://brave.com/). What are your thoughts about it? It's also privacy oriented, but it's actually built on top of Chromium. What is even more interesting, Brave was founded by Brendan Eich (the co-founder of Mozilla).
- gilrain 8y ago
  Brave is rent-seeking the entire Internet and doesn’t deserve serious mention.
  - BostonEnginerd 8y ago
    I disagree. They have presented an alternative to the current system of surveillance capitalism without forcing anyone into their platform. I don’t really love the browser and wish the Brave protocol was available for Firefox, but hopefully we can get there sometime in the future.
    - jolmg 8y ago
      I really don't know what's better. While it's bad that having a free web has lead to multiple entities doing everything they can to track as much as they can, it's also a great benefit to society to have free access to so much knowledge. In the end though, I don't think we'll see a shift to people paying for their content. Societal problems arising from lack of privacy is one of those high-impact-low-probability-or-slow-to-come risks that the public is so bad at handling for their greater aggregate benefit. To really see a change, if Brave has done their part, what'd be missing would be a general public education program that would better inform the public of what the risks are and what can be done about it. Something like Smokey Bear.
      - bunderbunder 8y ago
        > While it's bad that having a free web has lead to multiple entities doing everything they can to track as much as they can, it's also a great benefit to society to have free access to so much knowledge. This feels like a false dilemma to me. Many, if not most, of the corners of the web that are devoted to disseminating knowledge are funded by means that don't involve tracking ads. It's the entertainment corner of the web - social media, yes, but I include listicle-oriented versions of journalism here, too - that seems to be the primary engine of all this surveillance capitalism. It's no coincidence that they also have a tendency to actively exploit the parts of human psychology that make us susceptible to addiction. Which means that, while it's true that they don't charge an up-front fee, their products do still come at a price.
sebazzz 8y ago
How well is Gecko/Servo suitable for embedding in another application as a web browser? Apparently it is very easy with Chrome, why we have 25+ Chrome derivatives.
- jcranmer 8y ago
  I can't speak for Servo, but Mozilla pretty firmly gave up on trying to have a good embedding story for Gecko and SpiderMonkey (in the name of being able to rapidly iterate on APIs, which never ended up settling down) somewhere around 2009. I contend that one of Mozilla's big mistakes was to give up on embedding.
  - kitsunesoba 8y ago
    RIP Camino, which served as many Mac users’ favored browser for years even after it stopped getting updates.
tapoxi 8y ago
What would be the downside of "pulling an Edge" and just making Firefox a Chrome fork with some Mozilla specific features? There's an alternative to Google, Mozilla saves a ton of money/time on duplicated effort, and developers only have to worry about testing against Blink/Webkit. Servo/Quantum is cool, but it seems to be too late for that. I'm worried that Mozilla is simply in denial about this and when reality sets in course correction will be significantly more painful.
- SamWhited 8y ago
  But there's now no alternative to Blink, and Google can do the IE/Netscape thing of just ignoring the standards process and making up new web technologies that benefit them (and everyone else has to adopt them). The browser UI is the least important thing to compete on.
- danShumway 8y ago
  It would give the Chromium dev team a massive amount of leverage in directing web standards. This matters because, on-the-whole, Mozilla's dev teams tend to be much better at writing standards than Google's are; partially because many of the standards Chromium focuses on are prioritized and developed with the intention of being helpful to Google's long-term strategies. There have been multiple instances (html imports spring to mind) where bad decisions were averted purely because Mozilla had the guts to say, "we're not putting that in Firefox, come back when you have a better proposal." Yes, Chromium is Open Source, but Open Source isn't magic. It's still very much a Google product, designed to increase Google's overall influence over the direction of the web. Unless Mozilla's plan is to literally fork Blink, then having a primarily for-profit mono-culture in charge of what features get fast-tracked and prioritized for browsers is still incredibly harmful.
  - tapoxi 8y ago
    There are enough large, interested parties (Samsung, Microsoft, Mozilla) out there that they could literally fork Blink if organizational issues arise and gain a sizable install base.
SamWhited 8y ago
> Eventually, Google will do something that is an abuse of their monopoly power. This is one of Mozilla's problems: they constantly advertise privacy, etc. and while I agree their views in general, most users don't care. If you position yourself as the privacy respecting web browser, you will only ever get the tiny niche of people who care and everyone else who sees your marketing will just roll their eyes and makes jokes about tinfoil hats. That's not to say that Mozilla should do all the anti-competitive things Google does, just that they need to stop advertising themselves this way if they ever want to get any reasonable market share back (unless they want to be a niche browser for people who don't like Google, which is fine if that's all they want to do). That being said, I don't see how any amount of marketing can fix Mozilla's problem for the same reasons the article pointed out.
- organsnyder 8y ago
  During the IE-6 dark ages of the early 2000s, Mozilla's browser (the Mozilla suite, then standalone Firebird, finally renamed to Firefox) was positioned in a similar way: it was the niche browser for people who cared about an open web. It stayed that way for quite a few years, slowly gaining traction by implementing features—tabbed browsing, popup blocking—not found in the dominant IE browser. I could see a similar approach working again. Mozilla could focus on user-centric features, while Chrome has to also serve the needs of Google's business interests.
  - laumars 8y ago
    > the Mozilla suite, then standalone Firebird, finally renamed to Firefox I believe it was originally called Phoenix. Though you're right it was then called Firebird and renamed again to Firefox afterwards. I think each time was due to trademark disputes? Going to your point though, I hope you're right but I'm a bit more sceptical. Chromium, being open source, means anyone who doesn't like the stagnation of Chrome would just fork Blink and create their own modern browser while still enforcing the Chrome mono-culture. I'd love to see Gecko take off in the same way kHTML, webkit and blink have done. In fact I'm surprised it hasn't. I don't suppose anyone more familiarity with the code base of these rendering engines are able to offer possible reasons why?
mercer 8y ago
> Eventually, Google will do something that is an abuse of their monopoly power. Either there will eventually be a privacy/creepiness fiasco, or Google will attempt to use Chrome as leverage to squeeze a competitor out of a market. > When that happens, Mozilla will be well-positioned as an alternative. I hope you're right, but my main concern is that this could be a war of attrition: Google has such deep pockets that they can simply play nice, all the while testing the limits of what users will accept, until Mozilla taps out. And once that happens, all bets are off.
Yizahi 8y ago
Arguably Google is already abusing their monopoly power but in the way that people like. I'm talking about AMP. In the future AMP/regular page boundary will blur and Chrome/GSearch/AMPpages will merge in the ubiquitous googlenet hosted on google servers (because it will work better than regular internet pages). Almost everybody will be happy after this and Mozilla will fall into obscurity. Basically you can't create a revolution in tech by failing once and then trying harder the second time and it looks like Mozilla failed even while being better. The only way for Mozilla to win is (like linked article suggests) is to dominate somewhere else and then leverage that to push web browser. They won't do this and don't want to really. PS: maybe they could buy/merge with other privacy oriented players in tech and create end-to-end privacy services that are usable, seemingly secure and integrated and then push this offering. But I can't see a big market today for this offer if it would exist. PPS: also to add to less known evil moves by Google - their U2F websites refuse to work in Firefox, despite it supporting U2F for a long time.
- jcranmer 8y ago
  > PPS: also to add to less known evil moves by Google - their U2F websites refuse to work in Firefox, despite it supporting U2F for a long time. The one that still sticks in my craw is that they never bothered to add support for Hangouts in Firefox. Hangouts was modified to use WebRTC in Chrome, but relied on a plugin in Firefox--despite Firefox actually implementing the relevant WebRTC features first.
  - larrik 8y ago
    Hmm, I use Hangouts in Firefox...
    - kenhwang 8y ago
      The chat or the video? The video hasn't worked in long time now.
      - Wowfunhappy 8y ago
dbolgheroni 8y ago
As a long Firefox user, I did switch to Chrome/Iridium lately. When Firefox decided to attack the problem of market share with engineering, 2 things were happening (almost) at the same time[1]: 1) the deprecation of the old add-on engine and 2) the introduction of the new Quantum engine. For the 1), while I understand there are some reasons in doing so (it was not a stable API as it was always breaking the extensions and security-wise), I think these problems could be managed. On the other hand, there were lots of good add-on depended on this API. Particularly, even when Firefox was behind technically-speaking, that was the main reason I used it. Firefox replaced the old API without offering all the new interfaces with the new API. So, I lost what made Firefox really unique. For the 2), I think it was a consequence for the 1). Firefox was finally "better" with Quantum. Of course everyone likes a responsible browser, but I actually didn't see that much difference. And there was another browser which was already really good: Chrome. Suddenly, there was no real advantage in using Firefox anymore. Someone my say privacy. But in some corners of the Internet, it's already impossible to navigate without some privacy-wise add-on/extension, which usually work on both browsers. Added to these, if you go deep down, security-wise there are some real technical advantages in running Chrome instead of Firefox in some OSs. For instance: https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=152872551609819&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=152872551609819&w=2 [1] I'm pretty sure a lot of other things were happening, but I'm in the perspective of the user here.
- Izkata 8y ago
  > Of course everyone likes a responsible browser, but I actually didn't see that much difference. Same here. The only difference I noticed was startup speed when restoring 200+ tabs; that was indeed far faster in Quantum, but I never noticed any other speed improvements. And it was something I only encountered once every couple of weeks anyway.
  - johnny22 8y ago
    what OS though? It seems like only Windows users really saw speed improvements
    - 8y ago
thaumaturgy 8y ago
Firefox's current problems go back to around 2011, and you can see this in the trend graphs. At that time, there was still a hot three-way race between Chrome, Firefox, and IE. But Mozilla made a misstep: they decided that, to compete with Chrome, they would adopt a new "Rapid Release" model. This resulted in a massively pissed-off base of former supporters and articles like "Rapid-release Firefox meets corporate backlash" [1] and "Understanding the Corporate Impact" [2]. There were multiple discussions with titles like, "Mozilla Executive: We're Not Interested In Enterprise Level Users", and it was still going on a year later with, "Everybody Hates Firefox Updates" [3]. People have been conditioned now to accept frequent updates, and -- years later -- the browser vendors have mostly stopped reskinning their interface every other release. But that wasn't the situation at the time, and so Firefox gave up their one competitive advantage over Chrome, and leveled the playing field in Chrome's favor. Mozilla could have instead embraced that big, loyal enterprise base, and found a sane middle road for updates that allowed them to keep a healthy release schedule for DOM, JS, and CSS support. But, they didn't. So all of that good will that Mozilla had fostered over the years just evaporated, and Mozilla never looked back. (It didn't help that, just after alienating their enterprise user base, Mozilla also kicked off some drama with a developer [5].) This falls into that category of mistakes-that-kill-your-business-years-later, alongside other case studies like Sears and RadioShack. [1]: https://www.cnet.com/news/rapid-release-firefox-meets-corporate-backlash/ https://www.cnet.com/news/rapid-release-firefox-meets-corpor... [2]: https://mike.kaply.com/2011/06/23/understanding-the-corporate-impact/ https://mike.kaply.com/2011/06/23/understanding-the-corporat... [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2692205 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2692205 [4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4209384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4209384 [5]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2741660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2741660
yogthos 8y ago
Has Mozilla considered focusing on the emerging federated ecosystem championed by Mastodon. I really think that federated sites are a way forward for the open web. Federated platforms are inherently decentralized, and they avoid the problem of a single company deciding what's right for all the users. Platforms like Mastodon and PeerTube are already able to interoperate via ActivityPub, and it would be great to see this ecosystem keep growing. I can see an ecosystem of federated platforms that fill the same niches as Twitter, Fb, Reddit, and Instagram. All developed independently, and all able to collaborate with one another. One big aspect of traditional web is searching, and that's where Google built their empire originally. Why not invert that equation and build search and discoverability into federated platforms. Perhaps extend ActivityPub, or create a sister protocol that focuses on searching. This approach would address the problem of discoverability much better than an external search engine. Perhaps Mozilla could help come up with such a standard.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
> We will largely be defined in opposition to Google. Looking at the Financial Report for 2017 https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-fdn-2017-fs-short-form-final-0927.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-fdn-201... it seems that the the vast majority of Mozilla revenue is from Royalties ($539M out of $562M). In addition in the report there is a statement to the effect that 93% of Royalties were from search engine deals. We know that Mozilla entered into a search engine deal with Google at the end of 2017. It looks like that the vast majority of Mozilla's revenue is from Google and will be for the next several years at least. It will be interesting to see Mozilla positioning themselves in opposition to Google when Google provides the vast majority of their revenue.
swebs 8y ago
>People who use Firefox in the future will increasingly be people who do so consciously, presumably because they view Mozilla as helping them protect their privacy. Chrome is and will continue to be the default. Honestly, the only reason I use Firefox is because it supports vertical tabs and Chrome doesn't. Maybe you should start advertising features that are more immediately visible than privacy.
fchristant 8y ago
hi, author of the article checking in. Thanks for commenting in the open from Mozilla's perspective, even if its just one voice, it's much appreciated. I agree that Firefox will remain an attraction to the group of people caring about openness, standards, and their privacy. My deepest concern is on how small that group is going to be. Will it settle at the current ~10%, or will it be as low as 5%, which I consider very dangerous grounds to be in. As for Google's abuse of market power, I strongly believe it has already happened, in plain view. There's no doubt in my mind that dominance in one market has been used to capture another market. We don't have to wait for that "mistake", it has already happened. These abuses are already under investigation, but I'm afraid it won't change the outcome. They'll pay some fine in a few years, but none of the browsers will be uninstalled. It won't matter much, but added an update to the top of the article suggesting people to install Firefox.
rdsubhas 8y ago
> Eventually, Google will do something that is an abuse of their monopoly power. Either there will eventually be a privacy/creepiness fiasco, or Google will attempt to use Chrome as leverage to squeeze a competitor out of a market. They did recently. They force signed and associated every user to the Chrome identity, thereby linking everything users do in the web to their Google ID. Nobody seems to have bothered.
latexr 8y ago
Add AppleScript support to Firefox and I’ll switch today. I don’t like Chrome’s dominance either, but what do you want me to do if your browser does not support a feature I use everyday, multiple times a day (and that was there but was removed, back in version 3)? You’re giving me a browser that is useless for my needs, so I can’t use it. You bet I’m thinking of leaving Chrome behind (and will likely do so once I make a clean install to Mojave, that should happen soon) but my only real alternative is Safari. I’d rather that alternative be Firefox, but it isn’t. I rely on browser AppleScript control so heavily, I’d sooner stop using a web browser than switch to Firefox. And if you think I’m alone in that, there’s a chunk of the macOS automators community you’re not visiting. We build our tools with support for major browsers (and some minor) but never Firefox, because it can’t do it. We don’t even mention it anymore. If someone asks why our tools don’t work on Firefox, we answer that it’s because you don’t support the necessary feature. The number of people asking is lower every year. Every time there’s a Firefox thread on HN, you see the same complaints from macOS users: poor performance, missing features (I’ve seen lackluster Keychain support also mentioned). Give me a browser I can use, and I will. P.S.: Even if I could code enough to add what I need, it’s not even clear to me from your bug tracker if you’d take the addition. Last I looked, I couldn’t even decipher if AppleScript support is something desirable or not.
mr_toad 8y ago
> Either there will eventually be a privacy/creepiness fiasco, or Google will attempt to use Chrome as leverage to squeeze a competitor out of a market. Perhaps if it ever comes to that, people will look to an alternative means (than the web) of accessing documents and code.

zamadatix 8y ago

I really don't think the general population cares about any of that enough to incite the change you are referring to. People stopped using IE because it was hilariously bad to use compared to Firefox and then Chrome. Until Chrome becomes hilariously worse for an average user to use it'll remain a near monopoly.

Reinmar 8y ago

You say that Mozilla will be well-positioned as an alternative to Google. That sounds realistic and I hope it will be able to team up with bigger companies which would like to compete with Google (instead of helping it). However, that made me think about Brave (https://brave.com/ https://brave.com/). What are your thoughts about it? It's also privacy oriented, but it's actually built on top of Chromium. What is even more interesting, Brave was founded by Brendan Eich (the co-founder of Mozilla).

gilrain 8y ago
Brave is rent-seeking the entire Internet and doesn’t deserve serious mention.
- BostonEnginerd 8y ago
  I disagree. They have presented an alternative to the current system of surveillance capitalism without forcing anyone into their platform. I don’t really love the browser and wish the Brave protocol was available for Firefox, but hopefully we can get there sometime in the future.
  - jolmg 8y ago
    I really don't know what's better. While it's bad that having a free web has lead to multiple entities doing everything they can to track as much as they can, it's also a great benefit to society to have free access to so much knowledge. In the end though, I don't think we'll see a shift to people paying for their content. Societal problems arising from lack of privacy is one of those high-impact-low-probability-or-slow-to-come risks that the public is so bad at handling for their greater aggregate benefit. To really see a change, if Brave has done their part, what'd be missing would be a general public education program that would better inform the public of what the risks are and what can be done about it. Something like Smokey Bear.
    - bunderbunder 8y ago
      > While it's bad that having a free web has lead to multiple entities doing everything they can to track as much as they can, it's also a great benefit to society to have free access to so much knowledge. This feels like a false dilemma to me. Many, if not most, of the corners of the web that are devoted to disseminating knowledge are funded by means that don't involve tracking ads. It's the entertainment corner of the web - social media, yes, but I include listicle-oriented versions of journalism here, too - that seems to be the primary engine of all this surveillance capitalism. It's no coincidence that they also have a tendency to actively exploit the parts of human psychology that make us susceptible to addiction. Which means that, while it's true that they don't charge an up-front fee, their products do still come at a price.

sebazzz 8y ago

How well is Gecko/Servo suitable for embedding in another application as a web browser? Apparently it is very easy with Chrome, why we have 25+ Chrome derivatives.

jcranmer 8y ago
I can't speak for Servo, but Mozilla pretty firmly gave up on trying to have a good embedding story for Gecko and SpiderMonkey (in the name of being able to rapidly iterate on APIs, which never ended up settling down) somewhere around 2009. I contend that one of Mozilla's big mistakes was to give up on embedding.
- kitsunesoba 8y ago
  RIP Camino, which served as many Mac users’ favored browser for years even after it stopped getting updates.

tapoxi 8y ago

What would be the downside of "pulling an Edge" and just making Firefox a Chrome fork with some Mozilla specific features? There's an alternative to Google, Mozilla saves a ton of money/time on duplicated effort, and developers only have to worry about testing against Blink/Webkit. Servo/Quantum is cool, but it seems to be too late for that. I'm worried that Mozilla is simply in denial about this and when reality sets in course correction will be significantly more painful.

SamWhited 8y ago
But there's now no alternative to Blink, and Google can do the IE/Netscape thing of just ignoring the standards process and making up new web technologies that benefit them (and everyone else has to adopt them). The browser UI is the least important thing to compete on.
danShumway 8y ago
It would give the Chromium dev team a massive amount of leverage in directing web standards. This matters because, on-the-whole, Mozilla's dev teams tend to be much better at writing standards than Google's are; partially because many of the standards Chromium focuses on are prioritized and developed with the intention of being helpful to Google's long-term strategies. There have been multiple instances (html imports spring to mind) where bad decisions were averted purely because Mozilla had the guts to say, "we're not putting that in Firefox, come back when you have a better proposal." Yes, Chromium is Open Source, but Open Source isn't magic. It's still very much a Google product, designed to increase Google's overall influence over the direction of the web. Unless Mozilla's plan is to literally fork Blink, then having a primarily for-profit mono-culture in charge of what features get fast-tracked and prioritized for browsers is still incredibly harmful.
- tapoxi 8y ago
  There are enough large, interested parties (Samsung, Microsoft, Mozilla) out there that they could literally fork Blink if organizational issues arise and gain a sizable install base.

SamWhited 8y ago

> Eventually, Google will do something that is an abuse of their monopoly power. This is one of Mozilla's problems: they constantly advertise privacy, etc. and while I agree their views in general, most users don't care. If you position yourself as the privacy respecting web browser, you will only ever get the tiny niche of people who care and everyone else who sees your marketing will just roll their eyes and makes jokes about tinfoil hats. That's not to say that Mozilla should do all the anti-competitive things Google does, just that they need to stop advertising themselves this way if they ever want to get any reasonable market share back (unless they want to be a niche browser for people who don't like Google, which is fine if that's all they want to do). That being said, I don't see how any amount of marketing can fix Mozilla's problem for the same reasons the article pointed out.

organsnyder 8y ago
During the IE-6 dark ages of the early 2000s, Mozilla's browser (the Mozilla suite, then standalone Firebird, finally renamed to Firefox) was positioned in a similar way: it was the niche browser for people who cared about an open web. It stayed that way for quite a few years, slowly gaining traction by implementing features—tabbed browsing, popup blocking—not found in the dominant IE browser. I could see a similar approach working again. Mozilla could focus on user-centric features, while Chrome has to also serve the needs of Google's business interests.
- laumars 8y ago
  > the Mozilla suite, then standalone Firebird, finally renamed to Firefox I believe it was originally called Phoenix. Though you're right it was then called Firebird and renamed again to Firefox afterwards. I think each time was due to trademark disputes? Going to your point though, I hope you're right but I'm a bit more sceptical. Chromium, being open source, means anyone who doesn't like the stagnation of Chrome would just fork Blink and create their own modern browser while still enforcing the Chrome mono-culture. I'd love to see Gecko take off in the same way kHTML, webkit and blink have done. In fact I'm surprised it hasn't. I don't suppose anyone more familiarity with the code base of these rendering engines are able to offer possible reasons why?

mercer 8y ago

> Eventually, Google will do something that is an abuse of their monopoly power. Either there will eventually be a privacy/creepiness fiasco, or Google will attempt to use Chrome as leverage to squeeze a competitor out of a market. > When that happens, Mozilla will be well-positioned as an alternative. I hope you're right, but my main concern is that this could be a war of attrition: Google has such deep pockets that they can simply play nice, all the while testing the limits of what users will accept, until Mozilla taps out. And once that happens, all bets are off.

Yizahi 8y ago

Arguably Google is already abusing their monopoly power but in the way that people like. I'm talking about AMP. In the future AMP/regular page boundary will blur and Chrome/GSearch/AMPpages will merge in the ubiquitous googlenet hosted on google servers (because it will work better than regular internet pages). Almost everybody will be happy after this and Mozilla will fall into obscurity. Basically you can't create a revolution in tech by failing once and then trying harder the second time and it looks like Mozilla failed even while being better. The only way for Mozilla to win is (like linked article suggests) is to dominate somewhere else and then leverage that to push web browser. They won't do this and don't want to really. PS: maybe they could buy/merge with other privacy oriented players in tech and create end-to-end privacy services that are usable, seemingly secure and integrated and then push this offering. But I can't see a big market today for this offer if it would exist. PPS: also to add to less known evil moves by Google - their U2F websites refuse to work in Firefox, despite it supporting U2F for a long time.

jcranmer 8y ago
> PPS: also to add to less known evil moves by Google - their U2F websites refuse to work in Firefox, despite it supporting U2F for a long time. The one that still sticks in my craw is that they never bothered to add support for Hangouts in Firefox. Hangouts was modified to use WebRTC in Chrome, but relied on a plugin in Firefox--despite Firefox actually implementing the relevant WebRTC features first.
- larrik 8y ago
  Hmm, I use Hangouts in Firefox...
  - kenhwang 8y ago
    The chat or the video? The video hasn't worked in long time now.
    - Wowfunhappy 8y ago

dbolgheroni 8y ago

As a long Firefox user, I did switch to Chrome/Iridium lately. When Firefox decided to attack the problem of market share with engineering, 2 things were happening (almost) at the same time[1]: 1) the deprecation of the old add-on engine and 2) the introduction of the new Quantum engine. For the 1), while I understand there are some reasons in doing so (it was not a stable API as it was always breaking the extensions and security-wise), I think these problems could be managed. On the other hand, there were lots of good add-on depended on this API. Particularly, even when Firefox was behind technically-speaking, that was the main reason I used it. Firefox replaced the old API without offering all the new interfaces with the new API. So, I lost what made Firefox really unique. For the 2), I think it was a consequence for the 1). Firefox was finally "better" with Quantum. Of course everyone likes a responsible browser, but I actually didn't see that much difference. And there was another browser which was already really good: Chrome. Suddenly, there was no real advantage in using Firefox anymore. Someone my say privacy. But in some corners of the Internet, it's already impossible to navigate without some privacy-wise add-on/extension, which usually work on both browsers. Added to these, if you go deep down, security-wise there are some real technical advantages in running Chrome instead of Firefox in some OSs. For instance: https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=152872551609819&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=152872551609819&w=2 [1] I'm pretty sure a lot of other things were happening, but I'm in the perspective of the user here.

Izkata 8y ago
> Of course everyone likes a responsible browser, but I actually didn't see that much difference. Same here. The only difference I noticed was startup speed when restoring 200+ tabs; that was indeed far faster in Quantum, but I never noticed any other speed improvements. And it was something I only encountered once every couple of weeks anyway.
- johnny22 8y ago
  what OS though? It seems like only Windows users really saw speed improvements
  - 8y ago

thaumaturgy 8y ago

Firefox's current problems go back to around 2011, and you can see this in the trend graphs. At that time, there was still a hot three-way race between Chrome, Firefox, and IE. But Mozilla made a misstep: they decided that, to compete with Chrome, they would adopt a new "Rapid Release" model. This resulted in a massively pissed-off base of former supporters and articles like "Rapid-release Firefox meets corporate backlash" [1] and "Understanding the Corporate Impact" [2]. There were multiple discussions with titles like, "Mozilla Executive: We're Not Interested In Enterprise Level Users", and it was still going on a year later with, "Everybody Hates Firefox Updates" [3]. People have been conditioned now to accept frequent updates, and -- years later -- the browser vendors have mostly stopped reskinning their interface every other release. But that wasn't the situation at the time, and so Firefox gave up their one competitive advantage over Chrome, and leveled the playing field in Chrome's favor. Mozilla could have instead embraced that big, loyal enterprise base, and found a sane middle road for updates that allowed them to keep a healthy release schedule for DOM, JS, and CSS support. But, they didn't. So all of that good will that Mozilla had fostered over the years just evaporated, and Mozilla never looked back. (It didn't help that, just after alienating their enterprise user base, Mozilla also kicked off some drama with a developer [5].) This falls into that category of mistakes-that-kill-your-business-years-later, alongside other case studies like Sears and RadioShack. [1]: https://www.cnet.com/news/rapid-release-firefox-meets-corporate-backlash/ https://www.cnet.com/news/rapid-release-firefox-meets-corpor... [2]: https://mike.kaply.com/2011/06/23/understanding-the-corporate-impact/ https://mike.kaply.com/2011/06/23/understanding-the-corporat... [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2692205 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2692205 [4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4209384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4209384 [5]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2741660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2741660

yogthos 8y ago

Has Mozilla considered focusing on the emerging federated ecosystem championed by Mastodon. I really think that federated sites are a way forward for the open web. Federated platforms are inherently decentralized, and they avoid the problem of a single company deciding what's right for all the users. Platforms like Mastodon and PeerTube are already able to interoperate via ActivityPub, and it would be great to see this ecosystem keep growing. I can see an ecosystem of federated platforms that fill the same niches as Twitter, Fb, Reddit, and Instagram. All developed independently, and all able to collaborate with one another. One big aspect of traditional web is searching, and that's where Google built their empire originally. Why not invert that equation and build search and discoverability into federated platforms. Perhaps extend ActivityPub, or create a sister protocol that focuses on searching. This approach would address the problem of discoverability much better than an external search engine. Perhaps Mozilla could help come up with such a standard.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago

> We will largely be defined in opposition to Google. Looking at the Financial Report for 2017 https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-fdn-2017-fs-short-form-final-0927.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-fdn-201... it seems that the the vast majority of Mozilla revenue is from Royalties ($539M out of $562M). In addition in the report there is a statement to the effect that 93% of Royalties were from search engine deals. We know that Mozilla entered into a search engine deal with Google at the end of 2017. It looks like that the vast majority of Mozilla's revenue is from Google and will be for the next several years at least. It will be interesting to see Mozilla positioning themselves in opposition to Google when Google provides the vast majority of their revenue.

swebs 8y ago

>People who use Firefox in the future will increasingly be people who do so consciously, presumably because they view Mozilla as helping them protect their privacy. Chrome is and will continue to be the default. Honestly, the only reason I use Firefox is because it supports vertical tabs and Chrome doesn't. Maybe you should start advertising features that are more immediately visible than privacy.

fchristant 8y ago

hi, author of the article checking in. Thanks for commenting in the open from Mozilla's perspective, even if its just one voice, it's much appreciated. I agree that Firefox will remain an attraction to the group of people caring about openness, standards, and their privacy. My deepest concern is on how small that group is going to be. Will it settle at the current ~10%, or will it be as low as 5%, which I consider very dangerous grounds to be in. As for Google's abuse of market power, I strongly believe it has already happened, in plain view. There's no doubt in my mind that dominance in one market has been used to capture another market. We don't have to wait for that "mistake", it has already happened. These abuses are already under investigation, but I'm afraid it won't change the outcome. They'll pay some fine in a few years, but none of the browsers will be uninstalled. It won't matter much, but added an update to the top of the article suggesting people to install Firefox.

rdsubhas 8y ago

> Eventually, Google will do something that is an abuse of their monopoly power. Either there will eventually be a privacy/creepiness fiasco, or Google will attempt to use Chrome as leverage to squeeze a competitor out of a market. They did recently. They force signed and associated every user to the Chrome identity, thereby linking everything users do in the web to their Google ID. Nobody seems to have bothered.

latexr 8y ago

Add AppleScript support to Firefox and I’ll switch today. I don’t like Chrome’s dominance either, but what do you want me to do if your browser does not support a feature I use everyday, multiple times a day (and that was there but was removed, back in version 3)? You’re giving me a browser that is useless for my needs, so I can’t use it. You bet I’m thinking of leaving Chrome behind (and will likely do so once I make a clean install to Mojave, that should happen soon) but my only real alternative is Safari. I’d rather that alternative be Firefox, but it isn’t. I rely on browser AppleScript control so heavily, I’d sooner stop using a web browser than switch to Firefox. And if you think I’m alone in that, there’s a chunk of the macOS automators community you’re not visiting. We build our tools with support for major browsers (and some minor) but never Firefox, because it can’t do it. We don’t even mention it anymore. If someone asks why our tools don’t work on Firefox, we answer that it’s because you don’t support the necessary feature. The number of people asking is lower every year. Every time there’s a Firefox thread on HN, you see the same complaints from macOS users: poor performance, missing features (I’ve seen lackluster Keychain support also mentioned). Give me a browser I can use, and I will. P.S.: Even if I could code enough to add what I need, it’s not even clear to me from your bug tracker if you’d take the addition. Last I looked, I couldn’t even decipher if AppleScript support is something desirable or not.

mr_toad 8y ago

> Either there will eventually be a privacy/creepiness fiasco, or Google will attempt to use Chrome as leverage to squeeze a competitor out of a market. Perhaps if it ever comes to that, people will look to an alternative means (than the web) of accessing documents and code.