14 ms·

Chris was great from what I have seen, but I think Mozilla needs a CEO that knows how to increase market share.

TheCraiggers 7y ago
The hard part will be doing it while not running afoul of the ethical standard that they have set for themselves, and so many of us hold them to. It's easy to increase market share if you're willing to play dirty and have lots of money to throw around. When you have neither... well, I'd hate to be the new CEO.
- RandomBacon 7y ago
  They need a killer feature. Firefox used to be the only better alternative to IE. Then Chrome came along and it used to be the best at tabs and resources. Then Brave came along with automatic ad-blocking. Firefox needs to match the competition and surpass it. What would the next killer feature be?
  - giancarlostoro 7y ago
    > Then Brave came along with automatic ad-blocking. I don't think I will ever use Brave due to how it "blocks ads" I think the industry should be doing the job of Brave which is to ensure ads aren't infested with bad code. No ad server should serve arbitrary JS that hasn't been tested and secured. If it costs money to ensure this then they should charge more for ads. If an ad infests machines, the ad company should be liable, and they should really go after the person who paid for the ad too.
    - RandomBacon 7y ago
      I will never use Brave because they're replacing ads with their own and making money doing it. uBlock Origin on FF is better and not scummy like Brave. People shouldn't break the law, but until that never happens, I will do what I can to protect myself.
      - BrendanEich 7y ago
        You are misinformed. Brave does not "[replace] ads with their own" and we never have. We are working with publishers to do private/anonymous ads which pay them 70% and the user 15% of gross revenue, but these are not out yet. We already pay users 70% of revenue for ads that go in the user's own space, not in any publisher slot. Whether user or publisher ads, in Brave neither kind uses any tracking. Matching is done locally against an objective (same for all users in a region on a given day) catalog; views and clicks confirmed using a Privacy Pass like "blind signature" protocol. No user identifier or linkability among events on any server, even ours. If you acted on incorrect information, I hope you'll stop repeating it and give Brave a try. Thanks.
  - conradfr 7y ago
    On mobile people need to know that uBlock Origin works the same as on the desktop.
  - UweSchmidt 7y ago
    Privacy! Rethink the whole thing from the ground up with privacy in mind. This includes transparency to whats going on under the hood, an integration of important plugins (your average video downloading plugin is likely siphoning all kinds of information), sandboxing, privacy-aware defaults, and banning and blacklisting a whole lot of known crap!
    - jtbayly 7y ago
      For some reason I read that as "Piracy!" Got my mind running in a rather different direction. lol
      - Endy 7y ago
        Unfortunately, to most of the adtech and copyright lobby, those two things are always going to go together.
    - mav3rick 7y ago
      The mainstream user doesn't care about privacy. Speed has always been paramount.
  - daveFNbuck 7y ago
    For me, the killer feature is multi-account containers. Unfortunately, the support for them isn't great.
    - TheArcane 7y ago
      Mozilla, please oh please have Firefox Sync support Multi-account containers. I have way too many settings and redirects configured with MAC and Cookie Auto-Delete to work with MAC that I dread having to switch to another computer.
jcadam 7y ago
Can't help but wonder how Brendan Eich would have fared in the job.
- _red 7y ago
  Well, Brave started from nothing and seems to be growing. I use it now on all my devices and really like it as a daily driver. Had Brendan been able to try these ideas with the firefox userbase it could've advanced the privacy conversation much further...
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - stakhanov 7y ago
    Finding a niche is one thing. If you change a product used by a portion (albeit small) of the mainstream into a product that would appeal only to a niche audience, that may well end up going against you.
    - BrendanEich 7y ago
      The causal arrow points the other way. Today Firefox finally started blocking third party cookies (some, not all as Brave does; they use Disconnect.me's 3rd party cookie blocking list) by default. This does not limit mainstream appeal, it follows Safari and Brave, who have been leading the privacy by default movement among browsers.
  - tapoxi 7y ago
    I can't help but feel that a lot of Brave's userbase are pushing it because they have a financial investment in BAT from the ICO. Brave certainly doesn't help with the monoculture threat either, its just Chrome.
    - modzu 7y ago
      i duno. the other day i used a friend's computer without an adblocker and searched google for "AWS". i could not see a link to amazon AWS on the results page. it was under 5 ads for azure, gcp, and some other crap. i mean, i use an adblocker on my own devices and had no idea it had gotten that crazy. it was horrifying. the non tech-savvy people are clicking god knows what and fueling a massive industry of identity theft, not to mention the psychological pollution and interference to genuine knowledge and information that so many ads represent. sure brave is sketchy in its own way, but it's a paradigm shift in the right direction. something has got to change. so i can totally see why users and not just investors would want to give brave a try.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
huhtenberg 7y ago
Mozilla is now openly peeing in Google's punch all the while being dependent on piles of money they take from it. At some point Google will get tired of this and will withdraw from the agreement. They won't be the default search provider, but that will play to their advantage - Firefox out-of-the-box user experience will take a sharp nose dive. Say all you want about DDG and alternatives, but they still can't hold a candle to Google's search quality. So what Mozilla will end up with is (a) a dip in funding and (b) a dip in the user share. This might be just enough to either make them reconsider their ethics or to kill Mozilla altogether. So, yeah, a good CEO that can shed the Google dependency is very much required.
- ur-whale 7y ago
  On the flipside, Chrome went from being the best browser on the market to a bloated spying machine, and I'm very glad firefox exists to offer an alternative. If on top of that, they manage to do it using Google's dough, I say bravo and hope they'll remain smart enough to feed from the vampire for a long time
  - jonathankoren 7y ago
    Chrome was always a spying machine. It was just a spying machine that was fast.
- glhaynes 7y ago
  I'd guess the intersection of people who will even consider using Firefox, have search engine needs that won't be satisfied by DuckDuckGo, and won't be able to change their search engine is vanishingly small, so I'm not that concerned about the user experience hit. But, yeah, the dip in funding would be brutal in that scenario.
- coldpie 7y ago
  I'd be happy to support Mozilla financially, but I'm too lazy to go figure out how to do it. Link me to a Patreon, or shove some subscription model more prominently in my face, Mozilla.
angrygoat 7y ago
When Firefox decimated Internet Explorer in the 2000s, it was just... better. And I think Chrome had some fairly obvious gains over Firefox and IE which led it to gain market share. I was an early adopter of Chrome, but that was in the days before Google seemed so sinister... I use Firefox now because I care about privacy, and I'd rather use a browser developed by a non-profit that cares about that as well. But I suspect that's a bit too abstract for most people to care about, at least at this point. Chrome's advantage seems fairly baked in; people aren't going to shift unless there's a decent reason to. I wonder what that reason could be. Can privacy concerns become a sufficient motivator for people to shift browser; or even, thinking a bit bigger, to change the fundamental architecture of the web?
- modzu 7y ago
  its so obvious that native ad blocking could be that feature. when a non-tech user opens up a browser with ad blocking it blows their mind. they go to youtube and put on a song, and wait! they don't have to reach for the mute first to silence some loud ad? they don't have to wait to click "skip" on the ad? it just works?? the user just wants the content and we can give it to them. imo this would be the step from chrome, which will never implement it because they depend on it. but the web is not ads. the web can survive without ads.
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    The web can survive without ads, will corporations let it though?
  - sciurus 7y ago
    Firefox has tracking protection enabled by default. Given the current state of the ad ecosystem, this has the side effect of blocking most ads. https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/06/04/firefox-now-available-with-enhanced-tracking-protection-by-default/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/06/04/firefox-now-availab...
    - floatingatoll 7y ago
hutzlibu 7y ago
Well, how to increase market share for a browser? Simple, offer a better browser. Now the technical core of firefox seems now very solid(if they keep the extensions api stable), with long term decisions like rust and quantum paying off.. But the problem seems to be, that many websites are developed and tested in chrome only, sometimes with chrome-only features.. so it does not help only implementing nonstandard feature after nonstandard feature. They need to get the developers back and that can only work with a massive investment in the firefox dev tools as they are far, far behind chrome devtools. I sympathise with firefox and mozilla a lot, but even for me, it would require a huge improvement to even consider changing back. I am annoyed enough from the occasional firefox debugging. No wonder more and more developers simply skip firefox due to low marketshare and save the effort.
- feanaro 7y ago
  > They need to get the developers back and that can only work with a massive investment in the firefox dev tools as they are far, far behind chrome devtools. This isn't a universal truth -- I consider them much better in many respects. It's much better to point out concrete deficiencies as these can be acted upon.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
One area where a company like Firefox could do well is embedded browsers. Some years ago I had a need to embed a browser into a windows app and there were really not many good options available. Mozilla had something (XULRunner) that seemed not maintained anymore. Mozilla could build a better competitor to Electron. That would give them developer mindshare and probably also contributions once companies are building products with that framework. Or they could be innovative with their browser. Sometimes I have trouble telling chrome and Firefox apart. They are so similar.
- jcranmer 7y ago
  In retrospect, it seems that Mozilla's biggest stumble was their decision to ignore embedding. Around 2009-ish, the decision was made to break any compatibility guarantees for embedding, at first temporarily (which was necessary until new APIs that could support multiprocess in the engine), and then the idea was that you wouldn't embed Gecko at all, and instead use XULRunner. Then XULRunner was killed off for Firefox webapps, which itself was killed off for... nothing?
  - fzzzy 7y ago
    XULRunner was killed off for webapps, which was killed off for https://github.com/mozilla/positron https://github.com/mozilla/positron, which was killed off for nothing. On the bright side, Servo is designed for embedding, although it's a lot more work than something like XULRunner or Electron.
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    Maybe they hired some product managers from Microsoft :). I mean the ones that managed the whole mess with Winforms, WPF, WinRt, silverlight and UWP
  - ryacko 7y ago
    The interesting thing about Electron was that it was produced by a group independent of Google. If Mozilla spun off XULRunner as a subsidiary and allowed them to make decisions on marketing, there’d be actual competition. (There’s also not much point to disabling XUL extensions entirely since Firefox now requires extensions to be signed).

The hard part will be doing it while not running afoul of the ethical standard that they have set for themselves, and so many of us hold them to. It's easy to increase market share if you're willing to play dirty and have lots of money to throw around. When you have neither... well, I'd hate to be the new CEO.

RandomBacon 7y ago
They need a killer feature. Firefox used to be the only better alternative to IE. Then Chrome came along and it used to be the best at tabs and resources. Then Brave came along with automatic ad-blocking. Firefox needs to match the competition and surpass it. What would the next killer feature be?
- giancarlostoro 7y ago
  > Then Brave came along with automatic ad-blocking. I don't think I will ever use Brave due to how it "blocks ads" I think the industry should be doing the job of Brave which is to ensure ads aren't infested with bad code. No ad server should serve arbitrary JS that hasn't been tested and secured. If it costs money to ensure this then they should charge more for ads. If an ad infests machines, the ad company should be liable, and they should really go after the person who paid for the ad too.
  - RandomBacon 7y ago
    I will never use Brave because they're replacing ads with their own and making money doing it. uBlock Origin on FF is better and not scummy like Brave. People shouldn't break the law, but until that never happens, I will do what I can to protect myself.
    - BrendanEich 7y ago
      You are misinformed. Brave does not "[replace] ads with their own" and we never have. We are working with publishers to do private/anonymous ads which pay them 70% and the user 15% of gross revenue, but these are not out yet. We already pay users 70% of revenue for ads that go in the user's own space, not in any publisher slot. Whether user or publisher ads, in Brave neither kind uses any tracking. Matching is done locally against an objective (same for all users in a region on a given day) catalog; views and clicks confirmed using a Privacy Pass like "blind signature" protocol. No user identifier or linkability among events on any server, even ours. If you acted on incorrect information, I hope you'll stop repeating it and give Brave a try. Thanks.
- conradfr 7y ago
  On mobile people need to know that uBlock Origin works the same as on the desktop.
- UweSchmidt 7y ago
  Privacy! Rethink the whole thing from the ground up with privacy in mind. This includes transparency to whats going on under the hood, an integration of important plugins (your average video downloading plugin is likely siphoning all kinds of information), sandboxing, privacy-aware defaults, and banning and blacklisting a whole lot of known crap!
  - jtbayly 7y ago
    For some reason I read that as "Piracy!" Got my mind running in a rather different direction. lol
    - Endy 7y ago
      Unfortunately, to most of the adtech and copyright lobby, those two things are always going to go together.
  - mav3rick 7y ago
    The mainstream user doesn't care about privacy. Speed has always been paramount.
- daveFNbuck 7y ago
  For me, the killer feature is multi-account containers. Unfortunately, the support for them isn't great.
  - TheArcane 7y ago
    Mozilla, please oh please have Firefox Sync support Multi-account containers. I have way too many settings and redirects configured with MAC and Cookie Auto-Delete to work with MAC that I dread having to switch to another computer.

jcadam 7y ago

Can't help but wonder how Brendan Eich would have fared in the job.

_red 7y ago
Well, Brave started from nothing and seems to be growing. I use it now on all my devices and really like it as a daily driver. Had Brendan been able to try these ideas with the firefox userbase it could've advanced the privacy conversation much further...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- stakhanov 7y ago
  Finding a niche is one thing. If you change a product used by a portion (albeit small) of the mainstream into a product that would appeal only to a niche audience, that may well end up going against you.
  - BrendanEich 7y ago
    The causal arrow points the other way. Today Firefox finally started blocking third party cookies (some, not all as Brave does; they use Disconnect.me's 3rd party cookie blocking list) by default. This does not limit mainstream appeal, it follows Safari and Brave, who have been leading the privacy by default movement among browsers.
- tapoxi 7y ago
  I can't help but feel that a lot of Brave's userbase are pushing it because they have a financial investment in BAT from the ICO. Brave certainly doesn't help with the monoculture threat either, its just Chrome.
  - modzu 7y ago
    i duno. the other day i used a friend's computer without an adblocker and searched google for "AWS". i could not see a link to amazon AWS on the results page. it was under 5 ads for azure, gcp, and some other crap. i mean, i use an adblocker on my own devices and had no idea it had gotten that crazy. it was horrifying. the non tech-savvy people are clicking god knows what and fueling a massive industry of identity theft, not to mention the psychological pollution and interference to genuine knowledge and information that so many ads represent. sure brave is sketchy in its own way, but it's a paradigm shift in the right direction. something has got to change. so i can totally see why users and not just investors would want to give brave a try.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

huhtenberg 7y ago

Mozilla is now openly peeing in Google's punch all the while being dependent on piles of money they take from it. At some point Google will get tired of this and will withdraw from the agreement. They won't be the default search provider, but that will play to their advantage - Firefox out-of-the-box user experience will take a sharp nose dive. Say all you want about DDG and alternatives, but they still can't hold a candle to Google's search quality. So what Mozilla will end up with is (a) a dip in funding and (b) a dip in the user share. This might be just enough to either make them reconsider their ethics or to kill Mozilla altogether. So, yeah, a good CEO that can shed the Google dependency is very much required.

ur-whale 7y ago
On the flipside, Chrome went from being the best browser on the market to a bloated spying machine, and I'm very glad firefox exists to offer an alternative. If on top of that, they manage to do it using Google's dough, I say bravo and hope they'll remain smart enough to feed from the vampire for a long time
- jonathankoren 7y ago
  Chrome was always a spying machine. It was just a spying machine that was fast.
glhaynes 7y ago
I'd guess the intersection of people who will even consider using Firefox, have search engine needs that won't be satisfied by DuckDuckGo, and won't be able to change their search engine is vanishingly small, so I'm not that concerned about the user experience hit. But, yeah, the dip in funding would be brutal in that scenario.
coldpie 7y ago
I'd be happy to support Mozilla financially, but I'm too lazy to go figure out how to do it. Link me to a Patreon, or shove some subscription model more prominently in my face, Mozilla.

angrygoat 7y ago

When Firefox decimated Internet Explorer in the 2000s, it was just... better. And I think Chrome had some fairly obvious gains over Firefox and IE which led it to gain market share. I was an early adopter of Chrome, but that was in the days before Google seemed so sinister... I use Firefox now because I care about privacy, and I'd rather use a browser developed by a non-profit that cares about that as well. But I suspect that's a bit too abstract for most people to care about, at least at this point. Chrome's advantage seems fairly baked in; people aren't going to shift unless there's a decent reason to. I wonder what that reason could be. Can privacy concerns become a sufficient motivator for people to shift browser; or even, thinking a bit bigger, to change the fundamental architecture of the web?

modzu 7y ago
its so obvious that native ad blocking could be that feature. when a non-tech user opens up a browser with ad blocking it blows their mind. they go to youtube and put on a song, and wait! they don't have to reach for the mute first to silence some loud ad? they don't have to wait to click "skip" on the ad? it just works?? the user just wants the content and we can give it to them. imo this would be the step from chrome, which will never implement it because they depend on it. but the web is not ads. the web can survive without ads.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  The web can survive without ads, will corporations let it though?
- sciurus 7y ago
  Firefox has tracking protection enabled by default. Given the current state of the ad ecosystem, this has the side effect of blocking most ads. https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/06/04/firefox-now-available-with-enhanced-tracking-protection-by-default/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/06/04/firefox-now-availab...
  - floatingatoll 7y ago

hutzlibu 7y ago

Well, how to increase market share for a browser? Simple, offer a better browser. Now the technical core of firefox seems now very solid(if they keep the extensions api stable), with long term decisions like rust and quantum paying off.. But the problem seems to be, that many websites are developed and tested in chrome only, sometimes with chrome-only features.. so it does not help only implementing nonstandard feature after nonstandard feature. They need to get the developers back and that can only work with a massive investment in the firefox dev tools as they are far, far behind chrome devtools. I sympathise with firefox and mozilla a lot, but even for me, it would require a huge improvement to even consider changing back. I am annoyed enough from the occasional firefox debugging. No wonder more and more developers simply skip firefox due to low marketshare and save the effort.

feanaro 7y ago
> They need to get the developers back and that can only work with a massive investment in the firefox dev tools as they are far, far behind chrome devtools. This isn't a universal truth -- I consider them much better in many respects. It's much better to point out concrete deficiencies as these can be acted upon.

Ididntdothis 7y ago

One area where a company like Firefox could do well is embedded browsers. Some years ago I had a need to embed a browser into a windows app and there were really not many good options available. Mozilla had something (XULRunner) that seemed not maintained anymore. Mozilla could build a better competitor to Electron. That would give them developer mindshare and probably also contributions once companies are building products with that framework. Or they could be innovative with their browser. Sometimes I have trouble telling chrome and Firefox apart. They are so similar.

jcranmer 7y ago
In retrospect, it seems that Mozilla's biggest stumble was their decision to ignore embedding. Around 2009-ish, the decision was made to break any compatibility guarantees for embedding, at first temporarily (which was necessary until new APIs that could support multiprocess in the engine), and then the idea was that you wouldn't embed Gecko at all, and instead use XULRunner. Then XULRunner was killed off for Firefox webapps, which itself was killed off for... nothing?
- fzzzy 7y ago
  XULRunner was killed off for webapps, which was killed off for https://github.com/mozilla/positron https://github.com/mozilla/positron, which was killed off for nothing. On the bright side, Servo is designed for embedding, although it's a lot more work than something like XULRunner or Electron.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  Maybe they hired some product managers from Microsoft :). I mean the ones that managed the whole mess with Winforms, WPF, WinRt, silverlight and UWP
- ryacko 7y ago
  The interesting thing about Electron was that it was produced by a group independent of Google. If Mozilla spun off XULRunner as a subsidiary and allowed them to make decisions on marketing, there’d be actual competition. (There’s also not much point to disabling XUL extensions entirely since Firefox now requires extensions to be signed).