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I'll agree this is all true for power users but I think that catering to that small number of power users at the expense of having a faster, more stable, more s

I'll agree this is all true for power users but I think that catering to that small number of power users at the expense of having a faster, more stable, more secure browser earlier was a major mistake. I loved Tab Mix Plus too and yes, there are some things you still can’t do in WebExtensions that you could do before. And that sucks. But I stopped using Firefox despite those options because it was so slow and unstable, especially on the Mac. By the time it got better, it was not only too late, but Chrome had extensions. Catering to the loyalists is what killed Firefox. What’s more important to normal users is speed, not Tab Mix Plus.

arp242 6y ago
Well, Firefox is far from dead, is it? I guess the issue is a different view of what Firefox should be; I feel that many people would be satisfied if Firefox was just a small(ish) browser catering to power users. There's nothing wrong with that: power users are users too (and there are more of them than many seem to think), and I feel that many people are somewhat frustrated that all software seems designed with only my grandmother in mind. This is an issue that extends far beyond XUL by the way.
- kmeisthax 6y ago
  The original design goal of Firefox was to be a "90/10" browser (relative to the old Mozilla suite). e.g. 90% of the people only need 10% of the features. Catering to power users was never the goal of Firefox and they lost users to Chrome when they did. What people want is a browser that loads webpages quickly and doesn't use a lot of system resources doing so.
  - arp242 6y ago
    Well, Mozilla included email, chat, and whatnot. Regardless of what the goals were, it did cater to power users and clearly many people don't want the direction Firefox went in.
    - Semaphor 6y ago
      > and clearly many people don't want the direction Firefox went in. A majority? I doubt it. I think it’s an extremely vocal minority that don’t care about the slowness of their browser (pre-e10s, pre-quantum), about things breaking (XUL extensions) or about UI features for the broad masses. I’d bet money that FF’s 25% in Germany would be far closer to US numbers if they stayed where those vocal people want them.
      - arp242 6y ago
        I never said majority. All I'm saying is that based on my observations people's views on what Firefox should or should not be are different, and that this explains why people are still "angry" about the extensions breaking and such. I'm not having an argument with anyone.
    - cedilla 6y ago
      That may seem like bloat today, but in those days, web mail barely existed and was inferior. If anything, using the MUA bundled with your browser was less power-userish than using a stand-alone client.
      - arp242 6y ago
        I still miss the old Opera, including the built-in email client I used. So yeah, I agree. Honestly, Opera is one of the best pieces of software I've ever used. It had tons of features and customizability without being slow or feeling "bloated". I never quite understood why it failed to gain marketshare 10 years ago while Firefox did.
        zokula 6y ago
        > I never quite understood why it failed to gain marketshare 10 years ago while Firefox did. Firefox was free and Opera wasn't. Geeks don't trust proprietary garbage.
  - m4rtink 6y ago
    These "most people only use 10% of the features, so we can drop the rest" ideas are just soo stupid & can quickly kill otherwise good projects. And it's not just about chasing away power users, who are about the only advocates and marketing you have. Its mainly about the 10% being different for every user, effectively covering the full feature matrix!
    - Dagger2 6y ago
      Exactly. There's no such thing as an average user: https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-force-discovered-the-flaw-of-averages.html https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-... If you design your thing for the average user, it won't work well for any user.
      - Karunamon 6y ago
        Yet that seems to be precisely who they're targeting. The only benefit Firefox now has over Chrome is a vague political notion of not using Google-made software, something that there isn't enough call for in the real world to drive significant marketshare. Their real differentiation was sacrificed on the altar of ease of development, and now what we're left with is an also-ran, in multiple meanings of that term. Worse, an also-ran that's doing increasingly arational things, almost as if they're wildly groping about for the mythical marketshare.
        Izkata 6y ago
        Well, perhaps not the only thing: Tree Style Tabs opens in a sidebar in Firefox (and with user CSS, can be made to auto-expand), while in Chrome it opens in a separate window.
- The_Colonel 6y ago
  > I feel that many people would be satisfied if Firefox was just a small(ish) browser catering to power users. There's no way to do that in today's environment. Browser development is extremely expensive (there's only 3 companies in the world developing competitive browser engines) so you need money. For Firefox, the only way to get serious cash is to have serious marketshare. And in reality there isn't that many "power users". I mean, even a lot of developers (like me) use barely any extensions and in any case prefer more speed than more extensibility.
  - slightwinder 6y ago
    Browser development is not that expensive. Developing of Web-Engines is the dark part that sucks all the money. > For Firefox, the only way to get serious cash is to have serious marketshare. Not true. That's only valid if your single income is marketshare-based. Mozilla for some unknown reasons hasn't made any serious attempts in the last 15+ years to get any alternative income, instead it was satisfied with being feeding on google and yahoo, while wasting money on some obvious dead projects.
    - The_Colonel 6y ago
      > Browser development is not that expensive. Developing of Web-Engines is the dark part that sucks all the money. Of course, but then there's enough Chromium skins, no? Without independent browser engine you have no clout in defining and ratifying standard (as MS recently found out) which means giving Google full control. > Mozilla for some unknown reasons hasn't made any serious attempts in the last 15+ years to get any alternative income, instead it was satisfied with being feeding on google and yahoo, while wasting money on some obvious dead projects. They had some feeble attempts which largely failed. Mozilla's main expertise is still browser technology based and it is probably difficult to monetize it.
      - slightwinder 6y ago
        > Of course, but then there's enough Chromium skins, no? Most of them are more than skins. A browser is the interface and whole workflow, not just the way the website is displayed. > as MS recently found out What do you mean? > They had some feeble attempts which largely failed. They had no SERIOUS attempt. Well until now at least. They did some half-assed with pocket and now VPN-reselling, but never touched real business.
- dao- 6y ago
  > if Firefox was just a small(ish) browser catering to power users. There's nothing wrong with that Except that it couldn't work in today's world, as more and more web sites would stop working in Firefox. Firefox needs significant market share to survive with an independent browser engine. Having an independent engine is key to achieving Mozilla's mission: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/ You can build a browser focused on power users if you don't need to worry about the engine. Perhaps you want to take a look at Vivaldi?
  - rvba 6y ago
    When you have a browser that is USED by programmers, the programmers will know that their own site is bad. Problems started when it stopped being a browser for programmers and power users. They were the ones marketing it. Mozilla cut the branch on which they were sitting and is now shocked that they lose maretshare.
dman 6y ago
Strongly disagree - I think the reason Firefox market share is in a tailspin is because once they "rationalized" the codebase by getting rid of power features - there was no moat around them to keep even simple upstarts like Edge away. Programmers often make the mistake of classifying all complexity as cruft - when much of that are use cases accumulated over time that reflect your competitive advantage - one that any competitor has to overcome. The more Firefox streamlines the more they will cede ground to better funded alternatives.
- acdha 6y ago
  Firefox’s market share started declining when Google ran huge ad campaigns for Chrome and made some of the most popular sites on the web promote Chrome and, in the case of YouTube, run better on it. Microsoft Edge didn’t affect Firefox much, and fared equally poorly against that juggernaut. Any theory which talks about niche features without accounting for that push is unlikely to be right.
  - robenkleene 6y ago
    Quibi had a big ad budget too. Marketing gives you leg up, but at the end of the day, a product's merits have to live up to it. Both IE and Safari had an even bigger advantage than marketing by being built-in to their respective platforms, and both have lost marketshare to Chrome. I'll say pointblank I don't know what people see in Chrome, but they clearly see something in it. To me today, Safari, Firefox, and Chrome are essentially identical, which is a bad spot to be in for everyone except the market leader, because there's no incentive to switch. UPDATE: There's a stronger case regarding Google sabotaging Firefox, but I don't think that accounts for the magnitude of the switch, here's a detail of the accusation[0]: > A Mozilla Program Manager named Chris Peterson accused Google of making Youtube performance slower on the Firefox explorer in July 2018. Peterson alleged that Google was aware that both Firefox and Edge, Microsoft’s browser, were performing better with regard to loading the popular video sharing platform YouTube and decided to switch to a Javascript library which was incompatible with Firefox. Google Chrome became the dominant browser around 2012, after being released in 2008. That's an astronomically fast takeover, if there were any shenanigans that accounted for it, they'd have to be quite aggressive (and therefore discussed more at that time). [0]: https://btcmanager.com/former-mozilla-executive-accuses-google-sabotage/?q=/former-mozilla-executive-accuses-google-sabotage/& https://btcmanager.com/former-mozilla-executive-accuses-goog...
Amezarak 6y ago
> I think that catering to that small number of power users at the expense of having a faster, more stable, more secure browser earlier was a major mistake. Catering to power users is the only reason Firefox ever had market share in the first place! Normal users do not install their own browsers. Normal users do not care about their browser. They barely even know what a browser is, other than it's the thing they use to get on the Internet. Every bit of Mozilla's original market share came from power users wanting a browser with more features and power than Internet Explorer. And once the power users fell in love with it, they evangelized it relentlessly to their friends and family. There were campaigns for power users to go install it on grandma's computer. This is the only way Firefox ever got on a normal user's computer. (This was also the only way Firefox got headway in enterprise environments, though it would have made a lot more if Mozilla had listened to power users and system admins and added the group policy and installation options they asked for.) Chrome crushed Firefox because it was a decent, fast browser and because of the massive marketing budget. Chrome was and is pushed hard on the biggest web properties on the world - you get notifications on Google and YouTube if you use anything other than Chrome. Various other installers also installed Chrome, unless you unchecked a box. There were TV commercials. It was the default browser on Google platforms from phones to Chromebooks. That's why Chrome won. When Firefox killed feature after feature that catered to power users, power users cared less and less about evangelization, and some of them switched to Chrome because Firefox was becoming increasingly Chrome-like, Chrome dev tools were evidently pretty good, and many people perceived Chrome to be faster. I still use Firefox, but I honestly don't see any reason to other than ideological reasons, which are becoming increasingly tenuous and not really a winning argument even for power users. This is why Firefox usage will continue to decline. It doesn’t matter how much faster Firefox becomes. It doesn’t matter how much easier Firefox development gets. Mozilla alienated their core user base, they aren’t coming back, and normal users are never going to start installing niche browsers that aren’t pushed hard by multi billion dollar companies. Mozilla has no path forward. They’ve screwed up irrevocably and the best they can hope for is to manage the decline and cling to their remaining user base. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like they’re going to be able to manage even that.
kazinator 6y ago
I.e. new users, like friends, are cooler and more exciting than old users.
lenkite 6y ago
My grandmother used Tax Mix Plus several years ago. I personally found it a bit laborious, but she liked organising her reading. That was such a wonderful extension. People on HN make the mistake of assuming that the mythical 'average' user will not use such features. And convincing them otherwise is so difficult. The folks who love your product will plumb every depth of it. Not everything needs to be dumbed down to the dirt.
roenxi 6y ago
> What’s more important to normal users is speed If normal users cared about speed they can go and use Chrome. The framing in many of the comments here seems to be that there is 1 ideal that all web browsers should be working towards; and it is represented by Google Chrome. That isn't really the case, there are multiple interpretations. It is very annoying that Firefox chose the path of being Chrome-but-worse. All the people who want Chrome are using it - or chromium - and they don't need Firefox trying to implement the same thing but in red. Firefox has lost substantial features over the years - Chatzilla for example was a great little add-on. It is quite a bold strategy to write a blog post saying "we stripped out a bunch of features, but trust me you didn't want them". Even if it is true there doesn't seem to be the level of regret here that is appropriate for trashing an ecosystem that has never recovered.

arp242 6y ago

Well, Firefox is far from dead, is it? I guess the issue is a different view of what Firefox should be; I feel that many people would be satisfied if Firefox was just a small(ish) browser catering to power users. There's nothing wrong with that: power users are users too (and there are more of them than many seem to think), and I feel that many people are somewhat frustrated that all software seems designed with only my grandmother in mind. This is an issue that extends far beyond XUL by the way.

kmeisthax 6y ago
The original design goal of Firefox was to be a "90/10" browser (relative to the old Mozilla suite). e.g. 90% of the people only need 10% of the features. Catering to power users was never the goal of Firefox and they lost users to Chrome when they did. What people want is a browser that loads webpages quickly and doesn't use a lot of system resources doing so.
- arp242 6y ago
  Well, Mozilla included email, chat, and whatnot. Regardless of what the goals were, it did cater to power users and clearly many people don't want the direction Firefox went in.
  - Semaphor 6y ago
    > and clearly many people don't want the direction Firefox went in. A majority? I doubt it. I think it’s an extremely vocal minority that don’t care about the slowness of their browser (pre-e10s, pre-quantum), about things breaking (XUL extensions) or about UI features for the broad masses. I’d bet money that FF’s 25% in Germany would be far closer to US numbers if they stayed where those vocal people want them.
    - arp242 6y ago
      I never said majority. All I'm saying is that based on my observations people's views on what Firefox should or should not be are different, and that this explains why people are still "angry" about the extensions breaking and such. I'm not having an argument with anyone.
  - cedilla 6y ago
    That may seem like bloat today, but in those days, web mail barely existed and was inferior. If anything, using the MUA bundled with your browser was less power-userish than using a stand-alone client.
    - arp242 6y ago
      I still miss the old Opera, including the built-in email client I used. So yeah, I agree. Honestly, Opera is one of the best pieces of software I've ever used. It had tons of features and customizability without being slow or feeling "bloated". I never quite understood why it failed to gain marketshare 10 years ago while Firefox did.
      - zokula 6y ago
        > I never quite understood why it failed to gain marketshare 10 years ago while Firefox did. Firefox was free and Opera wasn't. Geeks don't trust proprietary garbage.
- m4rtink 6y ago
  These "most people only use 10% of the features, so we can drop the rest" ideas are just soo stupid & can quickly kill otherwise good projects. And it's not just about chasing away power users, who are about the only advocates and marketing you have. Its mainly about the 10% being different for every user, effectively covering the full feature matrix!
  - Dagger2 6y ago
    Exactly. There's no such thing as an average user: https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-force-discovered-the-flaw-of-averages.html https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-... If you design your thing for the average user, it won't work well for any user.
    - Karunamon 6y ago
      Yet that seems to be precisely who they're targeting. The only benefit Firefox now has over Chrome is a vague political notion of not using Google-made software, something that there isn't enough call for in the real world to drive significant marketshare. Their real differentiation was sacrificed on the altar of ease of development, and now what we're left with is an also-ran, in multiple meanings of that term. Worse, an also-ran that's doing increasingly arational things, almost as if they're wildly groping about for the mythical marketshare.
      - Izkata 6y ago
        Well, perhaps not the only thing: Tree Style Tabs opens in a sidebar in Firefox (and with user CSS, can be made to auto-expand), while in Chrome it opens in a separate window.
The_Colonel 6y ago
> I feel that many people would be satisfied if Firefox was just a small(ish) browser catering to power users. There's no way to do that in today's environment. Browser development is extremely expensive (there's only 3 companies in the world developing competitive browser engines) so you need money. For Firefox, the only way to get serious cash is to have serious marketshare. And in reality there isn't that many "power users". I mean, even a lot of developers (like me) use barely any extensions and in any case prefer more speed than more extensibility.
- slightwinder 6y ago
  Browser development is not that expensive. Developing of Web-Engines is the dark part that sucks all the money. > For Firefox, the only way to get serious cash is to have serious marketshare. Not true. That's only valid if your single income is marketshare-based. Mozilla for some unknown reasons hasn't made any serious attempts in the last 15+ years to get any alternative income, instead it was satisfied with being feeding on google and yahoo, while wasting money on some obvious dead projects.
  - The_Colonel 6y ago
    > Browser development is not that expensive. Developing of Web-Engines is the dark part that sucks all the money. Of course, but then there's enough Chromium skins, no? Without independent browser engine you have no clout in defining and ratifying standard (as MS recently found out) which means giving Google full control. > Mozilla for some unknown reasons hasn't made any serious attempts in the last 15+ years to get any alternative income, instead it was satisfied with being feeding on google and yahoo, while wasting money on some obvious dead projects. They had some feeble attempts which largely failed. Mozilla's main expertise is still browser technology based and it is probably difficult to monetize it.
    - slightwinder 6y ago
      > Of course, but then there's enough Chromium skins, no? Most of them are more than skins. A browser is the interface and whole workflow, not just the way the website is displayed. > as MS recently found out What do you mean? > They had some feeble attempts which largely failed. They had no SERIOUS attempt. Well until now at least. They did some half-assed with pocket and now VPN-reselling, but never touched real business.
dao- 6y ago
> if Firefox was just a small(ish) browser catering to power users. There's nothing wrong with that Except that it couldn't work in today's world, as more and more web sites would stop working in Firefox. Firefox needs significant market share to survive with an independent browser engine. Having an independent engine is key to achieving Mozilla's mission: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/ You can build a browser focused on power users if you don't need to worry about the engine. Perhaps you want to take a look at Vivaldi?
- rvba 6y ago
  When you have a browser that is USED by programmers, the programmers will know that their own site is bad. Problems started when it stopped being a browser for programmers and power users. They were the ones marketing it. Mozilla cut the branch on which they were sitting and is now shocked that they lose maretshare.

dman 6y ago

Strongly disagree - I think the reason Firefox market share is in a tailspin is because once they "rationalized" the codebase by getting rid of power features - there was no moat around them to keep even simple upstarts like Edge away. Programmers often make the mistake of classifying all complexity as cruft - when much of that are use cases accumulated over time that reflect your competitive advantage - one that any competitor has to overcome. The more Firefox streamlines the more they will cede ground to better funded alternatives.

acdha 6y ago
Firefox’s market share started declining when Google ran huge ad campaigns for Chrome and made some of the most popular sites on the web promote Chrome and, in the case of YouTube, run better on it. Microsoft Edge didn’t affect Firefox much, and fared equally poorly against that juggernaut. Any theory which talks about niche features without accounting for that push is unlikely to be right.
- robenkleene 6y ago
  Quibi had a big ad budget too. Marketing gives you leg up, but at the end of the day, a product's merits have to live up to it. Both IE and Safari had an even bigger advantage than marketing by being built-in to their respective platforms, and both have lost marketshare to Chrome. I'll say pointblank I don't know what people see in Chrome, but they clearly see something in it. To me today, Safari, Firefox, and Chrome are essentially identical, which is a bad spot to be in for everyone except the market leader, because there's no incentive to switch. UPDATE: There's a stronger case regarding Google sabotaging Firefox, but I don't think that accounts for the magnitude of the switch, here's a detail of the accusation[0]: > A Mozilla Program Manager named Chris Peterson accused Google of making Youtube performance slower on the Firefox explorer in July 2018. Peterson alleged that Google was aware that both Firefox and Edge, Microsoft’s browser, were performing better with regard to loading the popular video sharing platform YouTube and decided to switch to a Javascript library which was incompatible with Firefox. Google Chrome became the dominant browser around 2012, after being released in 2008. That's an astronomically fast takeover, if there were any shenanigans that accounted for it, they'd have to be quite aggressive (and therefore discussed more at that time). [0]: https://btcmanager.com/former-mozilla-executive-accuses-google-sabotage/?q=/former-mozilla-executive-accuses-google-sabotage/& https://btcmanager.com/former-mozilla-executive-accuses-goog...

Amezarak 6y ago

> I think that catering to that small number of power users at the expense of having a faster, more stable, more secure browser earlier was a major mistake. Catering to power users is the only reason Firefox ever had market share in the first place! Normal users do not install their own browsers. Normal users do not care about their browser. They barely even know what a browser is, other than it's the thing they use to get on the Internet. Every bit of Mozilla's original market share came from power users wanting a browser with more features and power than Internet Explorer. And once the power users fell in love with it, they evangelized it relentlessly to their friends and family. There were campaigns for power users to go install it on grandma's computer. This is the only way Firefox ever got on a normal user's computer. (This was also the only way Firefox got headway in enterprise environments, though it would have made a lot more if Mozilla had listened to power users and system admins and added the group policy and installation options they asked for.) Chrome crushed Firefox because it was a decent, fast browser and because of the massive marketing budget. Chrome was and is pushed hard on the biggest web properties on the world - you get notifications on Google and YouTube if you use anything other than Chrome. Various other installers also installed Chrome, unless you unchecked a box. There were TV commercials. It was the default browser on Google platforms from phones to Chromebooks. That's why Chrome won. When Firefox killed feature after feature that catered to power users, power users cared less and less about evangelization, and some of them switched to Chrome because Firefox was becoming increasingly Chrome-like, Chrome dev tools were evidently pretty good, and many people perceived Chrome to be faster. I still use Firefox, but I honestly don't see any reason to other than ideological reasons, which are becoming increasingly tenuous and not really a winning argument even for power users. This is why Firefox usage will continue to decline. It doesn’t matter how much faster Firefox becomes. It doesn’t matter how much easier Firefox development gets. Mozilla alienated their core user base, they aren’t coming back, and normal users are never going to start installing niche browsers that aren’t pushed hard by multi billion dollar companies. Mozilla has no path forward. They’ve screwed up irrevocably and the best they can hope for is to manage the decline and cling to their remaining user base. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like they’re going to be able to manage even that.

kazinator 6y ago

I.e. new users, like friends, are cooler and more exciting than old users.

lenkite 6y ago

My grandmother used Tax Mix Plus several years ago. I personally found it a bit laborious, but she liked organising her reading. That was such a wonderful extension. People on HN make the mistake of assuming that the mythical 'average' user will not use such features. And convincing them otherwise is so difficult. The folks who love your product will plumb every depth of it. Not everything needs to be dumbed down to the dirt.

roenxi 6y ago

> What’s more important to normal users is speed If normal users cared about speed they can go and use Chrome. The framing in many of the comments here seems to be that there is 1 ideal that all web browsers should be working towards; and it is represented by Google Chrome. That isn't really the case, there are multiple interpretations. It is very annoying that Firefox chose the path of being Chrome-but-worse. All the people who want Chrome are using it - or chromium - and they don't need Firefox trying to implement the same thing but in red. Firefox has lost substantial features over the years - Chatzilla for example was a great little add-on. It is quite a bold strategy to write a blog post saying "we stripped out a bunch of features, but trust me you didn't want them". Even if it is true there doesn't seem to be the level of regret here that is appropriate for trashing an ecosystem that has never recovered.