3 ms·

Oh it's absolutely dead man walking at this point. Just a question of when they finally decide to admit it, turn off the lights and go home.

fleddr 5y ago
That's a crude way to put it, but yes, I can't see how this can go on. With limited resources, trying to keep up with giants speeding away from you, whilst market share keeps shrinking. I'm trying to think of a good exit plan, but I don't see any. Switching to Chromium, which would be a humiliating defeat, solves nothing. Chromium + privacy is Brave. Donating the entire project to the larger open source community won't do miracles either. It's highly questionable how many contributions will be made, but that's not the real problem. The real problem is that there's no reach. It's not an engineering problem. If you can't push a browser as a default or plug it from a billion user platform, you're out of the game.
- zarzavat 5y ago
  Firefox needs to become the default browser for web developers. They need to go all-in on developer tooling. The manifest v3 issue may help by poaching technical users from chrome. They also need to stop being so "principled" about features such as WebMidi. If I have to keep another browser around certain websites that Firefox is too principled to support then why bother using Firefox at all.
  - fleddr 5y ago
    They can't out engineer Google on dev tooling, or the dev ecosystem. They just don't have the resources. Chrome dev tools is vast and very rapidly evolving. Google has large evangelists teams dedicated to explaining dev tools or web tech in general. They are everywhere, on Twitter, Youtube, blogs, conferences, in web standards proposals. It's Google all the way down. If I'm not mistaken, Mozilla doesn't even have any evangelists anymore.
    - zarzavat 5y ago
      Yet I still use Mozilla MDN far more than all of those google resources put together. They're not dead yet.
      - fleddr 5y ago
        Are you aware that the technical writers parts of the MDN team were all fired as part of Mozilla's most recent restructuring?

fleddr 5y ago

That's a crude way to put it, but yes, I can't see how this can go on. With limited resources, trying to keep up with giants speeding away from you, whilst market share keeps shrinking. I'm trying to think of a good exit plan, but I don't see any. Switching to Chromium, which would be a humiliating defeat, solves nothing. Chromium + privacy is Brave. Donating the entire project to the larger open source community won't do miracles either. It's highly questionable how many contributions will be made, but that's not the real problem. The real problem is that there's no reach. It's not an engineering problem. If you can't push a browser as a default or plug it from a billion user platform, you're out of the game.

zarzavat 5y ago
Firefox needs to become the default browser for web developers. They need to go all-in on developer tooling. The manifest v3 issue may help by poaching technical users from chrome. They also need to stop being so "principled" about features such as WebMidi. If I have to keep another browser around certain websites that Firefox is too principled to support then why bother using Firefox at all.
- fleddr 5y ago
  They can't out engineer Google on dev tooling, or the dev ecosystem. They just don't have the resources. Chrome dev tools is vast and very rapidly evolving. Google has large evangelists teams dedicated to explaining dev tools or web tech in general. They are everywhere, on Twitter, Youtube, blogs, conferences, in web standards proposals. It's Google all the way down. If I'm not mistaken, Mozilla doesn't even have any evangelists anymore.
  - zarzavat 5y ago
    Yet I still use Mozilla MDN far more than all of those google resources put together. They're not dead yet.
    - fleddr 5y ago
      Are you aware that the technical writers parts of the MDN team were all fired as part of Mozilla's most recent restructuring?