6 ms·

I have an alternative set of explanations regarding why Firefox is seeing a continuous decline for the last 12 years. 1. Mozilla is competing against Google. N

by Yoric 5y ago

I have an alternative set of explanations regarding why Firefox is seeing a continuous decline for the last 12 years. 1. Mozilla is competing against Google. Numbers are not public but I would be surprised if Google didn't have 10x more people working on Chrome vs. the number of people working on Firefox. 2. Mozilla is competing against Google. Numbers are again not public but I remember reading estimates that the equivalent ad budget for promoting Chrome during year 1 was about 6x the entire budget of Mozilla for that period (writing "equivalent" because webside, Google is its own ad agency). 3. Mozilla is competing against Google. Google owns countless properties besides Chrome, from Google Docs to Google Translate to Android, and leverages all of these (great products) to lead users towards Chrome. Case in point: many properties that don't/didn't work or work correctly with Firefox could be made to magically work if you changed your user agent to Chrome. 4. Mozilla is competing against Google. While Mozilla was front and center on many things open-source, relying on volunteers, Google employs countless (talented) Tech Evangelists and managed to attract considerable goodwill, much of it at the expense of the army of volunteers who used to help Mozilla. 5. Replace "Google" with "Apple" in the above points, adapt product names and repeat. 6. In 2011, predicting that the only way out of this was to outmaneuver Google and Apple on mobile devices/silos, Mozilla bet the farm on Firefox OS and lost. Mozilla never recovered. 7. During the Brendan Eichgate, Mozilla became a hapless victim of the US culture wars, mostly acccidentally. Mozilla never recovered. Now, I'm not claiming that Mozilla never made any other mistake wrt technology or UX or PR. We've all seen a number of them. What I'm claiming is that these mistakes have next to no influence in comparison to the points above.

phillipseamore 5y ago
To points 1-4, where would FF be without $400m a year from Google?
- ndiddy 5y ago
  I suspect Google thinks the $400m/year is worth not having to deal with antitrust proceedings due to having a competing desktop browser.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    I think so too. But in that case its declining userbase is also a concern. A tiny competitor isn't going to stave off antitrust action. For that there must be substantial competition. I wonder if they'll continue bothering with the deal when Edge continues to grow. Sure, Edge is just a reskin of chromium but it's run by a different company so that'll be most likely enough for market regulators.
  - webmobdev 5y ago
    And it's not as if they are just giving the 400 million dollars away - they earn billions of dollars from Firefox users and they give a percentage of that to Firefox.
- Klinky 5y ago
  Is this what peak competition looks like? 3 browsers, 2 from companies with histories of anti-trust behavior who use the same browser engine, and the alternative is heavily funded by 1 of those 2 companies.
- Yoric 5y ago
  Your point is also true.
dTal 5y ago
>many properties that don't/didn't work or work correctly with Firefox could be made to magically work if you changed your user agent to Chrome. Pretty damning that Google was never slammed with a huge fine for anti-competitive behavior for that.
- WhyNotHugo 5y ago
  Chrome is just the new IE. I've been saying this for over a decade, and facts like just continue to make this clear.
  - treis 5y ago
    Except that chromium is open source. Plenty of alternate browsers exist and at least one has big backing (Edge). It's not a bad thing for there to be only one HTML & JavaScript engine that you have to deal with. In fact it's the opposite. The dominance of Chrome has made development much easier.
  - recursive 5y ago
    I've been hearing this for the last decade also. I wonder if those saying it were around for the dominance of IE. Chrome is like the opposite of IE. IE didn't ship an update for like 6 years. Chrome ships updates every ~6 weeks.
    - timw4mail 5y ago
      It updates too often, introducing yet more APIs that will be "deprecated" and re-implemented, forcing yet more incompatabilites.
      - recursive 5y ago
        If you use the standardized ones, you won't have much to worry about. That wasn't the case with IE.
roca 5y ago
This is certainly much closer to the mark than an article that leads with "tabs on top". It's easy and fun to point to half a dozen of your favourite Mozilla missteps over more than a decade and say "those are why Mozilla is losing". Maybe if Mozilla had done none of them, they wouldn't be losing. But in reality every vendor makes missteps. It's the unrelenting competition from Google that really made the difference, via the avenues you mention and others.
will4274 5y ago
Um. A "hapless victim" of the US culture wars? Mozilla quite deliberately committed suicide - they bought a fucking fireworks show to announce to the world that if you had views as conservative or more conservative that the average American, you had a permanent glass ceiling for your employment at Mozilla. Now they struggle to hire developers over the age of 25 - who would have guessed? Describing the prosecutors of a culture wars as the victims of that same culture war is a bizarre doublespeak.
- aaomidi 5y ago
  Dude literally spent money trying to fuck over the right for gay people to get married. He's a predator, not a victim. Using your influence to fuck over people who have NOTHING TO DO WITH YOU is absolutely disgusting and unforgivable.
- ryanobjc 5y ago
  More importantly when confronted with a serious piece of leadership challenge the guy screwed up badly. He needed to navigate that a lot better and didn’t. That was worth his resignation.
- dralley 5y ago
  If I were an LGBT employee at Mozilla, I would be pretty pissed and demoralized that my "leader" was actively trying to remove my rights. Because that's what Proposition 8 was, an attempt to constitutionally remove marriage rights from gay people after the California courts ruled that it was allowed. I think I'd be pretty uncomfortable making money for a person who would turn around and it to take away my / my family's rights.
  - will4274 5y ago
    And the result is that Mozilla is a zombie company, filled with LGBT employees who would rather work for a company that is useless than one that has a leader who opposes gay marriage. That's fine for the U25s, but as people get older, they usually want to work for a company that is accomplishing something. I understand the folks who wanted that and why they wanted that. But it still turned Mozilla and Firefox into walking corpses.
eplanit 5y ago
As a US citizen, I really wish I lived in a country with effective (i.e. actually used/enforced) antitrust laws, that would see the dominance in browsers (chrome and android), combined with dominance in search -- which promotes its ads (another industry it dominates), the alteration of how the web is experienced to favor itself (hiding site identity the browser and in search results, combined with showing scraped content instead of directing traffic to actual site), combined with ... as being monopolistic and anti-competitive practices. It's beyond ridiculous anymore.
- davidebaldini 5y ago
  How do you wish the outcomes of these legal enforcements to be like? An authority with the effective power to cripple the finances and business practices of Google for the purpose of reducing its market share to an arbitrarily lower percentage would be immediately detrimental to furthering the development of Google's products, and consequently detrimental to the utility of its users, while in the longer term it wouldn't be obvious that conceding the lesser competitors to scramble for this stolen market slice would yield better alternative products, nor that users would ultimately benefit from having more lesser competitors.
  - eplanit 5y ago
    Who says anything about crippling or destroying anything? One approach is to split up the company in to separate entities. Search, YouTube, advertising, technology products and OSs, etc...
    - davidebaldini 5y ago
      ...and prohibit these newly-formed entities to cooperate too much with each other toward holistic objectives, therefore reducing the efficiency of capital allocation to their detriment. If this new arrangement wouldn't be less efficient, less productive or crippling in any way, it would rationally be attained voluntarily without political imposition. Unless the intervention manifests in a hindrance so expensive to cause the market share to shrink in one or more service segments, and give smaller competitors the opportunity to collect unsatisfied customers who seek alternatives to the reduced quality of services offered by the former monopoly, what would the alleged benefit be for society?
zdragnar 5y ago
I switched because FF was painfully slow, and chrome was blazing fast when it came out in comparison. Not only that, but the dev tools (specifically for JS) were far better than anything else out there. Fast forward 12 years, and little has changed. I dont keep 1000 tabs open, so chrome has never felt slow. I tried installing the developer edition of FF about 6 years ago on macOS and it refused to open. Why bother changing?
- SSLy 5y ago
  Because since FF57 it feels faster than Chrome.
  - zdragnar 5y ago
    And yet, chrome doesnt feel slow to me. The difference isn't nearly as stark as it once was between the two. FF lost because they lost the plot. If I were a tab hoarder (I.e. didn't know how to use bookmarks) or thought that Mozilla were any more trustworthy than Google (why is it that the for profit puts out FF but the not-for-profit collects donations that go to anything but?) then I would switch. I'm waiting to see how manifest v3 shakes out- Chromes plan is still better than safari has been (she admittedly low bar) but until thr browsing experience is affected, I have no problem sticking with chrome / chromium.
rwmj 5y ago
> Google owns countless properties besides Chrome, from Google Docs to Google Translate to Android, and leverages all of these (great products) to lead users towards Chrome I always wonder why Google do this. Sure, they could always have more Chrome users, but at the same time they're going to have to support Firefox forever whatever happens, and Firefox is a nice hedge for Google against being accused of having a browser monopoly.
- anonymousab 5y ago
  > but at the same time they're going to have to support Firefox forever whatever happens, and Firefox is a nice hedge for Google against being accused of having a browser monopoly They merely need to wait for a time when the regulatory environment is more favorable. It's just a roll of the dice every 4 years, sooner or later their number will come up and they can cut all support then and there. But it's not really necessary. By making Chrome the preferred and optimal way to use any site, and making chrome intrinsics the expected behavior of a web browser, they are creating an environment where all the incentives are towards making your browser more like chrome. Eventually there won't be much difference in the surface between Firefox and Chrome and Mozilla will finally make the decision we all eventually expect, and just change Firefox into a true chromium fork. Though that may happen sooner anyways. It feels pretty clear that there are parts of the greater Mozilla org that don't benefit at all from all the effort going into Gecko (or a web browser in general) and wouldn't be disappointed in the money going towards other initiatives instead.
shartacct 5y ago
> 7. During the Brendan Eichgate, Mozilla became a hapless victim of the US culture wars, mostly acccidentally. Mozilla never recovered. Defending Eich is a hot take that you only see here on HN. He is a worthless individual who champions the cause of taking away personal freedoms of groups of people he doesn't like, pushes anti-mask conspiracy and smears public workers like Fauci, and his only technical 'achievement' since leaving Mozilla has been to create a fork of chrome that bakes in his companies ads and pushes a scamcoin on the user. The fact you even have the gall to defend such a person is laughable. It wasn't that long ago the population would summarily execute such people when they revealed their status as societal bad actors.
- Yoric 5y ago
  Please read my message carefully. I have neither defended nor attacked Brendan Eich, only mentioned an episode in the history of Mozilla.
throwaway81523 5y ago
Of course Eich becoming a Mozilla higher-up (even before becoming CEO) is why browsers became so complicated and expensive to develop. We would have been better off staying with HTML3 and no javascript.
- BrendanEich 5y ago
  ("throwaway81523", ok; I'll take the bait.) Check your chronology: I wasn't a Mozilla higher-up when HTML 4.0 replaced 3.2. IE won the first browser war and MS was instrumental along with Dave Raggett in finalizing HTML 4. MS also was all-in on "JScript" by that point, having contributed to the ECMA-262 standard as I describe here: https://www.pldi21.org/prerecorded_hopl.12.html https://www.pldi21.org/prerecorded_hopl.12.html I was not a "Mozilla higher-up" during this period, I was not in management. From engineer role doing JS in 1995, I was promoted to Principal Engineer at Netscape by 1997. So your chronology there is bogus. Also, mozilla.org did not exist until late 1997, and was not launched until April 1, 1998. Once again you are out to lunch on history, out of some bizarre desire to blame me personally for the web standards in full, and consequently browsers that implement them, being so complicated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML#HTML_4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML#HTML_4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars
soundnote 5y ago
There was also something about Firefox being actively antagonistic to being easy to mass deploy and manage by IT?

by Yoric 5y ago

phillipseamore 5y ago

To points 1-4, where would FF be without $400m a year from Google?

ndiddy 5y ago
I suspect Google thinks the $400m/year is worth not having to deal with antitrust proceedings due to having a competing desktop browser.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  I think so too. But in that case its declining userbase is also a concern. A tiny competitor isn't going to stave off antitrust action. For that there must be substantial competition. I wonder if they'll continue bothering with the deal when Edge continues to grow. Sure, Edge is just a reskin of chromium but it's run by a different company so that'll be most likely enough for market regulators.
- webmobdev 5y ago
  And it's not as if they are just giving the 400 million dollars away - they earn billions of dollars from Firefox users and they give a percentage of that to Firefox.
Klinky 5y ago
Is this what peak competition looks like? 3 browsers, 2 from companies with histories of anti-trust behavior who use the same browser engine, and the alternative is heavily funded by 1 of those 2 companies.
Yoric 5y ago
Your point is also true.

dTal 5y ago

>many properties that don't/didn't work or work correctly with Firefox could be made to magically work if you changed your user agent to Chrome. Pretty damning that Google was never slammed with a huge fine for anti-competitive behavior for that.

WhyNotHugo 5y ago
Chrome is just the new IE. I've been saying this for over a decade, and facts like just continue to make this clear.
- treis 5y ago
  Except that chromium is open source. Plenty of alternate browsers exist and at least one has big backing (Edge). It's not a bad thing for there to be only one HTML & JavaScript engine that you have to deal with. In fact it's the opposite. The dominance of Chrome has made development much easier.
- recursive 5y ago
  I've been hearing this for the last decade also. I wonder if those saying it were around for the dominance of IE. Chrome is like the opposite of IE. IE didn't ship an update for like 6 years. Chrome ships updates every ~6 weeks.
  - timw4mail 5y ago
    It updates too often, introducing yet more APIs that will be "deprecated" and re-implemented, forcing yet more incompatabilites.
    - recursive 5y ago
      If you use the standardized ones, you won't have much to worry about. That wasn't the case with IE.

roca 5y ago

This is certainly much closer to the mark than an article that leads with "tabs on top". It's easy and fun to point to half a dozen of your favourite Mozilla missteps over more than a decade and say "those are why Mozilla is losing". Maybe if Mozilla had done none of them, they wouldn't be losing. But in reality every vendor makes missteps. It's the unrelenting competition from Google that really made the difference, via the avenues you mention and others.

will4274 5y ago

Um. A "hapless victim" of the US culture wars? Mozilla quite deliberately committed suicide - they bought a fucking fireworks show to announce to the world that if you had views as conservative or more conservative that the average American, you had a permanent glass ceiling for your employment at Mozilla. Now they struggle to hire developers over the age of 25 - who would have guessed? Describing the prosecutors of a culture wars as the victims of that same culture war is a bizarre doublespeak.

aaomidi 5y ago
Dude literally spent money trying to fuck over the right for gay people to get married. He's a predator, not a victim. Using your influence to fuck over people who have NOTHING TO DO WITH YOU is absolutely disgusting and unforgivable.
ryanobjc 5y ago
More importantly when confronted with a serious piece of leadership challenge the guy screwed up badly. He needed to navigate that a lot better and didn’t. That was worth his resignation.
dralley 5y ago
If I were an LGBT employee at Mozilla, I would be pretty pissed and demoralized that my "leader" was actively trying to remove my rights. Because that's what Proposition 8 was, an attempt to constitutionally remove marriage rights from gay people after the California courts ruled that it was allowed. I think I'd be pretty uncomfortable making money for a person who would turn around and it to take away my / my family's rights.
- will4274 5y ago
  And the result is that Mozilla is a zombie company, filled with LGBT employees who would rather work for a company that is useless than one that has a leader who opposes gay marriage. That's fine for the U25s, but as people get older, they usually want to work for a company that is accomplishing something. I understand the folks who wanted that and why they wanted that. But it still turned Mozilla and Firefox into walking corpses.

eplanit 5y ago

As a US citizen, I really wish I lived in a country with effective (i.e. actually used/enforced) antitrust laws, that would see the dominance in browsers (chrome and android), combined with dominance in search -- which promotes its ads (another industry it dominates), the alteration of how the web is experienced to favor itself (hiding site identity the browser and in search results, combined with showing scraped content instead of directing traffic to actual site), combined with ... as being monopolistic and anti-competitive practices. It's beyond ridiculous anymore.

davidebaldini 5y ago
How do you wish the outcomes of these legal enforcements to be like? An authority with the effective power to cripple the finances and business practices of Google for the purpose of reducing its market share to an arbitrarily lower percentage would be immediately detrimental to furthering the development of Google's products, and consequently detrimental to the utility of its users, while in the longer term it wouldn't be obvious that conceding the lesser competitors to scramble for this stolen market slice would yield better alternative products, nor that users would ultimately benefit from having more lesser competitors.
- eplanit 5y ago
  Who says anything about crippling or destroying anything? One approach is to split up the company in to separate entities. Search, YouTube, advertising, technology products and OSs, etc...
  - davidebaldini 5y ago
    ...and prohibit these newly-formed entities to cooperate too much with each other toward holistic objectives, therefore reducing the efficiency of capital allocation to their detriment. If this new arrangement wouldn't be less efficient, less productive or crippling in any way, it would rationally be attained voluntarily without political imposition. Unless the intervention manifests in a hindrance so expensive to cause the market share to shrink in one or more service segments, and give smaller competitors the opportunity to collect unsatisfied customers who seek alternatives to the reduced quality of services offered by the former monopoly, what would the alleged benefit be for society?

zdragnar 5y ago

I switched because FF was painfully slow, and chrome was blazing fast when it came out in comparison. Not only that, but the dev tools (specifically for JS) were far better than anything else out there. Fast forward 12 years, and little has changed. I dont keep 1000 tabs open, so chrome has never felt slow. I tried installing the developer edition of FF about 6 years ago on macOS and it refused to open. Why bother changing?

SSLy 5y ago
Because since FF57 it feels faster than Chrome.
- zdragnar 5y ago
  And yet, chrome doesnt feel slow to me. The difference isn't nearly as stark as it once was between the two. FF lost because they lost the plot. If I were a tab hoarder (I.e. didn't know how to use bookmarks) or thought that Mozilla were any more trustworthy than Google (why is it that the for profit puts out FF but the not-for-profit collects donations that go to anything but?) then I would switch. I'm waiting to see how manifest v3 shakes out- Chromes plan is still better than safari has been (she admittedly low bar) but until thr browsing experience is affected, I have no problem sticking with chrome / chromium.

rwmj 5y ago

> Google owns countless properties besides Chrome, from Google Docs to Google Translate to Android, and leverages all of these (great products) to lead users towards Chrome I always wonder why Google do this. Sure, they could always have more Chrome users, but at the same time they're going to have to support Firefox forever whatever happens, and Firefox is a nice hedge for Google against being accused of having a browser monopoly.

anonymousab 5y ago
> but at the same time they're going to have to support Firefox forever whatever happens, and Firefox is a nice hedge for Google against being accused of having a browser monopoly They merely need to wait for a time when the regulatory environment is more favorable. It's just a roll of the dice every 4 years, sooner or later their number will come up and they can cut all support then and there. But it's not really necessary. By making Chrome the preferred and optimal way to use any site, and making chrome intrinsics the expected behavior of a web browser, they are creating an environment where all the incentives are towards making your browser more like chrome. Eventually there won't be much difference in the surface between Firefox and Chrome and Mozilla will finally make the decision we all eventually expect, and just change Firefox into a true chromium fork. Though that may happen sooner anyways. It feels pretty clear that there are parts of the greater Mozilla org that don't benefit at all from all the effort going into Gecko (or a web browser in general) and wouldn't be disappointed in the money going towards other initiatives instead.

shartacct 5y ago

> 7. During the Brendan Eichgate, Mozilla became a hapless victim of the US culture wars, mostly acccidentally. Mozilla never recovered. Defending Eich is a hot take that you only see here on HN. He is a worthless individual who champions the cause of taking away personal freedoms of groups of people he doesn't like, pushes anti-mask conspiracy and smears public workers like Fauci, and his only technical 'achievement' since leaving Mozilla has been to create a fork of chrome that bakes in his companies ads and pushes a scamcoin on the user. The fact you even have the gall to defend such a person is laughable. It wasn't that long ago the population would summarily execute such people when they revealed their status as societal bad actors.

Yoric 5y ago
Please read my message carefully. I have neither defended nor attacked Brendan Eich, only mentioned an episode in the history of Mozilla.

throwaway81523 5y ago

Of course Eich becoming a Mozilla higher-up (even before becoming CEO) is why browsers became so complicated and expensive to develop. We would have been better off staying with HTML3 and no javascript.

BrendanEich 5y ago
("throwaway81523", ok; I'll take the bait.) Check your chronology: I wasn't a Mozilla higher-up when HTML 4.0 replaced 3.2. IE won the first browser war and MS was instrumental along with Dave Raggett in finalizing HTML 4. MS also was all-in on "JScript" by that point, having contributed to the ECMA-262 standard as I describe here: https://www.pldi21.org/prerecorded_hopl.12.html https://www.pldi21.org/prerecorded_hopl.12.html I was not a "Mozilla higher-up" during this period, I was not in management. From engineer role doing JS in 1995, I was promoted to Principal Engineer at Netscape by 1997. So your chronology there is bogus. Also, mozilla.org did not exist until late 1997, and was not launched until April 1, 1998. Once again you are out to lunch on history, out of some bizarre desire to blame me personally for the web standards in full, and consequently browsers that implement them, being so complicated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML#HTML_4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML#HTML_4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars

soundnote 5y ago

There was also something about Firefox being actively antagonistic to being easy to mass deploy and manage by IT?