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Why Firefox Deserves Its Sad Decline

14 points by embit 4y ago

scopecreep 4y ago
Firefox the browser is great. The developers are great. Pretty much everyone else at mozilla (the execs, marketing, and the graphic designers that feel the need to reinvent some minor part of the wheel every 3-5 years to justify their existence) can all pound sand. Someone needs to do to Firefox what Firefox did to Netscape, except this time instead of ditching a legacy codebase they need to ditch their woeful corporate leadership.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Librewolf?
ryanbytes 4y ago
Did anyone edit that article? Horrid.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
It's hardly the fault of the code that there has been a hostile takeover by a CEO whose interests are opposed to the open web.
bastawhiz 4y ago
> The main reason this utterly failed, is because there is literally no reason for people to use this, considering that most Phones came with Android pre-installed and nobody was mad enough to install FirefoxOS instead which came with no software support and had no unique selling point. Mozilla spent tens of millions pushing Firefox OS app development: asking developers to build for an underpowered device that they couldn't buy, whose users spoke a different language, didn't want to spend money, and didn't yet exist. Separately, every app built for Firefox for Android (yes, it has app support) worked on Firefox OS. The Android version had millions of active installs. Smart people were working on making web apps compilable to APKs, but that work was killed. Meanwhile, what DID ship was an OS with two app stores: Firefox Marketplace and Everything.me. The latter was a spammy mess that gave glorified shortcuts baked into the home screen. Lots of folks didn't even know that the actual app store was. Firefox declined because leadership put fools in charge of strategy. They were so high on their own supply that they thought fxos was going to make developers materialize out of thin air. It was wishful thinking at best.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
This is not a useful summary of what happened. In particular, it makes the classic mistake of comparing percentage of browser market as that market grew at a ridiculous rate and spread to more and "normal" people. The kind of people who don't really notice if some app they installed also installed a new default browser for a small monetary kickback. https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/257159-google-chrome-bundling-with-adobe-java-whatever-else-boooo https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/257159-google-chrome-... That's the story. Everything else is what people want to project onto that.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
detaro 4y ago
dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32047380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32047380
tunap 4y ago
Phoenix, not Pheonix. Internetworks introduced tabs in the 90's and Opera was the 1st modern, mainstream browser to implement them. Google captured massive market share with Chrome installers/hijackers added onto many(most?) 3rd party app installers in the late 2000's & early 2010's. Love him, or hate him, Mozilla suffered massive 'brain drain' when Eich departed, aka, was shown the door.
- bastawhiz 4y ago
  Mozilla suffered brain drain when Gary Kovacs showed up and killed browser development and burned everyone out rushing to ship a project that wasn't going to succeed.
  - Kukumber 4y ago
    It's not just brain drain, they refused to fix the performance issues, they refused to do something about the toolbar bloat, the browser became a nest for adwares/malwares, a security and privacy nightmare Other than the shady tactics Google did that helped Chrome spread with the installer, for a majority of users it was a choice to stick with chrome, faster, lighter, more secure, that helped the browser grow at a fast pace

14 points by embit 4y ago

Firefox the browser is great. The developers are great. Pretty much everyone else at mozilla (the execs, marketing, and the graphic designers that feel the need to reinvent some minor part of the wheel every 3-5 years to justify their existence) can all pound sand. Someone needs to do to Firefox what Firefox did to Netscape, except this time instead of ditching a legacy codebase they need to ditch their woeful corporate leadership.

Schroedingersat 4y ago
Librewolf?

ryanbytes 4y ago

Did anyone edit that article? Horrid.

Schroedingersat 4y ago

It's hardly the fault of the code that there has been a hostile takeover by a CEO whose interests are opposed to the open web.

bastawhiz 4y ago

> The main reason this utterly failed, is because there is literally no reason for people to use this, considering that most Phones came with Android pre-installed and nobody was mad enough to install FirefoxOS instead which came with no software support and had no unique selling point. Mozilla spent tens of millions pushing Firefox OS app development: asking developers to build for an underpowered device that they couldn't buy, whose users spoke a different language, didn't want to spend money, and didn't yet exist. Separately, every app built for Firefox for Android (yes, it has app support) worked on Firefox OS. The Android version had millions of active installs. Smart people were working on making web apps compilable to APKs, but that work was killed. Meanwhile, what DID ship was an OS with two app stores: Firefox Marketplace and Everything.me. The latter was a spammy mess that gave glorified shortcuts baked into the home screen. Lots of folks didn't even know that the actual app store was. Firefox declined because leadership put fools in charge of strategy. They were so high on their own supply that they thought fxos was going to make developers materialize out of thin air. It was wishful thinking at best.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

This is not a useful summary of what happened. In particular, it makes the classic mistake of comparing percentage of browser market as that market grew at a ridiculous rate and spread to more and "normal" people. The kind of people who don't really notice if some app they installed also installed a new default browser for a small monetary kickback. https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/257159-google-chrome-bundling-with-adobe-java-whatever-else-boooo https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/257159-google-chrome-... That's the story. Everything else is what people want to project onto that.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

detaro 4y ago

dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32047380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32047380

tunap 4y ago

Phoenix, not Pheonix. Internetworks introduced tabs in the 90's and Opera was the 1st modern, mainstream browser to implement them. Google captured massive market share with Chrome installers/hijackers added onto many(most?) 3rd party app installers in the late 2000's & early 2010's. Love him, or hate him, Mozilla suffered massive 'brain drain' when Eich departed, aka, was shown the door.

bastawhiz 4y ago
Mozilla suffered brain drain when Gary Kovacs showed up and killed browser development and burned everyone out rushing to ship a project that wasn't going to succeed.
- Kukumber 4y ago
  It's not just brain drain, they refused to fix the performance issues, they refused to do something about the toolbar bloat, the browser became a nest for adwares/malwares, a security and privacy nightmare Other than the shady tactics Google did that helped Chrome spread with the installer, for a majority of users it was a choice to stick with chrome, faster, lighter, more secure, that helped the browser grow at a fast pace