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What made Firefox originally successful (and gave it significant marketshare against a preinstalled incumbent) was the features. They simply made a better brows

What made Firefox originally successful (and gave it significant marketshare against a preinstalled incumbent) was the features. They simply made a better browser than the status-quo at the time. I don't understand nor approve their current strategy of trying to make a Chrome clone - even if they actually make a perfect copy, why would people use it instead of Chrome itself? The only way for Firefox to survive and thrive is to differentiate itself from the incumbents and offer features that those incumbents can't offer due to conflicts of interest such as built-in ad blocking. Make a better browser and people will come. At the moment there is no reason for any non-technical user to use it over Chrome, since in its default configuration it's no better (and being non-technical means they are not aware of add-ons/etc). Give non-technical users an actual reason to pick it over Chrome. Worse, their current strategy is actually alienating their current (mostly-technical) users, effectively working against their already-tiny marketshare.

mrguyorama 3y ago
>Make a better browser and people will come. With magic money? Do you think mozilla employees and firefox employees should starve? Should they be making firefox entirely as charity? The other browsers are made by a GigaCorp that extracts a tax from pretty much everything on the internet, especially if you want to do any advertising, and another Megacorp that has billions upon billions of dollars in cash just waiting for a need and also extracts 30% on ANY financial transaction using their hardware. Imagine people pushing stupid hard for everyone to use Meta's MetaVerse instead of VRChat because VRChat once had an advertising ID in their code or something. Like sure, that's not awesome, but like, what the fuck is the alternative?
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  > With magic money? Do you think mozilla employees and firefox employees should starve? Should they be making firefox entirely as charity? Well they've got enough magic money considering the salaries of their C-suite, so short-term needs are absolutely covered. Long-term the Google subsidy will eventually dry up but focusing on an enterprise-grade browser (see my other comment here) is worth a shot. Charity isn't actually that bad of an idea either, since Mozilla Foundation is actually a non-profit (but somehow owns a for-profit company that pays insane salaries to execs? Shady as fuck). Developing a browser that is actually focused on the user fits with their purported mission and will do more to improve the web than all the auxiliary projects/initiatives they've done so far.

mrguyorama 3y ago

>Make a better browser and people will come. With magic money? Do you think mozilla employees and firefox employees should starve? Should they be making firefox entirely as charity? The other browsers are made by a GigaCorp that extracts a tax from pretty much everything on the internet, especially if you want to do any advertising, and another Megacorp that has billions upon billions of dollars in cash just waiting for a need and also extracts 30% on ANY financial transaction using their hardware. Imagine people pushing stupid hard for everyone to use Meta's MetaVerse instead of VRChat because VRChat once had an advertising ID in their code or something. Like sure, that's not awesome, but like, what the fuck is the alternative?

Nextgrid 3y ago
> With magic money? Do you think mozilla employees and firefox employees should starve? Should they be making firefox entirely as charity? Well they've got enough magic money considering the salaries of their C-suite, so short-term needs are absolutely covered. Long-term the Google subsidy will eventually dry up but focusing on an enterprise-grade browser (see my other comment here) is worth a shot. Charity isn't actually that bad of an idea either, since Mozilla Foundation is actually a non-profit (but somehow owns a for-profit company that pays insane salaries to execs? Shady as fuck). Developing a browser that is actually focused on the user fits with their purported mission and will do more to improve the web than all the auxiliary projects/initiatives they've done so far.