22 ms·

Mozilla's midlife crisis has taken it from pioneer to Google's weird neighbor

297 points by mrzool 3y ago

jqpabc123 3y ago
[flagged]
- maverick74 3y ago
  Ahahah!!! Good point!!! Well said!!!
Devasta 3y ago
In the modern age where "Web Standards" is just a synonym for "Chrome's Feature Set", Mozilla serves one purpose and one purpose alone: they are to be dangled about like Weekend At Bernies so that Google can pretend they dont have a monopoly on browsers. I expect even that will become untenable soon: when other engines finally appear on iOS in the next few years we'll start seeing websites blocking any non-chrome browsers (and probably some of the reskins too) and then Mozilla won't even be useful as a fig leaf. Its an awful state of affairs, and I don't see any way out of it for them.
- p-e-w 3y ago
  Safari's market share dwarfs that of Firefox, and has for a long time. If there is indeed such a "fig leaf", it's Apple, not Mozilla.
  - chiefalchemist 3y ago
    Apple acquires Mozilla? Eventually?
    - Dah00n 3y ago
      That would mean the death of Firefox. Apple is the exact opposite of what Mozilla is or tries to be.
      - eastbound 3y ago
        Economically, Mozilla is a subsidiary of Google. Honestly, they keep arguing it is not the case, but they excellently serve as non-threatening competition.
    - hollander 3y ago
      Why would they?
      - chiefalchemist 3y ago
        Why not? Stranger things have happened.
  - 5- 3y ago
    most of that market share will go away the moment google is allowed to push chrome on ios.
    - nfriedly 3y ago
      I don't know, defaults are pretty powerful. There's already a Chrome-branded Safari wrapper on iOS; but my guess is that the majority of iOS users use "regular" Safari and will continue to because it's the default.
      - bratwurst3000 3y ago
        I don’t think they will. Safari doesn’t have good plugins. That’s a big point. Using plugins.
        nfriedly 3y ago
        I'm mostly a Firefox on Android user, does Chrome on Android have plugins now? I know it didn't for a while.
        danarmak 3y ago
        I assume you mean extensions, not plugins. No, Chrome doesn't support extensions on android, but some Chromium reskins do. That said, the most important extension usecase is adblocking, and with Manifest v4 and FLoC/Topics and SafetyNet/remote attestation, well...
        bad_user 3y ago
        Chrome's adblocking capabilities, introduced in Manifest v3, are (1) inspired by Safari and (2) more capable than what Safari provides. You can track this uBlock Origin Lite issue: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/issues/52 https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/issues/52
        oktoberpaard 3y ago
  - cmcaleer 3y ago
    In terms of desktop market share it's about equal. https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#desktop-site-by-browser https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#desktop...
  - Devasta 3y ago
    Does Safari work on Windows or Android? Safaris market share is because other browser engines are restricted. The second Chrome becomes available on iOS Google search, maps, YouTube, everything will have "Works best in Chrome" plastered everywhere.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      Just as info for the young folks, Safari had a Windows version until 2012.
- frizlab 3y ago
  One of the main reasons why I’m fiercely _against_ the possibility of having alternate rendering engines on iOS.
  - 5- 3y ago
    - don't fight evil with evil - two wrongs don't make a right - can't put out fire with more fire etc. sorry for the lazy response, but too many exactly fitting idioms to resist.
    - olavfosse 3y ago
      Putting out fire with more fire works very well: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_burn https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_burn
    - Ensorceled 3y ago
      The idiom is literally “fight fire with fire” Also, “the enemy of my enemy, is my friend”
      - Sindisil 3y ago
        Maxim 29. The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy. No more. No less.
        stjohnswarts 3y ago
        That doesn't mean what they're doing isn't to your advantage.
      - marcosdumay 3y ago
        > “the enemy of my enemy, is my friend” That one basically never leads to anything good.
        Ensorceled 3y ago
        Well, none of these are “words to live by” so you’re not wrong.
- jqpabc123 3y ago
  Sorry, this was the common excuse for years. It just doesn't fly any more now that FireFox market share has shrunk to irrelevance. By every available statistic, Chrome has more than 80 percent of the "free market" --- i.e. the market outside of Apple's walled garden where it has only recently become a realistic option.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    No, it works just fine like that. The ideal outcome is for FireFox to continue to exist with a very small marketshare. That's enough for the FigLeaf function and not enough for Google to worry about killing it off any further. And contrary to the other time when a monopolist kept their competition alive I don't think this one is going to end with FireFox reversing its fate and ending up with market dominance after a surprise success.
    - eastbound 3y ago
      It only exists because people with an ideal keep trying to stay as users. Ideals die hard, so the long trail will be long, but Firefox is effectively as niche as Linux on the desktop.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        Fortunately for me I have both FF and Linux on the desktop. Now that they've finally fixed web midi even that reason to have Chrome has gone away.
        jqpabc123 3y ago
        I suspect that most remaining FF users are running it on Linux desktop.
        pseudalopex 3y ago
        Most Firefox requests to Wikimedia sites say Windows.[1] [1] https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#all-sites-by-os-and-browser/os-browser-family-and-major-hierarchical-view https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#all-sit...
- cmcaleer 3y ago
  That's not true, Mozilla also exist to pay Mitchell Baker and her cronies fat salaries. In 2020, she got paid $3MM. In 2021, after an incredible year which saw Firefox's market share fall even further, she of course got a raise to $5MM for her brave decision to lay off 250 people in Aug 2020. I hope she gets a massive bonus for 2023, given that her leadership has allowed Microsoft Edge to flip Firefox most days according to the stats, and she still has a quarter to let Safari consistently flip Firefox too! It is obscene. She wants to be paid according to what she alleges her market value is, but she does not have the accountability of a publicly traded company's CEO. Firefox needs a radical culture change and it needs to happen 8 years ago. I have no hope it will happen, as it exists to siphon money from suckers who pay donations that barely pay Mitchell's salary (total annual donations barely cover this expense![1]) and the board does not give a shit about what Firefox's core audience cares about. The grift will continue until Mitchell and co decide enough is enough and flee the sinking ship. Whoever inherits it and the massively bloated outgoing expenses will probably be fucked, regardless of who they are or how good their intentions are. Firefox is massively behind, web devs are not incentivised to accommodate for the single-digit percent of Firefox users, and things are only going to continue to get worse. [1] Yes Mitchell is paid by the corporation as opposed to the non-profit and donations go to the non-profit, but ultimately money that could have gone to the non-profit went to Mitchell's bank account Stats from https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#desktop-site-by-browser https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#desktop...
  - maverick74 3y ago
    Thats not all!!! I was really amazed with this post I found here the other day: https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-investigating-the-bizarre-finances-of-mozilla https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest... maybe they should think better where they put their money!!! If servo ever gets into a decent independent browser I will let go of Firefox the second its released!!! I do not support a donation-based tech company spending money in other places not related to tech!
    - phero_cnstrcts 3y ago
      Wow. If that’s all true then that’s really disconcerting but hardly surprising in this corrupt-to-bone world. Every single choice we have to make boils down to taking the lesser evil.
- wodenokoto 3y ago
  You’re very behind the times if you think it is Firefox that is between Chrome and complete browser dominance. That spot has been filled by safari on the iPhone a long time ago. Firefox is my favorite desktop browser, but the desktop market is not the big deal when it comes to browsers. Even edge has higher usage than Firefox across devices. https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
  - Devasta 3y ago
    Thats only because of the restriction on Webkit only on iOS. That wall is collapsing and with it anything that keeps Safari in the game.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      By then anyone doing web development can rename their CVs entries from Web Developer into ChromeOS Developer.
  - philistine 3y ago
    The reality is different from what Google says to the regulators. That’s the Weekend at Bernie’s stuff that is happening.
- Semaphor 3y ago
  Luckily, in Germany FF still has over 10% of the total market, and almost 20% on Desktop.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    It might be, however in most projects it no longer makes into the browser matrix for project delivery acceptance.
    - Semaphor 3y ago
      In German projects? That would be both dumb and sad. In US projects? That would be expected, even when targeting the German market.
      - pjmlp 3y ago
        Yes, in Germany, since 2019 I never worked in a project where supporting Firefox was a requirement.
        Semaphor 3y ago
        Wow. Why, considering the spread? We (average age probably over 50) actually even have over 50% FF on desktop
        pjmlp 3y ago
        Because the target market is the world, not Germany alone, and FF is trailing around 3%.
- extraduder_ire 3y ago
  > we'll start seeing websites blocking any non-chrome browsers (and probably some of the reskins too) and then Mozilla won't even be useful as a fig leaf. Thankfully, browser extensions can quite easily make firefox pretend to be whatever browser you want.
- devit 3y ago
  They could drop Gecko and switch to Blink/Chromium. Then Firefox would be guaranteed to be strictly better than Chrome, since the baseline is the same and they can put in all the features that Google doesn't want because they would reduce their ad income, such as great ad-blocking support. This might result in losing Google's search engine deal, but they can probably make a similar deal with an LLM-based search engine and even if the money might be less they don't need that much if they are only maintaining a fork and not the whole engine.
- SergeAx 3y ago
  I'm not getting it: why would websites block browsers?
  - jandrese 3y ago
    In the old days there were plenty of websites designed only for IE6, and a few that refused to load if they detected any other browser string. It doesn’t make much sense today, Firefox loads sites developed for Chrome just fine. There is no ActiveX like “embrace and extend” coming from the Google camp quite yet.
    - paulryanrogers 3y ago
      I'd argue the rapid pace of new Chrome-only APIs is effectively EEE. Web developers can't wait to use new features, so once features land in Chrome they'll get used. Then folks not using Chrome find more friction until they eventually give up and switch.
      - postalrat 3y ago
        Can you think of any real life examples of websites that use Chrome only apis and don't work in Firefox?
        paulryanrogers 3y ago
        Just this week: - Snyk - Fastly's support site - background blur on Meet and Zoom
        xctr94 3y ago
        I don’t have a list of examples, but this is historically a problem for the web. I’ve sat in a couple of Ecmascript events where maintainers complain about Google implementing features before approval. Sometimes Chrome ships stage 2 features because (apparently) Google engineers don’t want to respect due process. It’s known, we just put up with it. I also blame developers working on non-standardized features. You should work with the ES that is official and current, not the one Google is forcing on other vendors. Apologies for not listing all the times this happened, but I think too many.
TekMol 3y ago
What is most important to me in a browser is that I can customize it. So I am very annoyed if that is restricted. As it happened with the latest update of FireFox: Recently, my Firefox updated and now I can't run bookmarklets anymore right after starting the browser. Say I have a bookmarklet like javascript:alert(123) Then it works fine on every page, even on about:blank. But not right after the browser started with what is called "blank page" in the settings. This is a bit cumbersome, because I often use a bookmarklet as the first step of my browsing session. A bookmarklet, which goes like "If TekMol is not on page B and not on page C, then send him to page A". So I start with page A, then click the bookmarklet again, get to page B, click it again and get to page C. But that workflow is broken now. Must be some regression in the latest version of Firefox.
- BadBadJellyBean 3y ago
  That is one of the oddest workflows I have yet encountered. It reminds me of something I read that was like "If your software supports something, explicitly or implicitly, someone will depend on it.". Using Javascripts in a bookmark to rotate through websites is unexpected. I hope it will be fixed for you though. Maybe open a ticket if you can't find one.
  - jwmcq 3y ago
    There's a relevant XKCD, of course https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/
  - petercooper 3y ago
    A cute idea though. Going through a daily "rotation" of Web sites is probably pretty common and turning that into a formal process is pretty smart to avoid procrastination or having lots of tabs opening all at once. It would work better as an extension, I suspect.
    - TekMol 3y ago
      The nice thing about a bookmarklet is that it works on all of my devices. Even on my tablet. And that editing it is possible by simply right clicking the bookmark and hitting "edit".
lloydatkinson 3y ago
Firing their entire servo team using Rust and then most of their docs team (MDN) and then giving the CEO a raise was the beginning.
- iforgotpassword 3y ago
  Oh how I despise that CEO. Another example where prior experience or skill was not the primary criteria for filling the position.
  - pseudalopex 3y ago
    Mitchell Baker was the Mozilla project's general manager, Mozilla Foundation's 1st president, and Mozilla Corporation's 1st CEO.
- uptime 3y ago
  I did not know that. I use FF on my phone, on Desktop I use MDN more than I use Firefox!
- insanitybit 3y ago
  FWIW Baker has been a disaster for way longer than that but it was definitely one of the loudest "I am absolutely unfit for this position" statements to date.
- skinkestek 3y ago
  The beginning was actually when they threw out Brendan Eich.
  - prepend 3y ago
    I think that kind of was the beginning of firing the smart people who literally built Firefox and hiring random mba-bots because they thought it didn’t matter. Now their tech sucks and market share is sinking. I don’t think it’s the only reason, but firing Eich didn’t help. Also, Brave has been a pretty nice browser with lots of small quality of life innovations. It’s a shock to me that Firefox didn’t capitalize on its unique position to be privacy focused.
Arbortheus 3y ago
> Much of Mozilla's revenue comes from Google, of course. This couldn't be because Rust was, and is, outshining Google's GoLang? Surely not? I don’t understand this assertion, and definitely not the comparison between Rust and GoLang, which exist for entirely different purposes (systems programming versus cloud servers)
- justinclift 3y ago
  Yeah. Spelling the name of the language wrongly is also a pretty clear indication the author isn't familiar with Go. And doesn't grok it gets used for very different stuff to Rust. So their suggestion this was why Servo was dropped seems extremely bizarre.
  - seanhunter 3y ago
    Also things like computer language wars just don't factor into executives' thinking at all when they make big strategic decisions except in cases where it's a proxy for market capture, like dotnet where the language (C# mostly) was initially really about locking users into a delivery ecosystem on Microsoft. If you added up everyone in the boardroom of google and mozilla you would find less than 0.01 millifucks given about go vs rust in total. You might as well ask Mark Zuckerberg about tabs vs spaces.
  - didntcheck 3y ago
    To be fair it's not just this author. For some reason people are absolutely obsessed with comparing Rust and Go, whereas more applicable comparisons would respectively be Zig or D, and a JVM language or C#
- angra_mainyu 3y ago
  In practice they overlap a lot. I don't particularly understand why people say this. I've worked doing systems programming a lot (i.e: many many syscalls) and Go does this just fine. Unless you're working on some kind of hard real time system, I can't see why you would discard Go.
  - 3y ago
mrkramer 3y ago
From web pioneer to Google's slave.
- dralley 3y ago
  Slave implies they do what Google wants them to do, which is demonstrably not the case.
  - mrkramer 3y ago
    "One thing Mozilla does have going for it is a lot of money—more than $1 billion in cash reserves, according to its latest financial statement. The primary source of this capital is Google, which pays Mozilla to be the default search engine on the Firefox home page. Those payments, which started in 2005, have been increasing—up 50% over the past decade, to more than $450 million, even as the total number of Firefox users has plummeted. In 2021 these payments accounted for 83% of Mozilla’s revenue[0]." They depend on Google. [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-google-keeps-paying-mozilla-s-firefox-even-as-chrome-dominates https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-go...
    - dralley 3y ago
      Read my comment again and then explain how this has anything to do with it. I'm well aware that the majority of Mozilla's income is from Google.
      - mrkramer 3y ago
        >Slave implies they do what Google wants them to do, which is demonstrably not the case. Google wants Google to be the default search engine of Mozilla's browser Firefox, Google in order to incentivize them to do it, offers them $450 million and Mozilla accepts it because otherwise they would be on the verge of bankruptcy since 80% of their revenue comes from Google. OK, they are not directly enslaved by Google but they are existentially dependent on Google in the monopolistic abuse of power situation.
    - 3y ago
pshirshov 3y ago
But they have Pocket.
godzillabrennus 3y ago
Firefox containers are the only reason I use their browser. It’s a great way to use social media sites on a computer. Brave is my daily driver. I find that while still having issues it is better than Chrome itself.
kzrdude 3y ago
It should be a good time for Firefox, because now it's clear that Firefox plus ublock origin can block more ads than google ever allows Chrome to do (they don't allow it anymore). That's a tangible benefit you can tell your friends about.
- louthy 3y ago
  But other Chromium based browsers do that too: Brave etc.
  - jowea 3y ago
    If the scenario other posters are concerned about where most sites become chrome-only I wonder if something like that will substitute the market niche that Firefox currently occupies. Or will we just have Firefox on Blink like Microsoft moved Edge to Blink.
  - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
    But if Google changes what's in Chromium, those other browsers would get those anti-features downstream.
- SpacePortKnight 3y ago
  tbh if ads on a website can not be blocked by a simple content blocker, then I'll just simply stop using the website. Safari and Chrome V3 blocker are much more privacy friendly since the extension does not need to access the entire DOM.
  - TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
    So you will stop using YouTube? You will stop using some of the biggest sites on the internet and restrict yourself to a small niche?
    - SpacePortKnight 3y ago
      I pay for Youtube Premium. I don't mind paying for things which provide me value.
johnasmith 3y ago
Mozilla's office in SF, pictured in the article's first photo, is literally neighbor to Google's SF office, making that a particularly apt photo and headline pair.
- lproven 3y ago
  Never been there, didn't know that. I wrote the article but I didn't write the headline and I have zero influence over the selection of the pictures. Interesting point, though.
cxr 3y ago
> six months into the pandemic, Mozilla laid off the entire [Rust] team, killing its next-gen rendering engine, Servo.¶ (Much of Mozilla's revenue comes from Google, of course. This couldn't be because Rust was, and is, outshining Google's GoLang? Surely not?) Really dumb aside that shouldn't have made it past the editor (not least of all because of the insane rendering of "GoLang"). > Mozilla also backs the development of the leading cross-platform messaging client, Thunderbird. This overstates Mozilla's involvement in Thunderbird. The relationship is basically ceremonial at this point. > in 1998, owner AOL promised to open source it[...]. Four years later, the open source version shipped. The way this is written makes it sound like there was a delay to fulfill the promise. In reality, it only took 2 months for Netscape to publish source code. It took another four years for them to decide to scrap the old code and undertake a rewrite that culminated in the release a 1.0 of a different product line which the author refers to here.
- bitcurious 3y ago
  “Golang” used to be a google-endrosed synonym for Go; the official domain was golang.org for a while.
  - dralley 3y ago
    Yes but nobody capitalizes the L
    - wussboy 3y ago
      Sigh.
- micimize 3y ago
  Yeah I found it tough to keep reading after that golang line. What an absolutely unhinged thing to imply. While I maybe self-servingly agree that mozilla could stand to focus more on the power-user market segment, this article feels more like a low-effort ramble than any kind of real investigation into what the modern org's actual focus is vs what it should/could be.
solarkraft 3y ago
Mid-life? How optimistic.
petercooper 3y ago
I visited Mozilla HQ a few years ago (it was very nice, as were the people) and came away with strong vibes of an organization struggling with both an identity crisis and inertia. Baker is a great operator and Mozilla is still bringing in a solid income, but I think they sorely need/needed some sort of outgoing, proactive tech visionary type to give Mozilla a fresh/enhanced meaning to evolve into rather than continuing to live off the fat of the land. To be fair to Baker, she has blogged about how she thinks about Mozilla's ongoing mission – https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2023/03/31/a-quarter-century-of-mozilla/ https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2023/03/31/a-quarter-century... – but I can't help feel a more proactive and public approach might be needed to evolve and grow their market share.
- Jochim 3y ago
  Why should I be fair to anyone who believes that $3m/year isn't enough for them? Someone who decided they needed an additional $2m after their incompetence lead to them laying off many of the people who actually produce work.
  - petercooper 3y ago
    I'm not saying you should be fair ;-) I wanted to balance my "Mozilla needs to do something" opinion with Baker's blog post that implies that they are.
  - taway1237 3y ago
    >fair: impartial and just, without favouritism or discrimination. We should be fair to everyone. But there's no contradiction - you can be fair to someone, and still judge them very harshly. Disclaimer: I'm not a native speaker, feel free to correct me if I'm misinterpreting something.
    - Jochim 3y ago
      You're not incorrect in your sentiment or definition but fairness is often misused in order to downplay an individual's responsibility or to justify their actions. An illustrative example where the use of the phrase "to be fair" would be justified: Person A: "Brian has been very rude to me lately!" Person B: "To be fair, he's been in a lot of pain since the surgery." However, in this case originally, GP's request for fairness read to me as a pre-emptive dismissal of concerns regarding the ceo's performance, given that the examples did not address any criticism. When I say I have no interest in being fair to the ceo of Mozilla, it's not to say that I believe they should be treated unjustly. Rather, it's that I believe their behaviour to be inexcusable given the context. Admittedly, this does veer a little from the dictionary definition.
spaceribs 3y ago
If any organization should be a worker-cooperative, it should be Mozilla. Why should a team that is so heavily supportive of OSS be reliant on investments and donations?
- QuiDortDine 3y ago
  They would still have to pay themselves, presumably with investments and donations (and subsidies).
  - spaceribs 3y ago
    There are lots of ways to do this, companies divest into worker cooperatives all the time.
    - pseudalopex 3y ago
      What revenue model is unavailable to Mozilla now and would become available by reforming into a cooperative?
      - spaceribs 3y ago
        I wouldn't say any, it creates a more stable infrastructure that isn't at the whims of the markets or outside stakeholders. I'd say browsers are ready for that sort of stability too, and I'd hazard that it would be a renaissance for bringing in other interested silicon valley tech leaders to build out new sides of the business.
        pseudalopex 3y ago
        Markets' whims affect a non profit foundation with more than $1 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and investments less than most cooperatives. Mozilla's actions are not consistent with concern to please the main funder. And people called leaders in Silicon Valley seem very little interested in cooperatives.
      - 3y ago
0xpgm 3y ago
If only they had continued on their trajectory of the early 2010s. When Brendan Eich was still there they seemed to have a clear purpose and identity. A lot of interesting stuff was happening: the birth of what would become Rust, PDF.js which is now ubiquitous back when downloading PDFs was the norm, Firefox OS, which somehow found success after they abandoned it, asm.js, the predecessor of web assembly which killed the alternative that Google was championing called NaCl (very few remember it now). Then they just seemed to lose their way I can't tell how
- insanitybit 3y ago
  And people can shit on Brave (Eich's next browser venture) but the reality is that they're doing a pretty incredible job. TOR integration alone is a pretty radical privacy control, and you can say "oh but crypto" but they're at least trying to figure out how to make money independent of Google, unlike Mozilla. Brave actually tries to create a monetizable web without ads, Mozilla literally relies on the status quo for all of its revenue.
  - dralley 3y ago
    >they're at least trying to figure out how to make money independent of Google, unlike Mozilla. Brave actually tries to create a monetizable web without ads, Mozilla literally relies on the status quo for all of its revenue. 1) Mozilla does have alternate sources of revenue, like Pocket and Mozilla VPN. 2) Mozilla had a partnership with Scroll, which was precisely that (a way of funding websites without advertising and taking a slice of that) before it got acquired by Twitter and subsequently dismantled.
    - insanitybit 3y ago
      None of those strategies involve changing how the internet works. Website owners generally need to pay for their sites. Currently their payments are subsidized (sometimes to oblivion) by advertising. Mozilla is doing nothing to change that, Brave is. You're right that they perhaps don't want to be reliable on Google themselves, although they are and all other ventures have failed, but that's different from wanting a web that is not driven by advertising.
telmo 3y ago
I use Firefox as my main browser and it is fine. People complain because it is not Chrome, that is all. It is a shame, because the last remnants of the open web will soon be gone, and with them any sort of user control over their computing environments, namely the ability to block intrusive ads and the various other mechanisms of surveillance capitalism. But I guess it will all be worth it because something was off by 1px on Firefox or it lacked "polish" or whatever...
Sporktacular 3y ago
"Can we please have a Firefox that leans into being the browser for power users? Bundle ... BitTorrent support." "There are plugins that get it talking to Slack, WhatsApp, Telegram, RocketChat, Signal, Mattermost, you name it. Adopt it, update it, add it to Chat Core." This is terrible advice. They've spent years paring back and compartmentalising to get Firefox into the lean, secure browser it is today. Make a fork if you want but don't turn it into an slow, ugly everything app.
- idonotknowwhy 3y ago
  Opera 12 had bittorrent and irc. It was a great power user browser. The mobile version was the best browser on my Nokia E63 as well, it let me load my desktop only banking site and everything. Didn't end well for opera sadly
- lproven 3y ago
  I wrote this article. ISTM that you did not understand it well. The first line you quote refers to Firefox. The second line you quote refers to Thunderbird. I am at a bit of a loss how you can conflate these 2 separate comments about 2 separate products with different functionality.
ajvs 3y ago
I can see Mullvad taking over the "privacy browser" niche in the future thanks to Mullvad Browser and Tor Browser which they contribute to.
- orra 3y ago
  ... which are soft forks of which browser? Firefox.
  - ajvs 3y ago
    Yes. My point is that Mozilla are failing as stewards of Firefox, so I can see these two projects continuing their legacy.
    - orra 3y ago
      You're completely underestimating the effort involved in maintaining a web browser. These forks are deliberately friendly.
arusahni 3y ago
While I understand why folks would miss the loss of XUL/XPCOM, stating that it was to ape Chrome feels disingenuous. Removal of those technologies enabled multiprocess Firefox and bolstered stability. If anything, based on comments I see here and elsewhere, it was one of the things that brought people back to the browser. Adopting/starting WebExtensions made sense, too (IMO), as Chrome already had way too much mindshare introduce anything totally novel.
- arp242 3y ago
  It was 100% painful and frustrating, but also 100% done for technically valid reasons. I've always preferred Firefox (or Opera Presto, before that) for the simple reason that Chromium's text selection is weird, clunky, and unlike anything else I've ever seen (this is also how you can spot any Electron app). But it really was just ... slow. Moving away from XUL was an important step in fixing that. That said, I do feel that Firefox fell in the "X is more popular, X does Y, therefore, we need to do Y" trap, forgetting that you have your current userbase exactly because you're NOT doing Y but Z. But that's an entirely different matter.
- orra 3y ago
  100% this. Folks used to lament Firefox for being slow. And for me it would freeze for seconds sometimes, because of synchronous extensions APIs. Removing XPCOM, switching to multiprocess, and switching to asynchronous Web Extensions was absolutely vital technologically. Perf is good now.
- pseudalopex 3y ago
  No. Firefox 48 supported multiprocess. Mozilla pushed developers to make their XUL extensions multiprocess compatible after WebExtensions development started. Firefox 57 disabled XUL extensions. They removed XUL gradually after.
- lproven 3y ago
  > While I understand why folks would miss the loss of XUL/XPCOM, stating that it was to ape Chrome feels disingenuous. I wrote the article. I did not state that. I did not even hint it or imply it, and my eyebrows went so far up when I read this comment that my hat lifted. I've never even heard this idea before. Please can you point out where I said that the removal of XUL was in order to ape Chrome?
rvba 3y ago
Users want Firefox to be the browser that allows broad customization and multiple addons. Including addons that remove ads or allow to customiize the shell. Sadly the ones that run the org are not interested in that. All they want is fat salaries sponsored by Google. The programming teams mostly make greenfield projects not related to firefox at all. Thos projects usually end up half baked and cancelled (no need for painful maintenance or having to make the code work!) that can be used to advance ones career further. Meanwhile users jump to Chrome.
voytec 3y ago
90% of Mozilla's revenue comes from Google/Alphabet which can be loosely translated as "Mitchell Baker's salary is paid in 90% by Google" and "Mitchell Baker (indirectly) works for Google". Mozilla is not a "weird neighbor" but a controlled opposition and its CEO's salary would suffer from breaking this unhealthy relationship or stepping on Google's toes. I'm fairly certain that a lot of Mozilla's developers and users don't have pro-Google viewpoints but it's cash that matters here, not viewpoints.
- smarnach 3y ago
  None of this holds any water. Google does not control Mozilla. There are other companies who would happily pay more than Google, and for a few years Yahoo did. Mozilla is constantly stepping on Google's toes, in many different ways, and there is zero indication this hurts Mitchell Baker's compensation. (I think it's also significantly less than 90 % of Mozilla's revenue that currently comes from Google, but that's completely besides the point.)
  - Zuiii 3y ago
    What happens to the salary of the CEO if google doesn't renew their deal? Fire the remaining engineers there?
    - smarnach 3y ago
      If Google doesn't renew the deal, someone else will. There are multiple companies who would happily take it.
WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html Mozilla knows how to siphon money, they play double face non-profit and for-profit at the same time with the same name
eieio 3y ago
Is there a canonical answer (or three) for why Chrome beat out Firefox the way that it did? I think I remember Chrome doing per-tab sandboxing back when a single Firefox tab could brick your whole browser, but I'd be a little surprised if that was a huge deal to the average user; maybe Firefox (which I used through ~2016) just crashed a lot more than I remember? Or maybe Chrome was just wayyy faster back when it launched? I stayed on Firefox for years so that I could use Pentadactyl[1], an extension that made the Firefox UI minimal and vim-like. I think I had to run LTS Firefox to keep it working through 2016 or so and then moved on. I miss it! Maybe it's just because I'm based in NYC but a lot of folks I know have moved to Arc this year - I'm excited to see where it goes and whether it can push things forward! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentadactyl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentadactyl
- flashback2199 3y ago
  It was a lot faster for me than Firefox at the beginning, I remember that. It also looked a lot nicer; the UI was super slick at the time. I remember it being a pretty easy and obvious switch for me at the time.
  - eieio 3y ago
    Alright yeah, speed makes sense. I had forgotten about the UI! Kinda remembering now how they pushed the tabs up into the window chrome next to the close/minimize buttons which let them really shrink down the size of the top bar back when browsers typically spent a ton of vertical space on ~stuff. I bet having a single bar instead of separate URL / search bars was nifty too. I guess Chrome's launch is also from a different era where sentiment around Google was much closer to uniformly positive which I'm sure helped.
    - pxoe 3y ago
      yep, having just two bars - tabs + window buttons, and omnibox + browser buttons (which were also condensed just to 'page' and 'settings'), was kinda huge. at that time, (when browsers like firefox 3 and ie8 were around), browsers were still having bars on top of bars on top of bars: window bar, on top of a file menu, on top of address bar (with a split search bar), and they'd throw in a bookmarks bar in too by default (which chrome had turned off by default), and that's beside toolbars which were still a thing (and were not a thing at all in chrome). all that would come up at a total of 3 to 5 bars, which was a lot. particularly the combining of window title bar and tabs bar into one (along with putting tabs up top, and forgoing window title and file menu along the way), was a big thing. which seems to have influenced all the other browsers later on. (see firefox 4, opera 10, ie9 which all did kind of a spin on that, with ie9 surprisingly going even further and putting both address bar and tabs bar on a single bar) it kinda changed everything, with its approach to simplicity. i'd argue that even now chrome remains one of simpler browsers among those popular ones out today (compare to firefox, opera, vivaldi, edge, etc. which all seem to have features piling up and just popping out at you). but it is also getting crowded as well, in that button zone around main menu. if I could hide those (given that they're also redunant, cause most of those things are in main menu anyway), i wouldn't miss them at all.
ruune 3y ago
Afaik Thunderbird has no Mozilla-Money anymore and is now entirely backed by donations. But please correct me if I'm wrong
jakeogh 3y ago
Pocket killed it for me. "Oh it can be disabled!" they say. Good luck.
pimpampum 3y ago
Interest alignment is a weird thing. After getting so much finding from Google it's hard for them to break away.
IgorPartola 3y ago
So Mozilla can: 1. Integrate IPFS as a first class citizen. This alone would be a huge step forward for the new web. 2. Provide a competitor to Electron with better features and installation experience. 3. Create a Steam-like cross platform marketplace for lightly vetted apps from #2. An experience that should ideally seamlessly blend the UX of signing into Slack in the browser vs having it installed. This has been a holy grain of web apps for three decades and now finally there are ways forward. 4. Marry browser identities with website authentication. Kill passwords with a logical successor to Persona while also providing credentials sync across all your devices and OSes. 5. If #3 and #4 are successful, then their own OS finally has a place in the world. Native FOSS OS a la ChromeOS but works both on desktop and mobile thanks to #2.
vorticalbox 3y ago
My question is what browser do we use? On one hand you have chrome based which gives Google more control or you use Firefox.
x-complexity 3y ago
There's an argument to be made that the extreme breadth of scope that modern web browsers are obliged to support (in order to gain/retain market share) heavily contributes to there being no worthy contenders against Chromium's web monopoly. https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope.html https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope.... When you're the leader, you can further widen your lead by bolting on additional functions & features that require at least X amount of effort to implement. Any new contender will have to put in SUM(X effort for each feature) to match feature parity with the existing leader, and existing competitors will have to put in at least X effort to catch up. Existing OSS work can help bridge the gap, but only for what's already been done.
meristohm 3y ago
This essay feels overall hopeful, and I really hope Firefox distinguishes itself as the go-to browser for "power users" at least (while all I run anymore is Linux, I don't consider myself a power user so much as a cheapskate with an idealistic/irrational sense of fairness who used to tinker a lot more but who now just likes things to work on decade-old hardware and thus sticks with Linux Mint). The side tabs thing is a real lack, and so far I just use the dropdown on the upper right and either scroll or search. Sometimes I double-click the side arrows on the tab bar to scroll by a window's amount of tabs. None of those options are tree-style tabs, though. I know there are ways and extensions, but this should really be baked in- horizontal text stacks well, especially on these wide screens.
mediumsmart 3y ago
Chrome has made Webdesign much easier. You work in safari, test in libre wolf and done. All browsers covered.
lproven 3y ago
That face when someone posted your own article to HN before you did and it's gone berserk over the weekend without you noticing. For those calling Firefox irrelevant: note that its market share of web users is about the same as desktop Linux's market share. 3% of surfers is a lot of people and not an irrelevance or a rounding error.

297 points by mrzool 3y ago

jqpabc123 3y ago

[flagged]

maverick74 3y ago
Ahahah!!! Good point!!! Well said!!!

Devasta 3y ago

In the modern age where "Web Standards" is just a synonym for "Chrome's Feature Set", Mozilla serves one purpose and one purpose alone: they are to be dangled about like Weekend At Bernies so that Google can pretend they dont have a monopoly on browsers. I expect even that will become untenable soon: when other engines finally appear on iOS in the next few years we'll start seeing websites blocking any non-chrome browsers (and probably some of the reskins too) and then Mozilla won't even be useful as a fig leaf. Its an awful state of affairs, and I don't see any way out of it for them.

p-e-w 3y ago
Safari's market share dwarfs that of Firefox, and has for a long time. If there is indeed such a "fig leaf", it's Apple, not Mozilla.
- chiefalchemist 3y ago
  Apple acquires Mozilla? Eventually?
  - Dah00n 3y ago
    That would mean the death of Firefox. Apple is the exact opposite of what Mozilla is or tries to be.
    - eastbound 3y ago
      Economically, Mozilla is a subsidiary of Google. Honestly, they keep arguing it is not the case, but they excellently serve as non-threatening competition.
  - hollander 3y ago
    Why would they?
    - chiefalchemist 3y ago
      Why not? Stranger things have happened.
- 5- 3y ago
  most of that market share will go away the moment google is allowed to push chrome on ios.
  - nfriedly 3y ago
    I don't know, defaults are pretty powerful. There's already a Chrome-branded Safari wrapper on iOS; but my guess is that the majority of iOS users use "regular" Safari and will continue to because it's the default.
    - bratwurst3000 3y ago
      I don’t think they will. Safari doesn’t have good plugins. That’s a big point. Using plugins.
      - nfriedly 3y ago
        I'm mostly a Firefox on Android user, does Chrome on Android have plugins now? I know it didn't for a while.
        danarmak 3y ago
        I assume you mean extensions, not plugins. No, Chrome doesn't support extensions on android, but some Chromium reskins do. That said, the most important extension usecase is adblocking, and with Manifest v4 and FLoC/Topics and SafetyNet/remote attestation, well...
        bad_user 3y ago
        Chrome's adblocking capabilities, introduced in Manifest v3, are (1) inspired by Safari and (2) more capable than what Safari provides. You can track this uBlock Origin Lite issue: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/issues/52 https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/issues/52
      - oktoberpaard 3y ago
- cmcaleer 3y ago
  In terms of desktop market share it's about equal. https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#desktop-site-by-browser https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#desktop...
- Devasta 3y ago
  Does Safari work on Windows or Android? Safaris market share is because other browser engines are restricted. The second Chrome becomes available on iOS Google search, maps, YouTube, everything will have "Works best in Chrome" plastered everywhere.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Just as info for the young folks, Safari had a Windows version until 2012.
frizlab 3y ago
One of the main reasons why I’m fiercely _against_ the possibility of having alternate rendering engines on iOS.
- 5- 3y ago
  - don't fight evil with evil - two wrongs don't make a right - can't put out fire with more fire etc. sorry for the lazy response, but too many exactly fitting idioms to resist.
  - olavfosse 3y ago
    Putting out fire with more fire works very well: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_burn https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_burn
  - Ensorceled 3y ago
    The idiom is literally “fight fire with fire” Also, “the enemy of my enemy, is my friend”
    - Sindisil 3y ago
      Maxim 29. The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy. No more. No less.
      - stjohnswarts 3y ago
        That doesn't mean what they're doing isn't to your advantage.
    - marcosdumay 3y ago
      > “the enemy of my enemy, is my friend” That one basically never leads to anything good.
      - Ensorceled 3y ago
        Well, none of these are “words to live by” so you’re not wrong.
jqpabc123 3y ago
Sorry, this was the common excuse for years. It just doesn't fly any more now that FireFox market share has shrunk to irrelevance. By every available statistic, Chrome has more than 80 percent of the "free market" --- i.e. the market outside of Apple's walled garden where it has only recently become a realistic option.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  No, it works just fine like that. The ideal outcome is for FireFox to continue to exist with a very small marketshare. That's enough for the FigLeaf function and not enough for Google to worry about killing it off any further. And contrary to the other time when a monopolist kept their competition alive I don't think this one is going to end with FireFox reversing its fate and ending up with market dominance after a surprise success.
  - eastbound 3y ago
    It only exists because people with an ideal keep trying to stay as users. Ideals die hard, so the long trail will be long, but Firefox is effectively as niche as Linux on the desktop.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      Fortunately for me I have both FF and Linux on the desktop. Now that they've finally fixed web midi even that reason to have Chrome has gone away.
      - jqpabc123 3y ago
        I suspect that most remaining FF users are running it on Linux desktop.
        pseudalopex 3y ago
        Most Firefox requests to Wikimedia sites say Windows.[1] [1] https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#all-sites-by-os-and-browser/os-browser-family-and-major-hierarchical-view https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#all-sit...
cmcaleer 3y ago
That's not true, Mozilla also exist to pay Mitchell Baker and her cronies fat salaries. In 2020, she got paid $3MM. In 2021, after an incredible year which saw Firefox's market share fall even further, she of course got a raise to $5MM for her brave decision to lay off 250 people in Aug 2020. I hope she gets a massive bonus for 2023, given that her leadership has allowed Microsoft Edge to flip Firefox most days according to the stats, and she still has a quarter to let Safari consistently flip Firefox too! It is obscene. She wants to be paid according to what she alleges her market value is, but she does not have the accountability of a publicly traded company's CEO. Firefox needs a radical culture change and it needs to happen 8 years ago. I have no hope it will happen, as it exists to siphon money from suckers who pay donations that barely pay Mitchell's salary (total annual donations barely cover this expense![1]) and the board does not give a shit about what Firefox's core audience cares about. The grift will continue until Mitchell and co decide enough is enough and flee the sinking ship. Whoever inherits it and the massively bloated outgoing expenses will probably be fucked, regardless of who they are or how good their intentions are. Firefox is massively behind, web devs are not incentivised to accommodate for the single-digit percent of Firefox users, and things are only going to continue to get worse. [1] Yes Mitchell is paid by the corporation as opposed to the non-profit and donations go to the non-profit, but ultimately money that could have gone to the non-profit went to Mitchell's bank account Stats from https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#desktop-site-by-browser https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#desktop...
- maverick74 3y ago
  Thats not all!!! I was really amazed with this post I found here the other day: https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-investigating-the-bizarre-finances-of-mozilla https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest... maybe they should think better where they put their money!!! If servo ever gets into a decent independent browser I will let go of Firefox the second its released!!! I do not support a donation-based tech company spending money in other places not related to tech!
  - phero_cnstrcts 3y ago
    Wow. If that’s all true then that’s really disconcerting but hardly surprising in this corrupt-to-bone world. Every single choice we have to make boils down to taking the lesser evil.
wodenokoto 3y ago
You’re very behind the times if you think it is Firefox that is between Chrome and complete browser dominance. That spot has been filled by safari on the iPhone a long time ago. Firefox is my favorite desktop browser, but the desktop market is not the big deal when it comes to browsers. Even edge has higher usage than Firefox across devices. https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
- Devasta 3y ago
  Thats only because of the restriction on Webkit only on iOS. That wall is collapsing and with it anything that keeps Safari in the game.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    By then anyone doing web development can rename their CVs entries from Web Developer into ChromeOS Developer.
- philistine 3y ago
  The reality is different from what Google says to the regulators. That’s the Weekend at Bernie’s stuff that is happening.
Semaphor 3y ago
Luckily, in Germany FF still has over 10% of the total market, and almost 20% on Desktop.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  It might be, however in most projects it no longer makes into the browser matrix for project delivery acceptance.
  - Semaphor 3y ago
    In German projects? That would be both dumb and sad. In US projects? That would be expected, even when targeting the German market.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      Yes, in Germany, since 2019 I never worked in a project where supporting Firefox was a requirement.
      - Semaphor 3y ago
        Wow. Why, considering the spread? We (average age probably over 50) actually even have over 50% FF on desktop
        pjmlp 3y ago
        Because the target market is the world, not Germany alone, and FF is trailing around 3%.
extraduder_ire 3y ago
> we'll start seeing websites blocking any non-chrome browsers (and probably some of the reskins too) and then Mozilla won't even be useful as a fig leaf. Thankfully, browser extensions can quite easily make firefox pretend to be whatever browser you want.
devit 3y ago
They could drop Gecko and switch to Blink/Chromium. Then Firefox would be guaranteed to be strictly better than Chrome, since the baseline is the same and they can put in all the features that Google doesn't want because they would reduce their ad income, such as great ad-blocking support. This might result in losing Google's search engine deal, but they can probably make a similar deal with an LLM-based search engine and even if the money might be less they don't need that much if they are only maintaining a fork and not the whole engine.
SergeAx 3y ago
I'm not getting it: why would websites block browsers?
- jandrese 3y ago
  In the old days there were plenty of websites designed only for IE6, and a few that refused to load if they detected any other browser string. It doesn’t make much sense today, Firefox loads sites developed for Chrome just fine. There is no ActiveX like “embrace and extend” coming from the Google camp quite yet.
  - paulryanrogers 3y ago
    I'd argue the rapid pace of new Chrome-only APIs is effectively EEE. Web developers can't wait to use new features, so once features land in Chrome they'll get used. Then folks not using Chrome find more friction until they eventually give up and switch.
    - postalrat 3y ago
      Can you think of any real life examples of websites that use Chrome only apis and don't work in Firefox?
      - paulryanrogers 3y ago
        Just this week: - Snyk - Fastly's support site - background blur on Meet and Zoom
      - xctr94 3y ago
        I don’t have a list of examples, but this is historically a problem for the web. I’ve sat in a couple of Ecmascript events where maintainers complain about Google implementing features before approval. Sometimes Chrome ships stage 2 features because (apparently) Google engineers don’t want to respect due process. It’s known, we just put up with it. I also blame developers working on non-standardized features. You should work with the ES that is official and current, not the one Google is forcing on other vendors. Apologies for not listing all the times this happened, but I think too many.

TekMol 3y ago

What is most important to me in a browser is that I can customize it. So I am very annoyed if that is restricted. As it happened with the latest update of FireFox: Recently, my Firefox updated and now I can't run bookmarklets anymore right after starting the browser. Say I have a bookmarklet like javascript:alert(123) Then it works fine on every page, even on about:blank. But not right after the browser started with what is called "blank page" in the settings. This is a bit cumbersome, because I often use a bookmarklet as the first step of my browsing session. A bookmarklet, which goes like "If TekMol is not on page B and not on page C, then send him to page A". So I start with page A, then click the bookmarklet again, get to page B, click it again and get to page C. But that workflow is broken now. Must be some regression in the latest version of Firefox.

BadBadJellyBean 3y ago
That is one of the oddest workflows I have yet encountered. It reminds me of something I read that was like "If your software supports something, explicitly or implicitly, someone will depend on it.". Using Javascripts in a bookmark to rotate through websites is unexpected. I hope it will be fixed for you though. Maybe open a ticket if you can't find one.
- jwmcq 3y ago
  There's a relevant XKCD, of course https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/
- petercooper 3y ago
  A cute idea though. Going through a daily "rotation" of Web sites is probably pretty common and turning that into a formal process is pretty smart to avoid procrastination or having lots of tabs opening all at once. It would work better as an extension, I suspect.
  - TekMol 3y ago
    The nice thing about a bookmarklet is that it works on all of my devices. Even on my tablet. And that editing it is possible by simply right clicking the bookmark and hitting "edit".

lloydatkinson 3y ago

Firing their entire servo team using Rust and then most of their docs team (MDN) and then giving the CEO a raise was the beginning.

iforgotpassword 3y ago
Oh how I despise that CEO. Another example where prior experience or skill was not the primary criteria for filling the position.
- pseudalopex 3y ago
  Mitchell Baker was the Mozilla project's general manager, Mozilla Foundation's 1st president, and Mozilla Corporation's 1st CEO.
uptime 3y ago
I did not know that. I use FF on my phone, on Desktop I use MDN more than I use Firefox!
insanitybit 3y ago
FWIW Baker has been a disaster for way longer than that but it was definitely one of the loudest "I am absolutely unfit for this position" statements to date.
skinkestek 3y ago
The beginning was actually when they threw out Brendan Eich.
- prepend 3y ago
  I think that kind of was the beginning of firing the smart people who literally built Firefox and hiring random mba-bots because they thought it didn’t matter. Now their tech sucks and market share is sinking. I don’t think it’s the only reason, but firing Eich didn’t help. Also, Brave has been a pretty nice browser with lots of small quality of life innovations. It’s a shock to me that Firefox didn’t capitalize on its unique position to be privacy focused.

Arbortheus 3y ago

> Much of Mozilla's revenue comes from Google, of course. This couldn't be because Rust was, and is, outshining Google's GoLang? Surely not? I don’t understand this assertion, and definitely not the comparison between Rust and GoLang, which exist for entirely different purposes (systems programming versus cloud servers)

justinclift 3y ago
Yeah. Spelling the name of the language wrongly is also a pretty clear indication the author isn't familiar with Go. And doesn't grok it gets used for very different stuff to Rust. So their suggestion this was why Servo was dropped seems extremely bizarre.
- seanhunter 3y ago
  Also things like computer language wars just don't factor into executives' thinking at all when they make big strategic decisions except in cases where it's a proxy for market capture, like dotnet where the language (C# mostly) was initially really about locking users into a delivery ecosystem on Microsoft. If you added up everyone in the boardroom of google and mozilla you would find less than 0.01 millifucks given about go vs rust in total. You might as well ask Mark Zuckerberg about tabs vs spaces.
- didntcheck 3y ago
  To be fair it's not just this author. For some reason people are absolutely obsessed with comparing Rust and Go, whereas more applicable comparisons would respectively be Zig or D, and a JVM language or C#
angra_mainyu 3y ago
In practice they overlap a lot. I don't particularly understand why people say this. I've worked doing systems programming a lot (i.e: many many syscalls) and Go does this just fine. Unless you're working on some kind of hard real time system, I can't see why you would discard Go.
- 3y ago

mrkramer 3y ago

From web pioneer to Google's slave.

dralley 3y ago
Slave implies they do what Google wants them to do, which is demonstrably not the case.
- mrkramer 3y ago
  "One thing Mozilla does have going for it is a lot of money—more than $1 billion in cash reserves, according to its latest financial statement. The primary source of this capital is Google, which pays Mozilla to be the default search engine on the Firefox home page. Those payments, which started in 2005, have been increasing—up 50% over the past decade, to more than $450 million, even as the total number of Firefox users has plummeted. In 2021 these payments accounted for 83% of Mozilla’s revenue[0]." They depend on Google. [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-google-keeps-paying-mozilla-s-firefox-even-as-chrome-dominates https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-go...
  - dralley 3y ago
    Read my comment again and then explain how this has anything to do with it. I'm well aware that the majority of Mozilla's income is from Google.
    - mrkramer 3y ago
      >Slave implies they do what Google wants them to do, which is demonstrably not the case. Google wants Google to be the default search engine of Mozilla's browser Firefox, Google in order to incentivize them to do it, offers them $450 million and Mozilla accepts it because otherwise they would be on the verge of bankruptcy since 80% of their revenue comes from Google. OK, they are not directly enslaved by Google but they are existentially dependent on Google in the monopolistic abuse of power situation.
  - 3y ago

pshirshov 3y ago

But they have Pocket.

godzillabrennus 3y ago

Firefox containers are the only reason I use their browser. It’s a great way to use social media sites on a computer. Brave is my daily driver. I find that while still having issues it is better than Chrome itself.

kzrdude 3y ago

It should be a good time for Firefox, because now it's clear that Firefox plus ublock origin can block more ads than google ever allows Chrome to do (they don't allow it anymore). That's a tangible benefit you can tell your friends about.

louthy 3y ago
But other Chromium based browsers do that too: Brave etc.
- jowea 3y ago
  If the scenario other posters are concerned about where most sites become chrome-only I wonder if something like that will substitute the market niche that Firefox currently occupies. Or will we just have Firefox on Blink like Microsoft moved Edge to Blink.
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  But if Google changes what's in Chromium, those other browsers would get those anti-features downstream.
SpacePortKnight 3y ago
tbh if ads on a website can not be blocked by a simple content blocker, then I'll just simply stop using the website. Safari and Chrome V3 blocker are much more privacy friendly since the extension does not need to access the entire DOM.
- TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
  So you will stop using YouTube? You will stop using some of the biggest sites on the internet and restrict yourself to a small niche?
  - SpacePortKnight 3y ago
    I pay for Youtube Premium. I don't mind paying for things which provide me value.

johnasmith 3y ago

Mozilla's office in SF, pictured in the article's first photo, is literally neighbor to Google's SF office, making that a particularly apt photo and headline pair.

lproven 3y ago
Never been there, didn't know that. I wrote the article but I didn't write the headline and I have zero influence over the selection of the pictures. Interesting point, though.

cxr 3y ago

> six months into the pandemic, Mozilla laid off the entire [Rust] team, killing its next-gen rendering engine, Servo.¶ (Much of Mozilla's revenue comes from Google, of course. This couldn't be because Rust was, and is, outshining Google's GoLang? Surely not?) Really dumb aside that shouldn't have made it past the editor (not least of all because of the insane rendering of "GoLang"). > Mozilla also backs the development of the leading cross-platform messaging client, Thunderbird. This overstates Mozilla's involvement in Thunderbird. The relationship is basically ceremonial at this point. > in 1998, owner AOL promised to open source it[...]. Four years later, the open source version shipped. The way this is written makes it sound like there was a delay to fulfill the promise. In reality, it only took 2 months for Netscape to publish source code. It took another four years for them to decide to scrap the old code and undertake a rewrite that culminated in the release a 1.0 of a different product line which the author refers to here.

bitcurious 3y ago
“Golang” used to be a google-endrosed synonym for Go; the official domain was golang.org for a while.
- dralley 3y ago
  Yes but nobody capitalizes the L
  - wussboy 3y ago
    Sigh.
micimize 3y ago
Yeah I found it tough to keep reading after that golang line. What an absolutely unhinged thing to imply. While I maybe self-servingly agree that mozilla could stand to focus more on the power-user market segment, this article feels more like a low-effort ramble than any kind of real investigation into what the modern org's actual focus is vs what it should/could be.

solarkraft 3y ago

Mid-life? How optimistic.

petercooper 3y ago

I visited Mozilla HQ a few years ago (it was very nice, as were the people) and came away with strong vibes of an organization struggling with both an identity crisis and inertia. Baker is a great operator and Mozilla is still bringing in a solid income, but I think they sorely need/needed some sort of outgoing, proactive tech visionary type to give Mozilla a fresh/enhanced meaning to evolve into rather than continuing to live off the fat of the land. To be fair to Baker, she has blogged about how she thinks about Mozilla's ongoing mission – https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2023/03/31/a-quarter-century-of-mozilla/ https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2023/03/31/a-quarter-century... – but I can't help feel a more proactive and public approach might be needed to evolve and grow their market share.

Jochim 3y ago
Why should I be fair to anyone who believes that $3m/year isn't enough for them? Someone who decided they needed an additional $2m after their incompetence lead to them laying off many of the people who actually produce work.
- petercooper 3y ago
  I'm not saying you should be fair ;-) I wanted to balance my "Mozilla needs to do something" opinion with Baker's blog post that implies that they are.
- taway1237 3y ago
  >fair: impartial and just, without favouritism or discrimination. We should be fair to everyone. But there's no contradiction - you can be fair to someone, and still judge them very harshly. Disclaimer: I'm not a native speaker, feel free to correct me if I'm misinterpreting something.
  - Jochim 3y ago
    You're not incorrect in your sentiment or definition but fairness is often misused in order to downplay an individual's responsibility or to justify their actions. An illustrative example where the use of the phrase "to be fair" would be justified: Person A: "Brian has been very rude to me lately!" Person B: "To be fair, he's been in a lot of pain since the surgery." However, in this case originally, GP's request for fairness read to me as a pre-emptive dismissal of concerns regarding the ceo's performance, given that the examples did not address any criticism. When I say I have no interest in being fair to the ceo of Mozilla, it's not to say that I believe they should be treated unjustly. Rather, it's that I believe their behaviour to be inexcusable given the context. Admittedly, this does veer a little from the dictionary definition.

spaceribs 3y ago

If any organization should be a worker-cooperative, it should be Mozilla. Why should a team that is so heavily supportive of OSS be reliant on investments and donations?

QuiDortDine 3y ago
They would still have to pay themselves, presumably with investments and donations (and subsidies).
- spaceribs 3y ago
  There are lots of ways to do this, companies divest into worker cooperatives all the time.
  - pseudalopex 3y ago
    What revenue model is unavailable to Mozilla now and would become available by reforming into a cooperative?
    - spaceribs 3y ago
      I wouldn't say any, it creates a more stable infrastructure that isn't at the whims of the markets or outside stakeholders. I'd say browsers are ready for that sort of stability too, and I'd hazard that it would be a renaissance for bringing in other interested silicon valley tech leaders to build out new sides of the business.
      - pseudalopex 3y ago
        Markets' whims affect a non profit foundation with more than $1 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and investments less than most cooperatives. Mozilla's actions are not consistent with concern to please the main funder. And people called leaders in Silicon Valley seem very little interested in cooperatives.
    - 3y ago

0xpgm 3y ago

If only they had continued on their trajectory of the early 2010s. When Brendan Eich was still there they seemed to have a clear purpose and identity. A lot of interesting stuff was happening: the birth of what would become Rust, PDF.js which is now ubiquitous back when downloading PDFs was the norm, Firefox OS, which somehow found success after they abandoned it, asm.js, the predecessor of web assembly which killed the alternative that Google was championing called NaCl (very few remember it now). Then they just seemed to lose their way I can't tell how

insanitybit 3y ago
And people can shit on Brave (Eich's next browser venture) but the reality is that they're doing a pretty incredible job. TOR integration alone is a pretty radical privacy control, and you can say "oh but crypto" but they're at least trying to figure out how to make money independent of Google, unlike Mozilla. Brave actually tries to create a monetizable web without ads, Mozilla literally relies on the status quo for all of its revenue.
- dralley 3y ago
  >they're at least trying to figure out how to make money independent of Google, unlike Mozilla. Brave actually tries to create a monetizable web without ads, Mozilla literally relies on the status quo for all of its revenue. 1) Mozilla does have alternate sources of revenue, like Pocket and Mozilla VPN. 2) Mozilla had a partnership with Scroll, which was precisely that (a way of funding websites without advertising and taking a slice of that) before it got acquired by Twitter and subsequently dismantled.
  - insanitybit 3y ago
    None of those strategies involve changing how the internet works. Website owners generally need to pay for their sites. Currently their payments are subsidized (sometimes to oblivion) by advertising. Mozilla is doing nothing to change that, Brave is. You're right that they perhaps don't want to be reliable on Google themselves, although they are and all other ventures have failed, but that's different from wanting a web that is not driven by advertising.

telmo 3y ago

I use Firefox as my main browser and it is fine. People complain because it is not Chrome, that is all. It is a shame, because the last remnants of the open web will soon be gone, and with them any sort of user control over their computing environments, namely the ability to block intrusive ads and the various other mechanisms of surveillance capitalism. But I guess it will all be worth it because something was off by 1px on Firefox or it lacked "polish" or whatever...

Sporktacular 3y ago

"Can we please have a Firefox that leans into being the browser for power users? Bundle ... BitTorrent support." "There are plugins that get it talking to Slack, WhatsApp, Telegram, RocketChat, Signal, Mattermost, you name it. Adopt it, update it, add it to Chat Core." This is terrible advice. They've spent years paring back and compartmentalising to get Firefox into the lean, secure browser it is today. Make a fork if you want but don't turn it into an slow, ugly everything app.

idonotknowwhy 3y ago
Opera 12 had bittorrent and irc. It was a great power user browser. The mobile version was the best browser on my Nokia E63 as well, it let me load my desktop only banking site and everything. Didn't end well for opera sadly
lproven 3y ago
I wrote this article. ISTM that you did not understand it well. The first line you quote refers to Firefox. The second line you quote refers to Thunderbird. I am at a bit of a loss how you can conflate these 2 separate comments about 2 separate products with different functionality.

ajvs 3y ago

I can see Mullvad taking over the "privacy browser" niche in the future thanks to Mullvad Browser and Tor Browser which they contribute to.

orra 3y ago
... which are soft forks of which browser? Firefox.
- ajvs 3y ago
  Yes. My point is that Mozilla are failing as stewards of Firefox, so I can see these two projects continuing their legacy.
  - orra 3y ago
    You're completely underestimating the effort involved in maintaining a web browser. These forks are deliberately friendly.

arusahni 3y ago

While I understand why folks would miss the loss of XUL/XPCOM, stating that it was to ape Chrome feels disingenuous. Removal of those technologies enabled multiprocess Firefox and bolstered stability. If anything, based on comments I see here and elsewhere, it was one of the things that brought people back to the browser. Adopting/starting WebExtensions made sense, too (IMO), as Chrome already had way too much mindshare introduce anything totally novel.

arp242 3y ago
It was 100% painful and frustrating, but also 100% done for technically valid reasons. I've always preferred Firefox (or Opera Presto, before that) for the simple reason that Chromium's text selection is weird, clunky, and unlike anything else I've ever seen (this is also how you can spot any Electron app). But it really was just ... slow. Moving away from XUL was an important step in fixing that. That said, I do feel that Firefox fell in the "X is more popular, X does Y, therefore, we need to do Y" trap, forgetting that you have your current userbase exactly because you're NOT doing Y but Z. But that's an entirely different matter.
orra 3y ago
100% this. Folks used to lament Firefox for being slow. And for me it would freeze for seconds sometimes, because of synchronous extensions APIs. Removing XPCOM, switching to multiprocess, and switching to asynchronous Web Extensions was absolutely vital technologically. Perf is good now.
pseudalopex 3y ago
No. Firefox 48 supported multiprocess. Mozilla pushed developers to make their XUL extensions multiprocess compatible after WebExtensions development started. Firefox 57 disabled XUL extensions. They removed XUL gradually after.
lproven 3y ago
> While I understand why folks would miss the loss of XUL/XPCOM, stating that it was to ape Chrome feels disingenuous. I wrote the article. I did not state that. I did not even hint it or imply it, and my eyebrows went so far up when I read this comment that my hat lifted. I've never even heard this idea before. Please can you point out where I said that the removal of XUL was in order to ape Chrome?

rvba 3y ago

Users want Firefox to be the browser that allows broad customization and multiple addons. Including addons that remove ads or allow to customiize the shell. Sadly the ones that run the org are not interested in that. All they want is fat salaries sponsored by Google. The programming teams mostly make greenfield projects not related to firefox at all. Thos projects usually end up half baked and cancelled (no need for painful maintenance or having to make the code work!) that can be used to advance ones career further. Meanwhile users jump to Chrome.

voytec 3y ago

90% of Mozilla's revenue comes from Google/Alphabet which can be loosely translated as "Mitchell Baker's salary is paid in 90% by Google" and "Mitchell Baker (indirectly) works for Google". Mozilla is not a "weird neighbor" but a controlled opposition and its CEO's salary would suffer from breaking this unhealthy relationship or stepping on Google's toes. I'm fairly certain that a lot of Mozilla's developers and users don't have pro-Google viewpoints but it's cash that matters here, not viewpoints.

smarnach 3y ago
None of this holds any water. Google does not control Mozilla. There are other companies who would happily pay more than Google, and for a few years Yahoo did. Mozilla is constantly stepping on Google's toes, in many different ways, and there is zero indication this hurts Mitchell Baker's compensation. (I think it's also significantly less than 90 % of Mozilla's revenue that currently comes from Google, but that's completely besides the point.)
- Zuiii 3y ago
  What happens to the salary of the CEO if google doesn't renew their deal? Fire the remaining engineers there?
  - smarnach 3y ago
    If Google doesn't renew the deal, someone else will. There are multiple companies who would happily take it.

WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago

https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html Mozilla knows how to siphon money, they play double face non-profit and for-profit at the same time with the same name

eieio 3y ago

Is there a canonical answer (or three) for why Chrome beat out Firefox the way that it did? I think I remember Chrome doing per-tab sandboxing back when a single Firefox tab could brick your whole browser, but I'd be a little surprised if that was a huge deal to the average user; maybe Firefox (which I used through ~2016) just crashed a lot more than I remember? Or maybe Chrome was just wayyy faster back when it launched? I stayed on Firefox for years so that I could use Pentadactyl[1], an extension that made the Firefox UI minimal and vim-like. I think I had to run LTS Firefox to keep it working through 2016 or so and then moved on. I miss it! Maybe it's just because I'm based in NYC but a lot of folks I know have moved to Arc this year - I'm excited to see where it goes and whether it can push things forward! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentadactyl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentadactyl

flashback2199 3y ago
It was a lot faster for me than Firefox at the beginning, I remember that. It also looked a lot nicer; the UI was super slick at the time. I remember it being a pretty easy and obvious switch for me at the time.
- eieio 3y ago
  Alright yeah, speed makes sense. I had forgotten about the UI! Kinda remembering now how they pushed the tabs up into the window chrome next to the close/minimize buttons which let them really shrink down the size of the top bar back when browsers typically spent a ton of vertical space on ~stuff. I bet having a single bar instead of separate URL / search bars was nifty too. I guess Chrome's launch is also from a different era where sentiment around Google was much closer to uniformly positive which I'm sure helped.
  - pxoe 3y ago
    yep, having just two bars - tabs + window buttons, and omnibox + browser buttons (which were also condensed just to 'page' and 'settings'), was kinda huge. at that time, (when browsers like firefox 3 and ie8 were around), browsers were still having bars on top of bars on top of bars: window bar, on top of a file menu, on top of address bar (with a split search bar), and they'd throw in a bookmarks bar in too by default (which chrome had turned off by default), and that's beside toolbars which were still a thing (and were not a thing at all in chrome). all that would come up at a total of 3 to 5 bars, which was a lot. particularly the combining of window title bar and tabs bar into one (along with putting tabs up top, and forgoing window title and file menu along the way), was a big thing. which seems to have influenced all the other browsers later on. (see firefox 4, opera 10, ie9 which all did kind of a spin on that, with ie9 surprisingly going even further and putting both address bar and tabs bar on a single bar) it kinda changed everything, with its approach to simplicity. i'd argue that even now chrome remains one of simpler browsers among those popular ones out today (compare to firefox, opera, vivaldi, edge, etc. which all seem to have features piling up and just popping out at you). but it is also getting crowded as well, in that button zone around main menu. if I could hide those (given that they're also redunant, cause most of those things are in main menu anyway), i wouldn't miss them at all.

ruune 3y ago

Afaik Thunderbird has no Mozilla-Money anymore and is now entirely backed by donations. But please correct me if I'm wrong

jakeogh 3y ago

Pocket killed it for me. "Oh it can be disabled!" they say. Good luck.

pimpampum 3y ago

Interest alignment is a weird thing. After getting so much finding from Google it's hard for them to break away.

IgorPartola 3y ago

So Mozilla can: 1. Integrate IPFS as a first class citizen. This alone would be a huge step forward for the new web. 2. Provide a competitor to Electron with better features and installation experience. 3. Create a Steam-like cross platform marketplace for lightly vetted apps from #2. An experience that should ideally seamlessly blend the UX of signing into Slack in the browser vs having it installed. This has been a holy grain of web apps for three decades and now finally there are ways forward. 4. Marry browser identities with website authentication. Kill passwords with a logical successor to Persona while also providing credentials sync across all your devices and OSes. 5. If #3 and #4 are successful, then their own OS finally has a place in the world. Native FOSS OS a la ChromeOS but works both on desktop and mobile thanks to #2.

vorticalbox 3y ago

My question is what browser do we use? On one hand you have chrome based which gives Google more control or you use Firefox.

x-complexity 3y ago

There's an argument to be made that the extreme breadth of scope that modern web browsers are obliged to support (in order to gain/retain market share) heavily contributes to there being no worthy contenders against Chromium's web monopoly. https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope.html https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope.... When you're the leader, you can further widen your lead by bolting on additional functions & features that require at least X amount of effort to implement. Any new contender will have to put in SUM(X effort for each feature) to match feature parity with the existing leader, and existing competitors will have to put in at least X effort to catch up. Existing OSS work can help bridge the gap, but only for what's already been done.

meristohm 3y ago

This essay feels overall hopeful, and I really hope Firefox distinguishes itself as the go-to browser for "power users" at least (while all I run anymore is Linux, I don't consider myself a power user so much as a cheapskate with an idealistic/irrational sense of fairness who used to tinker a lot more but who now just likes things to work on decade-old hardware and thus sticks with Linux Mint). The side tabs thing is a real lack, and so far I just use the dropdown on the upper right and either scroll or search. Sometimes I double-click the side arrows on the tab bar to scroll by a window's amount of tabs. None of those options are tree-style tabs, though. I know there are ways and extensions, but this should really be baked in- horizontal text stacks well, especially on these wide screens.

mediumsmart 3y ago

Chrome has made Webdesign much easier. You work in safari, test in libre wolf and done. All browsers covered.

lproven 3y ago

That face when someone posted your own article to HN before you did and it's gone berserk over the weekend without you noticing. For those calling Firefox irrelevant: note that its market share of web users is about the same as desktop Linux's market share. 3% of surfers is a lot of people and not an irrelevance or a rounding error.