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Hacker News has detected a management team that led their product from 20% of the global market to watching-the-race status. If that doesn't elicit general crit

by roenxi 3y ago

Hacker News has detected a management team that led their product from 20% of the global market to watching-the-race status. If that doesn't elicit general criticism what will? I think they're being outcompeted by Opera. The issue here is that things like socialising, search and what have you to diversify revenue would have been really interesting back in Firefox 2.0 when they had a thriving extension ecosystem. There were things like ChatZilla where there were full fledged apps being built in browser to provide social options. Mozilla killed that off when they removed the old XUL layers. They went with Google's strategy of everything being a HTML/Javascript web app. Cool I suppose but they've obsoleted themselves and there isn't an obvious way back into the game for them. They aren't competent at anything, thy're stewarding a 3rd rate product and they're wasting a lot of money. They'll struggle to do anything right under current conditions.

Gud 3y ago
I agree with most of what you say, except Firefox is not a third rate browser. Despite everything , Firefox is still an amazing product. I just hope the Mozilla leadership gets thrown out before they finally kill Firefox through incompetence and neglect.
JohnTHaller 3y ago
The old extension ecosystem is one of the reasons their performance was suffering and their market share was declining. It had declined significantly long before the decision was made to end support for XUL. Ending that support is one of the reasons Firefox's performance is competitive with Chrome again. Your take also ignores the very real anti-competitive factors Firefox is up against. Google relentlessly promoting Chrome across their web presence and paying third parties to trick end users into installing it and setting it as their default for instance: https://imgur.com/gallery/WWZxj https://imgur.com/gallery/WWZxj
- roenxi 3y ago
  It's a fair point, but what is the pitch meant to be now? "We're reskinned Chrome"? If I wanted reskinned Chrome I'd use Brave. Which in fact I do want and do use. Firefox isn't owed a market. Google have proved themselves, so far, to be better stewards of the world's browser engine than the people at Mozilla. It might have a new era in the sun one day, but right now there really isn't much of a niche for Firefox. And the fact that Chrome overran Firefox does sit with the Mozilla, whatever the argument is about competitive practices. Chrome was (likely: still is) just technically better.
  - JohnTHaller 3y ago
    > And the fact that Chrome overran Firefox does sit with the Mozilla, whatever the argument is about competitive practices. I mean, Mozilla couldn't afford to pay Adobe, Avast, etc $3 per user to install an unwanted browser for years even if they'd cross the moral and ethical line to do so. So a chunk of that was outside of their control. Firefox uses an entirely different engine underneath. So, from a 'health of the web' perspective, it helps prevent the mono-culture. It also supports extensions on Android, which is quite nice, and syncs my stuff between them. It can't support them on iOS since everything is just Safari Lite underneath.

by roenxi 3y ago

Gud 3y ago

I agree with most of what you say, except Firefox is not a third rate browser. Despite everything , Firefox is still an amazing product. I just hope the Mozilla leadership gets thrown out before they finally kill Firefox through incompetence and neglect.

JohnTHaller 3y ago

The old extension ecosystem is one of the reasons their performance was suffering and their market share was declining. It had declined significantly long before the decision was made to end support for XUL. Ending that support is one of the reasons Firefox's performance is competitive with Chrome again. Your take also ignores the very real anti-competitive factors Firefox is up against. Google relentlessly promoting Chrome across their web presence and paying third parties to trick end users into installing it and setting it as their default for instance: https://imgur.com/gallery/WWZxj https://imgur.com/gallery/WWZxj

roenxi 3y ago
It's a fair point, but what is the pitch meant to be now? "We're reskinned Chrome"? If I wanted reskinned Chrome I'd use Brave. Which in fact I do want and do use. Firefox isn't owed a market. Google have proved themselves, so far, to be better stewards of the world's browser engine than the people at Mozilla. It might have a new era in the sun one day, but right now there really isn't much of a niche for Firefox. And the fact that Chrome overran Firefox does sit with the Mozilla, whatever the argument is about competitive practices. Chrome was (likely: still is) just technically better.
- JohnTHaller 3y ago
  > And the fact that Chrome overran Firefox does sit with the Mozilla, whatever the argument is about competitive practices. I mean, Mozilla couldn't afford to pay Adobe, Avast, etc $3 per user to install an unwanted browser for years even if they'd cross the moral and ethical line to do so. So a chunk of that was outside of their control. Firefox uses an entirely different engine underneath. So, from a 'health of the web' perspective, it helps prevent the mono-culture. It also supports extensions on Android, which is quite nice, and syncs my stuff between them. It can't support them on iOS since everything is just Safari Lite underneath.