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Of course it's in Mozilla's interest to challenge Safari's Apple-imposed monopoly on iOS. Firefox does not benefit from being suppressed on iOS just because Chr

Of course it's in Mozilla's interest to challenge Safari's Apple-imposed monopoly on iOS. Firefox does not benefit from being suppressed on iOS just because Chrome is also suppressed on iOS. Removing Apple's restrictions that prevent Firefox from implementing Gecko and Gecko-based WebExtensions (especially ad blockers) can only increase Firefox's market share on iOS. Those new iOS Firefox users would then be encouraged to adopt Firefox on their desktop computers, because they would finally be able to sync desktop Firefox with an adblock-enabled Firefox on iOS.

rollcat 3y ago
Disclaimer: I use Firefox on iOS, macOS, Linux, and OpenBSD. > Those new iOS Firefox users would then be encouraged to adopt Firefox on their desktop computers, because they would finally be able to sync desktop Firefox with an adblock-enabled Firefox on iOS. That's not true. People don't care about adblock-enabled Firefox on iOS, because they don't care about Firefox whatsoever. And they don't care about Firefox whatsoever because Mozilla doesn't care - they seem to be focused on just about anything (mostly CEO bonuses), except actually improving the browser to be a competitive product. I use Firefox as my daily driver, and believe me - the temptation to just switch to Chrome is there, every day. Chrome is not only a better browser, the incompatibilities and annoyances (resulting from its de-facto monopoly) are enough to drive people away from Firefox. The only reason why Firefox still exists, is because Google keeps paying Mozilla money to be their default search engine - and it remains in Google's best interest, it's their insurance card in a possible antitrust case. > Of course it's in Mozilla's interest to challenge Safari's Apple-imposed monopoly on iOS. Of course it is in their interest - because they are Google's sock-puppet. Personally, I do hope that Apple's rules for iOS web engines get challenged - but only as a followup to an antitrust case vs Google, ideally with an outcome of separating the browser from the adtech company.
- danShumway 3y ago
  > That's not true. People don't care about adblock-enabled Firefox on iOS, because they don't care about Firefox whatsoever. And they don't care about Firefox whatsoever because Mozilla doesn't care - they seem to be focused on just about anything (mostly CEO bonuses), except actually improving the browser to be a competitive product. Firefox has seen meaningful improvement over the 2023 and (imo) is competitive with both Safari and Chrome and out-delivers both browsers on some metrics. To say that Mozilla does not care about Firefox is to say that the entire browser ecosystem is so stunted that an organization of Mozilla's size can keep pace with two of the richest companies on the planet while actively trying to focus their attention elsewhere. It's nonsense. In 2023, Firefox finally shipped fully offline translation support (a feature that literally no other browser has), they (finally) brought back full extension support to mobile devices, Linux support on Wayland improved, Manifest V3 for Firefox is now shipping (with blocking web request support) and it's actually pretty good, voice commands are now supported on Mac, Firefox managed to start surpassing Chrome's speed on Speedometer (for all the test's flaws, this is still an achievement). PDF editing launched, picture-in-picture view got a redesign. I'm sure there's more that I'm forgetting I know that plenty of people would have preferred that Mozilla not spend so much time and attention on rewriting parts of mobile Firefox, but even there it's silly to argue that they significantly rewrote parts of mobile Firefox because they're not focused on Firefox. This claim comes up all the time and I genuinely don't understand how people can possibly believe this. You think that Firefox would be competitive with Chrome and Safari if Mozilla didn't care about it? Is the idea here that Chrome and Safari engineers are so lazy that Mozilla can keep pace with them by doing nothing?
  - rollcat 3y ago
    Thanks for your perspective. I realize the way I framed my argument makes it seem as if Firefox was barely palatable, yet I haven't switched away somehow. It's an OK browser - but it's not 2002 anymore. IE6 was distilled shit, literally everybody hated it, the market could hardly wait to be disrupted. I even managed to convince my boss to put a banner on our website, telling IE visitors to use a different browser. The bar this time is much higher, and it requires a proportional amount of effort to clear. Meanwhile: https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html https://lunduke.locals.com/post/5053290/mozilla-2023-annual-report-ceo-pay-skyrockets-while-firefox-marketshare-nosedives https://lunduke.locals.com/post/5053290/mozilla-2023-annual-... https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/01/mozilla-blinked/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/01/mozilla-blinked/ Firefox does not just have to improve faster than the competition, it needs to already be better, and to continue getting better, faster than two among the biggest behemoths of all time, to even hope to be competitive in a "free" (LOL, sorry.) market. Being objectively better by a huge margin is literally step 1, and we're. not. there. Antitrust is the only way, and all three companies need a kick in the balls. Mozilla perhaps the gentlest, but a kick nevertheless.
    - danShumway 3y ago
      Lunduke and JWZ seem to both have a bone to pick with Mozilla for various reasons, and some of their criticism is apt and fair, and some of it feels extremely personal. These articles tend to pop up from both of them every time that we reach a year end or donation campaign from Mozilla. While sometimes I agree with them (and in particular I agree that Mozilla has gotten way too comfortable with advertising and with partnering with extremely questionable and/or harmful people and technologies), an issue with the criticism I keep coming back to is that Mozilla is in a position where it often gets blamed simultaneously for relying too much on Google for revenue and also for every single revenue stream it comes up with that isn't Google being somehow a distraction from Firefox. I'm not actually a fan of Mozilla's current CEO or many of Mozilla's recent decisions, I do think on some levels Mozilla is floundering around. And you're never going to get an argument from me that CEOs shouldn't be paid less across the board. But it is worth adding some context to Lunduke's criticism in particular that the last few years have also seen some of the strongest financial developments for Mozilla in a while and I'm not completely sure what critics like Lunduke want if they're going to simultaneously call Mozilla out for being in the pocket of Google and call Mozilla out for looking to diversify revenue and push development towards what is by far one of the most popular buzzwords for financial investment and product investment/monetization in the entire tech industry at the moment. If Lunduke wants independence from Google, then short of antitrust this is how you get it: you build things that are actually monetizable. By that metric, even people who are critical of the CEO like me need to be willing to admit that she seems to on some points be doing an actually fairly decent job. Under her, Mozilla has finally started taking meaningful steps to diversify funding away from Google's influence. I don't want to act like the frustration isn't legitimate. I do feel frustration when I watch Mozilla rewrite their Android tech stack for the Nth time. That effort could be better spent elsewhere. But I'm also very firmly of the belief that you could replace Mozilla's CEO with anybody and the markestshare decline would look the same. This is not a problem of leadership. This is a problem of antritrust and Mozilla flat-out is not big enough to out-compete an anticompetitive market. I'm all for Mozilla getting better, but sometimes I see criticism here that if they just straightened their act up and made a fantastically better browser it would change everything. It wouldn't. ---- As a thought experiment: In June of 2024, Mozilla Firefox will be the only mainstream browser with fully effective uBO support. Manifest V3 will be out so it will be gone from Chrome. Safari already has terrible adblocking extension support. Brave is not deprecating those APIs, but Brave also (as far as I know) doesn't have an extension store and relies on Chrome's so if those extensions get dropped from development on Chrome they will also not be available for Brave. Come June, do we think that Firefox having indisputably the best adblocking of any other browser will move the needle on its market share? I don't. I don't think consumers will care. I can't count the number of times that I have told people about features in Firefox that are objectively better than Chrome's implementations (multi-account containers, profiles, android extension support, fully offline translations, the TOR uplift project, actually encrypted cross-device sync, etc, etc...) and they didn't even know those features exist. Yes, some of that is that Mozilla is genuinely terrible at marketing. But a much bigger part of that is that the browser market doesn't really work that way anymore; default positioning and anticompetitive behavior are more effective steering tools than any browser feature set. I agree that it comes down to antitrust. But the only thing I can think of that Mozilla can do about that is to A) continue to diversify their revenue from Google (because Firefox itself is not monetizable) and to B) start campaigning for intervention (which they are doing right now in this article). Because even if Mozilla was able to build an indisputably better browser than Chrome, it wouldn't matter. You've said it yourself, alternatives were much better than IE6 and it still didn't matter. Does anyone think it's even physically possible for a company of Mozilla's size to outpace Chrome even more than Chrome and Firefox outpaced IE6? Plenty of other companies (including Microsoft) have been in Mozilla's position and have tried to do what Mozilla is doing, and their conclusion was that they couldn't compete with Chrome; they couldn't develop a separate browser engine from Chromium and keep pace. Microsoft decided that what Mozilla is doing right now was too difficult to attempt.
- commoner 3y ago
  > actually improving the browser to be a competitive product Firefox would be more competitive on iOS with Gecko-based WebExtensions on iOS such as uBlock Origin, which is exactly what Mozilla is advocating for with this page. It's contradictory to argue that people don't want ad blocking on Firefox by claiming that Mozilla isn't trying to improve Firefox, when in reality, Mozilla is pushing for the removal of Apple's restrictions, which would enable Mozilla to improve Firefox on iOS with WebExtensions, ad blocking, and other useful features. > Of course it is in their interest - because they are Google's sock-puppet. It would be Mozilla's interest to challenge Safari's Apple-imposed monopoly on iOS even if they received all of their funding from other sources, and the reasoning is simple. Mozilla is harmed by Apple hindering Firefox in all of the ways that the page mentions, all of which limit Firefox's capabilities, convenience, and attractiveness. To credibly claim that it's not in Mozilla's best interest to challenge Apple's restrictions, you would have to show that Apple's restrictions benefit Mozilla indirectly in some way that fully offsets all of the ways it directly hurts Mozilla. And Mozilla does not benefit from Apple's restrictions in any significant way.
CharlesW 3y ago
> Firefox does not benefit from being suppressed on iOS… You have to understand that from the POV of 99.99% of users, Firefox is not "suppressed".¹² Yes, Firefox on iOS has to use WKWebKit. But "if Firefox could use their own browser engine on iOS then Firefox would be popular on iOS" is magical thinking. Other than a handful of technical gurus, users absolutely do not care. ¹ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browsers/mobile/ios/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browsers/mobile/ios/ ² https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/firefox-private-safe-browser/id989804926 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/firefox-private-safe-browser...
- commoner 3y ago
  Many users do care whether their web browser has an effective ad blocker and other extensions. Apple's iOS restrictions prevent Firefox from implementing extensions like uBlock Origin. Remove those restrictions and Firefox becomes much more attractive on iOS. I can tell you that I'll switch the default browser from Safari to Firefox on all of the iOS devices I manage the moment uBlock Origin becomes available, and I'm not the only one with that preference.
  - CharlesW 3y ago
    > Many users do care whether their web browser has an effective ad blocker and other extensions. I’m a uBlock Origin fan, and FWIW I’ve found that iOS products like 1Blocker work as well in practice. I can also recommend Rekt and Vinegar. I’m under the impression that Firefox on Android only supports a tiny percentage of Firefox extensions.
    - commoner 3y ago
      > iOS products like 1Blocker work as well in practice iOS content blockers don't work in any browser except Safari due to Apple's restrictions, which limits Firefox's usefulness and hurts Firefox adoption on iOS in an anticompetitive way. That is one of the reasons Apple should not restrict Firefox from implementing extensions on iOS. There is no reasonable justification for limiting browser extensions to Safari on iOS. > I’m under the impression that Firefox on Android only supports a tiny percentage of Firefox extensions. Firefox for Android can install every Firefox extension from addons.mozilla.org as of December 2023. Turn on desktop mode on addons.mozilla.org to see all of the options. Also, the beta channel of Firefox for Android can sideload any extension through the settings and this feature is on track to make it to the stable release.

rollcat 3y ago

Disclaimer: I use Firefox on iOS, macOS, Linux, and OpenBSD. > Those new iOS Firefox users would then be encouraged to adopt Firefox on their desktop computers, because they would finally be able to sync desktop Firefox with an adblock-enabled Firefox on iOS. That's not true. People don't care about adblock-enabled Firefox on iOS, because they don't care about Firefox whatsoever. And they don't care about Firefox whatsoever because Mozilla doesn't care - they seem to be focused on just about anything (mostly CEO bonuses), except actually improving the browser to be a competitive product. I use Firefox as my daily driver, and believe me - the temptation to just switch to Chrome is there, every day. Chrome is not only a better browser, the incompatibilities and annoyances (resulting from its de-facto monopoly) are enough to drive people away from Firefox. The only reason why Firefox still exists, is because Google keeps paying Mozilla money to be their default search engine - and it remains in Google's best interest, it's their insurance card in a possible antitrust case. > Of course it's in Mozilla's interest to challenge Safari's Apple-imposed monopoly on iOS. Of course it is in their interest - because they are Google's sock-puppet. Personally, I do hope that Apple's rules for iOS web engines get challenged - but only as a followup to an antitrust case vs Google, ideally with an outcome of separating the browser from the adtech company.

danShumway 3y ago
> That's not true. People don't care about adblock-enabled Firefox on iOS, because they don't care about Firefox whatsoever. And they don't care about Firefox whatsoever because Mozilla doesn't care - they seem to be focused on just about anything (mostly CEO bonuses), except actually improving the browser to be a competitive product. Firefox has seen meaningful improvement over the 2023 and (imo) is competitive with both Safari and Chrome and out-delivers both browsers on some metrics. To say that Mozilla does not care about Firefox is to say that the entire browser ecosystem is so stunted that an organization of Mozilla's size can keep pace with two of the richest companies on the planet while actively trying to focus their attention elsewhere. It's nonsense. In 2023, Firefox finally shipped fully offline translation support (a feature that literally no other browser has), they (finally) brought back full extension support to mobile devices, Linux support on Wayland improved, Manifest V3 for Firefox is now shipping (with blocking web request support) and it's actually pretty good, voice commands are now supported on Mac, Firefox managed to start surpassing Chrome's speed on Speedometer (for all the test's flaws, this is still an achievement). PDF editing launched, picture-in-picture view got a redesign. I'm sure there's more that I'm forgetting I know that plenty of people would have preferred that Mozilla not spend so much time and attention on rewriting parts of mobile Firefox, but even there it's silly to argue that they significantly rewrote parts of mobile Firefox because they're not focused on Firefox. This claim comes up all the time and I genuinely don't understand how people can possibly believe this. You think that Firefox would be competitive with Chrome and Safari if Mozilla didn't care about it? Is the idea here that Chrome and Safari engineers are so lazy that Mozilla can keep pace with them by doing nothing?
- rollcat 3y ago
  Thanks for your perspective. I realize the way I framed my argument makes it seem as if Firefox was barely palatable, yet I haven't switched away somehow. It's an OK browser - but it's not 2002 anymore. IE6 was distilled shit, literally everybody hated it, the market could hardly wait to be disrupted. I even managed to convince my boss to put a banner on our website, telling IE visitors to use a different browser. The bar this time is much higher, and it requires a proportional amount of effort to clear. Meanwhile: https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html https://lunduke.locals.com/post/5053290/mozilla-2023-annual-report-ceo-pay-skyrockets-while-firefox-marketshare-nosedives https://lunduke.locals.com/post/5053290/mozilla-2023-annual-... https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/01/mozilla-blinked/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/01/mozilla-blinked/ Firefox does not just have to improve faster than the competition, it needs to already be better, and to continue getting better, faster than two among the biggest behemoths of all time, to even hope to be competitive in a "free" (LOL, sorry.) market. Being objectively better by a huge margin is literally step 1, and we're. not. there. Antitrust is the only way, and all three companies need a kick in the balls. Mozilla perhaps the gentlest, but a kick nevertheless.
  - danShumway 3y ago
    Lunduke and JWZ seem to both have a bone to pick with Mozilla for various reasons, and some of their criticism is apt and fair, and some of it feels extremely personal. These articles tend to pop up from both of them every time that we reach a year end or donation campaign from Mozilla. While sometimes I agree with them (and in particular I agree that Mozilla has gotten way too comfortable with advertising and with partnering with extremely questionable and/or harmful people and technologies), an issue with the criticism I keep coming back to is that Mozilla is in a position where it often gets blamed simultaneously for relying too much on Google for revenue and also for every single revenue stream it comes up with that isn't Google being somehow a distraction from Firefox. I'm not actually a fan of Mozilla's current CEO or many of Mozilla's recent decisions, I do think on some levels Mozilla is floundering around. And you're never going to get an argument from me that CEOs shouldn't be paid less across the board. But it is worth adding some context to Lunduke's criticism in particular that the last few years have also seen some of the strongest financial developments for Mozilla in a while and I'm not completely sure what critics like Lunduke want if they're going to simultaneously call Mozilla out for being in the pocket of Google and call Mozilla out for looking to diversify revenue and push development towards what is by far one of the most popular buzzwords for financial investment and product investment/monetization in the entire tech industry at the moment. If Lunduke wants independence from Google, then short of antitrust this is how you get it: you build things that are actually monetizable. By that metric, even people who are critical of the CEO like me need to be willing to admit that she seems to on some points be doing an actually fairly decent job. Under her, Mozilla has finally started taking meaningful steps to diversify funding away from Google's influence. I don't want to act like the frustration isn't legitimate. I do feel frustration when I watch Mozilla rewrite their Android tech stack for the Nth time. That effort could be better spent elsewhere. But I'm also very firmly of the belief that you could replace Mozilla's CEO with anybody and the markestshare decline would look the same. This is not a problem of leadership. This is a problem of antritrust and Mozilla flat-out is not big enough to out-compete an anticompetitive market. I'm all for Mozilla getting better, but sometimes I see criticism here that if they just straightened their act up and made a fantastically better browser it would change everything. It wouldn't. ---- As a thought experiment: In June of 2024, Mozilla Firefox will be the only mainstream browser with fully effective uBO support. Manifest V3 will be out so it will be gone from Chrome. Safari already has terrible adblocking extension support. Brave is not deprecating those APIs, but Brave also (as far as I know) doesn't have an extension store and relies on Chrome's so if those extensions get dropped from development on Chrome they will also not be available for Brave. Come June, do we think that Firefox having indisputably the best adblocking of any other browser will move the needle on its market share? I don't. I don't think consumers will care. I can't count the number of times that I have told people about features in Firefox that are objectively better than Chrome's implementations (multi-account containers, profiles, android extension support, fully offline translations, the TOR uplift project, actually encrypted cross-device sync, etc, etc...) and they didn't even know those features exist. Yes, some of that is that Mozilla is genuinely terrible at marketing. But a much bigger part of that is that the browser market doesn't really work that way anymore; default positioning and anticompetitive behavior are more effective steering tools than any browser feature set. I agree that it comes down to antitrust. But the only thing I can think of that Mozilla can do about that is to A) continue to diversify their revenue from Google (because Firefox itself is not monetizable) and to B) start campaigning for intervention (which they are doing right now in this article). Because even if Mozilla was able to build an indisputably better browser than Chrome, it wouldn't matter. You've said it yourself, alternatives were much better than IE6 and it still didn't matter. Does anyone think it's even physically possible for a company of Mozilla's size to outpace Chrome even more than Chrome and Firefox outpaced IE6? Plenty of other companies (including Microsoft) have been in Mozilla's position and have tried to do what Mozilla is doing, and their conclusion was that they couldn't compete with Chrome; they couldn't develop a separate browser engine from Chromium and keep pace. Microsoft decided that what Mozilla is doing right now was too difficult to attempt.
commoner 3y ago
> actually improving the browser to be a competitive product Firefox would be more competitive on iOS with Gecko-based WebExtensions on iOS such as uBlock Origin, which is exactly what Mozilla is advocating for with this page. It's contradictory to argue that people don't want ad blocking on Firefox by claiming that Mozilla isn't trying to improve Firefox, when in reality, Mozilla is pushing for the removal of Apple's restrictions, which would enable Mozilla to improve Firefox on iOS with WebExtensions, ad blocking, and other useful features. > Of course it is in their interest - because they are Google's sock-puppet. It would be Mozilla's interest to challenge Safari's Apple-imposed monopoly on iOS even if they received all of their funding from other sources, and the reasoning is simple. Mozilla is harmed by Apple hindering Firefox in all of the ways that the page mentions, all of which limit Firefox's capabilities, convenience, and attractiveness. To credibly claim that it's not in Mozilla's best interest to challenge Apple's restrictions, you would have to show that Apple's restrictions benefit Mozilla indirectly in some way that fully offsets all of the ways it directly hurts Mozilla. And Mozilla does not benefit from Apple's restrictions in any significant way.

CharlesW 3y ago

> Firefox does not benefit from being suppressed on iOS… You have to understand that from the POV of 99.99% of users, Firefox is not "suppressed".¹² Yes, Firefox on iOS has to use WKWebKit. But "if Firefox could use their own browser engine on iOS then Firefox would be popular on iOS" is magical thinking. Other than a handful of technical gurus, users absolutely do not care. ¹ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browsers/mobile/ios/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browsers/mobile/ios/ ² https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/firefox-private-safe-browser/id989804926 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/firefox-private-safe-browser...

commoner 3y ago
Many users do care whether their web browser has an effective ad blocker and other extensions. Apple's iOS restrictions prevent Firefox from implementing extensions like uBlock Origin. Remove those restrictions and Firefox becomes much more attractive on iOS. I can tell you that I'll switch the default browser from Safari to Firefox on all of the iOS devices I manage the moment uBlock Origin becomes available, and I'm not the only one with that preference.
- CharlesW 3y ago
  > Many users do care whether their web browser has an effective ad blocker and other extensions. I’m a uBlock Origin fan, and FWIW I’ve found that iOS products like 1Blocker work as well in practice. I can also recommend Rekt and Vinegar. I’m under the impression that Firefox on Android only supports a tiny percentage of Firefox extensions.
  - commoner 3y ago
    > iOS products like 1Blocker work as well in practice iOS content blockers don't work in any browser except Safari due to Apple's restrictions, which limits Firefox's usefulness and hurts Firefox adoption on iOS in an anticompetitive way. That is one of the reasons Apple should not restrict Firefox from implementing extensions on iOS. There is no reasonable justification for limiting browser extensions to Safari on iOS. > I’m under the impression that Firefox on Android only supports a tiny percentage of Firefox extensions. Firefox for Android can install every Firefox extension from addons.mozilla.org as of December 2023. Turn on desktop mode on addons.mozilla.org to see all of the options. Also, the beta channel of Firefox for Android can sideload any extension through the settings and this feature is on track to make it to the stable release.