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Yeah, this is my takeaway as well. Folks in this discussion are saying “why can’t Mozilla just focus on making Firefox” and my response would be “because that’s

Yeah, this is my takeaway as well. Folks in this discussion are saying “why can’t Mozilla just focus on making Firefox” and my response would be “because that’s the path to eventual death”. Firefox is, what, 3% of the browser market today? It isn’t because it’s a bad browser. It’s because people are using OSes with tightly integrated browsers they never think to change. Making Firefox faster or adding vertical tabs or whatever the demand of the day is won’t change that.

mixmastamyk 2y ago
All that money for years put into an income-producing endowment could pay for firefox and tbird indefinitely. Desktops aren't going away, even if mobile outgrew them.
TulliusCicero 2y ago
People still download Chrome onto Windows. Used to be they did that for Firefox/Firebird/Phoenix.
- afavour 2y ago
  I would argue the reason so many people do that is because every time you visit a Google property it prompts you to do so. Mozilla doesn’t have the advantage of owning sites that are part of people’s daily routines either.
  - TulliusCicero 2y ago
    Yeah, but before Chrome people were doing this for Firefox, just from word of mouth.
    - paulryanrogers 2y ago
      Word of mouth is quite a bit different. It's the opinion of many unconflicted friends/family vs the opinion of one megacorp with a conflict of interest.
econ 2y ago
The thing I think will bring in users is search. Full text history search with some modest depth crawling for the domain and external links. The easy Google money makes it unattractive. It will take some time for enough users to be blown away by how useful this is. I wrote a simple user script one time that subscribes me to all discoverable rss feeds I run into while browsing. It seemed rather random but I was blown away by how interesting the websites I visit are to me. You can imagine it, now multiply that by 10 000 and you have a good estimate. Google has to index 130 billion pages and is barely able to deliver half interesting results. If you query it with something like "Firefox" or "Google" it will find zero interesting pages. Stuff so boring you won't even bother. In your history there might be hundreds of interesting articles, discussions, lectures, publications etc interesting to you specifically! That obscure website you once visited, that one without any traffic, visited by Googlebot one time per week which then bothers to index 5% of it and puts the results on page 20 of the search results. Why it even bothers to index it no one knows. Now say you want to read it again or you are searching for that obscure thing again 5 years later it is there in your history. Mozaïk had full text history search in 1994 when hard drives were 5 mb and the www had 10 000 pages. The www now has a hundred thousand times as many pages but drives are a million times larger. Unlike 1994 you won't be able to visit a single digit percentage of it.
- janalsncm 2y ago
  > Full text history search with some modest depth crawling for the domain and external links I’ve built something similar myself. It’s quite annoying that the browser only saves like 3 months of history.
- account42 2y ago
  A good start would be to not delete old history without warning like Firefox does now.
  - paulryanrogers 2y ago
    Shame they hide the option to keep history forever in about:config. At least there are some add-ons to help set that. I can understand the default not keeping forever, for privacy, storage, and performance reasons.

mixmastamyk 2y ago

All that money for years put into an income-producing endowment could pay for firefox and tbird indefinitely. Desktops aren't going away, even if mobile outgrew them.

TulliusCicero 2y ago

People still download Chrome onto Windows. Used to be they did that for Firefox/Firebird/Phoenix.

afavour 2y ago
I would argue the reason so many people do that is because every time you visit a Google property it prompts you to do so. Mozilla doesn’t have the advantage of owning sites that are part of people’s daily routines either.
- TulliusCicero 2y ago
  Yeah, but before Chrome people were doing this for Firefox, just from word of mouth.
  - paulryanrogers 2y ago
    Word of mouth is quite a bit different. It's the opinion of many unconflicted friends/family vs the opinion of one megacorp with a conflict of interest.

econ 2y ago

The thing I think will bring in users is search. Full text history search with some modest depth crawling for the domain and external links. The easy Google money makes it unattractive. It will take some time for enough users to be blown away by how useful this is. I wrote a simple user script one time that subscribes me to all discoverable rss feeds I run into while browsing. It seemed rather random but I was blown away by how interesting the websites I visit are to me. You can imagine it, now multiply that by 10 000 and you have a good estimate. Google has to index 130 billion pages and is barely able to deliver half interesting results. If you query it with something like "Firefox" or "Google" it will find zero interesting pages. Stuff so boring you won't even bother. In your history there might be hundreds of interesting articles, discussions, lectures, publications etc interesting to you specifically! That obscure website you once visited, that one without any traffic, visited by Googlebot one time per week which then bothers to index 5% of it and puts the results on page 20 of the search results. Why it even bothers to index it no one knows. Now say you want to read it again or you are searching for that obscure thing again 5 years later it is there in your history. Mozaïk had full text history search in 1994 when hard drives were 5 mb and the www had 10 000 pages. The www now has a hundred thousand times as many pages but drives are a million times larger. Unlike 1994 you won't be able to visit a single digit percentage of it.

janalsncm 2y ago
> Full text history search with some modest depth crawling for the domain and external links I’ve built something similar myself. It’s quite annoying that the browser only saves like 3 months of history.
account42 2y ago
A good start would be to not delete old history without warning like Firefox does now.
- paulryanrogers 2y ago
  Shame they hide the option to keep history forever in about:config. At least there are some add-ons to help set that. I can understand the default not keeping forever, for privacy, storage, and performance reasons.