And here is another unpopular opinion. I dont care if her salary is 3 million or even 30 million. If she had managed to bring Firefox to 60% marketshare and bring down Chrome on Desktop, would you have still complained if she was paid 30 million?

The problem is Mozilla is in such a bad shape and she is under performing as a CEO.

Unfortunately people dont learn much from history. And history dictate the only way to solve this problem is Mozilla think of it as a problem. Otherwise its current status at 10% marketshare is enough to sustain the operation. Nothing bad enough is happening, no interest or incentive for changes. Inertia. Let's keep thing this way.

So yes, it is counter intuitive. The only way to save Mozilla ( or change Mozill's direction, I guess the word "save" is a hyperbole, at least from Mozilla's perspective. ) isn't trying to get more user to use it. It is actually push people to abandon it.

Do you mean desktop-only use? From what I've seen many more people use the desktop than that (in combination with mobile). Nevertheless FF certainly is in bad shape.

Firefox is extremely pedantic and opinionated browser.

It became popular due to extensions, that is, it attracted power users. Then the other guys pretty much reached feature parity while Firefox was busy tossing XUL out the window with all its plugins.

At about that time, they started trying to "protect" me by stopping me from doing useful stuff (just warn and let me bypass).

There was one version, which was too much. It was borderline impossible to connect to a site with a bad certificate.

Yeah, I get the security speech, but for my old router or printer, I just don't care, let me skip the check and just do it.

It's gotten slightly better in the past few years, but Chrome is way better for most use cases.

In the case of Chrome, which ate Firefox's lunch, the new guy was built with isolation and security in mind, while the old guy was dragging a very modular but much less secure architecture.

There's a case for keeping the old XUL, but I'd much rather use the more recent multiprocessing, sandboxed browsers than a less secure one that lets me re-skin its UI at will. My understanding is that the two weren't compatible, and a meaningful sandbox could only be added by breaking existing extensions.

Chrome was practical and fast. But Firefox was where the magic happened. Chrome was like driving a car, simple controls for everyone, Firefox was like driving an airplane, a button for everything

At the time no one cared about sandboxing, and who did was using firejail, or similar, with multiple profiles, noscript, umatrix...

For me, that wasn't what made plugins great. What made them great was that they were powerful enough that they could be used to fix or work around the various bad functional decisions that Mozilla has long had a habit of making.

When they were neutered and could no longer do that, it made the browser much less attractive.

The cetificate thing gets in my way as well. Our fossil repo worked fone with a self generated cert before they screwed that up and I had to waste my time generating a LE cert and setting up renewal. This is an internal service not a public web site. Someone enabled HSTS on a different vhost and FF wouldn't let me load the fossil web repo. The amount of babysitting is quite annoying.

Unless they change their attitude about who they target, I don't see a revival...

Not just worth it, that's who their userbase actually is !

Powerusers, privacy freaks and their immediate social circle that they managed to strong-arm into using Firefox.

That's their remaining 3% of market share and Mozilla remains absolutely oblivious to it.

"Let's add whitespace everywhere. Let's remove RSS support, let's change the UI and also let's add as much useless junk nobody asked for".

Don't.

And their CEO must go. The fish rots from the head.

The three people I know who use ftp for something have and always had a dedicated client for it.

I don't understand your position.

Are you claiming that no web pages link to download files on FTP servers?

Or are you saying that the right thing to do in that situation is to refuse to download the file?

Because both of those positions are self-evidently wrong.

You need dedicated clients for plenty of protocols that can be in an href.

ftp is not a part of the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web is in HTTP. That is the “web” part of “web browser”. That they support other protocols is incidental.

- navigation (contains: bookmark, history, tab/window handling, etc)

- networking (contains: configuring proxies, credentials+cookies, traffic shapping, requests filtering/rewriting, caching+capture+replay)

- content display (html rendering + js sandboxes, userscripts and content filtering, pdf, multimedia, ..)

FTP has nothing exceptional to it beyond it being a shitty, old protocol that is much more rarely used than BitTorrent.

But even if it weren't, the fact that a smaller number of people would run into the bug doesn't magically make it not-a-bug.

I agree with you with respect to ftp, but I have to disagree with this. A site might link to a file with a gopher:// url or gemeni:// (these are real protocols) and the browser would of course spit out an error. That's not a bug, because that's expected behavior. No one, at present, expects a web browser to be able to access these protocols, despite the fact that both protocols are designed to access something corresponding roughly to "web pages".

The reason dropping ftp support is a bug is that there are a ton of real sites that link to ftp pages, and they do so because there is a history of ftp browsing support in web browsers and it was reasonably anticipated by these page authors that viewers would not have trouble accessing files made available in this way.

The Chrome team published some good information about exactly how widely FTP is used: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JUra5HnsbR_xmtQctkb2iVxR... (see heading: Usage information)

Removing insecure protocols is a good thing, especially one that is commonly used to download software of all things. If you're one of the ~0.03% (as of late 2020) that relies on downloading files through FTP for whatever reason, there's nothing stopping you from downloading a more specialized client.

I truly don't understand what your problem here is: if you install an FTP client and it registers itself as a handler for ftp links with your OS, the process of downloading a file via FTP when you click on an FTP link should be pretty seamless.

It's none of my business what parts of the web you frequent. But I'm only a hobbyist and I see FTP links all the time. Most recently while looking for older character set information for a homegrown libiconv-type project.

Firefox 90 removed functionality that has been a part of the standard experience for a quarter-century and is still in widespread use. It is a bug.

I can ask you the opposite question... I do mostly think it's sad that they're dropping FTP support, but if it's expensive for them to maintain it for the little percentage of users (I'm guessing, maybe this is an incorrect approximation) who use it...

Btw I'm just telling you my experience, please don't be rude, it's hard to find allies that way.

I would agree it's probably a small percentage of users who use it, but I don't think that's a good reason to drop support. If software only kept features used by a substantial number of users, SharePoint wouldn't allow exporting lists to Access databases, Excel wouldn't allow pivot tables, and so on. I think there's a cliché about how 80% of Word users only use 20% of its features... but it's a different 20% for everyone. As a result, adopting such a principle would lead to truly disheartening results. Will Firefox perhaps completely drop support for PIV tokens next?

I am not familiar with Firefox's architecture, I've only compiled it from source 2-3 times and only one of those times was setting up my own build environment (as opposed to a compiling package system). I've never hacked on it to any degree beyond the most trivial. So I could very well be wrong... but... I suspect it has not been very expensive to maintain, given that the protocol is simple and I believe has not changed in many years.

The last sentence reads to me like "Are you for freaking real right now?!", incredulity mixed with anger.

On the other hand, as annoying as this is, this is the one time that maintenance overhead actually makes sense to justify removal (out of all the times Mozilla has invoked that excuse), given how nonstandard FTP is and how kludgy the implementation has to be.

I tried Chromium yesterday as the next best thing, since I will not use any browser with "rewards", like Edge and Vivaldi and the rest. And today I found out that Chromium does not block autoplay and has no option for it. smh

Firefox is the best and I hope it lives for ever and it becomes even better that what it is now.

One is that by "autoplay" I mean on a foreground tab. Say I open a youtube tab in the background, then switch to it. The video starts playing. I don't want that, and FF was blocking that autoplay.

Two is that I talked about Chromium. Apparently there is a way to do this for Chrome, for Edge, but not for Chromium.

So please: just install and use FF already! :)

Mozilla does a lot of cool stuff aside of the browser, but what annoys me about ads in the address bar, shamelessly pushing pocket (a icon which for some reason I have to remove over and over again from the GUI) and similar things is not that they try to monetize their browser. What annoys me is that they don't have the trust in their own product that people would be willing to support them if they just asked. What annoys me is that they try those borderline dark-patterns and still try to sell it as a great feature for the user.

Just be honest to your users and if they understand your reasons they will support you, if they trust your decisions. Firefox was once a browser whos users bought T-shirts on it after all.

[0] https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js

They try, they fail, they try again, they fail again. It's hard to monetize from such a product, that's unfortunately the truth.

I prefer it to Chromium due to its more native feel, the quality of the multi-device password and history sync, and the ability to zap tabs to and from my laptop.

adblock also works wonderfully.

I don't trust Google to implement these features or honour my privacy.

I use FF almost exclusively on a desktop but can't afford luxury of running it on a laptop.

I admit that power mgmt and memory was a big issue before, but it improved, and it's still improving.

Firefox is a colossal RAM guzzler.

The RAM think really depends on the websites and what resources they are allocating. The browser is really just accommodate that. Sites that do continuous scroll are the worst as they often don’t release resources as they go.

Obviously you have to trust the FF Devs, but you're already doing that by running FF in the first place.

Vivaldi supports it, but it's too slow.

Because Mozilla is a non-profit and is more interested in protecting your privacy than Google who monetizes your lack of privacy.

I think one of two possible scenarios will occur

1. Firefox fades into obscurity/irrelevance, Chromium becomes the platform of the web, and thus Google dictates its future.

2. Firefox fades into obscurity/irrelevance, and Chromium still becomes the platform of the web, but anti-trust action is taken against Google with a result being that Chrome is spun off into its own entity independent of Google, and so while there's still a browser monoculture, that browser is developed by a relatively unbiased company.

Of course in all of this there's always the foothold that Safari has that must be taken into consideration, particularly on iOS where users quite literally don't have the choice to use another browser (as iOS Chrome and friends still use WebKit under the hood).

3. Firefox fades into obscurity/irrelevance, Chromium becomes the platform of the web, people realize this and forks abound, and eventually someone makes it into an ECMA standard and Google de facto loses control of it.

Oh also, another one:

4. The Linux Foundation or some other entity steps in and just builds a new GPL'd browser, which can mimic the success story of the Linux kernel (where the copyleft license will ensure that the vast number of open-source hackers prefer to contribute to it over something like the BSD-licensed Chromium).

The Linux Foundation was already given Servo (in late 2019 if memory is not failing me), the promising rendering engine Mozilla was working on. Which meant anyone who was working full time on it, is not right now.

So there's even a new base to work with from the ground up if we wanted to.

As long as Chromium is open source I don't see what there is to worry about. We literally have the code.

There's a lot to be gained by standardizing on Chromium as well. New features, improvements and optimizations only have to be implemented once instead of thrice, and developers only have to deal with bugs in one implementation instead of the union of bugs in all three.

We're going from a world where we had IE, Google, Firefox and Safari as independent projects, we're going towards one with just one.

Case in point: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/internet-explorer/ie11-depl...

That article about IE 11 mentions about an IE 5 compatibility mode that can be activated. IE11 is essentially the sum of IE5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11. So yeah: Microsoft couldn't maintain 7 browsers bundled into one, but who could? Moreover, who would? That's a terrible decision made completely from a place of fear ("what if that one customer that depends on IE5 compatibility mode gets really, really mad and drops their windows support contract!??!?!").

It'd be an absolutely massive undertaking, but it's not impossible. In fact, I'd go further and say that it's necessary.

Mozilla incubated Servo with a team of five (as of ~2014). It's not a complete browser on its own by any means, but surely that points at some degree of possibility.

a browser is... more complicated

3b. Chromium becomes the platform of the web and a fork becomes dominating through some unforeseen hype (without ECMA involvement)

I am not sure that can realistically be done anymore. Take a look at this for some estimates:

https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope....

4. The Zuckaverse becomes the primary way people interact with the Internet. Both Firefox and Chrome fade into obscurity. Everything is propriety and behind walled gardens.

There are a lot of tools for doing this these days (i.e. React Native, Flutter) but I get the impression that none of them _truly_ solve the problem and you can tell they're not REALLY native apps.

This imaginary company will have bills to pay. What search business will cover that company's costs? :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers#WebKit-ba...

Attempting to fund Firefox while hating the Foundation is entirely counter-productive.

Classic story of a clique milking an existing code base under the guise of social justice.

Ditto for GMail, Microsoft Office, Windows etc.

I know your designers tell you that we need to look "fresh" but you can do that with minimal tweaks, most people would rather a stable codebase that just works and doesn't cause surprises or bugs imho.

A long time ago, Mozilla did have the option to embed Gecko into apps. It was badly-documented and difficult to use.

A modern embeddable Gecko engine could be promoted as a modular, cross-platform alternative to Electron. The Gecko advantages: stripped-down, faster and less memory hungry than Electron (assuming these features can be achieved).

The traction that Electron has gained as a cross-platform option for building apps is huge and is only set to get bigger (whether for better or worse). And yet, Mozilla is completely absent from this space dominated by Chromium/Electron.

Imagine if thousands of developers place their trust in Mozilla because they have built their cross-platform apps using Gecko. They want to see Mozilla grow and succeed because they have a stake in seeing Gecko development succeed too. (And that could include large corporates sponsoring Mozilla to sustain development of Gecko.) Unfortunately, it is probably too late (or too unrealistic) for this to happen.

Would any of the above revive Firefox? Possibly not. However, an embeddable Gecko engine may give Mozilla new opportunities.

https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/

Revolving door management that has no clue what initiatives the previous management started and wants to start all their own initiatives really hurt Mozilla in the last 5 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XUL https://www-archive.mozilla.org/why/framework.html https://www-archive.mozilla.org/projects/xul/joy-of-xul

However to my astonishment, these isn't even one Gecko-based alternative. I've found a few based on WebKit (I've ended up using Qt5 in Python), a few based on Chromium (including Electron / nwjs), but zero for Gecko...

If perhaps Gecko would be easily embedable (and perhaps used less resources than Chromium), it could start appearing in other applications, and thus at least get some market-share in that segment.

* Palemoon * Waterfox

You mean Facebook? No thanx.

Despite the managements, it's the best alternative among the big browsers for my needs.

Good overall standards support (a few things missing) and addon suite, even after the XUL deprecation.

And performance wise, Linux ATL, it's fine. Is it better/worse than chrome in a benchmark? Idk, but I'm fine with the perf.

<3 Firefox.

I personally think Chrome gained so much market share, in large part, because it simply had the best developer tools.

Firefox had FireBug, which was great, and revolutionary for its time!

However! Having FireBug meant that Mozilla's built in tools never got much attention. So their dev tools were severely lacking, and stagnant. They remained that way until a few years back.

Meanwhile Chrome's dev tools just kept advancing. So in the end, FireBug (unintentionally) helped FireFox lose major marketshare

They did invent Rust to replace it :)

Last time I checked our company's visitor distribution, GA showed far less Fx usage than server logs, for instance. Not a huge number for Fx in the latter case, but better than 3% at least.

So not trying to excuse anything, just would like the focus to be redirected. Everyone always touts Pocket and the salary as these big things here on HN. But the masses don't care. It's not where the problem is.

Instead, it’s a matter of “fire her and hire a replacement” at $Xmm per year. So what is her replacement cost? I vaguely remember her raise being tied to increasing her compensation to be more in line with other CEOs, so it may be the case that there is no meaningful savings to be made there, or even that a competent replacement would cost more.

And, as the other commenter said, this is not the root cause of Firefox’s struggles. I don’t know what is, but I do observe that people on this site seem to hold Mozilla to a much higher standard than Google, quite unfairly in my opinion.

https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salar...

Are you sure that the loss of market share is due to mismanagement? Could it not be due to a competitor with unfair advantage? I mean the fact that even MS stopped their own development would suggest that to me.

So the concrete point you have against management: it is expensive. Does that explain the current situation? What if the CEO had a 300k salary, would that fundamentally change anything?

Edit: as a metter of fact, I also believe that a change is required, but I would look at the funding side, to diversify it. I would look into government funding (multiple governments), license merchandise, ask for individual donations, partner with more companies to sell rebranded versions of their products/services like with Mozilla VPN, etc.

Yes it would; it would make 2.7 million dollars of funding magically appear.

I also think her attitude of entitlement to such an unreasonable salary is contradictory with Mozilla's beliefs. It seems like an awful match. And 3m is really high for a non profit. Wikimedia's CEO gets ~$400k a year. https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salar...

No, I quit trusting Mozilla. I don't want another management. I want Firefox to be taken care of by another company/ NGO / consortium of companies. I want it to have a good development team and concentrate on technical excellence and user needs.

>So the concrete point you have against management: it is expensive. I'm more concerned with the fact that developers are fired while CEO is getting some fat checks while usage is declining and users are becoming more unhappy with Firefox.

It took a lot of effort by the slashdot intelligentsia to preach the virtues of open source and internet freedom and to riot against violations of those principles. These times are long gone, and today's tech scene would rather like to build one of those closed solutions themselves than keep the old faith alive.

We need a new generation of rioters. Closed systems and walled gardens are bad. If we go this route we will end up paying monthly fees for companies to allow us to do some computing or access information (which will be pruned with care).

For my day to day use everything works fine. I don't remember anything that didn't except the vscode.dev thing that appeared in the front page yesterday. Apparently the local file access is not supported/enabled in Firefox yet.

And when I was messing with CSS a few months ago there was... background-blur? Or something like that, not supported in Firefox. But pretty minor things.

Don't remember anything else where I had to switch to chromium lately.

I also have to use Figma on a daily basis and the there are some odd things happening in Firefox that don't appear in Chrome/Edge.

And this is not an isolated case... Each time I've had to submit a complaint about issues encountered while using a webapp / website (including for payment systems, utility companies, local government, etc.) I often get the same response: "try it with Chrome" or "we support only Chrome".

I still remember the "works best with Internet Explorer", which then changed to "works best with Firefox", and now it seems "works best with Chrome"... :)

Mostly, it was horrible old sites that were designed for IE.

Of course ymmv

Having been using Firefox and Chrome side by side for 10+ years, I don't think the difference (or preference) between the two worth the effort putting into making two (mostly) duplicate implementations of the same thing for such complex thing. And my experience in observing the development of Firefox is that they are already too short-handed to keep up.

Keep in mind Blink engine is forked from WebKit (an Apple product) and Chromium is created from thin air. Yet it doesn't stop Google to have the dominant position they have today.

My point is, Google controlling everything is bad, but having only one engine (be it chromium or something else) isn't what causes it.

Also, I don't say "should", I say I don't mind.

My suspicion is that the majority of people in this sort of thread will never use anything other than Chrome, because it is not Chrome. Maybe the web will survive until a more idealistic generation takes over.

That's exactly how qt-webengine is packaged. And qutebrowser (based on qt-webengine) is fantastic for a volunteer effort, but memory leaks and other issues, too much stuff for one volunteer to realistically address, make it difficult to use as a daily driver. And that's just building a UI around an existing rendering engine!

The root of the issue is: W3C specifications are >100 million words, and growing at a rate of hundreds of new standards per year. So even if the Chromium code base were forked from its current state, a team of full-time developers would be required just to keep up with new W3C standards.

What I find tragic about the Mozilla mismanagement is, if one guy is willing to develop and maintain qutebrowser as a volunteer, then surely Mozilla can find developers who would be willing to work on Firefox at sub-FAANG-but-reasonable salaries without the waterfront San Francisco office.

People might praise Microsoft for moving Edge to Chromium but ultimately it's because Microsoft couldn't compete on web standards and security and didn't want to invest further resources in to something not earning them money.

I believe there will be more options but not sure where from…

Maybe we should all quit http and move to Gemini.

Investors hate this.

I wouldn't be surprised to see Facebook's and Alphabet's stocks rise up the day they announce that they will stop allowing HTPP clients to reach their endpoints :)

However, this is only one of the situations in which, from time to time, "something" pushes me away from Firefox to Chromium. For example for about two weeks now Google Meet is not working properly on Firefox (at least on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed).

Moreover, they just keep needlessly changing things: I use the, now obsolete, "compact" UI mode; for about a month I've started experimenting "tabless" (i.e. one tab per window) but found that there isn't any more this option (I had to use `userChrome.css` to hide the tabs); they keep dropping or breaking `about:config` options; when they add new "features" (like UI buttons) they shove them in my UI and I have to remove it from each and every profile; etc.

Just another product that happens to be open-source, just another product that happens to have a business-model where I get the short end of the stick (mainly the "advertising" incarnation of stick)...

If perhaps websites / webapps would be less demanding on the latest-and-greatest web-feature, we could use simpler browsers, like the ones based on WebKit, or why not even something lightweight as Netsurf...

For example, they could sell more features on top of their password manager and compete with things like Bitwarden.

There are a dozens opportunities like this, the fact that they still go towards ads as a way to make money is what has me pessimistic about their management.

The Chromium monopoly is terrible. Google dropped the `alert()` function from cross-origin iframes starting Chromium 92, which broke a lot of websites like codepen.io. I couldn't see anything in the spec that suggested this change.

I have a bad feeling that this will end up something like the Internet Explorer monopoly back in the mid-2000s.

> Is it possible that some company with deep pockets forks Firefox and hires what it's left from its development team to further develop Firefox and improve its market share?

I totally agree with this. We need some serious competition in the browser space.

I run Firefox because it is the best modern[0] browser from a perspective of privacy. Ublock Origin works best (or only) on Firefox, no other browser has support for containers.

Apple branded itself on privacy, firefox can brand itself on freedom and privacy.

[0]: I am not going to be browsing the internet with either e3 or with Links. Those days are gone for me, go a head and do what you want to do.

[0] https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

But they don’t sell the vpn in my country and they give lockwise away for free but leave it broken on iOS.

Maybe that's even what's happening here. I agree, it's probably not the main issue at hand considering the overall financial situation.

Brave.

What does the foundation do? https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-do/

But I can't use it anymore, because it swaps.

My work laptop has only 8GB, soldered. One day I was shocked to find the NVME had only 50% useful life left. Digging further, FF memory demand was causing paging, on a drive that was so fast I wasn't really bothered by it. Who knows how long that had gone on....

Edge doesn't appear to do this.

I’m all for people being confident and ambitious, and getting paid what they deserve. But just say “I work hard and have a lot of value in my organization”. Don’t try to evoke sympathy for your family. Do a good job, get paid your worth, end of story.

Surely writing an open-source operating system that drives the world cannot be harder than writing a web browser? Or am I missing something?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/portswigger.net/daily-swig/amp/...

However, if they don't find a way to grow revenue, I don't think they'll ever realize their potential. Let it be a lesson, someone has to want to buy what you are selling, or it's just a hobby.

It seems like Firefox is getting more and more into bed with Cloudflare. They of course have their own interests like everyone else, but their interests are not the same as Google's interests. It seems like a development that is better than the current state of things where FF relies on Google for almost all of its revenue.

Deep Pockets: Microsoft gave up on making their own browser. I doubt anyone else will get into this game.

And regarding some comments: Both on mobile and Desktop, FF has almost exclusively improved in recent years, for me. Look and feel is amazing (not a fan of the "compact" removal, though), speed has been great ever since they finally finished Quantum (which many vocal people seem to see as a huge decline, for me the performance made it unusable before).

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...

That's an interesting perspective. Here's my take: developers don't build web sites for self-enjoyment, they build web sites for users. A lot of those users, especially users having the propensity to spend money, are going to access your web site with an iPhone - an iPhone running Safari. My conclusion therefore is if you're interested in making money then you're interested in Safari. It's a simple calculus for a simple man like me.

Here's another way to think of it - if you want your application to run on Apple's phone then you have to pay the 15% Apple tax. That's the price you pay to get access to their market. If you want your web site to run on Apple's phone then you have to pay the "Safari tax." Again, that's the price you pay to get access to their market. Is the price worth it? That's a business decision, based off ROI. Lots of people complain about it but obviously the ROI shows it's worth it.

For company project, I was paid to do it. So I did.

But the low quality browser implementation is pain in the ass to debug. If it didn't exist at first place. My life will be far easier.

Even better, make an optional paid version that has all profits reinvested in the product. I'm ready to pay for a good browser.