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.
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.
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.
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.
> I suspect that most remaining FF users are running it on Linux desktop.
Personally, I run it everywhere: on my phone, on my Windows desktop, on my Linux desktop, on my Linux netbook. Not even because of any particularly strongly held stances - it's just a nice browser that I like and it runs pretty well everywhere (plus the devtools are the most usable for me).
That said, I'm fairly sure that the majority of Linux desktop users are also using Firefox, because it's typically the default browser in most distros.
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.
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.
Defaults can be powerful, but we have the numbers. Edge is the default Windows desktop browser and has 8-10% of the market. Apparently defaults are not more powerful than shipping a shitty product.
But the defaults on the PC and on the mobile are not the same. I can recall that Samsung Android phones shipped with preinstalled Samsung browser and actually a lot of people used Samsung's browser because they just wanted working internet browser.
Tbh I can't recall if at the time Google Chrome was also preinstalled or just "Google" app. But I can say that it wasn't very clear which browser is the default one in which situation. For example when you open a link inside some third party app sometimes it would hook Samsung browser and sometimes Google Chrome. Sometimes Android pop-up would ask me, use Samsung browser/Google Chrome "Just once" or "Always" and if you pick "Always", how do you change it afterwards? Easy solution would be if you prefer one browser over another just uninstall the one you don't like but if it was preinstalled or whatever, it kept coming back.
Eh, in 2023 it feels like most peoples experience with Windows is less “Personal” Computer and more “Appliance work sent me”. I’m pretty sure a lot of that is set by IT.
Who’s to say the EU won’t force Apple to have a “browser selection screen” on first start up where people will pick Chrome because that’s what they use on desktop.
Safari is unfortunately the last bulwark against a Chrome monoculture where Google will decide the future of the web - which they will of course design to assist and enhance their ad selling.
Google won't let you turn off internet permissions on sketchy apps, why does the flashlight app need internet? They know it is needed for ads. Turn off location on android and it warns you won't be able to find your phone. Why can't you quick toggle it off but leave on selectively for find your phone? Ads need it.
I have location off on my Pixel and I block ads with a Pi-hole. I can still find my phone if I log into Chrome on my Linux laptop. You can also do recursive DNS with Unbound and have the phone pointing to your Pi. You can do this with a Pi at home or set up via a droplet on Digital Ocean. You can set it up on DO so you don't have an open DNS resolver hanging out in the cloud.
For as far as I know, Chrome on Android has no support for plugins at all, whereas Safari on iOS does support plugins, including adblockers. I don’t see why Chromium would support plugins on iOS, since they obviously benefit from the fact that you can’t block ads.
And growing. People are waking up. I've been a Pi-hole user for 7 years now. I will never not use something like it. Works on phones, laptops, TVs, everything. Since Pi-hole won't block ads on YouTube, I use uBlock Origin for this on my laptop, PopTube on phone, and for my TV, disabled the NIC, put my Firestick in developer mode, downloaded SmartTubeNext and have not seen an ad on any platform I control in years. I cannot fathom how people deal with ads. SmartTubeNext also blocks sponsors, which are just as bad. The second some YTer starts to shill, that's the second I bail from their channel. Finding indy channels that just provide info is increasingly difficult.
Economically, Mozilla is a subsidiary of Google. Honestly, they keep arguing it is not the case, but they excellently serve as non-threatening competition.
> 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.
What’s the alternative? If Chrome takes over on iOS too then what? Let Google unilaterally decide the future of the web?
Personal information extraction for ad targeting purposes will be on by default and eventually be made very hard to turn off.
New features that’s good for the web but Google doesn’t like because it threatens their ad business or they just don’t like it because of “not invented here” will die in the crib - see JPEGXL; Apple is trying to push for it but if Chrome displaces Safari that hope will be completely extinguished.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, but generally for completely legitimate reasons.
One example is a tool for flashing code to a embedded device. It's aimed at beginners, so not requiring an install is valuable. It means even kids with locked down Chromebooks can try it out.
But the Firefox teams doesn't like the vibes of a web USB API, so it'll be cheome-only indefinitely.
Because a page looking off for a subset of people is worse for the brand then the page not working for them at all. On the other hand, making the page work for everyone (including lynx users?) is simply uneconomical - and when the business tries to optimize for it, you get Java Applets and Flash.
I am an engineering manager in charge of 4 web products. The only problem we have with Firefox is audio/video access on mobile. There are zero problems with the desktop Firefox. There are some problems with the desktop Safari that QA are reporting here and there.
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
Mozilla is a case study in how damaging a CEO can be. She is truly a disaster and I have literally zero confidence in the company's success (or its ability to effect its mission) under her leadership.
1. Compensation is a function of power, not merit.
Merit is a secondary, indirect factor that _can_ have an effect on power, but it's not a necessary condition.
Power often comes from social currency, negotiation, manipulation, wealth and ownership.
2. Power and responsibility are at best loosely correlated.
Often those in power try excuse their obscene privileges by pointing to responsibility. According to this idea, their decisions are force multipliers and they carry a huge risk.
But reality shows time and time again, that this isn't true outside of the most extreme cases. They accumulate power and wealth to an irresponsible degree and make irresponsible decisions all the time without being held accountable. In fact, many get _rewarded_ instead.
---
I want a Mozilla that is the steward of the fastest, most advanced, secure and user respecting browser. I want the best in class dev tools.
I would gladly pay good money for that and I 100% bet that there would be enough people who would too.
What I don't understand is why someone doesn't just, essentially, fork the browser and take over for them. You'd either need someone with enough name recognition that the people tired of Mozilla's incompetence would switch to their fork (and thereby give them the search revenue), or a donation from someone to get them off the ground, but nobody even wants to make the attempt?
There are several Firefox forks of some note: LibreWolf, Palemoon, etc. I think you'll find that maintaining a huge, legacy codebase that supports a rapidly expanding API is significantly more costly than a single engineer's salary.
The point is to ultimately take over the entire thing.
Find some existing pain point that people don't like about Firefox, fix it, make sure people know the better version is available. People switch to it, you get more search revenue and donations, you hire more developers. It's the same way Mozilla operates, but this time you hire competent management so your market share goes up instead of down.
Browsers are a pretty crowded market and they seem to have reached a certain equilibrium of normie-facing features. Unlikely you'll gain traction among regular users who are bagged to use their OS or search vendor's own. Perhaps one could gain Mozilla users, though hard to compete against millions of dollars of development (regardless of whether CEO is taking a chunk or not).
> Browsers are a pretty crowded market and they seem to have reached a certain equilibrium of normie-facing features.
I feel like you could have said the same thing about IE 4.0. It's more like, the incumbents don't care outside of what they need for their own purposes and Mozilla is the one supposed to be doing it but they're not.
Except for the crowded market, but that's not even true now. We've got Firefox and the KHTML lineage and that's about it.
> Unlikely you'll gain traction among regular users who are bagged to use their OS or search vendor's own.
Chrome has 64% market share on desktop despite the proprietors of Edge and Safari having a combined ~90% desktop market share. Firefox itself had 32% market share in 2010. You can get people to switch from the default if they have a reason.
> Perhaps one could gain Mozilla users, though hard to compete against millions of dollars of development (regardless of whether CEO is taking a chunk or not).
The problem is more than the CEO taking too much. They're not actually spending most of the money on making Firefox better.
They should also be spending more of it on marketing, because their funding is directly tied to how many users they have, which keeps going down.
I have been liking Mozilla for a very long time, and even has thoughts of applying to work there. Now I read about that woman and I’m not so sure any longer. Now I see it all as some kind of politics, when you say so beautiful and shiny words, but in truth your actions are the opposite to all that.
Man, I want to be able to work for the Mozilla of yore too. But it simply just isn't what it was, and over the years its true purpose has become more and more clear.
After their alarming treatment of security researchers documented here [0], I've been doubting whether to continue using Firefox at all. For what it's worth I still do, because I think not using Chrome is a fight worth fighting and that alarming behaviour was just from the VPN team, but if any similar behaviour happens with the Firefox team I'm just going to drop it altogether.
I want Mozilla and Firefox to succeed. I want diversity in browser engines. I want to see the culture change happen. It still can! But the debt created with each passing year and each percentage point of market share lost makes it harder and harder.
I went all-in a couple of years ago, switching almost all of my computers from macOS to Linux (Fedora Workstation and Arch), and where I still have macOS, I use Firefox, not even having Chrome installed. Now I doubt it's worth it. But what else do we have these days? Safari? (Limited to just one OS.)
I remember these old-days of Linux with other browsers pre-installed. Like Konqueror (I see it's still in development), or others even more niche ones. Cannot even remember their names.
- The only non-Chrome browser available across 3 operating systems I use.
- The only mobile browser that supports extensions.
These two alone make it an objectively a better solution for me than Chrome or Safari, regardless of how I feel about any of them. If I was on iOS and didn't run Linux on my personal computer, then Safari might've been a worthy alternative. Since I'm not, Firefox is really the only one that satisfies both of those criteria, no "ideological" reasons necessary.
If those arguments are supposed to be slam dunks, then it's probably worth being pedantic about the second - standard Firefox, as downloaded from app stores, allows fewer than 2 dozen officially vetted Add-ons to be installed. [1]
It's not a great state of affairs. This is speaking as someone who's used Firefox as primary browser for many, many years.
Is there any other way of running full uBO on a phone?
Open a website in Firefox, click on three dots, click on "install", and you have an ad-free version of the app you'd otherwise find in the Play Store.
Just that one extension alone makes Firefox objectively better than Chrome or any of its Android forks. It is a slam dunk. Having all extensions available is a nice cherry on top, but no other desktop extension is as important as uBO.
I switched from iOS to Android so I could use Firefox, but looked for alternatives when their extension support got so bad. Kiwi Browser has been a huge improvement over Firefox for me: supports extensions, fast, frequent updates. I wouldn't recommend Firefox to anyone, but I would recommend Kiwi Browser to everyone. I really wish I could find another open source Chromium-based Android browser that supported extensions though.
It's still worth it because you really don't even have to think about it.
I don't use any Google products/services except when I need to at work. Firefox is perfectly fine for now; I agree that Mozilla's future is concerning but there is absolutely no downside to sticking with Firefox for now.
It's too bad that Mozilla doesn't push for more adoption; the vast majority of users would never know the difference between Firefox and Chrome once they're browsing. It's not like it's an inferior product.
I’ve never seen an alert either, but I’ve seen plenty of sites and pages that only work in Chrome. Just yesterday I was trying to pay a credit card bill and the page kept breaking in Firefox. Out of desperation I tried it in Chrome and it worked.
I've almost exclusively seen them on "luxury" apartment websites, where they're completely ignorable . oh, and tidepool, a diabetes data visualization website, where it is actually required.
IMHO, Safari has been consistently good for 20 years, and the need for defacto iOS support, and defacto chrome desktop support means the desktop version is generally supported most places.
I tend to use Firefox elsewhere too, primarily because of my disdain/distrust for/of Google and Microsoft. I know the WebKit/Konqueror relationship soured after a few years of Apple giving them massive, untenable patch sets, but haven’t kept up with their development. In the early 2000s it was really impressive what they were doing compared to the Mozilla bohemoth of the day.
I also find it sad that Opera and other implementations are out of the running. I’m sure one day some Blink challenger will arrive, just like some Gecko challenger arrived, just like some IE challenger arrived, but table stakes are so much higher than they were 15 years ago.
I just run Degoogled Chromium forks (Cromite/Thorium) these days. Maybe its still Chrome underneath, but if I'm blocking Google Ads and their native browser tracking, at least its still a middle finger to Google's business model.
For the entire life of Mozilla, the tech has been fantastic and the leadership... suboptimal. It's always been my greatest frustration with them, they're permanently unable to accept and change from criticism. They simply ignore it or brush it off.
Alarming treatment of security researchers made me think threats. Not communicating is bad. But is it more alarming than how Google handled the libwebp vulnerability for instance?
2. It's a false premise. We talk about bad CEOs all the time, especially egregiously bad ones. I saw only just the other day comments on the Yahoo CEO.
What a strange reply. Most people on this site do know their CEO and are able and willing to leave jobs when they disagree with their direction. I have done it myself.
Firefox users are known for defending it as a moral alternative to Chrome even though currently it is so behind in feature and performance. It makes no sense to defend Firefox if it is just a cash cow for some disconnected-from-reality leeches.
Even if it were actually worse of from a technical standpoint, do you not see the huge value of an independent implementation of the most crucial platform of humanity? Should it really be controlled by a single giga-corp?
I saw the huge value of it when it started and for a long time, now this is just an excuse for the privileged ones milking Mozilla to continue doing so. The market being controlled by a single giga-corp or shared with a paid fake competitor I would prefer the giga-corp so it becomes more obvious that we need to fund a real alternative, not waste money on what Mozilla became.
I use Firefox everywhere, MacOS, windows, iPad iOS. Not sure what features I am missing out on. I don’t use any plugins, mostly happy with performance, no complaints about current feature set regarding tabs. I really don’t have a wishlist of things I’d like to see improved. Faster and less resource consumption would be nice, but not super urgent. What am I missing?
You actually use safari on iPad and iOS, as it only has browser skins with a safari widget. (JIT compilation is a more restricted permission not given to AppStore apps)
The performance is fine on desktop, maybe even on par with Chrome. It used to be worse but nowadays I can't see any performance difference between Firefox and Chrome on desktop.
The performance on Android is garbage though :(.
The feature set is worse in some parts, better in others. Better UI customization, container tabs is cool, and some extended APIs for extensions. Meanwhile, Chrome has support for more exotic web APIs (e.g. WebUSB, filesystem access). So it's your choice.
Mozilla has occasionally seemed to have inconsistent values/behavior, for a long time, which has made me nervous. But some of their stuff is still the best starting point for some public interest technology goals. So I keep working with it, and promoting it (though not as strongly as I have in the past).
I've suspected that their mix of people includes (but not limited to):
* many very capable true-believers in their ostensible mission, like we'd expect of Mozilla (though they can't all have perfect morale right now);
* some people who've gone through, or are going through, a rough time, and are trying to use Mozilla to solve problems that they see elsewhere in the world (even if off-mission, but other people are sympathetic and want to help, so it's complicated);
* maybe some true-believers who have to make hard compromises to keep Mozilla alive, somewhat quietly (and maybe it's hard to know which compromises to make, and to not lose the way at some point); and
* people who'd actually much rather have their counterpart roles at a FAANG or other prestitious tech company (and so aren't true-believers in the mission, and will tend to think and act with their true thinking, with impact to vision and decisions, and to leadership of the true-believers).
Maybe some key people span multiple categories.
This isn't a satisfying grand unified theory of all of Mozilla's behavior, and I'm sure there's insiders with better insights.
Lunduke has his issues but I don't actually think there's are massive issues with this post. He clearly has idealistic issues with the political spending but it's hard to disagree that $500k on McKenzie Mack Group is probably not the best way to spend money...
FWIW I think a few of these likely have perfectly reasonable innocent explanations like consultants having a company they don't bother branding rather taking payments personally (hence hard to find specifics on them - they brand themselves rather than their company) and I find it hard to believe that Lunduke didn't consider this possibility, but he asks nothing that doesn't deserve an answer.
What's specifically wrong with this post besides the author?
One example is that he first explains that there are two different Mozillas, the corporation and the foundation, and then proceeds to ignore that for the rest of the peice when it's rhetorically convenient to do so.
He bags on "Mozilla" for claiming that they relied on donations to function on a Foundation donation page, using the total revenue from both orgs as proof that wasn't true, but didn't bother to drill down into the Foundation's income specifically to see if the statement was true in the actual context that it was being made.
Which is a common theme in a lot of his work. If he has an axe to grind (and he clearly does if you're familiar with his comments about Mozilla going back like 5+ years), his journalistic integrity takes a nosedive. Remember when he claimed that Mozilla funded terrorists because they donated to a privacy focused email service, and some antifa group he disliked used that email service? I do.
Mostly, knowing how completely insane he has been on this and similar topics in the past makes me assume that he's probably as least being misleading now.
> One example is that he first explains that there are two different Mozillas, the corporation and the foundation, and then proceeds to ignore that for the rest of the peice when it's rhetorically convenient to do so.
Charitably I'd assume the quoted reason in the article is the reason:
> In fact, the “not-for-profit” and “for-profit” aspects of Mozilla are so tightly intertwined that the auditors report makes a point of calling the collective group of three organizations simply “Mozilla”… and reports on their finances as a single entity.
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.
Interesting, I didn’t know that Baker was paid by the corporation. American 501c3 non-profit law is deeply flawed and, though orgs aren’t allowed to generate profit per se, they can pay their staff salaries as high as they want. If the board consists of the staff’s friends, eventually the staff view their positions as a sinecure and put in the minimum effort necessary to keep their jobs. So, I assumed that what happened with Firefox's director was the same corrupt non-profit thing.
It doesn't seem to be the case that you can pay 501c3 execs exuberant salaries.
This site looks to have a more realistic view of those tax rules. [1]
If she's getting that salary she must be able to defend it as reasonable based on comparable salaries in the industry, the income she's able to secure for the company, etc. So if her pay seems like a lot, it's probably because the tech sector overall is paid too much in your opinion.
Is there any evidence that's a problem that actually happens often, as opposed to just being something you can easily imagine happening?
I've known quite a lot of CEOs, of small and big for-profits and charities too, and anecdotally they've all been some of the hardest working people I know. There's many complaints to make against many CEOs (including some of the ones I've known), often including taking obscene salaries while under-paying workers, or other problematic management decisions, but in my experience laziness just doesn't seem common - in exec levels generally as well as chief ones.
If you want to be lazy and paid well, there are easier jobs with less constant security than being a CEO!
It happens often enough. I don’t want to give exact names, as that would possibly dox me, but 1) as an idealistic young person I worked for a time in the central office of an org where both ordinary staff and management admitted that they had long since lost interest in the mission, but the position was comfortable and required little actual work, and since the board consisted of some pretty acquiescing and clueless people, they were able to ensure regular pay increases. 2) One 501c3 I have been active in, dedicated to a certain hobby, is currently riven by scandal because the board hired a new director who, according to tax filings, gets a big salary for only a few hours of work a week, and this is only one of several business ventures she has going on, and the others look like outright grifts.
I think the biggest mistake they made was not succeeding in convincing edge to use Firefox's backend. It was such an obvious move but Microsoft instead have opted for the embrace technique.
Microsoft wouldn't have anything to gain by forking Firefox, as Chrome was already dominant and Chromium is open source, with more resources going into its development.
Microsoft dropped IExplorer because they were far behind in their implementation and by embracing Chromium they short-circuited the development needed to produce a credible alternative. They had nothing to gain from Firefox and everything to lose, actually.
I'm absolutely disgusted every time i'm reminded of just how obscene the yearly pay for that class of people, and how often they are just straight up psychopaths.
They rely on nepotistic networks of power, scamming, and straight up financial crime.
Unless you yourself built the company, or pulled some rare actually great scheme to elevate it, everything above 1MM a year is stealing from other peoples wages, especially in orgs like this.
I wonder why people haven't pulled a french revolution when there's countless examples of this type of siphoning everywhere these days.
These people don't give a fuck, they are twofaced, they lie all day long while they take your money and use it to buy wine cellars, yachts and propaganda to keep everyone down - all disguised by buzzwords like "open", "green", "patriotic" or whatever while they tank the great work done non psychopaths.
Excluding Netflix as it's irrelevant technology-wise and including Microsoft, the difference is that those companies are offering a wide array of core products (operating systems, developer tools, server hosting, smartphones, etc) which most people on earth consume. They make a lot of money and continue to do so.
On the other hand what is Mozilla offering? A (now) obscure web browser that has run an Google charity for decades. It's painfully obvious that Mozilla isn't playing in the same category.
Mozilla makes and manages many other software titles besides Firefox.
Rust, NSS, etc. Just think about all the current software built on Rust. That alone is a huge contribution to the tech industry and to society, more indirectly.
If you're like, at a very senior level it's not unusual. But that also comes with a level of accountability to stakeholders that Baker demonstrably does not have.
How long do you imagine someone in such a position at a FAANG company would last if they were getting Baker's market share numbers?
Yet how much of Sundar's time is spent on Chrome? Then what's that percentage of his compensation? My guess is it's likely millions more than any Mozilla CEO. Google is also under investigation for buying browser defaults and probably should be under investigation for bundling.
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.
> 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.
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.
> Really dumb aside that shouldn't have made it past the editor
Why? It was 100% intentional and the reason I included it is that I have often seen this raised as an alleged reason for Mozilla not more aggressively competing with Google, notably here on HN.
I don't believe it for a minute. That is specifically why I said "surely not".
> (not least of all because of the insane rendering of "GoLang").
"golang" is one of its official names and that is because the bare word "go" is open to misinterpretation and is hard to Google. The caps were merely for emphasis, and also, interCaps help screen-reader users.
> This overstates Mozilla's involvement in Thunderbird. The relationship is basically ceremonial at this point.
[Citation needed]
> The way this is written makes it sound like there was a delay to fulfill the promise.
There was.
> 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.
Arguably true but, I submit, tangential to the actual point. The decision to O/S it being the same time as the Netscape 5 rewrite was a deeply stupid idea, but also understandable.
However, it was some 25 years ago now, so I didn't and don't think it merits more than a single-line passing mention and was not -- and is not -- worth this level of hair-splitting.
I mean this is ancient history and I really don't know why you are so bothered about it, but as I recall, Netscape was unwilling and unable to open the source code for 3.x or 4.x and so rather than spend all the time and effort to clean it up for publication, it chose to rewrite it.
So, as I said: the reasoning was unfortunate but understandable.
> I really don't know why you are so bothered about it
Drop the ad hominem if you want to have a serious discussion. (In the future, that is. We won't be having a discussion here, for the reasons stated. You can email me if you want, but I'm going to impose a mandatory 1-month delay for reflection and require a simple affirmation that the purpose will be a genuine attempt to develop the facts rather than "winning" the conversation. Changing the subject, diverting attention with weak attempts at petty retorts, etc. are going to be strictly off-limits.)
There was no ad hom in my reply, and I don't feel any need for further argument, thanks.
My article had plenty of references and citations for the points I wanted to make. If you wish to falsify it, then you need to reply with your own citations. You have yet to do so, and what you claim are significant issues are, AFAICS, trivial cavils.
I can't answer that question without understanding why you think the relationship you're describing necessarily makes it one that isn't ceremonial (which is what you seem to be implying). You go first.
I don't understand. If you think a fully owned subsidiary can have a "basically ceremonial" to the parent foundation, then what kind of relationship would be "not ceremonial"?
For what it's worth, Firefox is also developed by a fully owned subsidiary of the Mozilla foundation. Do you also think the relationship between Firefox and Mozilla is "basically ceremonial"?
> If you think a fully owned subsidiary can have a "basically ceremonial" to the parent foundation, then what kind of relationship would be "not ceremonial"?
One in which the latter's involvement with the former (including influence on and influence from) amounts to substantially more than letting one use the other's name. The relationship between Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Foundation, for example, is not merely ceremonial.
> For what it's worth, Firefox is also developed by a fully owned subsidiary of the Mozilla foundation. Do you also think the relationship between Firefox and Mozilla is "basically ceremonial"?
I'm still not sure what you want to express. The CEO of MZLA technologies is appointed by, and reports to the Mozilla board of directors. Of course the Mozilla Foundation has influence on the Thunderbird project. Moreover, the employees of MZLA join Mozilla's yearly "all-hands", together with everyone else working for Mozilla. The progress of the Thunderbird project is reported at Mozilla monthly internal meetings. I have a hard time understanding what else you'd expect to call the relationship "not ceremonial". MZLA Technologies and the Mozilla Corporation are different, but their relationship to the foundation is rather similar.
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.
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.
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
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
If you want to argue that they should have done it themselves rather than in partnership, or bought out Scroll, then sure, I agree. Especially given how it turned out after Twitter bought Scroll.
> 1) Mozilla does have alternate sources of revenue, like Pocket and Mozilla VPN.
Not really though. All alternate sources are usually less then 5%. [1] As of 2021, they made 73% of total revenue from Google. [2] Mozilla VPN? You mean the one that refuses to fix CVEs? [3] Yikes. No thanks.
Those comments broke the site guidelines so badly that I need to let you know that we ban accounts that post like that, and ask you not to do it again—no matter how badly someone else's comments are or you feel they are. We're really trying to avoid having this site burn itself to a crisp, which is what unchecked flamewar leads to.
I prefer to post on the site—not to shame anybody, but because it's important for the community to see how HN is moderated and even to be aware that it is moderated. (It's surprising how many regular users don't know that.)
I agree, I can get snarky. Although I don't quite agree with the strictness of the rules, this site is one of the most unique I have found, so something must be going right.
Brave has the same user agent as Chrome to avoid being treated differently or blocked outright because of the built-in adblocker and anti-tracking features. It counts towards Chrome in web analytics.
We hide in Chrome's user-agent (too many sites break if you vary it but otherwise are Chromium-based). We're detectable by many means but that site and the other ones such as statcounter do not count us. I post our monthly user counts on "X", I just did September's stats. Here is living thread of threads:
Firefox's fall has more to do with expiring browser ballot regulation and Google's increasingly aggressive advertising of Chrome than leadership at Mozilla. No one can compete against the billions Google pumped into Chrome development and marketing. Google is a gatekeeper to the modern web. Even Apple struggles to stay relevant.
These are very important factors, of course. But Mozilla could’ve at least mitigated the disaster. Even amongst engineers Firefox was a hard sell for many years. It took me a long time but even I jumped ship eventually, despite being a die-hard fan with a couple of contributions to Firefox. For a veeeeery long time Firefox was just atrocious to use. And once you’ve moved browsers, there’s not a lot of incentive to go back.
They're talking about KaiOS [0], which is a moderately popular mobile OS (bigger than iOS) in many non-western countries. It's been adopted for super budget phones by Jio, for example.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
It may be odd, but bookmarklets are the quickest way to 'mod' a browser session, and a welcome leftover from a simpler time (for now even working on some mobile browsers).
For instance, I have one setup that after activation, allows me to highlight text on a page, which is then automaticaaly dated, annotated with metadata and copied to my clipboard, saving a lot of keystrokes and touch movements. Another parses the .bib metadata found in Google Scholar results, and prettyfies it to a markdown suitable format.
I would dread losing these simple scripts that can be run across all my devices.
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.
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".
You should be able to work around this by changing the "Homepage and new windows" setting from "Blank Page" to "Custom URL" and setting it to "about:newtab", and then change "New tabs" to "Blank page".
I don't know if this helps in your specific case, but I also fell prey to that "no more javascript: in bookmarks" ... enhancement ... and I was able to work around it via a data: url <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Basics_of_...> wrapping the relevant JS in a <script> tag, e.g.
The only reason I'm on Firefox is more multi-row tabs -- a workflow I got used to many years ago when that was a Firefox plugin. Now you can accomplish it by customizing the browser with CSS.
But every 10 or so versions of Firefox breaks this and I have to seek out a fix.
> 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)
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.
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.
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#
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.
Go was very much intended as a systems programming language. It's literally in the initial announcement[1]: "Go is a great language for systems programming with support for multi-processing, a fresh and lightweight take on object-oriented design, plus some cool features like true closures and reflection."
The whole cloud bonanza came later. A lot of Go programmers I know also don't really like it (myself included).
But we agree that Rust is purposeful closer to C and Go is purposeful closer to Java / C#? Systems can surely be build by all of them. My memory of the origins of Go was in building services but not low level drivers or renderers.
When going systems programming, the differences between Java and C# become significant, specifically, Java lacks zero/low-cost interop, ability to work with C structs directly and does not allow you to directly port unsafe pointers-based code which you can do with C# and Rust. In this regard, C# is much closer to C++ and Rust with GC attached on top and certain opinionated choices rather than being a high level language completely abstracted away via VM.
Indeed true. One of the unique and underrated strengths of C#. But "System Programming" is not exactly operating system or fundamental service writing but much more often your stock ticker broker or WhatsApp backend. The terminology is very misleading IMHO.
"Systems programming" is an ill-defined term and different people seem to mean different things with it. I think the thing you're getting at is that Go has a GC and Rust doesn't. That's indeed a meaningful difference with lots of implications, both good and bad for both, which doesn't mean that Go is unsuitable for all systems programming.
Running programs with Java and C# (OpenJDK and Mono at least) is nothing like running a Go (or Rust) programs. You can't distinguish between a Go or Rust binary at a glance, but you can spot a Java or C# program easily.
In many ways Go is significantly more similar to C than Rust is, and in other ways Rust is more similar.
I agree that the word "System Programming" is really bad.
C# and Java modern ahead of time compilation, tree shaking and linking should make it similar to Go at that sense (as in single file, no runtime, etc). There is still a lot to do but they are reaching that playing field. Not motivated by the servers but by apps and cloud startup times I guess.
Right, I don't really keep up with the latest changes – generally running Java/C# has been a bit of a hassle, similar to Python or Ruby. e.g. I had to manually download .NET things from the Microsoft website, and keep my DOTNETHOME directory around as a runtime dependency, etc. Nothing like "just download this binary and that's all you need".
This shouldn't be the case for .NET. You only have to download the tooling to build it (which can usually be done through package manager of your choice).
To run the built binaries, whether to require the runtime (by not including it in the executable) or not is a choice.
These can be configured via .csproj properties too, there are multiple ways to set those depending on your needs. If you don't have any specific dynamically linked native dependencies included with your project, all of the options will be a single executable that you can just run. Do note that to use AOT on macOS you will need .NET 8 (right now it's RC1/preview).
In general, dotnet CLI commands are similar cargo (it had some of the features earlier, some later): dotnet new, build, add, publish, etc.
Right; to be honest I'm not a C# expert, I just did some stuff with RimWorld modding a while back, and when I did that I had to keep all that around for some tooling (specifically: ilspycmd) or it didn't work, but looks like I just couldn't figure it out. Checking my notes I used "dotnet tool install ilspycmd -g" with .NET 6 for this, but looks like I should have used "publish".
I've saved your comment here to look at if I go back to this in the future; thanks!
Not to mention there’s no business competition between free languages. Google, like all other major corps, are looking at Rust and want it to succeed. It is not “threatening” Go in any way (whatever that means – it’s not like Google is dependent on outside contributions for Go).
It will not surprise you that I think you're dead wrong.
Notably you have failed to register that what I am doing in that paragraph is attempting (possibly badly) to rebut this surprisingly widespread allegation.
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... – but I can't help feel a more proactive and public approach might be needed to evolve and grow their market share.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Part of the answer is that people now are forgetting just how much goodwill Google had with the tech folks around the time Google came out with Chrome. It was open source! You could easily run it without Google! It was a titan squaring up against Internet Explorer, that did horrible things like not follow web standards or invent its own. And it was really really good.
It took a handful of years for tech folks to see Google (and Chrome) the way they do now.
This feels largely correct to me and I was in the same camp at the time re: Google sentiment. “Google kills products” has been a meme for so long that I had kinda forgotten.
It's one of my great regrets that I believed for any second that Google was different and the "Don't be evil." was a real promise. It felt like the internet coming from the status quo, but the status quo was just absorbing the internet.
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.
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.
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.
I still use Firefox, I find its UI prettier than Chrome's these days... but I wish it handled many tabs better. Google's solution of squishing the tabs until only the favicons are visible seems so obviously better than the horizontal scroll with wide tabs Firefox does.
I agree with the sibling comment; I think Chrome's solution is terrible. If you have a lot of tabs open from the same website (i.e. with the same favicon), then finding the right tab becomes really tedious. And, even if all the favicons are different, I don't necessarily remember which favicon corresponds to which page.
I can't really compare this with Firefox's native solution though, because I use Sidebery (and I used tree-style tabs before that).
I performed a test again. This is on a 1920x1080p screen, which is pretty standard. Firefox progressively shrinks tabs, until there are 21 or so. Then, you can scroll the tab bar left and right with the scrollwheel.
Chrome continues shrinking tabs, until there are 90 or so. Then you can switch tabs with the scrollwheel or with the drop-down arrow on the right. However, it will fail to display some of the most recently opened tabs in the tab bar.
My workflow usually consists in opening a new tab for a new activity, for instance search the web for a product category. Then open multiple tabs from here, and multiple other tabs from each, while searching more and more precise information (like spec sheets, or digging into some documentation). I progressively walk back, closing the tabs as I am done researching a topic. This process is very analogous to a mind map (and it's a representation I wish was available in browsers, together with annotations, a bit like pearltrees). Tree-style tabs come close enough, as you can collapse a group or close it at once.
The reason why Firefox's approach work is analogous to the principle of locality[1]: data that needs to be frequently accessed tends to be close together (in time and space). By opening new tabs close to the current one (middle-click a link or the new tab button), they stay close to each other, and scrolling the tab bar allows to shift your context window. It works quite well.
Now, Firefox has one big advantage compared to Chrome: its address bar is very effective for jumping to an open tab far away (or some matching browser history/bookmarks). Chrome probably has a conflict of interest here where they want you to search the web first. If you want to jump back to a topic 40 tabs to the left, you don't have to scroll, just type in some keywords in the address bar.
Lastly, and that works with both browsers (still thanks to this locality principle), you can shift-select multiple tabs to move them to a new window to form a "tab group" substitute. Though in practice, I just tend to use private windows.
> Many of us don't have enough horizontal space on all their machines to comfortably waste a bunch of it on a tree style tabs sidebar.
Now, I find this argument to be weak. The only screen I have trouble using it is my vertical 1360x768p screen (so 768 horizontal pixels). Most screens will otherwise fit this quite comfortably, and have more horizontal than vertical real estate. The Tree Style Tab extension, by default, is toggled with F1, so I just hide it on that screen, and bring it up when needed. Thinking about this, some auto-hiding panel could work very well here.
I am conceding the fact that my initial reply was exaggerated. After testing this again, Chromium's usability threshold is more around 30 tabs. And given the RAM chromium requires for maintaining numerous tabs, I am wondering if it isn't by design.
To summarize, well, it probably depends on what you are used to... You wouldn't catch me dead on either hill though.
Google home page, the most visited site in the world, had an ad spot for chrome inviting you to install it. Not the search result page, no. The home page, the empty white one with only one field.
This spot has never been available for any non google product, BTW.
Every time you visited a google property with Firefox you had this banner that said “the web is better with chrome” (or something) and had a download button.
Every single person I set up with Firefox (parents, non tech savvy fiends) ended up replacing it with chrome. When I asked they said it was because “google said it was better.”
In addition to actual advantages others have mentioned, google paid to bundle Chrome with things like Java upgrades (IIRC) and SourceForge downloads. I suspect this had as much impact on moving the needed for "normies" as any actual benefits.
Do you remember what you found better about it? Speed? the UI? Definitely believe that it was better (people switched to it fast!) but I'm curious about the details.
It had, and to this very second continues to have, world-class dev-tools. Which is doubly ironic because I believe that the dev-tools are an independent open source repo from Chromium itself but what I can't say with certainty is how many hooks are required into Chromium itself that would prevent adoption by Firefox
I can't recall so much from the early days but modern Chromium releases are packed with "shiny new toys" that the web-dev crews love. I deeeeeeeeeply appreciate that saying such a thing further entrenches the "Chromium is eating the world" perspective, but I'm just pointing out that web-devs love shiny toys and Chromium seems to ship them on the regular
So, too, do they ship an unholy number of C++ footguns, but omelet-breaking-eggs-etc-etc :-/
I did some experiments with webauth a couple months ago and I was pleasantly surprised that chrome has an authenticator emulator built into dev tools! I mainly use firefox but I had to install chromium for this feature alone, it's super helpful.
When Chrome first launched it was actually quite rough. There are some rose tinted glasses on this thread. It was Windows only, lacked basic features like printing, had no extensions system and had no few site compatibility bugs. The primary "features" that set it apart were all non-functionals like performance, security and the skyline tab UI which was nice but other browsers had tabs too. Oh, there was Incognito Mode, which was a nice improvement over other browser's history clearing UI.
It got some initial launch attention but then usage fell a lot (I was at Google at the time), and plateaued for a long time whilst the team fixed bugs, ported to other platforms and caught up on the feature set. It took a lot of belief by Google to continue funding it during these quiet years when relatively few people used it. One of the biggest struggles the Chrome marketing team faced turned out to be that nobody even knew what a browser was let alone why they'd consider switching to a different one.
Still, the team didn't give up. They just plugged away at it, year after year. They caught up on features, added a thoughtful/controllable extensions API and were careful to stop power users doing things that would accidentally trash performance, like opening billions of tabs or installing extensions that trashed the browser internals (a particular problem for Firefox).
At the time for me I had been running Firefox for years but it was kinda slow and an absolute memory hog, I don’t remember specifics but I remember having to constantly close it on my 4gb ram computer. When Chrome came out it’s big thing from what I remember was it was fast and lightweight. I remember installing it and it was night and day, I could have multiple tabs open with out my computer paging memory to disk and everything felt so snappy.
With all that said I think somewhere around 2015 or 2016 I switched back to Firefox because Chrome had become a CPU and memory hog while Firefox had stepped up its game and was a lot faster and more lightweight than Chrome.
Chrome was noticeably faster, not just the benchmark but actual usage , in both startup time and ajax sites. It crashed less often, and when it crashed, usually it took down only a single tab instead of the entire browser. The UI was more minimal and clean.
It was superior in almost every way. All other browsers had to play the catch-up for a while - especially the performance.
Chrome has a lot of little things that makes it feel smoother for me, e.g. the browser launches a little bit faster, closing multiple tabs is accessible in one menu click (compared to a second level menu in Firefox), easier access to create and switch between profiles, incognito window that is visually distinct from a regular window, etc.
None of the little things are absolute must-haves, but the little things do add up.
Lots of good reasons already mentioned, but there were 2 killer reasons for me: developer tools and extensions. I really wanted to stick with Firefox, but as someone working on the web, it was an appalling experience. And then Chrome just kept getting better and better extensions that I couldn’t find elsewhere.
Obviously Firefox becoming much slower and heavier over time, whilst introducing anti-features didn’t help either.
I despise Google now, so I don’t use Chrome anymore. But I’m not going back to Firefox either. The trust battery towards Mozilla never got back from zero.
I did say “then Chrome…”. Over time I found more and more extensions being Chrome-only. This before the manifest harmonization, of course.
A quick example that comes to mind is The Great Suspender (the tracking-free community edition). Firefox’s alternatives were really not very good. (I’m not sure how it is now.)
Saying then Chrome did not communicate it wasn't supposed to answer how Chrome overtook Firefox.
What was really not very good about Firefox's alternatives to The Great Suspender? I read some opinions now. All but 1 recommended alternatives even in Chrome because The Great Suspender could lose tabs if the browser crashed. And tabs suspended with it couldn't be restored without it. The other preferred The Great Suspender because it let them activate a tab without loading it.
But the question was why Chrome beat out Firefox the way that it did. I think Chrome overtook Firefox before Chrome extensions overtook Firefox extensions.
Google has more revenue and it engaged in aggressive anticompetitive practices, like breaking compatibility with competing browsers on its own popular web properties. I assume there is some relationship between Google and the US security machine that gives this situation a pass.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
> Mozilla, please stop aping Chrome. Copying is rarely the way to win big. The Australis Chrome-like theme in Firefox 29 annoyed users and was a driving force behind Pale Moon. Firefox Quantum killed XUL addons, and drove The Reg FOSS desk to Waterfox Classic.
Hmmm. I see what you mean, but that was not my intention. The meaning the author -- me -- intended was:
"A drove people to B. It didn't drive me to it, but C drove me to D."
Expanding that:
1. Stop copying Chrome.
2. Australis copied Chrome and that drove a whole fork because so many people hated it.
[Full stop.]
3. Also, comparably, for the author, Quantum killed XUL and that is why the author switched away from Firefox.
However, I note that the marketing claim from Mozilla was that Quantum used the same type of extensions that Chrome used ("webextensions") and that this would be good for the Firefox add-on ecosystem. This is demonstrably false, as I laid out in the Waterfox article which this story links to, but it was what Mozilla claimed at the time.
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.
One can argue that if you don't want ads, and you don't want to pay for a subscription, then maybe you shouldn't use that website.
Because continued use is just like software piracy. It's imoral because you're getting subsidized by those playing fair, but also because alternatives can't thrive unless you choose to vote with your wallet or eyeballs. It's the same reason piracy was imoral, as it kept people using the incumbents, instead of using alternatives that were open-source.
I have considered that actually but it would mean I have to give them my credit card thereby tying my real identity to the Google/YouTube account. I might consider it if they sold those gift cards that you can buy with cash at a convenience store.
This is a good reason, but it's niche, and such level of privacy isn't sustainable for most people. Because they are Google, and they know the location of your IP address better than anyone (since they have Wi-fi info, too), so if you can't trust them at all and fear repercussions, you'd better access them via Tor or some VPN you can trust.
Personally, I trust my local authorities, since I'm an EU citizen and the GDPR applies. I know this may be naive, but Google has implemented many changes in response to the GDPR already, and for me it's the only alternative short of avoiding them completely.
Speaking of Chromium, forks still exist, like Vivaldi or Brave, and they ship with ads blockers that are not subject to the limitations of Manifest v3.
Google tracking me and figuring out my identity is one thing and me giving my real life identity to them on a platter is another. There is zero doubt in the latter.
Again, the solution is simple, sell YouTube gift cards. Steam can do it. I think iTunes does it. It should be trivial for a company of Google’s size.
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.
"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.
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
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?
Mozilla Corporation paid Mozilla Foundation $20 million in 2021. 3.5% of revenue approximately. And received trademark licenses and IT services. I am skeptical changing IT vendors and rebranding would be beneficial.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
"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]."
>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.
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.