I don’t know that this idea would work for literally just Firefox, but I strongly believe that people would be willing to pay for a Firefox fork that has a laser focus on fit and finish and poweruser features. Think a “Firefox Pro” of sorts.
Why do I think this? Three reasons:
- It elevates the browser into a higher category of tool, where currently Firefox inhabits the same space as OS-bundled calculators and text editors, making it being paid more justifiable in peoples’ minds.
- Firefox has long had issues with rough edges and papercuts, which I believe frustrates users more than Mozilla probably realizes.
- Much of Firefox’s original claim to fame came from its highly flexible, power user friendly nature which was abandoned in favor of chasing mass appeal.
If someone was building "Arc but for Firefox" I'd gladly pay for that. Firefox is, because of its position in the market, incapable of doing anything broadly interesting that's not "Be as Chrome-like as possible." They sneak in features that are nice, but I simply don't think we'll ever see Mozilla put out something that does anything that really sets Firefox apart. We'll only ever just get marginally better privacy settings or whatever the next Pocket ends up being.
Browsers are _user agents_. I want my user agent to serve me by being as frictionless as possible when I use it. I simply can't accept that what Chrome/Firefox/Edge/Safari/Opera have provided as the standard web browsing experience for the last two decades is a global maximum. We use the web in very different ways than we did a generation ago and yet Firefox 136 looks impressively similar to both Firefox 36 and Firefox 3.6. Take the gradients away from Chrome 1.0 and you could convince me a screenshot of it was their next version. If the browser is a tool, it's astounding that the tool has hardly evolved _at all_.
I miss the days when Opera did all sorts of weird and wacky shit. Opera 9 was a magical time, and brought us things like tabs and per-tab private browsing and a proper download manager and real developer tools. Firefox should be that, but they're too scared to actually do anything that isn't going to be a totally safe business decision.
Totally agree. Even core features like bookmarks have barely improved in decades. All the emphasis has been on skin-deep UI refreshes, gimmicks, ways to monetize the user, and ways for developers to control the user’s experience.
I used to be a big fan of OmniWeb back in its day because it pushed the envelope in adding utility and emphasized its role as a powerful tool that put the user in control. It included things like per-page user CSS years before userstyles became popular in Firefox and Chrome.
It was paid however, and at least in that point in time there was little appetite for a paid browser, and so now it’s a hobby project that Omni Group devs occasionally tinker on and hasn’t been actively maintained in some time.
100%. I would say, even on the UI/UX side - Microsoft(!) has done a way better job on Edge (even though it's Chromium), with lots of new features on tab grouping, split screen browsing, note taking, syncing, and app integrations. Love it or hate it, at least they are doing some new features.
Bookmarks and tabs are a good example of how easily you could accidentally step on the core userbases' toes. There are absolutely stellar tab and bookmark addons that essentially completely change how those systems work. They are also vastly more complex (but in a way that serves powerusers).
If firefox changes either feature in an attempt to get closer to those tools they risk breaking those very addons (leading to pissed off users and devs). Likewise if they change in another direction.
The only real solution that avoids that would be to promote some addons to first class implementations and allow you to mix and match them. But that of course increases maintenance burden permanently and even then it's likely to piss off some chunk of users.
Both tabs and bookmarks currently work well in the simple usecase and can be extended to the power users' use cases. There are unfortunately though a ton of other things that take priority over that. Namely rustifying code (to reduce maintenance burden and reduce bugs) and maintaining feature parity with chrome.
The thing with extensions like Tree Style Tabs and Sidebery is that nice as they may be, they’re awkwardly bolted onto the browser’s UI and the best you as a user can do to try to fix that is to hack on your userchrome and then pray that your hacks won’t be broken in some upcoming browser update.
Personally I think the solution is to treat mainline browsers like Firefox as reference implementations that several highly specialized forks are developed on top of. Only users with the most general/basic of needs would use the “vanilla” version of the browser, while everybody else would have a favorite fork that fits their needs very closely.
Arc and Zen are a decent example of this model in play. They’re very opinionated and not everybody’s cup of tea, but that’s fine, because there’s literally every other browser if something more conducive to general audiences is what you’re looking for. Browsers don’t need to be one size fits all and in fact I think are being held back by trying to be that way.
> The thing with extensions like Tree Style Tabs and Sidebery is that nice as they may be, they’re awkwardly bolted onto the browser’s UI and the best you as a user can do to try to fix that is to hack on your userchrome and then pray that your hacks won’t be broken in some upcoming browser update.
Now that firefox has native vertical tabs it's possible that the the integration can get better in the nearer future since I doubt the vertical tabs feature (which i haven't used yet) has tabs on the top AND side.
Colorways anyone? How about tabs that now look like buttons for no conceivable purpose but fashion?
I would pay for an exploer-like sidebar with folders and containers as the top-level folders. Almost have that now with "tree tabs" extension and containers, but the interface is kludgy.
This plus a privacy guarantee would be worth paying for.
After a short time with it, I find it kinda funny. Back then, power users were up in arms about things like the omnibar, and chrome removing more and more parts of the actual URL. And here is a browser marketed at power users that goes beyond that, showing only a small fraction. There doesn’t even seem to be a Zen mod that restores a real usable URL bar.
For me, I manipulate URLs every day, both for work and private usage. Zen disqualified itself for my type of power usage very quickly, giving me a feeling of being on a small mobile device instead of a desktop PC.
> I manipulate URLs every day, both for work and private usage
Zen/Arc are actually much better for this use case, albeit after an adjustment period for people who’ve become accustomed to the way Firefox/Chrome do it.
The idea is that URLs are out of your way when you don’t need them and front-and-center when you do. Instead of simply focusing on the URL bar when you CMD+L or CMD+T, it brings up a modal dialog in the center of the screen where you’re free to do everything you can do in a normal location bar and more. It’s modeled after the command palette design in code editors or application launchers. So, for example, not only can you edit URLs, but you can search for commands instead of hunting for them in the browser’s menus. As an example, I’d never memorize the keyboard shortcut to take a whole-page screenshot because I don’t use it enough. But the other day I needed it, so I typed “CMD+L, screen” and it was the second result. Task completed in under 2 sec.
It took a few days to get used to, but now I never want to go back to the sort of location bar that Chrome and Firefox use. It just takes up space that I’d rather devote to the sites I’m visiting. Even the tab pane is easily toggled to get out of my way when I don’t care about it, which is especially useful when I’m tiling websites. I’ve developed a fondness for keeping documentation open in one panel alongside the website I’m developing, which means recapturing the width I lose from the tab pane is valuable.
I highly recommend pushing through the awkward phase where you’re sure you’re going to hate this browser design. Because once you get past it, you’ll wonder how you ever thought the old way could be better.
> it brings up a modal dialog in the center of the screen
Incredibly tiny modal dialog. I just tried checked one, and it fit 65 characters. Compared to firefox right now, after 112 characters the URL bar is slightly over halfway filled.
Yup, as I was told in another comment, it requires changing to "Multiple Toolbars or Collapsed Toolbar" instead of changing the URL bar setting, which is not exactly obvious. Posted from Zen for now ;)
Manual URL editing is unbelievably painful on mobile and all the kids only use their phones these days - I guess this includes all the cool kid engineers making browsers.
This is extremely true, especially when holding backspace and when you hold it a bit too long, the speed increases! Trying to remove query parameters, such as used for Google Analytics tracking, can be extremely frustrating.
they have a ko-fi and a patreon, with about a 1000 "subscribers" across both at <unknown> amounts at the moment. it's not exactly enough to promise indefinite support, but tbh i don't really much reason to have that faith from products i've paid for but are closed-source either.
TBF, I like the browser doesn't change that much. I install it for / recommend it to friends/family/etc and big changes would only increase the support I have to do. I think forks are much better suited to try out new concepts, which eventually might end up in the browser (I enabled the vertical tabs in 136 and I love them).
> They sneak in features that are nice, but I simply don't think we'll ever see Mozilla put out something that does anything that really sets Firefox apart.
> and yet Firefox 136 looks impressively similar to both Firefox 36 and Firefox 3.6.
Firefox 36 and 3.6 were pre-Quantum/Electrolysis. In those days, the XUL addons had an insane amount of control and could do so many things simply not possible nowadays, that if you took advantage of made a browser that looks nothing like modern Firefox.
Inevitably, I'd want any feature worth paying for to be freely accessible. Presumably I'm not just trying to support the devs but also fund other people accessing the same features that draw me to firefox in the first place.
Getting people to pay for something that has always been free is a tall ask. Most people are barely aware of what a browser is. They just think it’s part of the OS.
Enough people pay for Nebula and Kagi and Fastmail to make them profitable, even though YouTube and Google and Gmail are free. You don't need to get everyone in the world who uses the free service to be willing to pay, just enough of them to fund your project.
There's actually an advantage to the paid business model vs ads in that you don't have to appeal to N million people in order to pay the bills: you only have to appeal to `expenses / subscriptionPrice` people. This means you can cater to those people more aggressively and turn them into fans rather than just users, while also saving time on the features they don't need (reducing `expenses`).
(I'm a happy subscriber to all three above-mentioned services and would immediately sign on for a paid Firefox fork like OP suggests.)
However when it comes to web browsers, there’s been a looong history of failed attempts at selling commercial browsers.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the only people who’ve ever made any serious and sustained income from browsers have been Google; and even that’s been indirectly via upselling their other services.
Why do I think this? Three reasons:
- It elevates the browser into a higher category of tool, where currently Firefox inhabits the same space as OS-bundled calculators and text editors, making it being paid more justifiable in peoples’ minds.
- Firefox has long had issues with rough edges and papercuts, which I believe frustrates users more than Mozilla probably realizes.
- Much of Firefox’s original claim to fame came from its highly flexible, power user friendly nature which was abandoned in favor of chasing mass appeal.