Mozilla has been fumbling the ball for many years at this point. Clearly the Firefox engineers and MDN maintainers are bringing their A-game, but it feels like the company stakeholders are...
Mozilla has been fumbling the ball for many years at this point. Clearly the Firefox engineers and MDN maintainers are bringing their A-game, but it feels like the company stakeholders are clueless about who actually uses their product or why. Pocket was a mistake from day one, and their white-label VPN has no value proposition. The various attempts to lean into ad revenue over the years were comically tone-deaf. Now they've painted themselves into a corner where their most dedicated userbase is jumping ship because of lost confidence, and the "partnership" with Google amounts to a life-support machine that can be switched off at any time.
I don't have a solution but I continue to use Firefox because of what it represents, or once represented. I agree with the article that it's vital to keep a diversity of browser engines alive in the ecosystem. If only there was some way to oust the current leadership and put the nerds back in charge, with some uncompromising promises about recentering the focus on open standards and privacy. Cut ties with Google, lose some of the organizational fat so survival is possible on a more meager budget, and then raise that money doing something users actually want to pay for. Heck, I'd pay to use Firefox if it meant its future was secure.
You're right, but I don't think that will happen any time soon, since the longer Google props up Mozilla, the easier it is for them to claim they don't have a browser monopoly.
the "partnership" with Google amounts to a life-support machine that can be switched off at any time.
You're right, but I don't think that will happen any time soon, since the longer Google props up Mozilla, the easier it is for them to claim they don't have a browser monopoly.
Officially, Google is paying Mozilla to be the default search engine on Firefox. They pay Apple too. For a while, Mozilla switched the default search to Yahoo and then Yahoo was funding them. Then...
Officially, Google is paying Mozilla to be the default search engine on Firefox. They pay Apple too.
For a while, Mozilla switched the default search to Yahoo and then Yahoo was funding them. Then they terminated the deal early and switched back to Google. Apparently the Yahoo deal didn't work out?
If Google stopped paying Mozilla, maybe Microsoft would fund them to make Bing the default search engine?
The deal had a loophole that if Yahoo changed owner, Mozilla could choose to terminate the deal, and Yahoo would still have to continue paying them. Three years later, Verizon bought Yahoo....
Apparently the Yahoo deal didn't work out?
The deal had a loophole that if Yahoo changed owner, Mozilla could choose to terminate the deal, and Yahoo would still have to continue paying them. Three years later, Verizon bought Yahoo. Mozilla jumped on the opportunity to sign a new deal with Google, roughly doubling their revenues for the next two years.
If Google stopped paying Mozilla, maybe Microsoft would fund them to make Bing the default search engine?
Calling the Google deal a "life-support machine" is a big exaggeration, as long as there are other rich companies looking for search partnerships. Yahoo will probably not offer any deal as good as the 2014 one any time soon, but I imagine Bing would be quite generous. Longer term, maybe Baidu and Yandex will set their sights on the West and start looking for partners.
Would there be anything stopping them from cutting off Mozilla anyway and lawyer-ing their way into making the courts see Chromium "forks" like Vivaldi or Brave as competition to Chrome?
Would there be anything stopping them from cutting off Mozilla anyway and lawyer-ing their way into making the courts see Chromium "forks" like Vivaldi or Brave as competition to Chrome?
I'm not sure browsers need entirely different JavaScript interpreters or HTML rendering engines, though? An analogy: there are a variety of Linux distributions, and they do have different versions...
I'm not sure browsers need entirely different JavaScript interpreters or HTML rendering engines, though?
An analogy: there are a variety of Linux distributions, and they do have different versions of the Linux kernels with their own patches, but I don't think having entirely different kernel codebases is much of a value-add. (And yes, FreeBSD and OpenBSD are out there, but still, I'm not sure they're vitally important.)
Similarly I am unconvinced that much would be lost if Firefox reimplemented less and reused more. The important thing is being able to make your own policy decisions about web standards and so on, and having the market share to make that stick.
That probably means being able to go your own way with user-facing features and being able to say "no" to JavaScript API's by removing and perhaps reimplementing them. It doesn't mean reimplementing uncontroversial features that everyone agrees on.
I still use Firefox (and Firefox Android) and I'm happy with it, but ignoring ideological reasons of wanting to support competition, I don't think it offers me anything that Chrome doesn't. People...
I still use Firefox (and Firefox Android) and I'm happy with it, but ignoring ideological reasons of wanting to support competition, I don't think it offers me anything that Chrome doesn't. People will point to some misstep by Mozilla or another as the reason for Firefox's lack of popularity, but I think it's just as simple as that Chrome was significantly more performant than Firefox for a long time, and that Firefox today is barely distinguishable from Chrome without offering any practical benefit over it. Chrome is default on some platforms like Android, and using it on desktop too gets you good easy bookmark+password syncing, so it has a lot of inertia now.
I first switched from IE6 to Firefox so many years ago because it had a killer feature: tabs. Many people I know switched away to Chrome years later because it was so much more performant. I think it would take a practical feature on the scale of one of these in order to cause an uptick in popularity for Firefox.
I actually think Chrome on desktop will probably lose ground to Microsoft Edge and Safari in the years to come. It's not obviously practically better than either. Newer generations won't remember when those browsers were terrible and have little reason to switch from the defaults as they start using computers. I think this will be a big loss for open source browsers like Chrome and Firefox.
A lot of people view the browser battle as being between Google vs everyone else, or between Blink/webkit engine browsers vs everyone else (... eh, just Firefox really), and therefore see Chrome losing out as an obvious good, but I think the really important browser battle is between open source browsers (Chrome, Firefox, many Chrome forks like Brave, etc) vs everything else (Edge, Safari), so I'm not rooting against Chrome.
Firefox was dead in the water the moment Google jumped on the scene and introduced Chrome. I know the V8 Javascript engine is open source and all, but it took so long for other browsers to adapt...
Firefox was dead in the water the moment Google jumped on the scene and introduced Chrome. I know the V8 Javascript engine is open source and all, but it took so long for other browsers to adapt that everybody and their mother jumped on the Chrome bandwagon, and now it's literally in the "too big to fail" category of tech products and has become synonymous with the internet itself.
Here's the thing, Firefox came during a time when Internet Explorer 6 was the dominant browser. It's not that IE6 was good, it's that it came preinstalled on every copy of Windows 98SE, 2000 and XP. It's that Microsoft managed to monopolize the whole browser market through sheer antitrust to the point where Internet Explorer didn't even see its version 7 update until five years later. Firefox by comparison was like a breath of fresh air and through sheer word of mouth alone gained market share drastically.
It also grew in prominence back when Google's Don't Be Evil™ motto meant something, and not like now where everybody knows the tech industry and intelligence agencies are spying on them.
Google's dominance of the web is why nobody uses Firefox anymore. That and the really dumb preinstalled plugin ARG stunt they pulled with Amazon to promote Mr Robot pretty much killed what little goodwill they had left.
The only way I can see a browser taking market share off Chrome is if it implemented robust and stringent privacy features that could rival the likes of the Tor browser, whilst remaining fast.
Perhaps one marketing angle that could make a dent in things is raising awareness of just how bad the world would be with one single company in control over the Internet (because it had a monopoly...
Perhaps one marketing angle that could make a dent in things is raising awareness of just how bad the world would be with one single company in control over the Internet (because it had a monopoly on the browser market).
I stopped using Firefox because there are browsers that are less intrusive by default. I switched to Vivaldi because I like the interface more. I tried to hold on to Firefox but just wasn't...
I stopped using Firefox because there are browsers that are less intrusive by default. I switched to Vivaldi because I like the interface more. I tried to hold on to Firefox but just wasn't feeling it anymore.
My reason is they're trying to do everything except the one thing that made them good: The browser experience. I didn't mind the shift to a Chrome-style window, and even felt it looked better than a title and a window bar, but the latest change with tab buttons feels gross. I don't like their more aggressive advertising and pushing for services. Vivaldi offers an email service, for example, but only tells you about it when you sign up to sync and set a new install up. Firefox has links to its paid services all over the place. Firefox's Android browser only allows curated add-ons now, and that's only to match other browsers' built-in functionality when Firefox could have full extension support as the creators of their own engine.
I don't like that Vivaldi's UI isn't open source, for distro packaging reasons, but I feel Firefox lost the one advantage it had, which was a superior user experience. I switched to Vivaldi and DuckDuckGo for the majority of my internet use because it seems to offer the best experience for me.
Likewise. I find the UI and UX... clumsy and too focused on doing things the "Firefox Way" with built-in services. I want a native looking and feeling browser experience that melts into the...
My reason is they're trying to do everything except the one thing that made them good: The browser experience. I didn't mind the shift to a Chrome-style window, and even felt it looked better than a title and a window bar, but the latest change with tab buttons feels gross.
Likewise. I find the UI and UX... clumsy and too focused on doing things the "Firefox Way" with built-in services. I want a native looking and feeling browser experience that melts into the background. Whenever I use Firefox (always for browser testing features), I definitely can feel that I'm on Firefox.
For day to day browsing, I use Safari and sometimes Chrome. They feel like natural extensions of the OS experience. (But not Chrome on iOS, which I find similarly clumsy and too Google-y like many of Google's iOS apps.)
As an aside, what's a good privacy-focused and reliable ad blocker for Safari? It doesn't appear uBlock Origin is available for Safari, which is really the only ad blocker I've trusted for a long...
As an aside, what's a good privacy-focused and reliable ad blocker for Safari? It doesn't appear uBlock Origin is available for Safari, which is really the only ad blocker I've trusted for a long time.
Ka-Block! is an option i use with reasonable effect. I know a lot of people use adguard. Tried magic lasso, which seemed to work well iirc, but Ka-Block! seems more elegant.
Ka-Block! is an option i use with reasonable effect. I know a lot of people use adguard. Tried magic lasso, which seemed to work well iirc, but Ka-Block! seems more elegant.
I’ve recently installed Vivaldi to try out as a replacement. Seems to be alright, it’s made by the original developers of Opera and has many similarities. I haven’t researched the technology...
I’ve recently installed Vivaldi to try out as a replacement. Seems to be alright, it’s made by the original developers of Opera and has many similarities. I haven’t researched the technology behind it very much, not sure if it’s just a chrome reskin like brave and edge or it’s own thing, but I’m still bouncing back and forth between Vivaldi and Firefox while I transition. Anyone have any reasons for me not to use Vivaldi?
No reason not to use it, but it's reskinned Chromium. Opera used to maintain its own engine but switched to Chromium many years ago. Vivaldi is a fork of that, IIRC.
No reason not to use it, but it's reskinned Chromium. Opera used to maintain its own engine but switched to Chromium many years ago. Vivaldi is a fork of that, IIRC.
It's not a fork of anything Opera, they legally wouldn't be able to. Vivaldi started out of a site to replace a bunch of community services Opera shut down, and they later decided to make their...
It's not a fork of anything Opera, they legally wouldn't be able to.
Vivaldi started out of a site to replace a bunch of community services Opera shut down, and they later decided to make their own web browser. It is still a Chromium backend.
It seems like everything is a reskinned chromium these days. The only outliers are safari and Firefox and safari is basically the next internet explorer in terms of performance.
It seems like everything is a reskinned chromium these days. The only outliers are safari and Firefox and safari is basically the next internet explorer in terms of performance.
At its core, though, Vivaldi uses the chromium rendering engine. It poses no meaningful competition to Chrome shaping web standards for Google's benefit.
At its core, though, Vivaldi uses the chromium rendering engine. It poses no meaningful competition to Chrome shaping web standards for Google's benefit.
My only anecdotal experience with Vivaldi was that it was slower than Chrome and would constantly lock up any games I was running from Steam, IIRC. Once I uninstalled Vivaldi, the lockup games...
My only anecdotal experience with Vivaldi was that it was slower than Chrome and would constantly lock up any games I was running from Steam, IIRC. Once I uninstalled Vivaldi, the lockup games issue stopped. I switched to Brave since (and Chrome for work).
Nothing against Firefox, other than that it felt clunky. I still use Firefox on Android though.
Mozilla has been fumbling the ball for many years at this point. Clearly the Firefox engineers and MDN maintainers are bringing their A-game, but it feels like the company stakeholders are clueless about who actually uses their product or why. Pocket was a mistake from day one, and their white-label VPN has no value proposition. The various attempts to lean into ad revenue over the years were comically tone-deaf. Now they've painted themselves into a corner where their most dedicated userbase is jumping ship because of lost confidence, and the "partnership" with Google amounts to a life-support machine that can be switched off at any time.
I don't have a solution but I continue to use Firefox because of what it represents, or once represented. I agree with the article that it's vital to keep a diversity of browser engines alive in the ecosystem. If only there was some way to oust the current leadership and put the nerds back in charge, with some uncompromising promises about recentering the focus on open standards and privacy. Cut ties with Google, lose some of the organizational fat so survival is possible on a more meager budget, and then raise that money doing something users actually want to pay for. Heck, I'd pay to use Firefox if it meant its future was secure.
You're right, but I don't think that will happen any time soon, since the longer Google props up Mozilla, the easier it is for them to claim they don't have a browser monopoly.
Officially, Google is paying Mozilla to be the default search engine on Firefox. They pay Apple too.
For a while, Mozilla switched the default search to Yahoo and then Yahoo was funding them. Then they terminated the deal early and switched back to Google. Apparently the Yahoo deal didn't work out?
If Google stopped paying Mozilla, maybe Microsoft would fund them to make Bing the default search engine?
The deal had a loophole that if Yahoo changed owner, Mozilla could choose to terminate the deal, and Yahoo would still have to continue paying them. Three years later, Verizon bought Yahoo. Mozilla jumped on the opportunity to sign a new deal with Google, roughly doubling their revenues for the next two years.
Calling the Google deal a "life-support machine" is a big exaggeration, as long as there are other rich companies looking for search partnerships. Yahoo will probably not offer any deal as good as the 2014 one any time soon, but I imagine Bing would be quite generous. Longer term, maybe Baidu and Yandex will set their sights on the West and start looking for partners.
FYI Firefox already defaults to Yandex in Turkey.
Would there be anything stopping them from cutting off Mozilla anyway and lawyer-ing their way into making the courts see Chromium "forks" like Vivaldi or Brave as competition to Chrome?
I'm not sure browsers need entirely different JavaScript interpreters or HTML rendering engines, though?
An analogy: there are a variety of Linux distributions, and they do have different versions of the Linux kernels with their own patches, but I don't think having entirely different kernel codebases is much of a value-add. (And yes, FreeBSD and OpenBSD are out there, but still, I'm not sure they're vitally important.)
Similarly I am unconvinced that much would be lost if Firefox reimplemented less and reused more. The important thing is being able to make your own policy decisions about web standards and so on, and having the market share to make that stick.
That probably means being able to go your own way with user-facing features and being able to say "no" to JavaScript API's by removing and perhaps reimplementing them. It doesn't mean reimplementing uncontroversial features that everyone agrees on.
I think the concern is more that one engine, controlled by one company would be bad for the market.
I still use Firefox (and Firefox Android) and I'm happy with it, but ignoring ideological reasons of wanting to support competition, I don't think it offers me anything that Chrome doesn't. People will point to some misstep by Mozilla or another as the reason for Firefox's lack of popularity, but I think it's just as simple as that Chrome was significantly more performant than Firefox for a long time, and that Firefox today is barely distinguishable from Chrome without offering any practical benefit over it. Chrome is default on some platforms like Android, and using it on desktop too gets you good easy bookmark+password syncing, so it has a lot of inertia now.
I first switched from IE6 to Firefox so many years ago because it had a killer feature: tabs. Many people I know switched away to Chrome years later because it was so much more performant. I think it would take a practical feature on the scale of one of these in order to cause an uptick in popularity for Firefox.
I actually think Chrome on desktop will probably lose ground to Microsoft Edge and Safari in the years to come. It's not obviously practically better than either. Newer generations won't remember when those browsers were terrible and have little reason to switch from the defaults as they start using computers. I think this will be a big loss for open source browsers like Chrome and Firefox.
A lot of people view the browser battle as being between Google vs everyone else, or between Blink/webkit engine browsers vs everyone else (... eh, just Firefox really), and therefore see Chrome losing out as an obvious good, but I think the really important browser battle is between open source browsers (Chrome, Firefox, many Chrome forks like Brave, etc) vs everything else (Edge, Safari), so I'm not rooting against Chrome.
Extensions on Android. But the vast majority of Internet users don't use extensions, so it's not really a killer feature.
And Bromite now has a (pretty good) adblocker and user script support, which covers my use case for extensions.
Firefox was dead in the water the moment Google jumped on the scene and introduced Chrome. I know the V8 Javascript engine is open source and all, but it took so long for other browsers to adapt that everybody and their mother jumped on the Chrome bandwagon, and now it's literally in the "too big to fail" category of tech products and has become synonymous with the internet itself.
Here's the thing, Firefox came during a time when Internet Explorer 6 was the dominant browser. It's not that IE6 was good, it's that it came preinstalled on every copy of Windows 98SE, 2000 and XP. It's that Microsoft managed to monopolize the whole browser market through sheer antitrust to the point where Internet Explorer didn't even see its version 7 update until five years later. Firefox by comparison was like a breath of fresh air and through sheer word of mouth alone gained market share drastically.
It also grew in prominence back when Google's Don't Be Evil™ motto meant something, and not like now where everybody knows the tech industry and intelligence agencies are spying on them.
Google's dominance of the web is why nobody uses Firefox anymore. That and the really dumb preinstalled plugin ARG stunt they pulled with Amazon to promote Mr Robot pretty much killed what little goodwill they had left.
The only way I can see a browser taking market share off Chrome is if it implemented robust and stringent privacy features that could rival the likes of the Tor browser, whilst remaining fast.
Perhaps one marketing angle that could make a dent in things is raising awareness of just how bad the world would be with one single company in control over the Internet (because it had a monopoly on the browser market).
I stopped using Firefox because there are browsers that are less intrusive by default. I switched to Vivaldi because I like the interface more. I tried to hold on to Firefox but just wasn't feeling it anymore.
My reason is they're trying to do everything except the one thing that made them good: The browser experience. I didn't mind the shift to a Chrome-style window, and even felt it looked better than a title and a window bar, but the latest change with tab buttons feels gross. I don't like their more aggressive advertising and pushing for services. Vivaldi offers an email service, for example, but only tells you about it when you sign up to sync and set a new install up. Firefox has links to its paid services all over the place. Firefox's Android browser only allows curated add-ons now, and that's only to match other browsers' built-in functionality when Firefox could have full extension support as the creators of their own engine.
I don't like that Vivaldi's UI isn't open source, for distro packaging reasons, but I feel Firefox lost the one advantage it had, which was a superior user experience. I switched to Vivaldi and DuckDuckGo for the majority of my internet use because it seems to offer the best experience for me.
Likewise. I find the UI and UX... clumsy and too focused on doing things the "Firefox Way" with built-in services. I want a native looking and feeling browser experience that melts into the background. Whenever I use Firefox (always for browser testing features), I definitely can feel that I'm on Firefox.
For day to day browsing, I use Safari and sometimes Chrome. They feel like natural extensions of the OS experience. (But not Chrome on iOS, which I find similarly clumsy and too Google-y like many of Google's iOS apps.)
As an aside, what's a good privacy-focused and reliable ad blocker for Safari? It doesn't appear uBlock Origin is available for Safari, which is really the only ad blocker I've trusted for a long time.
Ka-Block! is an option i use with reasonable effect. I know a lot of people use adguard. Tried magic lasso, which seemed to work well iirc, but Ka-Block! seems more elegant.
I second Ka-Block. It's been great.
I use it in tandem with Hush, which blocks almost all cookie notices.
I’ve recently installed Vivaldi to try out as a replacement. Seems to be alright, it’s made by the original developers of Opera and has many similarities. I haven’t researched the technology behind it very much, not sure if it’s just a chrome reskin like brave and edge or it’s own thing, but I’m still bouncing back and forth between Vivaldi and Firefox while I transition. Anyone have any reasons for me not to use Vivaldi?
No reason not to use it, but it's reskinned Chromium. Opera used to maintain its own engine but switched to Chromium many years ago. Vivaldi is a fork of that, IIRC.
It's not a fork of anything Opera, they legally wouldn't be able to.
Vivaldi started out of a site to replace a bunch of community services Opera shut down, and they later decided to make their own web browser. It is still a Chromium backend.
Ah, thanks for the clarification!
It seems like everything is a reskinned chromium these days. The only outliers are safari and Firefox and safari is basically the next internet explorer in terms of performance.
Reskinned isn't quite the right word, Vivaldi adds tons of features other browser don't have.
At its core, though, Vivaldi uses the chromium rendering engine. It poses no meaningful competition to Chrome shaping web standards for Google's benefit.
My only anecdotal experience with Vivaldi was that it was slower than Chrome and would constantly lock up any games I was running from Steam, IIRC. Once I uninstalled Vivaldi, the lockup games issue stopped. I switched to Brave since (and Chrome for work).
Nothing against Firefox, other than that it felt clunky. I still use Firefox on Android though.