> 1. In many ways Apple's anti-competitive behaviour on iOS/iPadOS is a blessing. It's one of the few things that keep Chromium's dominance in check. Of course, it's not great that Apple are stifling innovation like this, but consider the alternative: Chromium dominance on all platforms.

for better or worse, Apple has been the single biggest driver towards privacy enhancement.

"Let's support a company that abuses its customers, developers and refuses to implement web standards just so a company that makes a far superior product doesn't gain more market share..."

Brave also deserves a mention. As long as Brave exists in its current form, there will be a version of Chromium without Google’s “bad” stuff.

It sure would, but here just as in many areas of tech, developer convenience is diametrically opposed to what's good for users.

A new one I found out is their supposedly open-source initiative called 'Cloud Information Model' [1]. Along with others such as Salesforce, Genesys and AWS (companies that I personally don't trust), they promise 'you can create seamless and tailored personal experiences across cloud-native applications'. It's all a bit vague and fancy and sufficiently "tech-y" to impress the marketing folks but colour me suspicious.

EDIT: forgot the link,

1: https://cloudinformationmodel.org/faq/

Mozilla existing (and shipping spyware, just like Chrome) doesn't really do anything to stop any of that.

Yes, users can themselves explicitly communicate feedback regarding the product or its features, and no, most of them don't do that. That's why telemetry is useful.

Firefox is extremely configurable. Settings being removed from the UI doesn't mean they are gone.

`about:config` has a crazy amount of toggles that allow customizing pretty much everything, including turning off all the Mozilla services (telemetriy, account sync, Pocket, VPN adds, ...). Compare that with the measly set of settings and undiscoverable CLI flags available in Chrome...

I personally feel removing settings from the standard UI is perfectly fine when almost no-one is using them, and power users can work just fine with settings.js or `about:config`.

Well, no surprise there. Technical people like us experiment. Mainstream users just use what they know, and what their techie friends recommend them. They're not suddenly going to use Firefox now that it's more like chrome. They'll just use the real chrome. And they don't like touching something that works.

Note that this approach didn't work for Microsoft either (and they went a lot more 'like chrome' than Mozilla!). They're having some success with Edge but it's mainly because they push it really hard to enterprise users with their O365 integration, so people are getting to know it at work and bringing it home.

> [...] If open-source projects can't access the same data as proprietary ones do, we can't expect them to be able to react to user demands in the same way, and so we can't expect them to be able to compete in today's market.

I don't want them to become like the proprietary browsers in this regard. Telemetry is not an all-seeing oracle, it's often used to confirm their own bias because it doesn't say why the users like something or what they'd prefer. What they should be doing is listening to users instead of blindly trusting telemetry. Google and Microsoft make the same mistake but they already have a monopoly on the browser and OS markets respectively so their mistakes are easily absorbed. It's not like their products have become a lot better since they started relying on telemetry so much.

But no, I won't allow telemetry and I block it for Microsoft and Google too in my DNS. The reason I use Firefox is because I don't want to "get with the program". If I have to change my ideology, I would be changed so much that the primary reason to use Firefox is no longer relevant.

That's the consequence of marketing themselves as "privacy first". Many people use Firefox because they don't want to be tracked, and therefore, any tiny bit of tracking/telemetry will be frowned upon. Google makes no such claim with Chrome, in fact, it makes it pretty clear that it tracks you.

They could focus on building that browser, instead of getting sidetracked and wasting money on other things. Also reduce the friction of contributing to their projects from the outside, streamline the process, bring it into the 21st century while keeping top-down politics and egos out of it. I wouldn't be surprised if their rivals see more outside contributions (in total) simply because they are somewhat easier to work with.

However, overall the vast majority of contributions to Mozilla's projects is likely still coming from the outside.

Mozilla is afraid it will fail with Firefox if they don't diversify. But if Firefox fails, the world doesn't need Mozilla. If that happens they should just pack up and hand the custody of surviving technologies (Rust etc.) to someone else.

for example Mozilla VPN and Firefox Relay which added a premium version with unlimited aliases and your own @*.mozmail.com subdomain.

If they can find a way to promote themselves as a leader of Internet privacy with well-integrated servoces, and from which they can get a revenue from it then at least they'll gain some independence.

>So Mozilla tries to move in Chrome's direction, removing configuration options and "dumbing down" the UI, which frustrates its existing user base (including me) while apparently also failing to eat into Chrome's market share.

You can have sensible defaults for people who value simplicity and want it to just work and have customisation accessible from the settings page for the people who want customization.

I have all telemetry and Nightly studies enabled wherever I can (unfortunately the option is unavailable in custom builds, and I use custom builds on my main OS, since I contribute code to Firefox occasionally).

> removing configuration options and "dumbing down" the UI

I never understood the whole "dumbing down" thing either. It's fundamentally the same UI as it was in Firefox 2.0 back in the day, except the menus are more well-structured (there's now a convenient hamburger rather than everything being in a crowded "application menu" bar at the top).

> I'm not sure what they could do to make Firefox a thriving, independent, sustainable browser

I think it's still all these things. But to make growth possible, they need to somehow fight against Google persistently advertising Chrome right on the fucking google dot com main page (and YouTube and so on).

Perhaps they could care for the automation niche. There are thriving communities on macOS who are deeply into automation, and virtually no one uses Firefox. The ones who do stop because Firefox’s AppleScript support is non-existent, while Chromium’s (and thus every browser based on it) is top notch, even better than Safari’s.

I’m not talking developers, either. Non-coders frequently cobble up short AppleScript snippets do to what they want. When they visit the forums asking for help and how to do what they want in Firefox, they are directed to the open bug report which is old enough to drink.

I have seen plenty of users abandon Firefox on account of that gap. I tried to convey that to Firefox developers multiple times—both in person and online—and their response was to not care.

No we are talking about a non-profit and a for-profit at the same time, where the distinction is often not clear. But it is clear, that they included ads and "studies" by default in their browser, that did send data to whoever, without any user consent.

So no, I do not really trust them anymore. Still more than google maybe, but not enough to voluntarily send them my data. And this is a shame, because I would have liked to keep trusting them.

Telemetry includes personal information such as IP address and some people are (rightfully) concerned about it. Also we do not know for sure what is done with this data, as Firefox server side code (the one that processes the telemetry) is not open source (and even if it was it would not be a guarantee).

> Okay, did you enable the telemetry that lets them know you use it?

There would be no problem if Firefox shipped as a zero-telemetry browser, and all telemetry was opt-in. This would remove all doubt and if you want to send Firefox data you can choose to do so.

However that is not the case. Significant amount of telemetry is enabled by default. Choosing to go for opt-out vs opt-in is what is hurting Mozilla's credibility here.

What then happens (and I am speculating here) is that this behavior triggers most power users in a negative way (for various reasons, one of them being simply using your bandwidth and resources for telemetry and noone likes having a slower browser) so they do their best to disable it. This in turn leaves Mozilla with data that does not include most of its power user base, the one that actually has most impact on Firefox market share (because as 'techies' they install the browser for their family and friends). The crippled data leads to crippled product decisions, which in turn makes power users even angrier and thus we witness the death spiral of user attrition that Firefox is currently in.

I would much rather lose a feature I use daily than send telemetry data.

This is simply not so. Google pays to be the default search engine on Firefox because it is beneficial for them. Had they not, this place would be bought out by Bing or whoever else, and in the end Google will lose more.

The funny thing about this is that it's a narrative, but is it correct? Configuration options may be low, but Chrome has added things like tab groups and a reading list / bookmarks sidebar. They're in no way aiming to be as customizable as Vivaldi/presto!Opera/xulExtensions!Firefox, but even stock Chrome is actually adding useful features, while most news I've seen from Firefox have been them removing unique features I've used and loved, like being able to sync keyword searches via bookmarks.

The only significant feature I've seen them add - and it's a doozy, I admit - is Containers. But that's cold comfort when other features get removed at a steady rate.

> It seems that the market niche of tech-capable people who value privacy and customisation over a simplified UX is not capable of sustaining Firefox on its own.

This may be true, but it can really come down to quality of product: Firefox is losing ground, but Brave for example is growing, and doing it by a privacy sales pitch (with some dumbfucks who think they're going to get rich off BAT added in - it's a cut from Brave's ad revenue, ffs, and individual ad viewers aren't worth shit except en masse when the money pools up at creators' and ad agencies' wallets).

> Okay, did you enable the telemetry that lets them know you use it? Receiving and analysing user data is increasingly important to delivering a good user experience. If open-source projects can't access the same data as proprietary ones do, we can't expect them to be able to react to user demands in the same way, and so we can't expect them to be able to compete in today's market.

This is true, but making decisions purely off telemetry stats and setting up self-fulfilling prophecies of making features harder to find and then saying nobody uses them isn't exactly the way either. Telemetry is a good jumping off point, I think, but as a sole director it's shit precisely because privacy-conscious users are going to turn that shit off if they can out of habit.

> I've never quite understood why Mozilla got such a hard time from users about telemetry.

I think a lot of the Mozilla userbase is from an earlier age, before everything became cloud-based subscription services. They long for the days of locally installable software, buying new versions vs. subscribing to an app, etc. Some are the kind of obstinate FOSS purists who'd use gNewSense even if it meant they had to use their computer as a command line only device.

Think about Pocket, for example. I was one of the abovementioned people and hated its inclusion, and people still grumble about it in part due to the source code, in part just due to the old bad blood.

They'd essentially need a relaunch with a new take and attitude - look at Brave, whose pitch is pretty similar, and how people are a-ok with monetized services within the browser so long as they're opt-in. The product's newer, and so the attitude people come to it is newer. And it's growing.

Finally, there's an issue of focus: The organization increasingly feels like general activists first, custodians of a product second, which is not a vibe much of the competition gives off. Actors like Brave and Vivaldi have firm, in some sense political stances, but they're of a narrower sort of user control and privacy. I know people at both orgs who do/have shown their politics, but it doesn't show at the org/product level. The user? Does. I never, ever want to hear shit like "we need more than deplatforming" from an ostensibly privacy and user centered organization.

Firefox or the (quite lost) Mozilla Corp ? They're not the same.

This sounds like the IE6 disaster all over again.

Say hello to https://servo.org/.

This reminds that Wine uses Mozilla code for their Internet Explorer replacement (wine-gecko). I wonder how far behind Firefox's rendering engine that code is, and how much effort is involved for the Wine maintainers.

https://wiki.winehq.org/Gecko

Yes. Contributing code to something doesn't mean that you suddenly control the direction of that thing. Google still makes the big decisions about what gets to enter the codebase: which web features to support, which ones to deprecate, how to interpret standards, and how to slowly align the web with their own financial incentives.

That's actually being done in the Serenity OS project! HTML renderer, JS interpreter, and Web Browser, from scratch:

https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMOpZvQB55beChggmvk-s...

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMOpZvQB55be0Nfytz9q2...

The end users don't care about who controls what. They care about having a simple, fast browser who just works.

and almost all of Webkit has been rewritten from the time of the fork from khtml.

Together with Chrome, they ended up beating IE, at the time neither had a significant advantage in distribution, at least compared to IE.

So in theory, Chrome can be beaten, except that unlike IE, Chrome doesn't suck, in fact, about the only thing going for Firefox is that it is not Chrome.

Somehow even with Microsoft promoting IE on their platform, people still chose to install an alternative.

Ugh, I dislike the title of that post. I still claim that you're misinterpreting it, though. It should have been something like "We need better answers than deplatforming." Deplatforming is not the answer, and we need better ones.

Sometimes deplatforming is the right answer. Not when it's about a political agenda, but there are many many actually harmful uses out there, many of them illegal, and ignoring those on your platform is the same as facilitating them. But deplatforming is about as effective as sticking your finger in a dike for truly improving things.

In my opinion, Mozilla has done a decent job of being apolitical when possible. Yes, it does think you shouldn't see some things on the 'net, but those things are things like scams and malicious disinformation. It does not say that you should not see the latest blatherings of Trump or whoever, except perhaps when they're directly encouraging violence or sedition.

Hm? When were keyword searches or compact mode removed? I’m still using them in 94.0

Any entity participating in a democratic society should be allowed to voice their support for keeping said society healthy. Antivaxxers and "the vote was stolen!!!" putsch supporters are a direct threat towards society itself.

There are things in a society where standing "impartially" aside is taking a stand in itself - a stand on the side of those who want to destroy society.

I would say:

The true reasons Firefox lost market share is because we, developer & tech people started to install Chrome on family computers instead of Firefox because it was safer & faster (way way faster). And we never came back from it.

Performance is a feature.

The marketing campaign for Chrome alone, if it is even possible to assign a dollar value to it, would have cost billions of dollars for anyone other than Google.

Unfortunately I don't think this will help. If their market share is already low, creating multiple forks makes it even harder for devs to target.

Simply look at desktop software support on Linux for an example of why this doesn't work.

Most of the negative feedback from users comes from two paths, changes that break add-ons, changes that remove customization. Either of those two effectively reduce the value proposition, so I think negative feedback is granted.

The problem most 'core' users have is this UX ethos that some how we are not having more MAUs because we fail to "make changes to compete with Chrome". This has penetrated the Firefox team and has lead to a copy cat of UX features from Chrome and a 'dummyfication' of UX.

The reason Firefox is unable to compete with Chrome or Edge is not because of missing features or performance. Both Firefox and Edge have million dollar advertisement and OEM agreements. Talk to anybody on the street and everyone and their dog will know Chrome, Firefox not so much. The average users will use whatever is pre-installed. They will not go out of their way because of Chrome-like features.

This causality that somehow Firefox is missing market share because of features or UX is flawed. Firefox is playing a Goliath and David game, with billion dollar revenue companies. Accepting and embracing it's niche nature is a necessary first step.

I don't think this is true at all. Anecdotally, a lot of Firefox users have been very receptive towards recent changes. Quantum was a huge success and I know very few people that miss the old Firefox with all of its jank.

> Mozilla need to follow suit in order to survive, rip that rendering engine out, build a new browser and a “browser toolkit” to let other people build their own

This is precisely what Servo is: https://servo.org/. Mozilla know what they're doing.

Exactly. I would really like to use something google-free, but the interface of Qutebrowser is too good, and Qutebrowser can't use Mozilla's rendering engine, even though the developers would like to.

I think the core goal is influence: The ability to meaningfully change the web ecosystem or counteract changes that would be harmful.

Of course market share is necessary for influence, but I don't think it's sufficient: If Firefox gained a larger market share but at the cost permanently catching up to Chrome, I don't think a lot would be won.

Mozilla brand has value in privacy, not browsers. It could start VPN, cloud services, remote backups, smart home, security cameras... Even Android phones with stamp from Mozilla would be great.

There are no money in browsers, it is basically a feed tube from big corporation to its drones. Mozilla should not sponsor large corporations.

How much of the users are actually technical?

The Firefox user share is frequently seen through the lens of technical features, however, I have the suspicion that the vast majority of the audience is regular users who have no idea of anything technical.

    > Mozilla need to [...] build a new browser

    >and a “browser toolkit” to let other people build their own