- Cut out all (or at the very least, most) initiatives that don't serve the goal of promoting Firefox's market share or sustainability going forward
- Donate the major money drains that aren't Firefox to the Apache Foundation or another worthy custodian
- Fire all inessential staff that don't want to work on Firefox.
- Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money, and cut their salaries (bonuses tied directly to increase in Firefox market share).
- Make sure that all donations from now on are redirected to things that support Firefox development and nothing else, period.
- Make whatever partnerships are needed to have a steady stream of income, be that donation or selling out to Google or Bing.
Firefox is in trouble. Firefox is also Mozilla's raison d'être, and they should embrace that. We as a community, cannot afford to let Firefox languish until the only browsers in the world are Chromium derivatives. The diversity of truly independent browser engines is far too important to give up without a fight.
Current CEO is a cancer to Mozilla, her main goal seems like to make more money personally before Mozilla goes bankrupt. As long is as she is there - there is no hope
> In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to." [0]
As someone who knew someone who worked there she is absolutely nuts and her thinking is beyond radical. She will destroy Mozilla if she doesn't step down. Assuming it's not too late already.
Well they fired the previous competent CEO for political reasons. If politics and what you do in your private time is more important than competence, then this is what you get. Well deserved. FireFox getting it what it deserves. If you hire CEOs based on being women or having nice private beliefs, instead of competence you can eat failure all day long as far as I'm concerned.
A big part of the problem IMO is that Mitchell Baker is a lawyer, not a technologist or engineer. She does not understand how software companies are supposed to function.
I used to strongly support the mission of Mozilla. When I first read about the practices of upper management I felt like a fool for ever having donated in the past.
That is not going to happen again and I don't even like Firefox so much anymore because of it.
"- Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money"
That has to be the first on the list, because that is the prerequisite for everything else.
Unfortunately there is no mechanism to achieve this within Mozilla. The people that need to go won't; they've got their trophy titles and they've feathered their nest as they want it. Thus Mozilla and Firefox with it are doomed.
Solving that would take a fork, just like it did with Netscape. It would also require an endowment of capital to fund a core of developers for years just to catch up with blink/webkit/etc. At this point the best plan might be to adopt the latter.
Thing is the market is producing this without Mozilla. Brave and others are delivering real alternatives to Chrome, Safari and Edge.
So at this point what is the value proposition of saving Firefox? That's a rhetorical question; I get it. I just don't know if it's enough to attract the developers and funding to do it. It's conceivable; one could imagine a leader with the passion to inspire people and attract the funding and developers.
Maybe that person exists. If so they won't be doing it under Mozilla.
> Thing is the market is producing this without Mozilla. Brave and others are delivering real alternatives to Chrome, Safari and Edge.
And in the end, it's all WebKit derivatives under the hood. That is the danger. There used to be three major distinct engines (Firefox, IE/Trident, WebKit) plus a boatload of specialized ones (Opera)... and that competition bred improvements and features. These days it's all about walled gardens, which is what the "market" (aka a bunch of ultra rich companies) wants, and Firefox is the last truly independent fighter standing.
Sadly, Firefox has been mismanaged for almost a decade now.
Was an endowment needed for LibreOffice and Maria DB? I don't actually know how it happened with those two, but they both seemed to be more or less grassroots forks when people realised that Oracle won't ever be a good custodian. Perhaps a Firefox fork here could emerge in a similar way.
> Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money, and cut their salaries (bonuses tied directly to increase in Firefox market share).
If Mozilla is just Firefox then why to they need a CEO at all? Why does a web browser need an executive team? It doesn't make any sense to me. Linux doesn't have a CEO. Python doesn't have a CEO. Postgres doesn't have a CEO.
But all those projects have commercial support in some way because other companies rely on them and provide resources. It's unclear to me how Firefox achieves the same. Maybe that's a question a CEO can answer.
If you think you need a CEO then it makes perfect sense to me to pay them a competitive salary. For the same reason you should pay your devs a competitive salary. You can't just say "they should work for less". That's unfair and unrealistic. Either you need one and should pay for a good one, or you don't need one at all.
> Donate the major money drains that aren't Firefox to the Apache Foundation or another worthy custodian.
> If Mozilla is just Firefox then why to they need a CEO at all? Why does a web browser need an executive team? It doesn't make any sense to me. Linux doesn't have a CEO. Python doesn't have a CEO. Postgres doesn't have a CEO.
It doesn't matter what the top position is called: CEO, the Grand Warlock of Yendor, or Benevolent Dictator For Life. CEO ≈ whoever is in charge and entrusted with enough authority that they can elevate or kill whatever they are managing, and that was probably the intended meaning.
> Or how about they donate Firefox to Apache?
Apache has a reputation as the graveyard of open source software. If Firefox gets donated to them, it's curtains. Maybe if they went elsewhere it could work.
Or, they could create a Totally-Not-Mozilla Foundation and bring trustworthy old-timers with the right vision on board. Then they could either do a hostile takeover aka LibreOffice, or coax the original Mozilla Foundation into handing over the brand peacefully.
You are answering the question "how can Mozilla make more money", but that wasn't what was asked. Mozilla as a whole is profitable already, and revenues have been growing close to 100% year over year. As a company they are in great health.
Except that's not what users care about when picking a browser. Google has too much money, tech, marketing and too big an existing user and device base to make any kind of direct competition feasible. Giving Mozilla a few hundred million dollars extra isn't going to make a difference.
The subtitle of the question was "What would you do if you were in charge of Mozilla? How would you save Firefox?"
My answer is an attempt at addressing these two questions. My goal wasn't to make Mozilla more profitable, but to ensure that it's focused on what should be its core mission, rather than the mire of sideshows that they engage in at the moment.
Also, I don't care how Mozilla the amorphous blob of a corporation is doing. I care about how Mozilla the vehicle for the survival, promotion and development of Firefox is doing, and that one seems to be on the brink of death if nothing is done to change the current course.
The real (and often downvoted) answer is that Mozilla compromised on their core values. A "death by a thousand cuts", as it were.
For me, it started back when "sponsored tiles" were first announced in 2014. On the surface it was obviously advertisements, but many defenders tried to argue that it was a "good thing"
Then there was the proprietary Pocket extension baked into the browser with no easy removal. Again, many defenders tried to argue it was a "good thing"
Then the "studies" channel was used to push a Mr Robot ad. It's unclear how it was aligned with the values, but defenders tried to argue it was a "good thing".
They partnered with Cliqz to collect data and make recommendations. Again, defenders tried to argue it was a "good thing"
They partnered with Booking.com to push advertisements, going so far as to argue that they didn't receive any monetary compensation and that it was just a "social experiment". Again, defenders tried to argue it was a "good thing"
This is just a sampling of the events in the last 8 years (sponsored tiles was 2014). Every single time, they may have received some sort of benefit, but a number of users who bought into firefox for the security and privacy aspects ... felt betrayed and left. Because if it isn't about the privacy, what is the USP of firefox? "Not google" is only a small part of the user base.
I know you're saying this not the question being asked, but what's your source for their revenue growing anywhere near that rate, or indeed at all?
As far as I can see their revenue peaked around FY 2017 at $562 million. In 2018 that number was about $450 million and short of expenses, they were short of expenses again for 2019 but for a $338 million settlement from Yahoo/Verizon.
The most recent reported year, 2020, saw a slight drop in their search income but a sharper cut to expenses (mostly by cutting about $60 million in "software development" expenses), putting them back on track, in a way.
They've had a steady increase in subscription income, but it's still dwarfed by the current search deal (in 2020, just shy of $25 million in subscriptions vs. over $440 million from search).
I think that the point of the GP is not necessarily about money, but to have the structure focus on Firefox. ie that it should be the source and the objective of the funding to have all the attention that it needs.
I know many people who used to use Firefox and moved on to Brave. Brave has a mission that is easier to get behind and till it’s unclear what Firefox is trying to be.
I don't think that's true: Brave is actively building independent revenue-generating services so they have a footprint on the web instead of just being a company that makes a window to the web.
And they are growing. The big thing there is just positioning, and being aggressive in the right places.
That's the fundamental problem with Mozilla: MS, Google and Apple can leverage web footprint and physical platforms to market their products and generate revenue for browser development. Plus Apple's happy to take money from Google. Brave's building some kind of revenue-generating platform that stands on its own.
I don't know if Mozilla has a vision in that kind of way.
>> We as a community, cannot afford to let Firefox languish until the only browsers in the world are Chromium derivatives. The diversity of truly independent browser engines is far too important to give up without a fight.
There are a lot of people oh HN who agree with that but then use a different browser for whatever reason. I feel like these people are being very hypocritical and should use what they want to succeed. Firefox is very usable and increasing its market share starts with you. Or to use another cliche - be the change you wish to see.
That's not to say Mozilla doesn't need to get their shit together, but if market share drops too low they will not be able to get money to do the things they need to do.
> Firefox is very usable and increasing its market share starts with you. Or to use another cliche - be the change you wish to see.
I use Firefox despite long standing bugs. Somehow a browser that aggressively throttles background tabs is still able to leak memory to background tabs. For the longest time Firefox messed with my wireless headset, they finally added proper support for web audio APIs and things are better now.
CPU usage is still all over the place. Some inactive tab will cause FF to spin CPU usage up to 100%.
Firefox still leaks resources, I can shut down all tabs and still have the media playback process using up tons of CPU and RAM.
WebGL performance is worse than Chrome.
TBF it has been getting steadily better over the last year, I have noticed a marked improvement. I'd say a year or so ago it was noticeably bad on a regular basis, now it is an occasional annoyance. But it should never have gotten that bad.
More to the point of the question, Google spent a LONG time pushing Chrome, hard. They paid lots of # to bundle it with app updates years ago. Visiting Google properties causes banner ads "Download Chrome!" to appear. A few years back YouTube videos would occasionally just stop working in Firefox.
And now days with Node development, well, Node developer tools are built into Chrome. React developer tools run in Chrome.
A while back I spent a few weeks figuring out how to configure Firefox to work exactly how I want a browser to work, then months happily using it. Then a big update was released and everything broke. I never bothered to get it working again. And despite claims of performance improvements that came with the release, it still chugged slower than Chrome. I would love to use a browser that I can actually configure how I want without things breaking every week, even if it's slower in general. But if I can't configure reliably and it's slower -- what's the point?
They offer nothing I cannot get elsewhere and thus I have no reason to switch.
When it first came out, Firefox was faster, lighter and offered way better function than the alternatives at the time. Since then, competition has been fierce in the browser market and they’ve done little to distinguish themselves in any major way from their competitive set.
Until they do something so vastly incomparable in the market, they gonna continue to falter.
Recently switched to Linux and only installed Firefox. When you force yourself to use it, it's doable. I think only once in the last 6 months did a website not work (my dumb HOA website). Other than that, it's more than sufficient.
It crashes sometimes but if that's the price for not having coercive software controlling my life, so be it.
I use Firefox. Not exclusively, but most of the time, on principle.
I would call it usable, but not "very usable". For normal people, Chrome(ium) UX is better. For power users, Vivaldi is a far better choice despite the Chromium browser engine. And for both of these groups, Firefox UX worsens and improves seemingly at random.
Quite frankly, I'm conflicted whether I should recommend Firefox at all. If I say "look, here's Firefox! It's more private than Chrome, and almost as fast and error-free!", and then Mozilla goes on to ruin that perception 6 months later (as they are wont to do), then it's my reputation and credibility at stake. Not only is that an unnecessary ego hit, but also makes me look like a liar (or at best, like an ivory tower dweller divorced from reality).
I want Firefox to succeed. But that doesn't mean I will use an inferior browser, especially when I feel the decision makers at Mozilla are out of sync.
I agree with your topline goal, but I am surprised by the way you think about it. Most of what you recommend has no obvious connection to firefox-the-program.
Like...
> - Donate the major money drains that aren't Firefox to the Apache Foundation or another worthy custodian
> - Fire all inessential staff that don't want to work on Firefox.
> - Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money, and cut their salaries (bonuses tied directly to increase in Firefox market share).
> - Make sure that all donations from now on are redirected to things that support Firefox development and nothing else, period.
All of these are good suggestions if the problem is that Firefox is running out of money or has too few resources. But that's not my impression at all!
Google's strategy with Chrome demonstrates how valuable it is to develop other compelling services that use cutting-edge standards supported by your browser. Google does it in a way where they freeze out other compatible browsers, but Mozilla does not have to. I would say that the number one thing that Mozilla can do to support the web is to make web standards meaningful again - and the best way to do that is to develop things aside from web browsers to demonstrate the value of those standards.
> We as a community, cannot afford to let Firefox languish until the only browsers in the world are Chromium derivatives.
I don't think Mozilla having non-Firefox projects harms Firefox. I think there is every reason to believe that a healthy Mozilla has Firefox at the center, with many other ongoing projects.
My impression is that Mozilla is too focused on basically everything that isn't Firefox - to me, it's axiomatic that Firefox wouldn't be in such a horrifying shape if they were focused on it. They are lacking for attention, and not money, which is why they should jettison everything that isn't Firefox or doesn't serve Firefox. Anyone else can do funny extensions or VPN or what have you got, but browser-making is Mozilla's core competency that no one in the FOSS ecosystem has mastered to the extent they did.
It seems evident to me that if they made Firefox into a power user browser again, somehow, then power users would flock to it again and bring in some of their peers and family, putting it back in a safe 10-15% range of market share where it can't be picked off or ignored by Google. And I know that power users are leaving en masse - I stuck with them through thick and thin for nearly 15 years, and I'm finally getting ready to leave if the situation doesn't improve.
> I think there is every reason to believe that a healthy Mozilla has Firefox at the center
Neither Mozilla not Firefox are healthy, in my assessment. And this is exactly because they are getting sidetracked instead of centering on Firefox.
If all that is left is chromium, then you can kiss what is left of web standards good bye. Google will set the standard, taking input from any other tech player big enough to have a seat at the table.
Its bad enough ISO certification boards and official positions of the W3C can be bought or corrupted. Let there be only one engine, controlled by Google? And even the pretense of a open and fair playing field goes away.
Open source and open protocols were not resistant enough to for profit corporations.
Now our standards are dwindling, open source projects and standards boards re completely co-opted, and the conversation on mailing lists and forums sounds like the never ending squabbling and finger wagging from your Fortune 500 HR department.
Foss and open standards have been captured by capital. And it shows in the culture.
Hell, it shows in the conversations around places like this.
Exactly. This is why Mozilla, as the only credible custodian of the only credible Chromium/Blink/WebKit competitor, needs to wake up and die trying to stop that future, if needed. If they lose that war, there is no reason for them to exist over Brave or Vivaldi, for example.
> If all that is left is chromium, then you can kiss what is left of web standards good bye.
Well, we've already done that. Google a) dominates the standards bodies and b) releases "standard" features that are only standard because Chrome says so
However, I think they need to answer the question, why should Firefox exist? If there is no compelling reason, well, there you go. If there is, double down on that make that reason shine. They have wasted so much money on the wrong things, IMO.
If Firefox dies, the open web dies. It's that simple. For the open web to remain open, there needs to be at least one more truly independent source of authority regarding how a rendering engine should work. Everyone else has thrown in the towel and abdicated that authority to Google by embedding Blink.
Google is either actively malicious to the open web, or doesn't care about it other than as something they can strip-mine as a revenue source. They sufficiently diversified into mobile and Android that the death of the open web would be but a blip to them.
IMO, Firefox should consciously be that alternate source of authority. How they accomplish that organisationally is irrelevant, what is relevant that their browser as a whole is competitive and focused enough that it stops haemorrhaging market share, and can start to slowly rebuild it as people look for a way out of Google's ecosystem.
>they need to answer the question, why should Firefox exist? If there is no compelling reason, well, there you go. If there is, double down on that make that reason shine.
Unfortunately, that reason (browser engine diversity)is compelling to people who understand the situation, but not general consumers - and it's impossible to make general consumers care, unless maybe Firefox went for an edgy "rebel against the man" vibe.
I think that's a bit too far - for example, Thunderbird is a great web client. I do think they should have found a way to hold onto the Servo team and make that engine more useable and better than the base chromium engine. If they had been able to keep the Rust foundation on board, it would have also made sense.
However, I do agree that their leadership has made terrible decisions and they've absolutely focused on the wrong products.
Thunderbird was on my mind when I was writing this. I think it ultimately comes down to whether they can afford any missteps or side concerns at all - and if the answer is "no", then Thunderbird must be cut loose no matter its value. It can always be mothballed until the times get better, or it can even be given "on loan" for some fixed duration to another trusted FOSS foundation and re-adopted when the time is up.
As good as Thunderbird is, I wouldn't want it to be anywhere near the top of Mozilla's priorities list right now.
The obvious thing to do was continue to invest in Servo. If they could have produced a parallel layout engine, which could provide app like animations without fiddling on desktop and Android, and then make that easy to embed, they could have made real inroads into blink/webkit.
Another interesting idea: what if they courted alternate browser projects and/or environments like electron to use the Firefox engine the way those currently tend to use Chromium?
I don’t know if Firefox is currently harder to integrate than Chromium, or if they would just need to gain some sort of edge (no pun intended). But they could for example:
- Provide first-class documentation for integrating
- Provide some kind of stripped-down version that’s optimized for Electron-type scenarios; perhaps they could make it more resource-light for this usecase than Chromium is
Gaining marketshare this way could garner better support from websites and/or libraries, and might also prompt corporate support from invested companies
> Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money, and cut their salaries (bonuses tied directly to increase in Firefox market share).
They fired the CEO that knew what he was doing. Personally, I think Mozilla is getting what they asked for.
What makes you think Brendan Eich would have been a good CEO? He was CTO of Mozilla during the period that Chrome was eating Firefox's lunch. He was probably more responsible for Firefox product decisions at that time than CEO Mitchell Baker.
I feel they should start trying to out “out innovate” the other browser developers. Stop playing politics, which Google will always win, and just start making new “cool shit” that developers want to use! Hire the best innovative thinkers in the industry and set them free to invent browser apis for developers to use.
Also, they should be attacking things like electron, and “hybrid” mobile app development. Build a toolkit based on Gecko for cross platform development that addresses the problems with electron.
> Hire the best innovative thinkers in the industry and set them free to invent browser apis for developers to use.
I think they should be doing the opposite: Adding features the users want to use and keeping the web as simple as they can get away with. Google is already busy giving web developers whatever APIs they want, that is not a fight Firefox can win.
I would instead argue that Firefox's Gecko engine is beyond saving and that any money invested in it now would be better donated to other community projects because there isn't enough resource to catch up. Sticking with Gecko will eventually lead to the dismise of Firefox the organization.
Microsoft, with their resource and their ability to bundle Microsoft Edge in with Windows, couldn't get any appreciable amount of marketshare. Firefox, with less resource than Microsoft, won't fare any better.
Rebuilding Firefox with Chronium would salvage whatever the mindshare/marketshare left. Then Firefox could still wield some influence with their marketshare and the threat of forking Chronium.
I'm 100% onboard with Chromium being the universal de facto standard for the web as long as it's open.
Really, all I want from a browser is Chromium, full features without disabled APIs, with a few extras like Sync, P2P stuff, and codecs, fully open.
Right now, I think anyone with name recognition and marketing ability could probably develop a winning browser for 50k or so. Just... take chromium, add sync, and an ad blocker for high bandwidth video ads. Done. You have made the world's best browser, the rest is business stuff.
This set of policies would spell the end of Mozilla, and the end of Firefox unless the community (or another org) picked it up. Mozilla is mostly funded by search engine companies, the largest being Google, and any direct attempt to compete with Chrome would probably end a significant chunk of that funding.
Like it or not, unless Mozilla does what Google sees as acceptable, Firefox can't continue. The only way to turn Firefox around and continue development would be to find an alternative benefactor.
Mozilla is mostly funded by search engine companies, the largest being Google
Not only that, but this creates perverse incentives for Mozilla. Google funds Mozilla to avoid charges of monopoly, and that disincentives Mozilla to compete with Google and make Firefox a competitive browser to Chromium.
Mozilla is currently funded by Google but why are you assuming that a non-profit oriented Mozilla could not find other funding sources? All their past attemts seem to be about monetizing the browser but just like Google has been throwing cash at them there will be others whose motives are more alligned with Mozilla doing the same. As far as I am aware there is no way to donate to the development of Firefox and even if there was I and many others would not do so while Mozilla while the Google funding steers Mozilla's interests.
Would Mozilla be able to get as much without Google as they get from Google? Probably not, but if they do follow the suggestions of the OP then hopefully they would not need as much.
Use all/most of the money from the Google deal to build a fund. Even doing this for a couple years will build a huge backup plan for Firefox and they can look at not relying on the deal for survival. Instead work off the interest earned on the fund.
True, but at this point it doesn't feel to me that the community has that much to lose. If we're truly sub-5% like Statcounter says, then as long as we minimally muzzle this particular paperclip maximiser (say, the browser engine must remain Gecko or an in-house project and cannot be Blink, user privacy must be no worse than currently, selling data or "partnering with" third parties is disallowed) and let it run for a couple of years, at least we'll get a viable browser out of it.
Cutting organizational expenses might be good for unrelated reasons, but I don't see how that increases the market share of Firefox, and I can think of a few ways it could decrease their market share.
My goal, if I were CEO, would be to reduce organizational expenses (and increase other forms of revenue) to the point where the 100s of millions of dollars from Google ($562 million in 2017) was not required for covering the cost of firefox development and spend all those millions on advertising firefox until Google stopped giving it. I can't see where having such a large part of your finances coming from your biggest direct competitor could ever be a good thing, but at least spending it on increasing firefox's market share directly through advertising would have a certain irony associated with it. At least of the Alanis Morisette variety.
What he said was: get rid of the people who are not interested in making the Firefox browser better. Get rid of the distractions. Focus on the browser.
If the goal is to plow all available resources into Firefox, then cutting down on expenses that don't directly or indirectly support the existence of Firefox seems key.
The CEO and upper management do loads to steer the ship. If all they care about is enriching themselves, they will likely struggle to find developers who are in it for the passion.
Look at Google. It is a late-stage, post-IPO business that’s now, frankly, ran by the CFO with a CEO who cares only about the board and an ever-increasing stock number.
The people who have passion left for the most part. Replaced by those who only seek to enrich themselves and climb the perf ladder.
Would those who have passion stuck around if Google was ran by people who still had passion? I’d imagine a much greater number of them would still be there.
on a more serious note, what if mozilla fires ALL execs? will it just crumble under its own weight or will that "industry linked remuneration" be replaced with more money for actual developers who get things done and are not in for the quick buck like address bar ads?
I'm hoping for the latter. Or if not, the that if the Firefox collapsed, it would re-emerge in some fashion as a grassroots community project with non-Mozilla governance.
> Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money, and cut their salaries (bonuses tied directly to increase in Firefox market share)
And people wonder why non-profits and NGOs don’t attract the best talent. This entitled mindset is the why.
That people who want to do good work should earn less. Perfect! Let them pay for their vacation with goodwill and air.
This is especially rich coming from the HN crowd. Everybody wants a revolutionary but in the neighbour’s house.
There is a vast ocean between strugling to pay for your vacation and making millions every year.
And there is no "the HN crowd" - don't fall into the trap of assinging to collective consciousness for groups and then complaining that it does not behave rationally.
Assuming the board are unable or unwilling to salvage FF for the sake of Mozilla, would it be worth considering starting a new non-profit browser based on FF? A new organization without all that baggage? WaterWolf or something?
Donating money isn't going to help them. It might help them look good to some techies that follow that information, but otherwise most wont care.
Mozilla needs to focus on other products to use in tandem w FF. Email service that is private, VPN (i think they have a partnership), Thunderbird, zoom like platform. They need office/business solutions most likely. Devtools, dev services, etc.
I'm not saying forget FF, but they can't just focus on 1 product or they are doomed.
I know their phone project fizzled, but I wonder if there's a market for a Chromebook competitor. Position it as a privacy-respecting product for schools. Introduce kids to the idea that Chrome != The Internet.
They should also consider more "Oxidation" of Firefox components, if only because it lowers the bar for mere mortals to make open source contributions.
My thoughts on this are that every time I see a news piece about Firefox it's about "social justice", some code of conduct controversy, or something else utterly unimportant to web browser selection.
Being "Open Source" does nothing for me when Firefox engages in the same crap as other closed source browsers, like Pocket. Mozilla also allowed social issues to take precedence over retaining good engineers. Whether you like it or not, even assholes have a basic right to exist and the more recent culture of shun and cancel has had negative consequences for society as a whole. Maybe they were assholes, but I don't give a shit how nice the developers who made my web browser are.
I suppose the problem with Mozilla is the CEO/people who make decisions about Firefox, replace them and maybe Firefox could be revived. But I have extraordinary doubts that Firefox is salvageable at this point. Mozilla's priorities have strayed so far from mine that I cannot see them becoming something I care about any time soon. I suspect it is similar for others.
There is not one issue with Firefox, the people in charge are not competent. It's mistake after mistake after mistake. These mistakes are a direct result of prioritizing diversity over talent.
I think this post assumes that Firefox is an inferior browser, and that the cause is mismanagement.
But is Firefox an inferior browser? I think it used to be, but over the last couple years, it has made massive improvements in features and performance. I use it in both desktop and mobile, and I prefer it over Chrome.
As a software engineer, I rely heavily on my browser for work. For me, the multi-account containers in Firefox are the must-have feature. No other browser can offer the ease of separating multiple test accounts, and multiple gmail/gsuite accounts for multiple enterprises separate.
Also, I like how Lockwise on mobile is divorced from the browser, making it easy to use it to manage passwords across websites and apps.
Maybe the problem with Mozilla, then, is marketing. Maybe not enough people know that Firefox is much, much better than it used to be. Or maybe the general sentiment is echoed in your post. People don't feel that Mozilla is focused on writing good software, so they don't expect Firefox to be good.
Personally, I think the biggest cause for the loss of market share is simple:
Safari is the default on iOS and Chrome is the default on Android, and population of mobile devices is exploding, and there are no mainstream mobile devices that are carrying Firefox with it.
I agree - Firefox today is super solid. It blows away Chrome in terms of memory management and I have less compatibility issues with it than any other browser.
I agree with you on marketing and mobile - if the defaults are good enough on mobile then people are going to mostly use that. And while Firefox used to be hugely popular Chrome has really taken over its market share. Butnow Chrome has gone from a lean and simple browser to a bloated mess that chokes when you have too many tabs and starts using gigabytes of ram.
It has problems with memory, performance, rendering and battery drainage.
Every year I switch to Firefox and use it as a main browser. It usually goes for a month and then I need to switch again because Firefox has too many glitches.
Firefox has had a bad policy of not fixing the basics first before new features.
I do use Firefox as my main development browser still but that is because I’m more used to the developer tools than the alternatives.
Several APIs that make powerful web applications possible are missing (e.g. WebUSB, various filesystem access APIs) and Firefox generally tends to lag behind Chrome when it comes to new APIs/web features.
The lower market share means that many web sites don't support it properly. For example, I need to keep a Chrome profile around for Zoom since the button doesn't even show up on Firefox, and when I tried to join a Teams meeting with Firefox, it failed in some non-obvious way, causing me to be late to a job interview (may have been due to some extension misbehaving or some config issue). I don't know if that's just because the sites don't test and do user agent sniffing, or whether Firefox is actually missing some APIs that would be required, but from a user perspective, it doesn't really matter, I can't use the browser for things I can do with Chrome.
A good time to remind everyone that when you donate to "Mozilla", you're donating to the Mozilla Foundation, which is the social justice part, not the Mozilla Corporation, which is the browser part.
The vast majority people who use web browsers have literally zero knowledge, awareness, or interest in these things. What actually seems to have happened, is that a long time ago now, their techy friends recommended they use Firefox instead of IE. Then those techy friends recommended Chrome because it was even better. Now it's arguably the case that Chrome and Firefox are equivalent from a non-techy standpoint, but non-techies don't want to move browsers over and over. That large audience is largely lost to Firefox until there there are big enough practical downsides to Chrome or upsides to Firefox.
As it stands now, even if techy people, who might be put off by the things you mention, were to be made perfectly happy again, if they recommend Firefox without a significant practical justification, non-techy people simply will not change from Chrome back to Firefox again.
Importantly, more and more people have just grown up with Chrome, never having used Firefox or IE even once. Even if Firefox stays as good as Chrome, more and more people will start their web browsing experience never having considered Firefox and just always having organically used Chrome. This alone will lead to Firefox losing market share over time, even if all existing Firefox users keep using it and loving it.
In my mind, it's clear that the reasons Firefox lost market-share are technical/practical, and the way it might regain market-share is also technical/practical improvements. That will be hard though, especially given Firefox would probably need technical/practical dominance on Android as well as on traditional computers.
If Google shut all the doors making ad blockers on Chrome virtually impossible that'd be interesting. Ad blocker use is pretty high and might be as high as 40% and if those people all defected that'd do it. Probably why Google can't do that though even though they clearly want to.
> I don't give a shit how nice the developers who made my web browser are
It sounds like you do give a shit that they care about "social justice" and you don't want to use their browser because of that?
Or are there specific features / functionality / performance / security issues that prevent you from using Firefox and are somehow caused by the worldview of the developers?
I am someone who does give a shit about not wanting to reward assholes.
There is one thing I think is worth noting. There's always all of this talk about, "It's the talent that matters, not the social justice stance of a developer. Keep the talented assholes; don't hire for social justice posturing!"
Well, I'm waiting to see all of those displaced "talented assholes" band together to create a product so compelling it will *prove* they were replaced by inferior developers for "social justice" reasons. By now there should be so many uber-talented people who aren't given their fair shake because of their abhorent political/social beliefs.
Or maybe... just maybe... those assholes talk a big game (as assholes often do), but aren't as indispensible as they believe themselves to be?
Just interpreting what the OP said and not really sure where I stand on the topic, but I think he means that "social justice" controversies have purged asshole devs that were competent developers producing good features and that firefox as a product is not as good due to that. Taking senior engineers off the roster will usually impact the product whether or not they were assholes.
I give a shit that the people building my tools are injecting their politics into my tools in places where they don't belong. Browser makers being happy to decide what I should see on the web will make me bail.
Now, there are of course parts of politics that are pertinent to the tool in question - privacy issues for browser developers, for example, or tracking.
Both the Brave and Vivaldi teams have people I know I disagree with politically. But I like their products, and I like the companies? Why? Because whatever the companies' employees views, the two companies' politics are about user control and privacy, and they walk the talk. Both in their own ways that reflect the people making the tool, but insofar as the companies are political, they are political in a very, very narrow way.
Basically, they understand their job is to make hammers and not to sermon about flower arrangement. Mozilla (and much of the tech sphere, sadly) is increasingly the reverse.
I use Firefox daily and I have no idea what the hell you are talking about. What does Mozilla have to do with "cancel" culture? Is there some huge news article I am missing out on or something?
Likely rooted in the experience with Brendan Eich who had a long history with Mozilla, was appointed as CEO and then (due to his personal political contributions, mainly Proposition 8 related) essentially forced to resign as CEO due to the accompanying backlash - https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/brendan-eich-steps-down-...
Yea, not having to work with assholes is pretty great. Maybe there is some tradeoff to be made and a balance where keeping a productive asshole around could be better for the product than purging said assholes, but I think a team with that toxicity can't be sustainable in the long run unless its a team full of assholes that are content.
> every time I see a news piece about Firefox it's about "social justice", some code of conduct controversy, or something else utterly unimportant to web browser selection.
This can't be true, unless you have extremely unusual new reading habits.
The problem is when some assholes are actively engaged in denying basic rights from others. If you say "well those assholes have a right to exist", you're effectively saying "the assholes have more of a right to exist than the people they're trying to erase."
Could you clarify what basic rights you are referring to, whose existence ”the assholes” are trying to erase, and what methods they are using to do so?
If the "asshole" is being an asshole on the job yes. If the problem is that the coworkers don't like the "asshole"'s beliefs or what he is doing in his free time then they should be told to deal with it.
I agree that it is your prerogative as a consumer to decide how much you care about the integrity of the companies who make the products you use. Maybe it's just my inner Hank Hill talking, but I don't think a responsible consumer would ever say, "I don't give a shit how nice the developers who made my web browser are." The way I see it, if you're willing to be an asshole for profit to someone else, then you're willing to be an asshole for profit to me too. So I appreciate and support companies who make deliberate choices to treat humans better, especially ones made at the cost of profits.
- Prioritise getting the new extension framework fully functional. And continue innovating on the capabilities that are exposed. Especially on mobile where the new fenix engine is still limited to a small whitelist of extensions
- Sort out the multi-profile story. Container tabs are great, but the chrome model is also a great fit for many workflow (e.g. different people in a house or home vs. work profiles).
- Try and work on making Gecko easily embeddable again. Webkit/Blink gets all the attention because it's easy to embed into things. I suspect Gecko needs to compete in this market if it hopes to survive. It needs to have more than one company invested in it.
This ship has probably sailed now as they've fired most of their Rust and Servo teams. But IMO they ought to have created a rust-based cross-platform UI framework. They tried to do it web-based with Firefox OS but that was too slow. But with a Rust solution I think they could have owned both the mobile and desktop application spaces, which could potentially have made them a bootload of money and been a huge win for linux.
Chrome’s Profiles are the #1 reason I use it over Firefox. If Firefox had as complete of an implementation as Chrome then I would consider switching, but until then Firefox is a non-starter for me.
I use all 3 of these profiles all day every day for work:
* one personal profile logged into personal Google
* one work profile managed by the company, logged into company Google
* one development profile with all the debugging extensions installed, like React and Redux tools (they require access to all pages all the time)
I use Firefox's container tabs all the time, which segment exactly the same way as profiles (albiet with the same extension pool). Personally I prefer having blended tabs in a single window, or having additional segregation; I keep Amazon punted out to it's own container, as well as social media. I know it won't stop all the cross-identificaiton, but it should at least help.
This is my personal opinion only, so take it with a grain of salt.
----
Mozilla can't save Firefox. It's not that Firefox can't be saved, but rather that Mozilla as an organization is not capable of doing so.
My take is this - Despite a history of being relatively privacy friendly, the vast majority of funding for the organization comes directly from Google (To the tune of ~90% of their total funding, straight from Google so that Google can maintain its position as the default search in Firefox).
That leads to insurmountable conflicts of interest - They claim they are for people and for privacy, but they are funded almost entirely by Google, and have to secure search deals for their continued existence (the latest just this year: https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-go...).
In this light - I believe it actually BENEFITS mozilla to keep Firefox relevant, but not good enough to replace Chrome. If the browser genuinely becomes good enough that customers start switching from Chrome to Firefox en mass, Mozilla needs a replacement funding plan because Google can essentially turn the lights off at any point by simply refusing to pay them for search at next contract renewal.
While they've dipped their toes into paid products... most of them are not particularly relevant or compelling on their own merits (that's not to say they're bad, just not all that innovative or likely to drive enough revenue to replace the 500million a year google is paying them)
So not only do I not believe that Mozilla is capable of "saving" Firefox in this way, I don't believe they have the right incentives to even seriously try.
The unsaid part is that Google keeps Firefox alive so that they are not hit by anti-trust over in-browser search. That's why FF will always trail Chrome, its the designated loser. If it weren't for anti-trust, Google would have bought out Mozilla years ago.
You can't buy out an open source project. If Google bought it out and started messing with it, there would be an immediate outcry and Firefox would end up with the community fork winning out, just like it happened with MySQL and OpenOffice.
I don't follow this line of reasoning. Google pays Mozilla for the search traffic. If Firefox overtook Chrome in market share, Mozilla's position would become even _more_ favourable and they could command a larger sum from Google. If Google threatened to end the agreement, Mozilla could simply walk to Bing/DuckDuckGo or whoever else.
Right now, Google pays more than Bing or DuckDuckGo.
Perhaps Google just has mountains of spare cash, which DDG doesn't. Perhaps Google gets extra value as FF both provides search traffic, and keeps competition regulators off their back. Perhaps Bing thinks if FF changed the default search engine away from Google, 95% users would change it right back.
But if Bing is only willing to pay 70% of what Google pays - could Mozilla survive losing that much income? Or would it trigger a death spiral, with less money meaning less development meaning lower market share?
As far as paid products go, it seems like a no brainer to offer paid plans for privacy focused email or other g-suite-like collaboration services. It seems like Mozilla needs additional revenue streams.
>Mozilla needs a replacement funding plan because Google can essentially turn the lights off at any point by simply refusing to pay them for search at next contract renewal.
And then Bing/Yandex/Baidu buys the rights, and all that changes is the amount they get. It'd drop if Google publicly vowed they won't bid on it anymore, but there's also the possibility that someone like Yahoo pays more than Google like what happened in 2015.
It's not like Google is arbitrarily deciding how much money to give Mozilla, they are buying something at the lowest price they can.
I think Google is fairly arbitrarily deciding how much money to give to Mozilla (and it's roughly their current OpEx) - They aren't just buying search, they're also buying "competition" in the browser space.
Further, the kind of transition where Firefox might gain users from Chrome isn't instantaneous, and it turns out users have a preference here (most users don't want to have google removed from Firefox - they still prefer it. Mozilla is quietly testing a program to use Bing as the default, just to see how loud the feedback is: https://www.pcgamer.com/firefox-is-conducting-a-study-to-see...)
So there's a tension here that's beyond just enterprise deals.
Last - that deal didn't actually work out very well for Yahoo, and that was when Firefox had nearly 15% of the browser market (vs ~8% today).
#1 reason: Google has been spending millions of dollars on ads. 2010 many subway, buses, and TVs had ads about how fast Chrome was. Advertising works! Early adopters switched, followed by mainstream users.
Additional Key Strategies:
Google focused on developer experience with its tools.
Google shipped a good enough extension system.
Google invested in matching or beating a few key features but kept Chrome a leaner project overall. Worse is better and 80/20 rule.
Ecosystem evolution:
Google successfully got every major browser vendor to move to their rendering engine, except for Firefox. Gecko has always been harder to embed.
Slowly over time, some web devs stopped testing their work on Firefox since they were using Chrome and most browsers "just worked" like Chrome. Every week I hit a site that I have to use in Chrome because of a bug I'm seeing in Firefox.
Mozilla went all-in on trying to disrupt itself with a mobile phone operating system, which didn't work out.
Mozilla dabbles in many strategies (Privacy, Games, Advertising, WebXR), but none have been successful in growing active daily users.
Some people say Mozilla should focus on executing Firefox, but I think Mozilla is smart for trying to re-invent itself because the browser is a commodity, and if Google wants to own that on-ramp to the internet, it will.
Netscape and Firefox 1.0 were massive products. Mozilla needs a 3rd act to return to a significant marketshare.
> #1 reason: Google has been spending millions of dollars on ads. 2010 many subway, buses, and TVs had ads about how fast Chrome was. Advertising works! Early adopters switched, followed by mainstream users.
Not to mention paying the likes of Adobe, Avast, AVG, and Oracle to have their installers auto-install Chrome using dark patterns.
The amount of people in HN who think they can do a better job at being the CEO of every company; or being the president of any country; or being better than whoever is trying to something, astounds me.
Dudes, if saving Firefox was so easy that could be described in a single comment like that, it would have been saved already.
There are more people at Mozilla than the CEO, she is not responsible for all decisions. She is a quite nice person to be honest, has always been very kind to me while I was volunteering and later while I was working there. She is more into the Mozilla mission than many here.
Also, people need to understand that Firefox is not the reason for Mozilla existence, Firefox is one of the tools that Mozilla has (and depends on) to fullfil its mission. People need to wake up and realise that Firefox is the last remaining independent browser, and that fighting against Microsoft, Google, and Apple is damn hard.
There is a huge intersection between people who are often saying they know how to fix Mozilla and those using non-Firefox browsers. If people here who cares about Mozilla would volunteer, and also use the browser, Mozilla would be in a much better shape.
People who keep saying things like "cut their salaries", "cancel all projects", have absolutely no idea how all this works, or even how Mozilla works. I understand you're all frustrated, but you're going at it from the wrong direction. You need to remember that it was side projects that made Firefox. At that time the workhorse of Mozilla was the Mozilla Suite. It was also non-Firefox projects that brought up Rust and many other cool technologies.
Not specifically about Firefox but: if nonprofits can’t pay for talent then you get what you pay for, crappy talent for important positions. That said many people have your mindset so that puts all nonprofits at a disadvantage against any for-profit initiative as far as getting talent goes. You shouldn’t need to martyr yourself to do something good.
> Also, people need to understand that Firefox is not the reason for Mozilla existence, Firefox is one of the tools that Mozilla has (and depends on) to fullfil its mission.
No. This is arguing that the tail is wagging the dog. The only reason why people care about Mozilla at all is not their social projects, not the fact that they released a VPN, or the fact that they maintain Thunderbird (OK, fine, for some it is). The reason they care is because Mozilla is developing Firefox.
Subtract Firefox from Mozilla, and you get zero or less. And yes, we realise that Firefox is the last remaining independent browser - which is why it's alarming that they are focusing on anything else when the market share is so low. Their ship is sinking and they are debating whether the orchestra should play Bach or Mozart on the way down.
> Also, people need to understand that Firefox is not the reason for Mozilla existence, Firefox is one of the tools that Mozilla has (and depends on) to fullfil its mission.
This is why I downvoted you. (edit: will undo, this misunderstanding needs to be discussed.)
This is the big misunderstanding.
If Mozilla can do something in addition to Firefox, fine.
But Firefox is simultaneously Mozillas biggest contribution to the open web and their main income source.
Sacrificing Firefox for a higher goal is almost literally to butcher the goose who laid the golden eggs.
> Want to fix Mozilla? Take an active part in it.
Try that and get flagged for advocacy(!). Seriously: see the tab strip api to see it in action.
>There is a huge intersection between people who are often saying they know how to fix Mozilla and those using non-Firefox browsers. If people here who cares about Mozilla would volunteer, and also use the browser, Mozilla would be in a much better shape
I have to agree with this. You see everyone on HN talking about the importance of Firefox in the fight against Google's monopoly but yet when you read comments about anything web related many (maybe most) commenters say they use Chrome (Someone should do a HN Poll).
There is no excuse to use anything other than Firefox if you claim to care about things the open web, software freedom etc.
very simple answer, because Mozilla doesn't control the infrastructure that runs on 80% of smartphones in the world and ships Firefox as the default browser.
It really has nothing to do with the bespoke features that people on HN pay attention to. Firefox doesn't control any platform and defaults matter. There's a reason Google pays them a gazillion dollars to be the standard search engine, which you can change with one click. It's also why Safari is still going relatively strong.
Microsoft was forced to allow browser choice in the EU. I don't see why Apple and Google shouldn't be subject to the same, with the added condition that browser rendering engine diversity gets preferential treatment.
Give users a 60% chance to see Firefox as the first option, then show them the multitude of Chrome/Safari-based browsers.
The problem is that even when that choice is given, every Google search pushes Chrome, Microsoft constantly pushes you to switch to Edge. I'm not sure how much Apple pushes Safari, but last I heard it actually gives superior battery life on Mac OS so there's a real technical reason to not use Firefox.
Because no one cares anymore about browser diversity now that the main browser is open source, runs on every platform and complies mostly with browser standards. Not to say it isn't important. But it was way worse when IE was creating a dependency on IE and Windows due to poor standards.
One thing missed when talking about Firefox's market share is desktop versus mobile market share.
If you look at Wikimedia's metrics, Firefox still has ~10% market share of the desktop browser market[0], not too bad considering Firefox is not the default browser on any platform outside of linux systems for the most part, and that Mozilla is much smaller entity than competing browser vendors. Still down from the ~30%[0] desktop share they had, but now they have 2 large competing entities offering default browsers so the decline is somewhat expected.
Also, contrast this with Firefox's ~0.7% share on mobile[0] where Mozilla has never been able to get a good foothold.
As long as Firefox isn't available as a default on mobile and as the share of mobile device web browsing increases, Firefox will keep losing total market share as a percentage.
Strategy wise, refocusing efforts on retaining that 10% desktop share might be a good idea. From there, work on building up more of the desktop share and then try marketing the mobile browser to the desktop browser community to build up mobile browser share.
I feel like Firefox on Android should be more popular than it is. Chrome is default, but it doesn't offer an Ad Blocker. Firefox with uBlock origin is a far superior experience. Although there are other 3rd party chromium-based browsers that are just as good.
I suspect that it's poor market share is due the very poor performance of the older fennec implementation.
I tried to use FF on Android, and while it's capable and works rather well, perf-wise Chromium is just years ahead (I use Brave).
You can see it well on JS-heavy sites like Twitter, the difference is very easy to perceive with loading time, scrolling perf, and also with memory management (Firefox evicts pages from memory cache aggressively compared to Chromium; you sometimes switch a tab or switch an app, go back, and bang, it's gone and needs a reload); and I have a decent good phone (not top shelf, but a "high-mid" Pixel 3a, probably 60-70th percentile within Androids?).
I use Firefox mobile for the past 3 or so phones. To be blunt, it sucks. The only reason I haven't switched to a Chromium derivative is because I don't want to migrate my bookmarks, because they don't have as good ad blocking support, and out of sheer stubbornness.
I’d argue that FF could possibly convince some manufacturers to preload Firefox with uBlock installed as a faster browser (if UCBrowser could, surely FF can).
This. When I joined my prev company in mid 2018, I checked some graphs, and mobile users market share was around 45%. When I checked the same graph in mid 2021, mobile market share was >60%.
Many people don't have a desktop anymore those days, or barely use it.
Readit News
- Cut out all (or at the very least, most) initiatives that don't serve the goal of promoting Firefox's market share or sustainability going forward
- Donate the major money drains that aren't Firefox to the Apache Foundation or another worthy custodian
- Fire all inessential staff that don't want to work on Firefox.
- Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money, and cut their salaries (bonuses tied directly to increase in Firefox market share).
- Make sure that all donations from now on are redirected to things that support Firefox development and nothing else, period.
- Make whatever partnerships are needed to have a steady stream of income, be that donation or selling out to Google or Bing.
Firefox is in trouble. Firefox is also Mozilla's raison d'être, and they should embrace that. We as a community, cannot afford to let Firefox languish until the only browsers in the world are Chromium derivatives. The diversity of truly independent browser engines is far too important to give up without a fight.
https://itdm.com/mozilla-firefox-usage-down-85-but-why-are-e...
> In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to." [0]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker
That is not going to happen again and I don't even like Firefox so much anymore because of it.
Dead Comment
High salary and a golden parachute would be required to attract anyone good enough to succeed.
That has to be the first on the list, because that is the prerequisite for everything else.
Unfortunately there is no mechanism to achieve this within Mozilla. The people that need to go won't; they've got their trophy titles and they've feathered their nest as they want it. Thus Mozilla and Firefox with it are doomed.
Solving that would take a fork, just like it did with Netscape. It would also require an endowment of capital to fund a core of developers for years just to catch up with blink/webkit/etc. At this point the best plan might be to adopt the latter.
Thing is the market is producing this without Mozilla. Brave and others are delivering real alternatives to Chrome, Safari and Edge.
So at this point what is the value proposition of saving Firefox? That's a rhetorical question; I get it. I just don't know if it's enough to attract the developers and funding to do it. It's conceivable; one could imagine a leader with the passion to inspire people and attract the funding and developers.
Maybe that person exists. If so they won't be doing it under Mozilla.
And in the end, it's all WebKit derivatives under the hood. That is the danger. There used to be three major distinct engines (Firefox, IE/Trident, WebKit) plus a boatload of specialized ones (Opera)... and that competition bred improvements and features. These days it's all about walled gardens, which is what the "market" (aka a bunch of ultra rich companies) wants, and Firefox is the last truly independent fighter standing.
Sadly, Firefox has been mismanaged for almost a decade now.
If Mozilla is just Firefox then why to they need a CEO at all? Why does a web browser need an executive team? It doesn't make any sense to me. Linux doesn't have a CEO. Python doesn't have a CEO. Postgres doesn't have a CEO.
But all those projects have commercial support in some way because other companies rely on them and provide resources. It's unclear to me how Firefox achieves the same. Maybe that's a question a CEO can answer.
If you think you need a CEO then it makes perfect sense to me to pay them a competitive salary. For the same reason you should pay your devs a competitive salary. You can't just say "they should work for less". That's unfair and unrealistic. Either you need one and should pay for a good one, or you don't need one at all.
> Donate the major money drains that aren't Firefox to the Apache Foundation or another worthy custodian.
Or how about they donate Firefox to Apache?
It doesn't matter what the top position is called: CEO, the Grand Warlock of Yendor, or Benevolent Dictator For Life. CEO ≈ whoever is in charge and entrusted with enough authority that they can elevate or kill whatever they are managing, and that was probably the intended meaning.
> Or how about they donate Firefox to Apache?
Apache has a reputation as the graveyard of open source software. If Firefox gets donated to them, it's curtains. Maybe if they went elsewhere it could work.
Or, they could create a Totally-Not-Mozilla Foundation and bring trustworthy old-timers with the right vision on board. Then they could either do a hostile takeover aka LibreOffice, or coax the original Mozilla Foundation into handing over the brand peacefully.
Except that's not what users care about when picking a browser. Google has too much money, tech, marketing and too big an existing user and device base to make any kind of direct competition feasible. Giving Mozilla a few hundred million dollars extra isn't going to make a difference.
My answer is an attempt at addressing these two questions. My goal wasn't to make Mozilla more profitable, but to ensure that it's focused on what should be its core mission, rather than the mire of sideshows that they engage in at the moment.
Also, I don't care how Mozilla the amorphous blob of a corporation is doing. I care about how Mozilla the vehicle for the survival, promotion and development of Firefox is doing, and that one seems to be on the brink of death if nothing is done to change the current course.
For me, it started back when "sponsored tiles" were first announced in 2014. On the surface it was obviously advertisements, but many defenders tried to argue that it was a "good thing"
Then there was the proprietary Pocket extension baked into the browser with no easy removal. Again, many defenders tried to argue it was a "good thing"
Then the "studies" channel was used to push a Mr Robot ad. It's unclear how it was aligned with the values, but defenders tried to argue it was a "good thing".
They partnered with Cliqz to collect data and make recommendations. Again, defenders tried to argue it was a "good thing"
They partnered with Booking.com to push advertisements, going so far as to argue that they didn't receive any monetary compensation and that it was just a "social experiment". Again, defenders tried to argue it was a "good thing"
This is just a sampling of the events in the last 8 years (sponsored tiles was 2014). Every single time, they may have received some sort of benefit, but a number of users who bought into firefox for the security and privacy aspects ... felt betrayed and left. Because if it isn't about the privacy, what is the USP of firefox? "Not google" is only a small part of the user base.
As far as I can see their revenue peaked around FY 2017 at $562 million. In 2018 that number was about $450 million and short of expenses, they were short of expenses again for 2019 but for a $338 million settlement from Yahoo/Verizon.
The most recent reported year, 2020, saw a slight drop in their search income but a sharper cut to expenses (mostly by cutting about $60 million in "software development" expenses), putting them back on track, in a way.
They've had a steady increase in subscription income, but it's still dwarfed by the current search deal (in 2020, just shy of $25 million in subscriptions vs. over $440 million from search).
Provide their own suite of integrated tools, search engines, communication platforms, and so on. But with a privacy-focused and ad-free approach.
DuckDuckGo already proved there is an appetite for something like this.
They could go further, and remain relevant and viable in the way that DDG is, even if they never again are the most popular browser.
And they are growing. The big thing there is just positioning, and being aggressive in the right places.
That's the fundamental problem with Mozilla: MS, Google and Apple can leverage web footprint and physical platforms to market their products and generate revenue for browser development. Plus Apple's happy to take money from Google. Brave's building some kind of revenue-generating platform that stands on its own.
I don't know if Mozilla has a vision in that kind of way.
Hell, Firefox OS? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS
This rant is pertinent: http://dpldocs.info/this-week-in-d/Blog.Posted_2021_09_06.ht...
There are a lot of people oh HN who agree with that but then use a different browser for whatever reason. I feel like these people are being very hypocritical and should use what they want to succeed. Firefox is very usable and increasing its market share starts with you. Or to use another cliche - be the change you wish to see.
That's not to say Mozilla doesn't need to get their shit together, but if market share drops too low they will not be able to get money to do the things they need to do.
I use Firefox despite long standing bugs. Somehow a browser that aggressively throttles background tabs is still able to leak memory to background tabs. For the longest time Firefox messed with my wireless headset, they finally added proper support for web audio APIs and things are better now.
CPU usage is still all over the place. Some inactive tab will cause FF to spin CPU usage up to 100%.
Firefox still leaks resources, I can shut down all tabs and still have the media playback process using up tons of CPU and RAM.
WebGL performance is worse than Chrome.
TBF it has been getting steadily better over the last year, I have noticed a marked improvement. I'd say a year or so ago it was noticeably bad on a regular basis, now it is an occasional annoyance. But it should never have gotten that bad.
More to the point of the question, Google spent a LONG time pushing Chrome, hard. They paid lots of # to bundle it with app updates years ago. Visiting Google properties causes banner ads "Download Chrome!" to appear. A few years back YouTube videos would occasionally just stop working in Firefox.
And now days with Node development, well, Node developer tools are built into Chrome. React developer tools run in Chrome.
When it first came out, Firefox was faster, lighter and offered way better function than the alternatives at the time. Since then, competition has been fierce in the browser market and they’ve done little to distinguish themselves in any major way from their competitive set.
Until they do something so vastly incomparable in the market, they gonna continue to falter.
It crashes sometimes but if that's the price for not having coercive software controlling my life, so be it.
I would call it usable, but not "very usable". For normal people, Chrome(ium) UX is better. For power users, Vivaldi is a far better choice despite the Chromium browser engine. And for both of these groups, Firefox UX worsens and improves seemingly at random.
Quite frankly, I'm conflicted whether I should recommend Firefox at all. If I say "look, here's Firefox! It's more private than Chrome, and almost as fast and error-free!", and then Mozilla goes on to ruin that perception 6 months later (as they are wont to do), then it's my reputation and credibility at stake. Not only is that an unnecessary ego hit, but also makes me look like a liar (or at best, like an ivory tower dweller divorced from reality).
Deleted Comment
Are you intentionally underselling it or is this what I can expect of Firefox? Because it's not a super awe-inspiring endorsement.
Like...
> - Donate the major money drains that aren't Firefox to the Apache Foundation or another worthy custodian
> - Fire all inessential staff that don't want to work on Firefox.
> - Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money, and cut their salaries (bonuses tied directly to increase in Firefox market share).
> - Make sure that all donations from now on are redirected to things that support Firefox development and nothing else, period.
All of these are good suggestions if the problem is that Firefox is running out of money or has too few resources. But that's not my impression at all!
Google's strategy with Chrome demonstrates how valuable it is to develop other compelling services that use cutting-edge standards supported by your browser. Google does it in a way where they freeze out other compatible browsers, but Mozilla does not have to. I would say that the number one thing that Mozilla can do to support the web is to make web standards meaningful again - and the best way to do that is to develop things aside from web browsers to demonstrate the value of those standards.
> We as a community, cannot afford to let Firefox languish until the only browsers in the world are Chromium derivatives.
I don't think Mozilla having non-Firefox projects harms Firefox. I think there is every reason to believe that a healthy Mozilla has Firefox at the center, with many other ongoing projects.
It seems evident to me that if they made Firefox into a power user browser again, somehow, then power users would flock to it again and bring in some of their peers and family, putting it back in a safe 10-15% range of market share where it can't be picked off or ignored by Google. And I know that power users are leaving en masse - I stuck with them through thick and thin for nearly 15 years, and I'm finally getting ready to leave if the situation doesn't improve.
> I think there is every reason to believe that a healthy Mozilla has Firefox at the center
Neither Mozilla not Firefox are healthy, in my assessment. And this is exactly because they are getting sidetracked instead of centering on Firefox.
Its bad enough ISO certification boards and official positions of the W3C can be bought or corrupted. Let there be only one engine, controlled by Google? And even the pretense of a open and fair playing field goes away.
Open source and open protocols were not resistant enough to for profit corporations.
Now our standards are dwindling, open source projects and standards boards re completely co-opted, and the conversation on mailing lists and forums sounds like the never ending squabbling and finger wagging from your Fortune 500 HR department.
Foss and open standards have been captured by capital. And it shows in the culture.
Hell, it shows in the conversations around places like this.
Well, we've already done that. Google a) dominates the standards bodies and b) releases "standard" features that are only standard because Chrome says so
However, I think they need to answer the question, why should Firefox exist? If there is no compelling reason, well, there you go. If there is, double down on that make that reason shine. They have wasted so much money on the wrong things, IMO.
Google is either actively malicious to the open web, or doesn't care about it other than as something they can strip-mine as a revenue source. They sufficiently diversified into mobile and Android that the death of the open web would be but a blip to them.
IMO, Firefox should consciously be that alternate source of authority. How they accomplish that organisationally is irrelevant, what is relevant that their browser as a whole is competitive and focused enough that it stops haemorrhaging market share, and can start to slowly rebuild it as people look for a way out of Google's ecosystem.
Unfortunately, that reason (browser engine diversity)is compelling to people who understand the situation, but not general consumers - and it's impossible to make general consumers care, unless maybe Firefox went for an edgy "rebel against the man" vibe.
However, I do agree that their leadership has made terrible decisions and they've absolutely focused on the wrong products.
As good as Thunderbird is, I wouldn't want it to be anywhere near the top of Mozilla's priorities list right now.
I don’t know if Firefox is currently harder to integrate than Chromium, or if they would just need to gain some sort of edge (no pun intended). But they could for example:
- Provide first-class documentation for integrating
- Provide some kind of stripped-down version that’s optimized for Electron-type scenarios; perhaps they could make it more resource-light for this usecase than Chromium is
Gaining marketshare this way could garner better support from websites and/or libraries, and might also prompt corporate support from invested companies
They fired the CEO that knew what he was doing. Personally, I think Mozilla is getting what they asked for.
A continuously increasing revenue seems to be what they're getting currently.
I feel they should start trying to out “out innovate” the other browser developers. Stop playing politics, which Google will always win, and just start making new “cool shit” that developers want to use! Hire the best innovative thinkers in the industry and set them free to invent browser apis for developers to use.
Also, they should be attacking things like electron, and “hybrid” mobile app development. Build a toolkit based on Gecko for cross platform development that addresses the problems with electron.
I think they should be doing the opposite: Adding features the users want to use and keeping the web as simple as they can get away with. Google is already busy giving web developers whatever APIs they want, that is not a fight Firefox can win.
Microsoft, with their resource and their ability to bundle Microsoft Edge in with Windows, couldn't get any appreciable amount of marketshare. Firefox, with less resource than Microsoft, won't fare any better.
Rebuilding Firefox with Chronium would salvage whatever the mindshare/marketshare left. Then Firefox could still wield some influence with their marketshare and the threat of forking Chronium.
Really, all I want from a browser is Chromium, full features without disabled APIs, with a few extras like Sync, P2P stuff, and codecs, fully open.
Right now, I think anyone with name recognition and marketing ability could probably develop a winning browser for 50k or so. Just... take chromium, add sync, and an ad blocker for high bandwidth video ads. Done. You have made the world's best browser, the rest is business stuff.
Like it or not, unless Mozilla does what Google sees as acceptable, Firefox can't continue. The only way to turn Firefox around and continue development would be to find an alternative benefactor.
Not only that, but this creates perverse incentives for Mozilla. Google funds Mozilla to avoid charges of monopoly, and that disincentives Mozilla to compete with Google and make Firefox a competitive browser to Chromium.
Would Mozilla be able to get as much without Google as they get from Google? Probably not, but if they do follow the suggestions of the OP then hopefully they would not need as much.
Use all/most of the money from the Google deal to build a fund. Even doing this for a couple years will build a huge backup plan for Firefox and they can look at not relying on the deal for survival. Instead work off the interest earned on the fund.
This might be a perverse incentive depending on if your goal is to make Firefox a good browser or just a popular one.
Do you mean WebKit derivatives? Or are you predicting that Apple would switch to Chromium? (No way)
Why stop there? Why not get developers who are "in it for the passion"?
Look at Google. It is a late-stage, post-IPO business that’s now, frankly, ran by the CFO with a CEO who cares only about the board and an ever-increasing stock number.
The people who have passion left for the most part. Replaced by those who only seek to enrich themselves and climb the perf ladder.
Would those who have passion stuck around if Google was ran by people who still had passion? I’d imagine a much greater number of them would still be there.
Aren't they? Do Mozilla developers work there just to get rich, or because they care about open source?
on a more serious note, what if mozilla fires ALL execs? will it just crumble under its own weight or will that "industry linked remuneration" be replaced with more money for actual developers who get things done and are not in for the quick buck like address bar ads?
And people wonder why non-profits and NGOs don’t attract the best talent. This entitled mindset is the why.
That people who want to do good work should earn less. Perfect! Let them pay for their vacation with goodwill and air.
This is especially rich coming from the HN crowd. Everybody wants a revolutionary but in the neighbour’s house.
And there is no "the HN crowd" - don't fall into the trap of assinging to collective consciousness for groups and then complaining that it does not behave rationally.
https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/i8nuyb/firefox_de...
It was from an earlier era where they innovated instead of just campaigned against powerful web features and tried to be a FOSS version of Apple.
Donating money isn't going to help them. It might help them look good to some techies that follow that information, but otherwise most wont care.
Mozilla needs to focus on other products to use in tandem w FF. Email service that is private, VPN (i think they have a partnership), Thunderbird, zoom like platform. They need office/business solutions most likely. Devtools, dev services, etc.
I'm not saying forget FF, but they can't just focus on 1 product or they are doomed.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Being "Open Source" does nothing for me when Firefox engages in the same crap as other closed source browsers, like Pocket. Mozilla also allowed social issues to take precedence over retaining good engineers. Whether you like it or not, even assholes have a basic right to exist and the more recent culture of shun and cancel has had negative consequences for society as a whole. Maybe they were assholes, but I don't give a shit how nice the developers who made my web browser are.
I suppose the problem with Mozilla is the CEO/people who make decisions about Firefox, replace them and maybe Firefox could be revived. But I have extraordinary doubts that Firefox is salvageable at this point. Mozilla's priorities have strayed so far from mine that I cannot see them becoming something I care about any time soon. I suspect it is similar for others.
There is not one issue with Firefox, the people in charge are not competent. It's mistake after mistake after mistake. These mistakes are a direct result of prioritizing diversity over talent.
But is Firefox an inferior browser? I think it used to be, but over the last couple years, it has made massive improvements in features and performance. I use it in both desktop and mobile, and I prefer it over Chrome.
As a software engineer, I rely heavily on my browser for work. For me, the multi-account containers in Firefox are the must-have feature. No other browser can offer the ease of separating multiple test accounts, and multiple gmail/gsuite accounts for multiple enterprises separate.
Also, I like how Lockwise on mobile is divorced from the browser, making it easy to use it to manage passwords across websites and apps.
Maybe the problem with Mozilla, then, is marketing. Maybe not enough people know that Firefox is much, much better than it used to be. Or maybe the general sentiment is echoed in your post. People don't feel that Mozilla is focused on writing good software, so they don't expect Firefox to be good.
Personally, I think the biggest cause for the loss of market share is simple: Safari is the default on iOS and Chrome is the default on Android, and population of mobile devices is exploding, and there are no mainstream mobile devices that are carrying Firefox with it.
I agree with you on marketing and mobile - if the defaults are good enough on mobile then people are going to mostly use that. And while Firefox used to be hugely popular Chrome has really taken over its market share. Butnow Chrome has gone from a lean and simple browser to a bloated mess that chokes when you have too many tabs and starts using gigabytes of ram.
It has problems with memory, performance, rendering and battery drainage.
Every year I switch to Firefox and use it as a main browser. It usually goes for a month and then I need to switch again because Firefox has too many glitches.
Firefox has had a bad policy of not fixing the basics first before new features.
I do use Firefox as my main development browser still but that is because I’m more used to the developer tools than the alternatives.
I liked that too. That was before they decided to shut it down...
Several APIs that make powerful web applications possible are missing (e.g. WebUSB, various filesystem access APIs) and Firefox generally tends to lag behind Chrome when it comes to new APIs/web features.
The lower market share means that many web sites don't support it properly. For example, I need to keep a Chrome profile around for Zoom since the button doesn't even show up on Firefox, and when I tried to join a Teams meeting with Firefox, it failed in some non-obvious way, causing me to be late to a job interview (may have been due to some extension misbehaving or some config issue). I don't know if that's just because the sites don't test and do user agent sniffing, or whether Firefox is actually missing some APIs that would be required, but from a user perspective, it doesn't really matter, I can't use the browser for things I can do with Chrome.
I also still have occasional crashes.
As it stands now, even if techy people, who might be put off by the things you mention, were to be made perfectly happy again, if they recommend Firefox without a significant practical justification, non-techy people simply will not change from Chrome back to Firefox again.
Importantly, more and more people have just grown up with Chrome, never having used Firefox or IE even once. Even if Firefox stays as good as Chrome, more and more people will start their web browsing experience never having considered Firefox and just always having organically used Chrome. This alone will lead to Firefox losing market share over time, even if all existing Firefox users keep using it and loving it.
In my mind, it's clear that the reasons Firefox lost market-share are technical/practical, and the way it might regain market-share is also technical/practical improvements. That will be hard though, especially given Firefox would probably need technical/practical dominance on Android as well as on traditional computers.
It sounds like you do give a shit that they care about "social justice" and you don't want to use their browser because of that?
Or are there specific features / functionality / performance / security issues that prevent you from using Firefox and are somehow caused by the worldview of the developers?
There is one thing I think is worth noting. There's always all of this talk about, "It's the talent that matters, not the social justice stance of a developer. Keep the talented assholes; don't hire for social justice posturing!"
Well, I'm waiting to see all of those displaced "talented assholes" band together to create a product so compelling it will *prove* they were replaced by inferior developers for "social justice" reasons. By now there should be so many uber-talented people who aren't given their fair shake because of their abhorent political/social beliefs.
Or maybe... just maybe... those assholes talk a big game (as assholes often do), but aren't as indispensible as they believe themselves to be?
Now, there are of course parts of politics that are pertinent to the tool in question - privacy issues for browser developers, for example, or tracking.
Both the Brave and Vivaldi teams have people I know I disagree with politically. But I like their products, and I like the companies? Why? Because whatever the companies' employees views, the two companies' politics are about user control and privacy, and they walk the talk. Both in their own ways that reflect the people making the tool, but insofar as the companies are political, they are political in a very, very narrow way.
Basically, they understand their job is to make hammers and not to sermon about flower arrangement. Mozilla (and much of the tech sphere, sadly) is increasingly the reverse.
Dead Comment
There coworkers do though, assholes have a right to exist and others have a right to not want to work with them.
This can't be true, unless you have extremely unusual new reading habits.
The problem is when some assholes are actively engaged in denying basic rights from others. If you say "well those assholes have a right to exist", you're effectively saying "the assholes have more of a right to exist than the people they're trying to erase."
>I don't give a shit how nice the developers who made my web browser are.
I dont either, but do their coworkers care? If so, they should be disciplined or fired depending on behavior.
Dead Comment
- Prioritise getting the new extension framework fully functional. And continue innovating on the capabilities that are exposed. Especially on mobile where the new fenix engine is still limited to a small whitelist of extensions
- Sort out the multi-profile story. Container tabs are great, but the chrome model is also a great fit for many workflow (e.g. different people in a house or home vs. work profiles).
- Try and work on making Gecko easily embeddable again. Webkit/Blink gets all the attention because it's easy to embed into things. I suspect Gecko needs to compete in this market if it hopes to survive. It needs to have more than one company invested in it.
This ship has probably sailed now as they've fired most of their Rust and Servo teams. But IMO they ought to have created a rust-based cross-platform UI framework. They tried to do it web-based with Firefox OS but that was too slow. But with a Rust solution I think they could have owned both the mobile and desktop application spaces, which could potentially have made them a bootload of money and been a huge win for linux.
I use all 3 of these profiles all day every day for work:
* one personal profile logged into personal Google
* one work profile managed by the company, logged into company Google
* one development profile with all the debugging extensions installed, like React and Redux tools (they require access to all pages all the time)
I also use multiple profiles. My setup is as fallows.
Create 2 profiles work and private.Change the theme of work to orange and private to black.
Create two .desktop files and append to the Exec line -P work (or private) and the Name to include (work)
I have work on desktop 5 and private on desktop 8 and 9.
Works like a charme for me. Additional bonus. Use container to add additional seperation.
Fenix is bloody fantastic. I would double-down on this and really push the fact that (even with the limited extension list) it has uBlock Origin.
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Mozilla can't save Firefox. It's not that Firefox can't be saved, but rather that Mozilla as an organization is not capable of doing so.
My take is this - Despite a history of being relatively privacy friendly, the vast majority of funding for the organization comes directly from Google (To the tune of ~90% of their total funding, straight from Google so that Google can maintain its position as the default search in Firefox).
That leads to insurmountable conflicts of interest - They claim they are for people and for privacy, but they are funded almost entirely by Google, and have to secure search deals for their continued existence (the latest just this year: https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-go...).
In this light - I believe it actually BENEFITS mozilla to keep Firefox relevant, but not good enough to replace Chrome. If the browser genuinely becomes good enough that customers start switching from Chrome to Firefox en mass, Mozilla needs a replacement funding plan because Google can essentially turn the lights off at any point by simply refusing to pay them for search at next contract renewal.
While they've dipped their toes into paid products... most of them are not particularly relevant or compelling on their own merits (that's not to say they're bad, just not all that innovative or likely to drive enough revenue to replace the 500million a year google is paying them)
So not only do I not believe that Mozilla is capable of "saving" Firefox in this way, I don't believe they have the right incentives to even seriously try.
Perhaps Google just has mountains of spare cash, which DDG doesn't. Perhaps Google gets extra value as FF both provides search traffic, and keeps competition regulators off their back. Perhaps Bing thinks if FF changed the default search engine away from Google, 95% users would change it right back.
But if Bing is only willing to pay 70% of what Google pays - could Mozilla survive losing that much income? Or would it trigger a death spiral, with less money meaning less development meaning lower market share?
And then Bing/Yandex/Baidu buys the rights, and all that changes is the amount they get. It'd drop if Google publicly vowed they won't bid on it anymore, but there's also the possibility that someone like Yahoo pays more than Google like what happened in 2015.
It's not like Google is arbitrarily deciding how much money to give Mozilla, they are buying something at the lowest price they can.
Further, the kind of transition where Firefox might gain users from Chrome isn't instantaneous, and it turns out users have a preference here (most users don't want to have google removed from Firefox - they still prefer it. Mozilla is quietly testing a program to use Bing as the default, just to see how loud the feedback is: https://www.pcgamer.com/firefox-is-conducting-a-study-to-see...)
So there's a tension here that's beyond just enterprise deals.
Last - that deal didn't actually work out very well for Yahoo, and that was when Firefox had nearly 15% of the browser market (vs ~8% today).
Additional Key Strategies:
Google focused on developer experience with its tools.
Google shipped a good enough extension system.
Google invested in matching or beating a few key features but kept Chrome a leaner project overall. Worse is better and 80/20 rule.
Ecosystem evolution:
Google successfully got every major browser vendor to move to their rendering engine, except for Firefox. Gecko has always been harder to embed.
Slowly over time, some web devs stopped testing their work on Firefox since they were using Chrome and most browsers "just worked" like Chrome. Every week I hit a site that I have to use in Chrome because of a bug I'm seeing in Firefox.
Mozilla went all-in on trying to disrupt itself with a mobile phone operating system, which didn't work out.
Mozilla dabbles in many strategies (Privacy, Games, Advertising, WebXR), but none have been successful in growing active daily users.
Some people say Mozilla should focus on executing Firefox, but I think Mozilla is smart for trying to re-invent itself because the browser is a commodity, and if Google wants to own that on-ramp to the internet, it will.
Netscape and Firefox 1.0 were massive products. Mozilla needs a 3rd act to return to a significant marketshare.
Not to mention paying the likes of Adobe, Avast, AVG, and Oracle to have their installers auto-install Chrome using dark patterns.
Dudes, if saving Firefox was so easy that could be described in a single comment like that, it would have been saved already.
There are more people at Mozilla than the CEO, she is not responsible for all decisions. She is a quite nice person to be honest, has always been very kind to me while I was volunteering and later while I was working there. She is more into the Mozilla mission than many here.
Also, people need to understand that Firefox is not the reason for Mozilla existence, Firefox is one of the tools that Mozilla has (and depends on) to fullfil its mission. People need to wake up and realise that Firefox is the last remaining independent browser, and that fighting against Microsoft, Google, and Apple is damn hard.
There is a huge intersection between people who are often saying they know how to fix Mozilla and those using non-Firefox browsers. If people here who cares about Mozilla would volunteer, and also use the browser, Mozilla would be in a much better shape.
People who keep saying things like "cut their salaries", "cancel all projects", have absolutely no idea how all this works, or even how Mozilla works. I understand you're all frustrated, but you're going at it from the wrong direction. You need to remember that it was side projects that made Firefox. At that time the workhorse of Mozilla was the Mozilla Suite. It was also non-Firefox projects that brought up Rust and many other cool technologies.
Want to fix Mozilla? Take an active part in it.
> Want to fix Mozilla? Take an active part in it.
Why would I volunteer for an organization that pays its CEO something like 70x the average American salary?
It doesn't operate itself like a nonprofit. I don't want to put my free time into a project that exists to pay for someone's private villas.
No. This is arguing that the tail is wagging the dog. The only reason why people care about Mozilla at all is not their social projects, not the fact that they released a VPN, or the fact that they maintain Thunderbird (OK, fine, for some it is). The reason they care is because Mozilla is developing Firefox.
Subtract Firefox from Mozilla, and you get zero or less. And yes, we realise that Firefox is the last remaining independent browser - which is why it's alarming that they are focusing on anything else when the market share is so low. Their ship is sinking and they are debating whether the orchestra should play Bach or Mozart on the way down.
This is why I downvoted you. (edit: will undo, this misunderstanding needs to be discussed.)
This is the big misunderstanding.
If Mozilla can do something in addition to Firefox, fine.
But Firefox is simultaneously Mozillas biggest contribution to the open web and their main income source.
Sacrificing Firefox for a higher goal is almost literally to butcher the goose who laid the golden eggs.
> Want to fix Mozilla? Take an active part in it.
Try that and get flagged for advocacy(!). Seriously: see the tab strip api to see it in action.
I have to agree with this. You see everyone on HN talking about the importance of Firefox in the fight against Google's monopoly but yet when you read comments about anything web related many (maybe most) commenters say they use Chrome (Someone should do a HN Poll).
There is no excuse to use anything other than Firefox if you claim to care about things the open web, software freedom etc.
What changes if I use it more with metrics disabled?
Deleted Comment
very simple answer, because Mozilla doesn't control the infrastructure that runs on 80% of smartphones in the world and ships Firefox as the default browser.
It really has nothing to do with the bespoke features that people on HN pay attention to. Firefox doesn't control any platform and defaults matter. There's a reason Google pays them a gazillion dollars to be the standard search engine, which you can change with one click. It's also why Safari is still going relatively strong.
Give users a 60% chance to see Firefox as the first option, then show them the multitude of Chrome/Safari-based browsers.
If you look at Wikimedia's metrics, Firefox still has ~10% market share of the desktop browser market[0], not too bad considering Firefox is not the default browser on any platform outside of linux systems for the most part, and that Mozilla is much smaller entity than competing browser vendors. Still down from the ~30%[0] desktop share they had, but now they have 2 large competing entities offering default browsers so the decline is somewhat expected.
Also, contrast this with Firefox's ~0.7% share on mobile[0] where Mozilla has never been able to get a good foothold.
As long as Firefox isn't available as a default on mobile and as the share of mobile device web browsing increases, Firefox will keep losing total market share as a percentage.
Strategy wise, refocusing efforts on retaining that 10% desktop share might be a good idea. From there, work on building up more of the desktop share and then try marketing the mobile browser to the desktop browser community to build up mobile browser share.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_market_share#Summary_t...
I suspect that it's poor market share is due the very poor performance of the older fennec implementation.
You can see it well on JS-heavy sites like Twitter, the difference is very easy to perceive with loading time, scrolling perf, and also with memory management (Firefox evicts pages from memory cache aggressively compared to Chromium; you sometimes switch a tab or switch an app, go back, and bang, it's gone and needs a reload); and I have a decent good phone (not top shelf, but a "high-mid" Pixel 3a, probably 60-70th percentile within Androids?).
Many people don't have a desktop anymore those days, or barely use it.