> It might be hard to believe for my younger readers, but Mozilla took on Internet Explorer that was just as entrenched as Chrome is now, and they kicked proverbial posterior! They did because they offered a better browser that respected the people who used it, and gave them agency in their browsing experience.
That is revisionist history. Firefox succeeded because MS was sitting on their hands with IE, and it was stagnating. Firefox didnt do the opposite of what IE - you could argue Mozilla was doing what MS should have been.
It wasnt about "respecting users", or "agency" but simply implemented standards properly.
And that's going to be a hard problem with Chrome because you're up against a browser that is moving very, very, fast.
Firefox was seriously a better browser, not just "implements standards better". It ran faster, it had tabs (wow!) and at one point it got Firebug which let you have a console INSIDE the browser that showed information you could print with `console.log`, I kid you not.
It was a better browser through and through, maybe because MS slept on IE or maybe not, but in the end it isn't revisionist to say they beat MS's proverbial posterior because the browser was better.
Firebug was a big reason for webdevs to adopt firefox in the first place. Part of what made chrome succeed is it came out with a pretty robust set of webdev tools right from the get-go.
But also, google spent a mountain of money advertising chrome.
One big feature at the time was Firefox had a built in popup blocker, IE did not. Popup ads were rife towards the backend of the 90's and the internet felt borderline unusable without a blocker.
> beat MS's proverbial posterior because the browser was better
not via marketshare. The fact is, only developers (and adjacent) were using firefox. IE, during those days (pre-chrome) was still such a dominant browser that you had to check for IE compatibility.
But today, developers are not checking for firefox compatibility. So, firefox today (and during the firefox heyday) were never truly "beating" IE from a marketshare perspective.
You could have a similar console on IE already back then, naturally it only worked on Windows, and MS being MS, the expectation was that either Office Tools or VS would be installed, as it was provided via them in a way similar to Firebug.
There was also the integration with Dreamweaver, Frontpage.
I'd also point out that IE won the title from Netscape in the first place, which was the basis for the Mozilla software set (that later spun off into firefox).
Mozilla didn't "take on" IE. Mozilla reclaimed their lost browser position. IE kicked the proverbial posterior of Netscape which both Netscape and Mozilla struggled to reclaim right up until the release of Firefox.
"On July 15, 2003, Time Warner (formerly AOL Time Warner) disbanded Netscape. Most of the programmers were laid off, and the Netscape logo was removed from the building."
Peak Netscape was 1996. By 2003, they had already handed development off to Mozilla, and Netscape the browser was just a thin veneer over Mozilla's browser.
By 2007, it was just Mozilla with AOL branding and almost all of it's users were people still using AOL in 2007.
Firefox grew in popularity due to widespread spyware issues at the time. Much of that spyware specifically targeted Internet Explorer’s ActiveX technology, making Firefox the safest alternative browser. I had everyone I know installing it and they all liked it.
This just reminded me of the time I thought Firefox was cooked when tabs were finally added in IE7. The idea that IE was ever suddenly going to have a huge resurgence is amusing in hindsight, but it really felt like we were stuck with it for a while there.
I started using Firefox with version 1.5, as did many of my friends, and we were doing it because it was flat out better. We did not care about 'stagnating' or standards.
Mozilla has the classic problem of a non-profit that achieved its aims. I was around back in the day and my friends and I were avid evangelists of Firefox - a few cogs in the wheel of the marketing installing Firefox on school machines and getting all the elderly people to use it and so on. There were user groups and student ambassador programs and so on. It was an incredible marketing effort combined with an effort to bring standards and compliance to them into the mainstream. And it worked because they added features at a rate that IE simply did not match.
The extension ecosystem, tabs, plugins, and notably whatever effort they did behind the scenes to ensure that companies that did streaming video etc. would work with their browser all played out really well.
I think the ultimate problem is that Mozilla's mission of a standards-compliant web with open-source browsers everywhere ultimately did get achieved. The era of "Works with IE6" badges has ended and the top browsers run on open-source engines. Despite our enthusiasm at the time for it, I think the truth is that Firefox was probably just a vehicle for this, much bigger, achievement.
Now that it's been achieved, Mozilla is in the fortunate place where Firefox only needs to exist as a backstop against Chrome sliding into high-proprietary world while providing the utility to Google that they get to say they're not a monopoly on web technologies.
Mozilla's search for a new mission isn't some sign of someone losing their way. It's just what happens to the Hero of Legend after he defeats the Big Bad. There's a post-denouement period. Sam Gamgee gets to go become Mayor of the Shire, which is all very convenient, but a non-profit like Mozilla would much rather find a similar enough mission that they can apply their vast resources to. That involves the same mechanics as product development, and they're facing the same primary thing: repeated failure.
This new "please accept cookies and scripts to prove you are running Google Chrome without Adblockers" Internet does not exactly look like mission accomplished to me. And that is before we even get to the part of the Internet that goes straight to "please run this Android app so we can ask Google who truly owns your device".
If Mozilla was not busy "offering" (renamed the no-thank-you setting once again) so many "experiences" they could be doing much of the same stuff they did back in the day.
American non-profits seem to be run like corporations, with all disadvantages of it. Bloated, losing focus, growing for the sake of growth (where growth means headcount and income, not necessarily charter goals)
I think its even worse than that. Corporations at least have a bottom line to chase. At the end of the day there is the hard reality of you are either making money or you arent. There is an objective measure of success. American non profits are like the bad parts without the checks and balances of actually having to make money.
Mozilla did lose their way. It happened because they abandoned their core users: you. People who loved Firefox so much they practically forced it on everyone around them.
Google released Chrome with a massive advertising campaign, reaching even to television. They put ads for Chrome on the world's biggest web properties. It was packaged in installers. Not to say it wasn't a good browser - but it wasn't obviously better than Firefox. This marketing campaign bought them a ton of marketshare.
Mozilla's response, instead of sticking by Mozilla evangelists, nearly all of whom were power users, was to decide that the browser was too complicated for its users. It needed to be more like Chrome. It needed to be the browser for the proverbial grandma. So they axed features (like Panorama), configurability, and extensibility, alienating everyone who really cared. Only they didn't have the marketing heft of Google, so they didn't get Grandma, either.
Ever since then they've been panicking and grasping at straws and shoving in shovelware like Pocket in obviously vain attempts to regain what they had. And they never will, until they make people like you and me LOVE Firefox again.
I've been saying for over a decade that Mozilla decided to abandon their core demographic - power users, instead going after people who "really like chrome, but think that it’s just too fast and doesn’t use enough memory".
I always questioned how big that demographic was. Looking at a chart of Firefox's market share would seem to indicate that I might have been on to something.
But Mozilla just keep doubling down on trash. They're not actually interested in hearing what people want. People like me tried to tell them before we abandoned Firefox. But they weren't interested in listening. It's been this way for 10 years or more now.
I've long been of the opinion that the best thing for Mozilla would be for it to die, so that some other FOSS group (maybe the FSF, or debian, someone like that) could take its place with a firefox fork. And maybe even start actually improving the software again.
When Chrome was released, the advertising I recall focused on one killer feature that Firefox didn't get for many years after that: Speed.
Chrome's JIT JavaScript was so much faster than everyone else's interpreted JavaScript that you could run a materially different kind of software in the browser. It was like the difference between a slow interpreted language and a fast compiled one. Chrome's rendering was also fast.
There was even a cartoon explaining how the new JavaScript engine worked.
Chrome felt like the next generation of browser.
I say this as someone who remained a fan and user of Firefox throughout. I stuck with Firefox through its relatively slow years.
Firefox caught up, but it took years. It got its own JIT JavaScript, but there were a few years after that where Firefox's rendering was relatively slow by the new standards. However, Firefox has excellent performance all round by now.
I was disappointed when Chrome came out that JIT JavaScript could even be a marketable feature and wasn't already the default in the best open source browsers, because it seemed like such an obvious thing to do for many years prior, and not particularly difficult. I guess market forces resulted in nobody deciding to do it in Firefox, or any other open source browser, until competition made it a necessity. I was quite surprised, because Firefox seemed like the product of passionate technology nerds, and performance JITs are very fun and satisfying things to make, with visible results.
The biggest problem with mozilla is they are trend chasing instead of finding a niche.
The AI stuff is the perfect example. Are there people who like AI? Certainly. Will they use firefox? Probably not.
At this stage firefox is the anti-establishment choice. That crowd hates AI. Betting on AI might make sense if you are chrome. It doesn't make sense if you are firefox.
I use Firefox to access ChatGPT. I wouldn't want AI suggestions or slop appearing on random pages.
The idea that LLM have been successful and useful for significant things is naturally confused with the idea LLMs needed to bolted on to literally anything.
Brendan Eich was the Director of Mozilla. This is the guy who invented Javascript in 10 days, at Netscape, and then co-founded Mozilla, and became the technical lead. He was Chief Architect of Mozilla, then CTO of Mozilla Corporation, then CEO. He made Firefox great. This was when Mozilla was in its heyday, and passed IE in marketshare.
Then he was fired in 2014 because a bunch of people went crazy that he made a $1,000 political donation for a California ballot proposition that had nothing to do with computers.
This sent a signal that Mozilla doesn't reward technical improvements to its software — it rewards following political trends.
Brendan was in charge of a company built on LGBT people. For him to turn around and donate to anti-LGBT political causes was not appropriate. The company fairly lost faith in him. How can you work somewhere your boss hates you so badly he campaigns against your basic human rights?
However, Brendan also did not increase his own pay by hundreds of percent while laying off over a quarter of the staff, which is what the executive teams since Brendan have done.
The bad stuff in Firefox started when the C-suite, now lead by an ex-McKinsey CEO, started lining their own pockets instead of running a technology company.
Brendan Eich then went on to develop a browser (a set of Chromium patches, rather) with cryptocurrencies, NFTs, LLM integrations, and all other trend-chasing junk. I'm not sure Firefox would be any better with him in the team - it'd probably be worse.
Mozilla is a search traffic vendor with one client, not a combination of the EFF and the FSF. That's their behavior and motives in a nutshell. How big of a fraction of the Google traffic comes from power users? How would they find an alternative? Those are the questions the (rational) high-paid execs at Mozilla ask about us.
Google once already has decided that certain Web property brings in too little traffic, and shut it down, which was probably the largest blunder in their history, burning immense amounts of goodwill. They shut down Google Reader.
It attracted a relatively narrow audience, but that audience was special: active and future founders, CEOs, CTOs, VPs of engineering, blogosphere and YouTube celebrities, etc. Each of these disgruntled users communicated their disappointment to hundreds and thousands of other, less affluent users. Most of them, once in positions of engineering power, now would think twice before relying on something from Google.
Same with Firefox. It may serve a relatively more narrow audience, but it's not necessarily the same kind of audience, on average, which Chrome or Edge or even Safari serves.
I think I disabled "Use AI to suggest tab group names" and "enable link previews" in settings (not about:config), and I don't really see any AI anywhere else? I can add/remove some chat thing from the sidebar, but you can just remove that button and you don't need to use it. It's like any other feature one may choose to not use.
I now see there's also a "Create alt texts automatically" for pdfjs. This actually seems one of the more useful AI features I've seen. But I've never noticed it exists as I don't need this accessibility feature. You can disable it in the pdfjs (no about:config needed).
In short, Firefox is not forcing anyone to use AI and ways to disable it are not that obfuscated.
I think something people should take a hard look at is Firefox's crypto libraries. Firefox's implementation of cryptography in NSS is fundamentally in the browser. Chrome works with the OS. One could argue which implementation is better, but as a user, it's really helpful to have Firefox laying around from time to time. For all sorts of reasons.
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That is revisionist history. Firefox succeeded because MS was sitting on their hands with IE, and it was stagnating. Firefox didnt do the opposite of what IE - you could argue Mozilla was doing what MS should have been.
It wasnt about "respecting users", or "agency" but simply implemented standards properly.
And that's going to be a hard problem with Chrome because you're up against a browser that is moving very, very, fast.
It was a better browser through and through, maybe because MS slept on IE or maybe not, but in the end it isn't revisionist to say they beat MS's proverbial posterior because the browser was better.
But also, google spent a mountain of money advertising chrome.
not via marketshare. The fact is, only developers (and adjacent) were using firefox. IE, during those days (pre-chrome) was still such a dominant browser that you had to check for IE compatibility.
But today, developers are not checking for firefox compatibility. So, firefox today (and during the firefox heyday) were never truly "beating" IE from a marketshare perspective.
The big thing about firebug was that you could see/edit the DOM, CSS, and at some point Network requests, etc.
There was also the integration with Dreamweaver, Frontpage.
Mozilla didn't "take on" IE. Mozilla reclaimed their lost browser position. IE kicked the proverbial posterior of Netscape which both Netscape and Mozilla struggled to reclaim right up until the release of Firefox.
Deleted Comment
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape:
"On July 15, 2003, Time Warner (formerly AOL Time Warner) disbanded Netscape. Most of the programmers were laid off, and the Netscape logo was removed from the building."
Peak Netscape was 1996. By 2003, they had already handed development off to Mozilla, and Netscape the browser was just a thin veneer over Mozilla's browser.
By 2007, it was just Mozilla with AOL branding and almost all of it's users were people still using AOL in 2007.
The extension ecosystem, tabs, plugins, and notably whatever effort they did behind the scenes to ensure that companies that did streaming video etc. would work with their browser all played out really well.
I think the ultimate problem is that Mozilla's mission of a standards-compliant web with open-source browsers everywhere ultimately did get achieved. The era of "Works with IE6" badges has ended and the top browsers run on open-source engines. Despite our enthusiasm at the time for it, I think the truth is that Firefox was probably just a vehicle for this, much bigger, achievement.
Now that it's been achieved, Mozilla is in the fortunate place where Firefox only needs to exist as a backstop against Chrome sliding into high-proprietary world while providing the utility to Google that they get to say they're not a monopoly on web technologies.
Mozilla's search for a new mission isn't some sign of someone losing their way. It's just what happens to the Hero of Legend after he defeats the Big Bad. There's a post-denouement period. Sam Gamgee gets to go become Mayor of the Shire, which is all very convenient, but a non-profit like Mozilla would much rather find a similar enough mission that they can apply their vast resources to. That involves the same mechanics as product development, and they're facing the same primary thing: repeated failure.
That's just life.
If Mozilla was not busy "offering" (renamed the no-thank-you setting once again) so many "experiences" they could be doing much of the same stuff they did back in the day.
Google released Chrome with a massive advertising campaign, reaching even to television. They put ads for Chrome on the world's biggest web properties. It was packaged in installers. Not to say it wasn't a good browser - but it wasn't obviously better than Firefox. This marketing campaign bought them a ton of marketshare.
Mozilla's response, instead of sticking by Mozilla evangelists, nearly all of whom were power users, was to decide that the browser was too complicated for its users. It needed to be more like Chrome. It needed to be the browser for the proverbial grandma. So they axed features (like Panorama), configurability, and extensibility, alienating everyone who really cared. Only they didn't have the marketing heft of Google, so they didn't get Grandma, either.
Ever since then they've been panicking and grasping at straws and shoving in shovelware like Pocket in obviously vain attempts to regain what they had. And they never will, until they make people like you and me LOVE Firefox again.
I've been saying for over a decade that Mozilla decided to abandon their core demographic - power users, instead going after people who "really like chrome, but think that it’s just too fast and doesn’t use enough memory".
I always questioned how big that demographic was. Looking at a chart of Firefox's market share would seem to indicate that I might have been on to something.
But Mozilla just keep doubling down on trash. They're not actually interested in hearing what people want. People like me tried to tell them before we abandoned Firefox. But they weren't interested in listening. It's been this way for 10 years or more now.
I've long been of the opinion that the best thing for Mozilla would be for it to die, so that some other FOSS group (maybe the FSF, or debian, someone like that) could take its place with a firefox fork. And maybe even start actually improving the software again.
Ah, but Chrome was obviously better than Firefox.
When Chrome was released, the advertising I recall focused on one killer feature that Firefox didn't get for many years after that: Speed.
Chrome's JIT JavaScript was so much faster than everyone else's interpreted JavaScript that you could run a materially different kind of software in the browser. It was like the difference between a slow interpreted language and a fast compiled one. Chrome's rendering was also fast.
There was even a cartoon explaining how the new JavaScript engine worked.
Chrome felt like the next generation of browser.
I say this as someone who remained a fan and user of Firefox throughout. I stuck with Firefox through its relatively slow years.
Firefox caught up, but it took years. It got its own JIT JavaScript, but there were a few years after that where Firefox's rendering was relatively slow by the new standards. However, Firefox has excellent performance all round by now.
I was disappointed when Chrome came out that JIT JavaScript could even be a marketable feature and wasn't already the default in the best open source browsers, because it seemed like such an obvious thing to do for many years prior, and not particularly difficult. I guess market forces resulted in nobody deciding to do it in Firefox, or any other open source browser, until competition made it a necessity. I was quite surprised, because Firefox seemed like the product of passionate technology nerds, and performance JITs are very fun and satisfying things to make, with visible results.
What are the sorts of features you think they should consider adding?
The AI stuff is the perfect example. Are there people who like AI? Certainly. Will they use firefox? Probably not.
At this stage firefox is the anti-establishment choice. That crowd hates AI. Betting on AI might make sense if you are chrome. It doesn't make sense if you are firefox.
The idea that LLM have been successful and useful for significant things is naturally confused with the idea LLMs needed to bolted on to literally anything.
Brendan Eich was the Director of Mozilla. This is the guy who invented Javascript in 10 days, at Netscape, and then co-founded Mozilla, and became the technical lead. He was Chief Architect of Mozilla, then CTO of Mozilla Corporation, then CEO. He made Firefox great. This was when Mozilla was in its heyday, and passed IE in marketshare.
Then he was fired in 2014 because a bunch of people went crazy that he made a $1,000 political donation for a California ballot proposition that had nothing to do with computers.
This sent a signal that Mozilla doesn't reward technical improvements to its software — it rewards following political trends.
All of the bad stuff in Firefox started then.
Brendan was in charge of a company built on LGBT people. For him to turn around and donate to anti-LGBT political causes was not appropriate. The company fairly lost faith in him. How can you work somewhere your boss hates you so badly he campaigns against your basic human rights?
However, Brendan also did not increase his own pay by hundreds of percent while laying off over a quarter of the staff, which is what the executive teams since Brendan have done.
The bad stuff in Firefox started when the C-suite, now lead by an ex-McKinsey CEO, started lining their own pockets instead of running a technology company.
LLM integration: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/ai-chatbot
Would it though?
Which is chromium
It attracted a relatively narrow audience, but that audience was special: active and future founders, CEOs, CTOs, VPs of engineering, blogosphere and YouTube celebrities, etc. Each of these disgruntled users communicated their disappointment to hundreds and thousands of other, less affluent users. Most of them, once in positions of engineering power, now would think twice before relying on something from Google.
Same with Firefox. It may serve a relatively more narrow audience, but it's not necessarily the same kind of audience, on average, which Chrome or Edge or even Safari serves.
Here are instructions on how to disable all of it:
https://github.com/Aetherinox/firefox-telemetry-block
(and no, you can't do it with just a few checkboxes in the prefs, you have to go into the advanced pref editor and look up some stuff.)
I now see there's also a "Create alt texts automatically" for pdfjs. This actually seems one of the more useful AI features I've seen. But I've never noticed it exists as I don't need this accessibility feature. You can disable it in the pdfjs (no about:config needed).
In short, Firefox is not forcing anyone to use AI and ways to disable it are not that obfuscated.