[HN Gopher] Firefox on the brink?
___________________________________________________________________
Firefox on the brink?
Author : alexzeitler
Score : 536 points
Date : 2023-12-05 14:24 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.brycewray.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.brycewray.com)
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yes, the Web has turned into ChromeOS, with the help of many
| folks that used to bash IE.
| dartos wrote:
| There's still safari at 34% usage. :badpokerface:
| irrational wrote:
| Only because of iOS, I assume. But it looks like Apple might
| be forced to open things up and allow other browsers to run
| on iOS. If that happened, I'd expect Safari to drop like a
| stone.
| jonhohle wrote:
| Until people find they can't get to lunch without having to
| charge their phones.
| jml78 wrote:
| Crazy thing is that I know a few Linux users that would
| love to have safari on our Linux machines for syncing.
|
| Firefox on iOS is a horrible experience. My desktop I have
| switched to Vivaldi so I can easily sync tabs between
| desktop and phone. I don't love Vivaldi but the overall
| experience is superior to Firefox on both.
|
| Would prefer safari on my Linux desktop and use it on my
| phone
| lambda_garden wrote:
| I'd rather have proper Firefox on iOS than Safari on
| Linux.
| DrBazza wrote:
| And MacOS.
|
| And I hope Apple doesn't manipulate the "power usage" data
| that always claims Safari is the lowest-power best-battery-
| saver browser on their platform.
|
| I run Safari on MacOS for only that reason, that it
| allegedly gives me an extra hour or so out of my laptop vs.
| Chrome or Firefox. Of course, I should actually benchmark
| myself and find out.
| jwells89 wrote:
| In my experience it depends somewhat on the sites/web
| apps one uses (some are not well optimized for WebKit),
| but Safari definitely tends to be easier on the battery.
| It seems to try harder to get to an idle state and keep
| CPU usage down where Chrome and Firefox are happy to keep
| the CPU spun up, perhaps due to a "speed and bells and
| whistles at all costs" mentality in development
| (traditionally browsers have been marketed on speed and
| features rather than efficiency).
| carlosjobim wrote:
| What's "only" about it? Smartphones gave everybody
| convenient internet access and thus increased the
| customer/user base enormously for everybody who publishes
| online. It's perfectly natural that the frontrunner in
| smartphones will have a huge chunk of the browser market.
| irrational wrote:
| If iOS allowed other browsers on the device (and I mean
| allow other browsers to run their own engines and not
| have to use Safari's engine under the hood - be first
| class citizens, just like Safari) then I doubt Safari
| would have such high numbers.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Maybe, maybe not. But there's nothing "only" about
| creating a massively popular way to browse the web. That
| Safari chunk will still be an iOS chunk. Device matters
| much more than browser for making web interfaces.
| corobo wrote:
| Fixing weird bugs like not loading cookies for a ~minute
| whenever the app needs to launch (as opposed to restore
| from background) would be a win too [1]
|
| I switched to Safari on iPhone because I was always logged
| out of stuff on first load, super annoying. I miss the
| syncing, but not that much.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-
| ios/issues/11994
| estel wrote:
| > If that happened, I'd expect Safari to drop like a stone
|
| Chrome and Firefox are already on iOS - if they're allowed
| to swap out their rendering engine, is this something
| customers will actually care about?
| theta_d wrote:
| Hopefully it will force Apple to compete again and improve
| Safari.
| summerlight wrote:
| No, that's not going to happen. Chrome replacing IE could
| happen only because of MSFT's strategical abandonment of
| their browser for sabotaging the web in favor of the
| Windows platform. Apple actually is well aware of this
| mistake and began to invest into Safari when it's clear
| that they cannot prevent 3rd party rendering engines
| forever.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It's perfectly fine to bash both Chrome and IE.
| frou_dh wrote:
| Internet Explorer references are overall just stale. Most
| uses of the catchphrase "X is the new IE" are basically
| shorthand for "I personally don't like browser X".
| eastbound wrote:
| I always get downvoted for that, so it seems that Firefox
| supporters are subjective about their beloved browser, ... and
| it doesn't matter anymore whether I phrase it properly, since
| it will be shunned anyway, preventing Mozilla from actually
| recognizing their culture problem...
|
| But Firefox has ads. It also has a lot of obnoxious browsing-
| interrupting interceptions saying that they care about our
| privacy. Which isn't possibly true, because they also
| encourage, sometimes in the same page, to create a Mozilla
| profile... which gives them all required information to track
| us better - no matter whether they do it, gaining the ability
| to do it is pretty much a blank card to the NSA.
|
| So thanks NSA and their Mozilla front and their downvoters on
| HN, have a safe imaginary trip to privacy!
| ale42 wrote:
| Do you think that Google (part of PRISM, remember?) protects
| your privacy better by automatically linking your browsing
| data with your Google profile if you ever have the idea of
| logging in on a Google website before tweaking the settings?
|
| And as far as I know, Mozilla can't access the key that
| encrypt Firefox profiles (as long as your profile password is
| not 123456). Didn't check the source code, but I guess that
| if they weren't doing that for real, someone would have
| spotted it already.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| I can't believe that we fell for this crap again.
|
| That's one of the side effects of aging engineers out of the
| industry so quickly. We've lost _so many_ of the engineers who
| just lived through a crippling browser monoculture not much
| more than _ten years ago._
| pjmlp wrote:
| And you see this all over the place, like microservices (The
| Network is the Computer, SOA, WebServices), WebAssembly
| (TIMI, P-Code, JVM, MSIL, PNaCL,...).
|
| Lots of stuff that keeps happening because newer folks just
| don't have any clue of what came before, or why that fence is
| in the middle of the field.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The only time I use Chrome is for Chrome Remote Desktop.
| Otherwise, Safari on macOS and iOS seems to do what I need it
| to do for at least 8 years.
| nequo wrote:
| I want Firefox to not be on the brink. I have had no problems
| with it on Linux over the last few years since I switched from
| Chrome. I do not wish to touch Chrome with a ten-foot pole.
| dartos wrote:
| Firefox regularly crashes for me on wayland.
|
| It slows down my whole system when it tries to load a page in
| first boot (but librewolf doesn't for some reason) the HID and
| webgl/webgpu support is bad...
|
| It's just not a very good browser compared to chrome forks or
| webkit based ones.
| BossingAround wrote:
| Sounds like a configuration problem. Firefox on
| Fedora/Wayland is very fast, haven't had it crash in a long
| time.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| Same. About the only thing that's stable on F37. Updates to
| the kernel and other things have been giving me headaches,
| but FF and Steam are still solid.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| I had that problem, too. It went away when I replaced my
| Nvidia card with an AMD one.
| dartos wrote:
| I'm using an amd card :(
| BossingAround wrote:
| Ah, well, Nvidia still has a lot of problems with Wayland I
| hear, that might not be Firefox's (or Wayland's) error.
| caution wrote:
| That's strange. I use Nvidia, on Wayland and have 0 issues
| with Firefox
| riskable wrote:
| I was running Firefox in Wayland just fine with my AMD
| Radeon 6650 XT but recently switched to an Nvidia 4060 Ti
| (16GB) and suddenly I started having crashes. I don't blame
| Firefox for this since _other_ applications started giving
| me issues too (e.g. Dolphin and Discord). I place the blame
| squarely on Nvidia.
|
| Nvidia's drivers _suck_ but if you want to do AI stuff
| their cards are basically the only option until Intel and
| AMD complete ramping up their support for AI stuff. I
| wouldn 't be surprised if two years from now AMD takes the
| crown with Intel being a close second (providing the best
| bang-for-the-buck) but for that to happen AMD needs to
| focus more on making _actual implementations_ faster (e.g.
| PyTorch) and not just making minor incremental improvements
| to ROCm (and also make it so you don 't need to use
| `amdgpu-install` to use it!).
| jacquesm wrote:
| I haven't seen a FF crash in the last five years and I
| typically have a few hundred tabs open across multiple
| instances.
| bildung wrote:
| Can confirm, I currently have around 240 tabs open (yeah I
| know...), and most of those a running for at least multiple
| weeks now.
|
| I am on X though, perhaps a Wayland related bug or config
| thing?
| resonious wrote:
| Huh... I've exclusively used Firefox on Wayland for a long
| time now due to good fractional scaling support (unlike
| Chrome which took ages to stop using x11 by default). I agree
| that the webgl/webgpu support is bad but haven't seen the
| whole-system slowdown.
| ParetoOptimal wrote:
| Firefox on Wayland for me has 0 problems.
|
| Have you tried:
|
| - running with terminal to see errors
|
| - running with a new profile
| ravenstine wrote:
| I haven't used it super extensively with Wayland, but so far
| I've not experienced any crashes. To clarify, I've been using
| Firefox on Debian virtualized with QEMU on aarch64, and the
| compositor is Weston, so maybe there are quirks on other
| setups. Overall, it runs impressively.
| TimeBearingDown wrote:
| I also have crashes on sway, but there's a rough workaround
| now which prevents the issue totally.
|
| I believe there's a design issue with Firefox and GTK
| handling input events; some Wayland compositors have
| workarounds but others do not.
|
| https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/7645
|
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1743144
|
| Firefox is my preferred browser and I hope we can keep its
| engine alive in this era of Chrome dominance.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| I have been using Sway and Firefox for the last three years
| at least, and have never experienced crashes. Sway and
| Firefox as packaged by Debian Stable. I really wish people
| on HN threads complaining about Firefox bugs clearly stated
| 1) their environment, and 2) who packaged the Firefox,
| because those are what could make all the difference.
| the8472 wrote:
| The bug depends on a few factors that aren't really
| packaging-specific. A) the default socket buffer size B)
| the polling rate of your mouse C) whether there's
| anything on your system or in your firefox profile that
| can cause enough lag that the buffer overflows D) whether
| your compositor has any workarounds for that protocol
| limitation
|
| Well, I suppose a packager could have disabled wayland in
| firefox...
| ChubbyGlasses wrote:
| I've had very similar experiences on Windows and Mac. I
| really wish Moz would fork WebKit or Blink and work on a
| browser for the modern age.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I had the same after forcing Firefox to do hardware
| acceleration on my Nvidia GPU. Firefox wanted to disable it,
| but I wanted to use my GPU anyway. Perhaps try resetting the
| GPU acceleration configuration?
|
| Firefox isn't as stable as I would like it to be, but it's
| much better than any Webkit alternative I can find on Linux.
| bshacklett wrote:
| I can't speak to the second point, but I'd look for OOM
| events in dmesg for the crashes.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Google finally beat my hands with a stick firmly enough to get
| me off Firefox.
|
| It was youtube. Not the ads -- I pay for premium -- but the
| fact that on FF they added an artificial 5s page load delay on
| firefox plus a bug has lingered for months where it always
| loads the _last_ video, so you have to load every video twice.
| 12s /video is too much delay.
|
| Ah well, it was good while it lasted.
| btreecat wrote:
| 12s of your time is the cost of compromised morals? That
| seems p cheap and unfortunately indicative.
| taylodl wrote:
| Compromised morals? WTF is the CEO of the Mozilla
| Foundation doing to earn $7M per year in salary? What about
| the Mozilla Foundation forcing out Brandon Eich because of
| a _personal_ donation he made to a cause they didn 't like?
|
| Morals my ass!
|
| I stopped using Firefox the day they kicked Brandon out and
| here's the kicker: _I don 't agree with the cause Brandon
| supported but I agree his employment shouldn't be affected
| by donations he made to support a ballot issue._
|
| So yeah, the Mozilla Foundation can go straight to hell
| with that shit.
|
| Good riddance!
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| What really moved me away from Firefox was using Brave
| search. I had been using DuckDuckGo since the Snowden
| leaks. When DuckDuckGo announced they would derank
| results if they thought it was Russian propaganda or
| disinformation, I moved to Brave search. A week or so
| later, I decided that Mozilla was too woke for my liking,
| and started using Brave's browser, too.
| worksonmine wrote:
| You seem to value integrity, are you aware that Brave
| browser replaced affiliate URLs with their own? So if you
| wanted to support someone and use their affiliate link
| they took the liberty to replace that. I wouldn't touch
| that spyware if I got paid.
| croes wrote:
| So you shoot yourself in the foot to teach Mozilla a
| lesson?
|
| We all lose if it's only Chrome.
| taylodl wrote:
| Last I looked Safari isn't Chrome.
|
| Also, _anybody_ can use the Gecko web rendering engine,
| yet project after project after project has picked the
| WebKit or Blink rendering engines.
|
| And no, I haven't "shot myself in the foot" - when I
| replaced Firefox I found two great browsers: Brave and
| Vivaldi.
|
| The better question is why you continue to support a
| compromised organization?
| glenstein wrote:
| Just to make sure I'm following along, we were talking
| about how youtube includes a delay of several seconds if
| it detects a certain ad blocking browser extension.
| Firefox has that browser extension, and therefore Mozilla
| is a "compromised organization."
| taylodl wrote:
| You violated YouTube's T's & C's and you're complaining
| about Google putting you in timeout for doing so. You
| steal from YouTube's content creators yet present Mozilla
| as the good guys. Have I summed that up accurately?
| toyg wrote:
| Gecko being a mess for embedded use pre-dates the Eich
| affair and Baker's payday.
|
| As for Mozilla being compromised - maybe, but it's still
| less compromised than advertisement companies, crypto
| companies, tax evaders, and their likes.
| croes wrote:
| Safari is a niche and is missing features.
|
| And Brave and Vivaldi are based on Chromium, so they help
| Google that Chromium sets the standards for the web.
|
| You already shot yourself, just didn't recognize yet.
|
| Why do you support a crooked company like Google?
| taylodl wrote:
| _> Why do you support a crooked company like Google?_
|
| Get back with me when the Mozilla Foundation has done a
| fraction of what Google has done in furthering our
| knowledge of computer science. Other companies making
| significant contributions to our knowledge of computer
| science are AT&T, IBM, and Microsoft. Would you prefer
| them to Google?
|
| Also, the Firefox against the world meme is juvenile.
| sgift wrote:
| Brendan Eich was not forced out. He made the donation, he
| couldn't stand the heat of defending it, he left.
|
| Also, personal donations can make you unfit for some
| positions. Significant parts of the community felt his
| donation was not in line with the values they wanted to
| see represented. And since you didn't agree with them you
| decided to leave.
| Timshel wrote:
| Don't know, the pro LGBT stance of Mozilla/ Mozilla
| Foundation was not new in 2014 I believe.
|
| So not having leadership with opposing view does not seem
| strange to me; donation was done privately but it end-up
| being public enough. There's enough hypocrisy and pink-
| washing ...
| taylodl wrote:
| Is the Mozilla Foundation a software organization or a
| LGBTQ+ advocacy organization?
|
| If it's the former then what business do they have caring
| about Brandon Eich's personal donation to support a
| ballot initiative?
|
| If it's the latter then it's a conflict of interest and
| Brandon Eich should be asked to leave.
| Timshel wrote:
| At the moment they appear to want to be both.
|
| Might at times be at the detriment of Firefox but it's
| not like there is any alternative imo. So I don't mind,
| it's not like if they remove their LGBT manifesto they
| suddenly will become relevant again and people will start
| to care about privacy.
|
| Might be that LGBT people care more about privacy and
| that this manifesto will help them stay relevant.
|
| And it's not like 2% is not a lot of people, TOR browser
| is certainly even less and it does not change the fact
| that I believe it's an highly important piece of
| software.
| ragnese wrote:
| Even besides the compromised morals, just the fact that
| they know and understand that Google is intentionally doing
| nefarious shit to make us switch to Chrome and they just
| went along with it.
|
| I must just be a naturally defiant person, but in that
| situation, I would go far, FAR, out of my way to make sure
| I never let them "win" with that kind of bullshit tactic.
| rumdz wrote:
| I have not experienced this. Could it be because I only
| browse the web with uBlock Origin enabled?
| southwesterly wrote:
| Yes. It is exactly that.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Hmm. Maybe I should try uBlock. I usually don't like
| adblockers -- both on principle, because I believe in
| paying for what I consume, and because they tend to
| subtly break a website and cause hours of headaches at
| least once a year -- but I don't like feeding the beast
| either. I'll look into this.
| klabb3 wrote:
| Adblockers are highly configurable, you can simply
| disable them selectively in cases where you want to
| "support" those that sell your data to the highest
| bidder, if that's your jam..
|
| Your former comment indicates that you care about page
| load times, in which case an adblocker will typically
| reduce both UI yank and certainly network usage, in case
| you're constrained.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| > you can simply disable them selectively
|
| Last time an ad-blocker caused a multi-hour debugging
| debacle, that turned out to not be the case. It was
| preventing me from logging into my bank even when it was
| supposedly disabled.
| mroche wrote:
| Does this occur for you with an ad blocker active (like
| uBlock Origin)?
| Timshel wrote:
| Sad when I had the 5s issue on FF I switched to Freetube.
|
| No surprise Google is doing those tactics if people react
| like you :( ...
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Thanks for the recommendation, I'll give freetube a spin!
| ape4 wrote:
| Wasn't this 5s delay for Firefox only debunked
| jjoonathan wrote:
| I lived it. Someone saying they "debunked" it doesn't
| change my experience.
| ncts wrote:
| FYI there is Invidious.
| mrgalaxy wrote:
| I use Chrome for Google's sites (Gmail, Youtube, etc) and
| Firefox for everything else. On Chrome you can install
| Youtube as an "app". That makes it easy for me to keep YT up
| and running while using Firefox for general browsing.
| Definitely recommend trying this approach out!
| BossingAround wrote:
| The one thing I miss from Chrome is the `thisisunsafe` feature
| to ignore whatever misconfiguration the webpage you're trying
| to access uses.
|
| Recently, one of the dev servers that I tried to access
| misconfigured HSTS, which made it really difficult for Firefox
| to access the web UI. I fired up chromium, simply typed the
| magic word, and accessed it no problem.
|
| Of course, ideally, there'd be no misconfigurations, but
| sometimes, I just need to access whatever dev server and I
| don't want to waste time on learning how to disable that
| particular security feature in Firefox temporarily.
| elashri wrote:
| While not recommended, and I would run firefox developer
| edition for that, you can disable (make the value false)
| `security.ssl.enable_ocsp_stapling` in `about:config`. You
| will be able to view sites with invalid certs/config. But
| will still prompt you that that something is invalid, and you
| have the choice to proceed forward.
|
| Again, I would not recommend doing that on vanilla Firefox,
| they have Firefox developer edition version for these
| reasons. And you can run both side by side.
| BossingAround wrote:
| That's exactly the problem though. I know it's somehow
| possible, but the fact that I have to search for what's the
| internal boolean name for whatever feature I want to
| disable is simply a bad dev UX.
|
| If there's a Firefox developer edition (I had no idea),
| they should enable all "I want to continue anyways" buttons
| by default. I mean, it's a developer edition!
| jeroenhd wrote:
| To be fair, "thisisunsafe" isn't exactly an advocated
| feature either.
|
| I would like a better way to bypass these TLS errors, but
| hidden booleans and secret phrases aren't that
| dissimilar.
| BossingAround wrote:
| The biggest difference is a catch-all phrase vs feature-
| specific booleans. So rather than have one place for
| everything, you have multiple of booleans.
|
| I agree that if there was at least one boolean to always
| show the "continue anyways" button, that'd be acceptable
| to me as well.
| elashri wrote:
| > That's exactly the problem though. I know it's somehow
| possible, but the fact that I have to search for what's
| the internal boolean name for whatever feature I want to
| disable is simply a bad dev UX.
|
| I think as a developer, searching for things are just
| part of the job, so if you have a niche need to debug or
| work with sites with invalid certs/configs, then it is
| not that hard to look on how to allow that. Firefox's
| docs are one of the best docs you can read to be fair.
|
| > If there's a Firefox developer edition (I had no idea),
| they should enable all "I want to continue anyways"
| buttons by default. I mean, it's a developer edition!
|
| To be honest, I use developer edition as my main browser
| and my profile is optimized and highly customized, so I
| don't remember is that was the default, or I changed it
| at some time (I keep it true).
|
| But for vanilla Firefox which most of the users or
| potential users are not developers, I think this is
| reasonable default.
| sp332 wrote:
| Compared to typing a nonstandard string in a nonstandard
| place? Going to about:config where all the deep settings
| are and searching for "ocsp" is downright obvious.
| BossingAround wrote:
| Not really... I don't even remember `about:config`. I
| know of its existence, but is it `config`, `:config`, or
| `about`, or ...?
|
| So what I do is, I google, right? First page that comes
| up references how to fix the problem on both Firefox and
| Chromium-based browsers.
|
| So on Firefox, I have to type the config page, then
| search for ocsp, then disable it. Then, I can finally
| access the webpage, but of course, I should remember to
| re-enable it after I'm done on the misconfigured server.
|
| On Chrome, I can fire up an incognito window, type a
| magic keyword, do what I need, close the incognito window
| and go back to default.
|
| Honestly, the latter is a vastly better experience in my
| world (I do backend/integration dev, mostly Python
| nowadays, probably a FE engineer will not care either
| way).
| elashri wrote:
| > On Chrome, I can fire up an incognito window, type a
| magic keyword, do what I need, close the incognito window
| and go back to default.
|
| You can do the same on Firefox (at least developer
| edition). I thought that you want to do that without
| going to incognito mode.
| toast0 wrote:
| How is searching for oscp obvious when the problem was
| HSTS?
| sp332 wrote:
| I was just copying what someone else said in this thread.
| It might actually be
| network.stricttransportsecurity.preloadlist but I have
| not tried it.
| zamadatix wrote:
| It might be this, it might be that, it might be all sorts
| of things. The point is you have to know what it is for
| each scenario, then you have to know where to go change
| it, then you have to know what the variable name is. Or
| you can know "thisisunsafe" which, while not being
| something you'll find using the settings for your
| saturday reading material, is something easily found and
| universally applicable to all situations without
| simultaneously turning every other connection you make
| into a security risk.
|
| It's a great hidden feature just like Firefox has
| shift+right click/double right click opening the native
| context. No amount of "well you can just put this in the
| console in these cases or this in the console in those
| cases" makes these kinds of features any less useful.
| godelski wrote:
| > That's exactly the problem though.
|
| Is it? The default options are for default users. Default
| users are dumb. It sounds like you have a non-standard
| case and the capacity to know the difference between
| misconfiguration and actual threats. It also makes sense
| that you are able to turn off certain features for
| default users when you want to do non-standard (default)
| tasks.
| swozey wrote:
| Browsers need some advanced/i'm-a-dev mode. I'm getting sick
| of things (TLS details, urls, unsafe) getting hidden
| away/removed.
|
| edit: Well comment below me just mentioned a Firefox
| developer version, wasn't aware of that.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| This drives me up a wall. I know the site. I trust the site.
| Yes, they screwed up something with their configuration or
| it's just ancient. I STILL WANT TO GO THERE!
| ThatMedicIsASpy wrote:
| And I refuse use chrome because I use
|
| full-screen-api.ignore-widgets
|
| which makes videos full screen to the browser size.
| javier_e06 wrote:
| Indeed, Chrome is bloated. Safari is, well Safari. Firefox is a
| good Open Source option.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| >Firefox peaked at 31.82% in November, 2009 -- and then began its
| long slide in almost direct proportion to the rise of Chrome.
|
| It will be a sad day when Firefox is truly dead. But what did
| Mozilla expect? They spent so much time and energy on activist
| bullshit that doesn't really matter for THE BROWSER.
| malermeister wrote:
| The browser itself is good these days. All these complaints are
| themselves activist bullshit that doesn't really matter.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| Is it? Firefox has had this sheen of "jank" for the past 6
| years.
| irrational wrote:
| Have you used it? I've used it as my primary browser for
| both personal use and web development for years and it has
| not been janky, at all.
| jandrese wrote:
| I don't know where that comes from, Firefox has worked just
| fine for ages. The only place it sucks is on iOS.
| FourHand451 wrote:
| What exactly do you mean?
| hooverd wrote:
| I use Firefox as a daily driver and it just works.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Well, yes and no. It does matter because if they had spent
| that money and effort on the browser _and_ made it possible
| to donate directly to the browser project then there is a
| fair chance that those numbers would be better.
| nathanaldensr wrote:
| Maybe it was never really about the browser, but the platform.
| Safari dominates all Apple devices. Imagine if all computing
| was truly open and we could run any app anywhere. Would Chrome
| have had a reason to exist to begin with, or would Firefox have
| become truly ubiquitous?
| acuozzo wrote:
| > Imagine if all computing was truly open and we could run
| any app anywhere.
|
| This was accomplished in the 1990s by Bell Labs with Plan9
| and later, at the application layer, with Inferno.
|
| It was additionally accomplished in the 1990s at the
| application layer by Sun Microsystems with Java and its
| applets.
|
| Frankly, the history of computing is littered with well-
| engineered solutions to this problem and many of its
| variants.
|
| The fundamental issue here is that businesses are involved
| and giving a business a monopoly over something so
| fundamental is usually a bad idea. The WWW succeeded because
| it grew somewhat organically.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| The financial statements are also currently on the front page.
| That's a nice hot take, but the number that really stands out
| is 25% of revenue on management, a full 50% of salaries.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38530382
| tompagenet2 wrote:
| I think there are plenty of decisions worth consideration, but
| this is nothing to do with why Firefox is declining. It's
| because if I buy an iPad it comes with Safari and doesn't
| really let me use anything else (only a skinned version of
| Safari). If I buy a PC it's Edge. If it's an Android device
| it's Chrome. A Mac? Safari. Firefox is the default nowhere, and
| in this world because Google has almost limitless marketing
| power and owns one of the world's most popular websites they
| can push Chrome to mean that on PCs and Macs there is a strong
| push for people to move from the defaults to Chrome.
|
| Firefox works great for me. It's just incredibly hard to get
| anyone to use it.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Maybe a better execution of Firefox OS would have helped.
|
| Nowadays KaiOS profits from it.
| seanw444 wrote:
| Activist bullshit, and redirecting the dwindling funds to
| making sure their CEOs always have a minimum of 3 yachts on
| standby.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Although it would be a shame to not have a company behind it,
| couldn't a derivative of Firefox continue to exist with
| community support? It's not like Firefox is so lacking today
| that a lot needs to be done to compete with Chrome. If I didn't
| update my Firefox installation for a year, I likely wouldn't
| notice or care. It's a really good browser no matter what other
| people say, IMO. Mozilla either giving up on Firefox or kicking
| the bucket might even be a good thing for the Firefox codebase
| because it could open up opportunities for new companies to own
| a derivative and work on it.
| dblohm7 wrote:
| It was the explosion of mobile browsing that did it.
| lxgr wrote:
| > I am personally unaware of any serious reason to believe that
| Firefox's numbers will improve soon.
|
| Hopefully the DMA can help? I'm not using Firefox on iOS mainly
| due to a lack of extension support.
| dartos wrote:
| I don't think there is one.
|
| Chrome got big bc it was radically different than IE and
| Firefox jumped on the lightweight trend far too late.
| lxgr wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the billions of marketing budget (for a while
| there was a Chrome billboard on every other bus stop in my
| city), aggressively installing it as part of Windows freeware
| etc. has at least as much to do with its popularity.
|
| Maybe Chrome got the first 10% of its user base on its merits
| (that's how I installed it at least); the next 30% definitely
| include a lot of people that don't know what a browser is and
| got it via some other deal.
| tommica wrote:
| What could get people to move to firefox? Is the only way really
| to have have your browser be popular is to have it either be
| installed by default, or being advertised on a page that people
| use daily? Would be crazy if facebook had a banner stating
| "switch to firefox now" suddenly
| jandrese wrote:
| Maybe if Google started messing with ad blockers in Chrome?
| isolli wrote:
| A lot of developers I know have moved to Firefox recently
| because of containers.
|
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-use-firefox-contain...
| nstart wrote:
| I literally could not switch away even if I wanted to because
| no other browser has anything close to container tabs. My
| workflow is built around it
| franczesko wrote:
| Firefox would need to win mobile. This is where action takes
| place.
| antiframe wrote:
| Well there isn't much browser action on iOS, so nobody but
| Apple can win that.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| They can make a better browser on top of WebKit,
| technically. For the brand recognition.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| I hope that the moment iOS is forced to allowed alternative
| browsers, Firefox is ready on day 1.
| rc202402 wrote:
| As someone who uses Firefox on Android the major attraction
| would be complete extension ecosystem and cross sync.
| Amezarak wrote:
| There is another way: make your browser THE browser for power
| users. Add crazy features that appeal to 0.1% of the userbase.
| Allow a free extension system that allows developers to come up
| with features you haven't even imagined and see what gets
| mindshare.
|
| Once you have committed power users who love your product, they
| will be more than happy to evangelize it to everyone they know.
| While their friends may not use any of the advanced
| functionality, they'll still use it if it works okay for them
| and their friends insist on it.
|
| Mozilla had something like this, and chose to throw it all away
| to make a browser for Idealized Grandma that more closely
| resembled Chrome - because Chrome was successful, so they
| figured they'd copy what they did. But while Chrome was a fine
| browser, and maybe even better than Firefox in some ways, what
| this mindset missed is that the main reason for Chrome's
| dominance was a) being shilled on all the largest web
| properties, even with popup bars, b) being installed as the
| default on Android and c), being bundled in installers. Also,
| if I remember rightly, an advertising campaign. Mozilla was not
| in a position to do any of this. They should have - and still
| could - stick to their strength.
|
| Now the only reason to use Firefox is ideological (privacy) and
| habit. I still use it at home. But I don't bother installing it
| anywhere else anymore. What's the point?
| Lendal wrote:
| For me it's the Firefox sync feature. I install Firefox
| everywhere so I can instantly be up and running anywhere with
| all the settings, bookmarks, open tabs, logins, and addons
| ready to go on any new computer. It's a huge convenience and
| time-saver.
| NegativeK wrote:
| > What's the point?
|
| Blocking ads in Android. That was my gateway into going back
| on all of my devices.
| geysersam wrote:
| IT admins please make Firefox the default on school and office
| computers. Why not?
| artificialLimbs wrote:
| Ad blocker built into mobile FF.
| tokai wrote:
| This article is like 6 years too late. The drop has happened,
| there's not really anything to base an "continuing free-fall" on.
| Even the articles own data show that Firefox usage has flatlined.
| nequo wrote:
| The article is specifically about US government guidelines for
| browser support.
| tokai wrote:
| I know. That doesn't change that there is no basis for
| claiming that there is a "continuing free-fall" for firafox
| usage. I might fall further, under 2%. But free-fall is
| misrepresenting the usage data.
| kemotep wrote:
| But their chart shows Firefox reaching above 3% usage in the
| past 12 months. It's pretty consistent in the past few years
| being above that government support cut off. And that's
| really just support. If people follow web standards Firefox
| will continue work.
|
| I mean it has been a steady decline but parent comment was
| suggesting that Firefox is probably near the floor of their
| market share.
| BossingAround wrote:
| With Google trying to cripple adblocker extensions, I hope users
| will find their way back to Firefox.
| unglaublich wrote:
| Google cripples adblocker extensions because users won't find
| their way back to alternative browsers anymore.
| BossingAround wrote:
| Google cripples adblocker extensions because of high interest
| rate and investor unease over the stock. If FF's market share
| was 50%, they'd still try to cripple adblockers.
|
| Once people start hitting two 30s unskippable ads on every
| song they want to listen to on YT, they'll start searching on
| how to fix that. FF could capitalize on this trend.
| ravenstine wrote:
| They know their average user in 2023 is not the type to be
| cognizant that they're even using a "web browser" when
| opening an app like Chrome. I think it's really up to geeks
| like we to install Firefox on our moms' computers and inform
| them on why they should try it. That's how I got my mom to
| try Firefox with ad blocking around 15 years ago; otherwise
| she either wouldn't have known about it or she might have
| thought ad blocking was something nefarious. We just can't
| act as if we build it then they will come.
| trealira wrote:
| I don't know if that's still true. I have no data, but just
| anecdotally, I'm pretty sure almost everyone knows what a
| web browser is and what an ad-blocker extension does
| nowadays.
| slig wrote:
| > I'm pretty sure almost everyone knows what a web
| browser is and what an ad-blocker extension does nowadays
|
| Most of the users do not use ad-blocker and most of the
| users uses whatever browser come with their mobile device
| or Windows install.
| LegitShady wrote:
| like chrome it can change over time if the value proposition
| changes.
| slavoglinsky wrote:
| As somebody developing websites, I always find myself on the edge
| of ugly internet with Firefox.
|
| I like it's disturbing monopoly, but it's rendering makes my life
| harder
| GeekyBear wrote:
| My anecdata shows that Google's recent decisions on the direction
| of Chrome and changes at Youtube have technically savvy users
| abandoning Chrome for Firefox,
| Finnucane wrote:
| Yes, every day Google seems to be doing things to drive people
| away, but it's not really moving the kinds of numbers that are
| going to make a difference. Also, some of those users will move
| to Chromium-based alternatives like Brave and Vivaldi, which
| might blunt some of the worst abuses but doesn't help ecosystem
| on the whole if you want a browser engine to exist that isn't
| controlled by Apple and Google.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Alternately, the technically savvy users understand that
| allowing Google's control of Blink to replace open standards
| with whatever implementation details Google prefers is to be
| avoided at all costs.
|
| It's just a repeat of the IE 6 debacle.
| Finnucane wrote:
| Yes, which took years and years to resolve. And only
| because in the end _developers_ refused to play along. If
| the people creating web sites decide collectively to
| support only open standards, then Google has less leverage.
| It kinda worked with Amp, so it 's not impossible.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Given Google leveraging their control of the browser to
| go to war against ad blockers, I would expect to see
| movement much more quickly this time.
| robin_reala wrote:
| It's not on the brink, it's that Firefox shims GA[1] with
| Enhanced Tracking Protection, which is on by default.[2]
| analytics.usa.gov uses GA.
|
| So you really can't rely on usage figures that don't represent
| the truth of your situation.
|
| [1] https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-
| dev/blob/413b88689f3ca2a30b...
|
| [2] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-now-
| ava...
| throw10920 wrote:
| The US government's page it uses to track web browser usage
| uses an analytics engine made by a company that makes its own
| web browser? That sounds like a pretty big issue!
| mavhc wrote:
| Weird that no one checks their own logs any more
| ksherlock wrote:
| I would guess lots of people no longer have access to the
| log files -- because the cloud is somebody else's computer
| (GitHub pages, etc) or because you're web scale and run
| your web server in docker so log files are ephemeral or
| maybe you're web scale so the only logging is dumping
| status messages to a background screen session.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| It's also a company the US government is presently suing for
| antitrust violations. That seems like an issue too.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2023/09/12/1198558372/doj-google-
| monopol...
| Chabsff wrote:
| Per the article, this is irrelevant. The case being made is
| that the figure seen by the government falling under 2%, which
| it is getting close to, will trigger a chain-reaction of
| consequences that will dramatically hurt Firefox, and it's not
| clear if Mozilla, the organization, could weather that.
|
| It doesn't particularly matter whether or not the figure is
| accurate in that context. Maybe that can be fixed easily by
| having Firefox contextually relax tracking a bit or by having
| the government change how they perform the tracking, but the
| status quo is not really sustainable. And that's really all the
| article is saying at the end of the day.
| robin_reala wrote:
| USDS aren't idiots, and if they haven't realised this yet
| then maybe this post will focus attention. They want to
| support every citizen it's reasonable to support (or at least
| I did when I was working for GOV.UK) and dropping support
| from a lack of knowledge shouldn't be on the agenda.
| dblohm7 wrote:
| Some of the USDS people are even ex-Mozilla!
| Miraste wrote:
| GOV.UK is dramatically more competent than USDS, are they
| not? I admit I'm not terribly familiar, but I wouldn't want
| to depend on the agency behind the Department of Education
| and VA websites for anything. I've seen the VA site, in
| particular, do serious harm to the people it's meant to
| serve.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| I don't think the USDS makes all or even most of the
| current federal gov websites.
| Miraste wrote:
| No, they don't. But they did create the VA site:
| https://www.usds.gov/projects/va-dot-gov
|
| And they're involved with the Department of Education,
| although I couldn't find out exactly what they built.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Oof, that sucks to hear. I had a hard time believing
| they'd be behind that website seeing that I often hear
| complaints about it. :(
| llimllib wrote:
| the va site is vast, to say any one team created the VA
| site would not be even close to correct.
|
| They did help change over the old va.gov to the new
| va.gov (which was built as vets.gov), which imo has been
| a huge improvement.
|
| (There are still many, many problems with the VA and its
| website. Just saying that 1. the new va.gov is a big
| improvement and 2. the USDS is far from being a single
| point of responsibility for it, or even _the_ major point
| of responsibility)
| boris-ning-usds wrote:
| USDS certainly does not. The guiding principle at the
| time from what I remembered is to try to set "some
| standard" for all federal government websites to strive
| to because there were none.
|
| We also helped with design and infrastructure support for
| ssa.gov (launched earlier this year) with a contractor
| team to try to boil down 60,000 pages to ~30 pages that
| people tend to use.
|
| // opinions of a former USDS, no longer with the team
| boris-ning-usds wrote:
| Hi!
|
| Can you elaborate on what in particular on the VA site
| that causes serious harm to the people it's meant to
| serve? I'm happy to bring it to the team or if you don't
| feel comfortable with stating it here, please bring it up
| to the open source website for va.gov.
| https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/vets-
| websi...
| Chabsff wrote:
| Sure, but the government HAS to make that determination in
| a data-driven way. It cannot be based on anything
| subjective, for what should be obvious reasons.
|
| On top of that, said lack of knowledge is a stated goal of
| all privacy-focused browsers. GA-blindness is an
| implementation detail of these policies. Any method the
| government could use to accurately track that information
| is effectively a bug in need of fixing from the POV of the
| browser's developers.
|
| The most practical answer is, as was posted by someone else
| here, the government spec'ing to a standard instead of a
| set of browsers, which it really should be doing in the
| first place. The mere fact that the current setup means
| that the government accidentally makes and/or breaks
| winners in that space is justification enough.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| Server-side tracking of user agent strings should still
| be possible.
| john-radio wrote:
| Yeah, I think the root comment of this thread is talking
| out of his ass. Third-party trackers are not needed, and
| wouldn't make sense to use, to discern browser market
| share; browsers self-report their identity and operating
| system unless specifically configured not to. For
| example, my User-Agent string in my GET request to
| retrieve Hacker News is: "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel
| Mac OS X 10.15; rv:120.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/120.0".
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Except we should be pushing for the elimination of user
| agent strings, too. They just end up being used as a lazy
| way for lazy developers to not test for capabilities.
|
| The most recent example I've run into is Snapchat's web
| client: It reject's Firefox purely by user agent string,
| but then works perfectly in Firefox if you just have your
| browser lie.
| andrepd wrote:
| That's the sort of this that should be illegal for
| anticompetitive reasons.
| Y_Y wrote:
| I strongly agree. I don't think a website is going to do
| anything with my user agent string that benefits me. I'd
| much prefer a web where websites can't do things outside
| of the standard. We ne er needed webmidi, but a company
| that makes a browser/is hybrid definitely wanted it.
|
| Speaking of Google, won't this interfere with their "look
| we're not a monopoly" payments to Mozilla Corp?
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| There is no standard that you can use instead of a set of
| browsers. There is no way of making sure that a website
| works with a browser other then testing it with that
| browser. The reason people test with different browsers
| is not that they want to use non-standard features, it's
| that even standard features often do not work in certain
| browsers.
| Chabsff wrote:
| Sort of agreed as of today, but this is not something
| that we just have to accept, especially considering the
| government doesn't really have a need to make use of the
| full suite of tools provided by the various existing
| standards. There are safe subsets to be picked in 2023.
|
| The government doesn't design roads to conform to the top
| brands of cars and trucks. It specs them to a standard
| and any manufacturer can have their product certified as
| compliant. This both protects the public and gives anyone
| an opportunity to provide products no matter how small
| their market share is. Doing it the other way around
| would be madness, and I don't see why the same principle
| shouldn't apply here.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > The reason people test with different browsers is not
| that they want to use non-standard features, it's that
| even standard features often do not work in certain
| browsers.
|
| This is exactly why sites should be tested for their
| conformance with the standard rather than with specific
| browsers. Testing against specific browsers just
| encourages browser-makers to continue to avoid fixing
| their shit.
| roywiggins wrote:
| If you want to make money or reach constituents, this
| isn't actually a viable option for anyone.
|
| When people complain that they can't submit their DMV
| forms (or whatever) and you say, "well we followed all
| the standards, go find another browser" and they say
| "which one" and you say "I don't know, we didn't test
| with any browsers, we just test against the standard" who
| do you think they'll blame?
| jasonjayr wrote:
| Is it really a standard if no one implements it in a way
| that everyone agrees on?
|
| Is it really a standard if the dominant vendor just
| ignores the standard and does what it wants because then
| it becomes the "actual standard" ?
|
| As a (terrible) example, look at FIPS. The government has
| the power to mandate a standard that everyone needs to
| implement. If instead of "supporting specific browser
| vendors" they "support a specific standard" then all
| vendors have a target that works with an agreed upon
| common ground.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Is it really a standard if no one implements it in a
| way that everyone agrees on?_
|
| Plenty of standards are guidelines. The point is the
| website's purpose trumps dogmatic adherence to a
| standard. If the site works against standards but not in
| the browser, it's a failure.
| JohnFen wrote:
| So we can't have a well-functioning system because that
| would interfere with some people making money. We truly
| do live in sad times.
| Silhouette wrote:
| Given the history of standardisation for promoting
| interoperability includes numerous success stories and a
| pattern of resistance fading over time I don't see why we
| should expect web standards to be any different. The
| level of functionality needed by a typical government
| site has worked close to 100% correctly in literally
| every major browser for literally decades.
| tomohawk wrote:
| They're the government. They can create a spec or
| standard for browsers to be able to use government
| supplied digital services. It's done all the time.
|
| This would be beneficial guidance for browser developers,
| but also for anyone developing government sites. Saying
| "whatever chrome is doing is our standard" is a cop out.
| beojan wrote:
| There was until Google and Mozilla decided W3C wasn't
| moving fast enough and introduced WHATWG.
| rchaud wrote:
| Firefox is not IE8, which declared lot of CSS3 and HTML5
| standards as "won't be supported" in 2009, paving the way
| for its own extinction.
|
| USDS serves basic pages and applets which work fine on
| Firefox. It is only a handful of very complex web apps
| like Photopea where the developer will say "run this on
| Chrome for best results".
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > Sure, but the government HAS to make that determination
| in a data-driven way.
|
| They really should be hiring a pollster to ask people
| which browser they use. It might be a bit difficult for
| those who use the default, but it wouldn't be that
| difficult to ask a couple of followup questions (e.g.
| which device) to determine which default browser that is.
| daotoad wrote:
| I think most people would say "the internet" or "my
| phone" rather than something useful.
| jddj wrote:
| I get unsupported browser warnings on my country's
| government portal when I use Firefox.
|
| I think it's been the case for a good 10 years.
|
| It works fine, of course
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| The 2% rule USDS use is taken directly from GDS (gov.uk),
| so that isn't what your old employer's policy is at all.
| They have to define reasonable, after all.
| robin_reala wrote:
| That part of the article was just wrong, to be fair (I
| used to be head of the front-end community at GDS and
| helped set things like browser support schedules). Our
| default approach was to add up all browser share (yes,
| based on GA, but this was a while ago) until we got to
| 99%, then removed the browsers that were left over. So
| typically we wouldn't consider dropping a browser version
| until it was less than 0.4% usage. You can use a
| colleague's client-side tool to test this approach:
| http://edds.github.io/browser-matrix/ (assuming it still
| works).
|
| The browser support is currently listed at
| https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/designing-
| for-d... . The mention of 2% is specific to IE11, so I
| guess this was special-cased at some point.
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| I stand corrected, thank you.
| stcredzero wrote:
| _Per the article, this is irrelevant. The case being made is
| that the figure seen by the government falling under 2%,
| which it is getting close to_
|
| So, the default position of the government is, "If we can't
| surveil you, we can't help you?" (Or taken the other way, you
| want us to help you? Let us surveil you!) This seems to be
| how it works out in practice, just because of favorable
| economics in mass surveillance. Example: RFID and license
| plate readers for toll collection. Various registrations with
| government agencies are another example.
| pas wrote:
| Well, if the world including whatever governments,
| institutions, groups, interests, companies, FOSS projects, OS
| distros, etc... all want to depend only on Chromium, then
| fine.
|
| If Mozilla can't even play this card, then they should really
| just shut down.
|
| Or, maybe, like Wikpedia, they should stop begging for more-
| more-more, and spend what they get wisely.
|
| Not to mention, they could simply start bug bounties and/or
| crowdfunding for actual deliverables and/or services (ie. a
| security team).
|
| And if all this fails, then it fails. Maybe we'll simply get
| a Firemium or Chromefox/fix whatever the name. A fork where
| adblock works.
| beanjuiceII wrote:
| I work in govt tech, we already internally do not care about
| FF support at all and only really look to chrome based
| browsers (chrome edge mostly) and safari. Many people don't
| even know what it is anymore, seems like time killed this
| browser too. Mozilla spending too much time/money and other
| crap over the years
| traviswt wrote:
| > Mozilla spending too much time/money and other crap over
| the years
|
| It seems like a pretty bit conflict of interest when the #1
| money source for Firefox comes from Firefox's only real
| competitor.
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| yea things have seriously gone downhill since chrome took
| off in 2010
| riversflow wrote:
| What does a government site need that you can't do on
| firefox? Honestly this is disenfranchising, you should
| consider the ethics of what you are proscribing for the
| populace. I should have a right to choose a browser that
| respects my privacy from a PC.
| insanitybit wrote:
| It's clearly not about what is needed, it's about what is
| _tested_. And spending resources on a browser that
| appears to have 2% of the market is not going to be a
| high priority.
| Chabsff wrote:
| Exactly. There are a plethora of browsers out there, and
| no one can be expected to test against all of them. As
| long as we go for a "government conforming to industry"
| mentality, then the cutoff has to be somewhere, and if
| Firefox doesn't make that cutoff, then that's all there
| is to it.
|
| No browser deserves special treatment here. And this is
| as true for Firefox as it is for Lynx.
| Silhouette wrote:
| A long time ago we had something called "standards" that
| were intended to solve this problem. The idea was that
| developers of different browsers would get together in a
| neutral forum and agree common ground that everyone would
| support. That way developers could reliably build upon
| that common ground and expect their products to operate
| correctly in any browser. It was an excellent idea that
| heralded the success of the modern WWW.
|
| Naturally this enforced competition wasn't in Google's
| interests as its browser became dominant and it adopted
| the infamous Microsoft strategy to deal with the threat.
| Apparently we're fast approaching the extinguish phase.
|
| The correct solution to this is for influential public
| bodies not to insist upon supporting any specific browser
| or browsers but instead to once again support open web
| standards and therefore free access to their information
| and services for all.
|
| This is almost certainly in their own interests anyway.
| Google has a nasty habit of suddenly killing off its non-
| standardised extensions. Relying on functionality that
| other browsers don't necessarily support as well seems
| unwise.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Nonsense. Only completely trivial standards work without
| testing actually implementations against each other.
|
| How do you think WiFi devices work together? Is it
| because WiFi is a standard? Not really - it's because
| WiFi vendors all test their chips against other WiFi
| chips on the market.
| riversflow wrote:
| > No browser deserves special treatment here.
|
| Completely disagree. Privacy is a 4th ammendment right,
| so the government has a _duty_ to support privacy first
| browsers. How am I "secure in my ... papers and effects"
| if I must use a privacy destroying browser to interact
| with the Government? If anything, chrome support is what
| should be questionable.
| gafage wrote:
| That's the mother of all reaches.
| riversflow wrote:
| How?
| eecc wrote:
| Well, that's what you get when you're a Public Service.
| There's an idiot living on the top of a mountain that
| needs some basic infrastructure? You got to get your
| truck out and build that supply line. You won't do it?
| Then the government that granted you that Public Service
| status has renounced sovereignty on that part of the
| country
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| Exactly, what a weird train of thought from government
| workers. Seems like the mission has been lost
| itronitron wrote:
| Last I checked gov tech is larger than just one person
| commenting on HN.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| If that's the case there would be a sudden decrease in the
| market share graph around 2019 (although that graph is from
| Statscounter which has Firefox currently sitting at around
| 3.2%).
|
| The decline has already been happening since around 2010
| without any drastic ups or downs.
| toss1 wrote:
| If this is the case, it seems that they need to recode the
| Enhanced Tracking Protection for GA to ensure that they get
| flagged as FFox.
|
| Might also be useful to have a plug-in to make a daily
| 'ping'/check-in from FFox to any govt sites used by their
| users. E.g., I use USPS and SBA/SBIR sites, but only
| occasionally or monthly, but if most FFox users who did so got
| logged more like daily instead of ~fortnightly or ~monthly,
| it'd improve the numbers. (Obviously, also must be done
| carefully so as to not get wholesale discounted).
|
| The cascade effect of the US Govt abandoning support would be
| catastrophic, likely terminal, which would be bad for everyone.
| worik wrote:
| > ...it seems that they need to recode the Enhanced Tracking
| Protection for GA to ensure that they get flagged as FFox.
|
| That would be backwards
|
| The main reason to use FF is the privacy protections
|
| I find it very frustrating they do not get more recognition
| for the work they do on that front
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Do you have a source for a more accurate picture of Firefox'
| market share? Every single report I've seen shows the same
| thing: long downward trend and a tiny fraction of the usage of
| Chrome and Safari.
| conradfr wrote:
| I have a modest (non-technical) side project (a few thousands
| visitors per day) that is used worldwide.
|
| GoAccess puts Firefox at 7.8% and Google Analytics at 3.3%.
|
| GoAccess puts Chrome at 57% and Google Analytics at 73%.
| simbolit wrote:
| Non-technical as in "the average user isn't a nerd" ?
|
| For non-nerd populations, these numbers seem high.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| "Enhanced Tracking Protection" is a poor name: it's not just
| one thing, but has two modes: Standard and Strict. (There's
| also Custom, which lets you go somewhere between the two, or
| restrict cookies even more tightly.)
|
| The default is Standard. It _doesn't_ block GA. The cynic in me
| suggests they decided making Firefox disappear altogether from
| popular stats by default would have harmed them more than not
| doing it harms their users, or that the backlash would be too
| great for their liking.
|
| Sources like Google Analytics and Statcounter _are_ still
| chronically undercounting minority browsers and platforms,
| which are much more likely to block these sorts of things, and
| Firefox and Linux will be particularly heavily hit, but I'm
| sure the difference it makes isn't as large as I'd like it to
| be.
| Steltek wrote:
| What stood out to me was that they didn't break out mobile from
| PC. The mobile landscape dominates usage these days and
| extremely few people make an active choice in browser there.
| The presented stats to me reads more like Android vs iPhone
| than it does Chrome vs everyone else.
| culi wrote:
| on iOS all browsers are forced to use WebKit
|
| And how could Firefox possibly complete against default
| browsers? Is it even worth the investment?
| rchaud wrote:
| They tried with FirefoxOS almost a decade ago but couldn't
| find any hardware partners.
| fabrice_d wrote:
| FirefoxOS was not stopped by Mozilla leadership due to a
| lack of hardware partners. The distribution model -
| mostly through carriers - failed because a key app was
| not available (WhatsApp) which caused a chicken and egg
| situation: no sales because no app, no official app
| because not enough users.
| geoelectric wrote:
| That's pretty interesting. I was around back then and
| hadn't recalled that there was such a lynchpin issue, but
| that makes a lot of sense as to why it suddenly hit such
| a hard stop. Were you able to support WhatsApp with
| KaiOS, or did the feature-phone target make it moot?
| vetinari wrote:
| At the time, I had a FirefoxOS device made by ZTE in my
| hands.
|
| It was so slow, it was unusable; even the first Android
| devices running on underpowered hardware were speed
| champions in comparison. Looking for an Whatsapp launcher
| was beyond the patience of even dedicated fans.
| isodev wrote:
| The rendering engine doesn't really matter - nothing is
| stopping Mozilla from implementing a better browser app
| than Safari.
|
| Safari is _really_ good and a very high bar to catchup to,
| even if you don't have to implement the rendering engine
| and Mozilla is not exactly known for their friendly and
| refined UIs. Vivaldi on iOS is much younger by comparison
| and looks a lot better than Firefox.
| culi wrote:
| > The rendering engine doesn't really matter
|
| I disagree. For the purposes of this conversation, I feel
| like it's the only thing that matters. The web doesn't
| benefit at all from a WebKit-based browser by Mozilla
| capturing some of the iOS marketshare. Websites will
| still have to cater to WebKit. Not Gecko or something new
|
| > Mozilla is not exactly known for their friendly and
| refined UIs
|
| I actually strongly prefer the Firefox app's UI to safari
| isodev wrote:
| > For the purposes of this conversation, I feel like it's
| the only thing that matters. The web doesn't benefit at
| all from a WebKit-based browser by Mozilla capturing some
| of the iOS marketshare.
|
| I believe it matters because it shows Mozilla's ability
| to market their product (Firefox). If they continuously
| fail to capture user base on any platform, then what
| powers Firefox is of little consequence.
|
| As an experiment, I just installed Firefox on iOS just to
| see what's up and honestly 4 screens of things to confirm
| before I even get to the browsing part? As a tech person
| I understood each of them of course, but no sane person
| would put 4 screens in a row blocking users from using an
| app they normally already know how top use. So no, I
| don't believe Mozilla has the required UI/UX skills.
| Steltek wrote:
| Mobile browsers aren't sufficiently differentiated enough
| for a significant amount of people to bother changing the
| default. Does anyone really think Samsung Browser would
| get close to 1.6% if it were a free and unbiased choice?
|
| Apple sets the rules, gets special access (new releases,
| features, platform changes, countless other things), and
| relentlessly captures their users into the Apple
| ecosystem/moat. You seem to think swapping the rendering
| engine is a trivial task but you're asking them to
| practically create a new browser. And for all that
| effort, you're still competing with an opponent that's
| basically cheating. I'm not sure why Firefox/iOS even
| exists, frankly.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Just to add some anecdata, we have both Google Analytics (if
| you accept the GDPR tracking request...) and our own internal
| statistics based purely on useragents. Here are some
| percentages for November (this is Germany, generally far higher
| FF usage)
|
| Ours:
|
| Chrome 37.4% Firefox 24.7% Safari 21.1% Edge 7.5% Opera 2.6%
|
| GA:
|
| Chrome 39.3% Safari 31.5% Firefox 11.9% Edge 9.9% Samsung
| Internet 2.9%
|
| For us, GA is undercounting FF by almost 13 percentage points,
| over 50%.
| culi wrote:
| Of course this heavily depends on niche. In some European
| countries Firefox is at almost 20% marketshare
| Semaphor wrote:
| I mentioned that:
|
| > this is Germany, generally far higher FF usage
|
| But the interesting part is not how much FF has here, but
| how much GA undercounts it.
| culi wrote:
| Yeah it's interesting. I wonder if it's done on purpose
| or if it has to do with the way bots/crawlers are counted
| Semaphor wrote:
| See parent. The default in FF is to shim the GA script
| hnbad wrote:
| Also GA requires opt-in in the EU (even if some sites try
| to be clever and illegally make it harder to refuse than
| to accept) whereas presumably their first-party tracking
| is done in such a way consent is not necessary (e.g.
| sufficient anonymization that a data point can not be
| correlated with the user it originated from). Presumably
| FF users are more likely not to consent by default to
| begin with.
| coldcode wrote:
| My programming blog (https://thecodist.com) sees Chrome 52%,
| Safari 27%, Firefox 9%, over six months covering a fair
| amount of the world. I use Plausible. I never found GA to be
| very reliable.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| if google analytics is undercounting firefox in a way that
| may make websites to drop firefox support, i suppose this is
| a case for antitrust?
|
| because google is using a near monopoly on analytics to bury
| a competitor in another segment
| mozTA wrote:
| Mozilla employee here.
|
| Truth of the situation is probably worse. We are losing users
| faster than anticipated.
| tiahura wrote:
| I just wish they'd hire the guy that reversed engineered Grand
| Theft Auto to optimize the loading code to do something about the
| memory leaks.
| fifteen1506 wrote:
| I think Firefox no longer has memory leaks. I just which they'd
| follow Brave's BAT idea, or something along those lines.
|
| Brave's BAT, while feeling kludgeful, is the only innovative
| idea in terms of funding sites nowadays.
|
| Micropayments => dead Coil => dead (sorry, on a open
| stewardship) Flattr => unknown, guessing dead
|
| So I want to block ads but I ain't depriving the websites of a
| way of earning money. If they want they can get my money -- but
| usually only that which was earned by wasting time to look at
| an ad.
| loganmarchione wrote:
| Mozilla also just posted their State of Mozilla 2022 (this
| includes financial statements). From what I've read, it seems
| that expenses are up and revenue from search deals is down.
|
| https://stateof.mozilla.org/
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38530382
|
| https://www.ghacks.net/2023/12/05/mozilla-earned-close-to-60...
|
| Firefox's market share has been on the decline since 2010.
|
| https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-2009...
|
| Genuine question. What is justifying Mozilla Corporation CEO
| Mitchell Baker's salary?
|
| - 2022 - $6.9m/yr
|
| - 2021 - $5.5m/yr
|
| - 2020 - $2.6m/yr
|
| - 2019 - $3.0m/yr
|
| - 2018 - $2.4m/yr
|
| - 2017 - $2.2m/yr
|
| - 2016 - $1.0m/yr
|
| - 2015 - $997k/yr
| ekianjo wrote:
| > Mozilla Corporation CEO Mitchell Baker's salary?
|
| What a ridiculous question. Obvious the chief captain on the
| Titanic is not responsible for the Iceberg jumping at the boat.
| munk-a wrote:
| I think it's a pretty reasonable question when the salary is
| so incredibly out of line with what developers make. Is the
| CEO singlehandedly responsible for productivity equal to that
| of sixty or so developers?
| ekianjo wrote:
| Did I need to append a /s for people to get my comment?
| munk-a wrote:
| Unfortunately yes - this view isn't so out there that
| it's not inconceivable that someone would genuinely
| express it.
| debo_ wrote:
| You always have to /s here. I figure there are enough
| people reading HN who have different backgrounds in how
| they understand English that it's necessary.
|
| Also important to label jokes.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| also a tech startup incubator, where there is a non-
| trivial portion of the population is, or is trying very
| hard to be, something like that CEO.
|
| in other words, for some people here it's not sarcasm.
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| Honestly yeah I had to read it a couple times, I didn't
| notice the joke right away, cause there are people out
| there who justify CEO salaries, I just can't remember the
| justification offhand.
|
| Maybe if you'd referenced Chernobyl I would have picked
| it up sooner. Or THERAC, that's a classic.
| me_me_me wrote:
| on the internet, ALWAYS
| chombier wrote:
| Nope, sarcasm was pretty obvious from the "iceberg
| jumping at the boat" part.
| ekianjo wrote:
| that was the give-away
| wkat4242 wrote:
| No you didn't. :P
| danaris wrote:
| Poe's Law[0] applies.
|
| Unfortunately, nowadays, unless you're among a group of
| people who _already know your general opinions on things_
| , it's nearly impossible to state an absurd position on
| some issue that a nontrivial number of people would
| actually, unironically, advocate for, until you get into
| the absolutely batshit stuff like "we should literally
| sacrifice poor people to the devil, then eat their flesh,
| to keep the rest of us from getting poor."
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
| godelski wrote:
| Carry on. I for one laughed at the obviousness of the
| iceberg jumping out. We definitely should be encouraging
| more careful reading than hinting and reading everything
| as if they are words only. Your comment is about as
| obvious as it gets. Unless... the icebergs are alive. But
| then we have a bigger problem. Global warming is their
| revenge!
| knute wrote:
| Not just in absolute terms, what could possibly justify a
| 600% increase in salary in 7 years?
| BigJ1211 wrote:
| I don't know, but really want to. I need this in my life.
| chii wrote:
| good negotiation skills and friends in high places.
|
| Salary has nothing to do with productivity at this level
| of an org.
| oliwarner wrote:
| > Salary has nothing to do with productivity at this
| level of an org.
|
| That's nonsense. The difference at this level is you're
| not looking at _personal_ productivity, you should be
| looking at a much broader interpretation. Except Mozilla
| doesn 't. They've seen flailing commercial performance
| and have rewarded the CEO and laid off developers. It
| feels like madness because it is.
|
| I love Firefox but Mozilla deserves to burn to the ground
| for this mismanagement.
| munk-a wrote:
| It should always be personal productivity but as a CEO
| your productivity is how much better you're doing than
| someone else in that role would. In the modern world too
| often executive compensation is viewed as "How valuable
| is this company" instead of "How much is this particular
| executive adding to the value of this company" - that's
| why we're seeing it spiral into simply ludicrous numbers.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > The difference at this level is you're not looking at
| personal productivity, you should be looking at a much
| broader interpretation.
|
| That's one of the arguments made by CEOs who are trying
| to justify their insane salaries, yes. But it's very
| unpersuasive.
| mikeryan wrote:
| CEO salaries aren't, and never have been, relative to the
| rank and file salaries.
|
| The question is how much you need to be to get a competent
| executive relative to the open market.
|
| You can argue whether they're getting what they're paying
| for but this doesn't seem to be out of line relative to the
| leaders of other, similarly sized organizations. Also a non
| profit has to have higher salaries as there's not a lot of
| room to offload that to bonuses or equity.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| > The question is how much you need to be to get a
| competent executive relative to the open market.
|
| No! The real question is what happens without an
| executive, but some cheaper leadership structure instead?
|
| I mean, maybe a cheaper leadership structure (whatever it
| may be) would run the company into the ground, but, well,
| at least they would achieve the same outcome for cheaper.
| ako wrote:
| Don't know, as a shareholder I would be very happy with a
| capable CEO that is able to extract profits from a doomed
| product. As long as she's bringing in more than she costs
| the ROI is positive.
| eldaisfish wrote:
| the benchmark of what other CEOs make is a horrible
| metric. There is an entire industry of << Consultants >>
| who will justify a higher CEO salary by claiming that
| other CEOs make the higher salary and then work with
| those other CEOs by point to your now higher salary.
| mikeryan wrote:
| Note, I didn't say that it had to be relative to other
| CEO salaries. It has to be competitive to any other
| position that a candidate has available to them.
|
| What would Mitchell make as an SVP at a FAANG company?
| What _could_ they make as a startup founder?
| wkat4242 wrote:
| True, Hiring a CEO is basically buying into an old boys
| network. It's like legalised corruption. With them you
| buy the goodwill of all of their buddies in other CEO
| positions.
|
| However in this case it doesn't actually seem to be
| paying off.
| ghostpepper wrote:
| This is true at most tech companies though - the CEO making
| a multiple of a typical dev salary. The large increases
| year over year, however, while Firefox loses market share,
| is a bigger red flag IMHO.
| ako wrote:
| It's simple math: how much revenue does she bring in,
| versus the costs. And how likely is it for the organization
| to find someone else that brings in equal or more, for
| reduced salary.
| prng2021 wrote:
| What a ridiculous analogy. What's the iceberg here? Google
| Chrome? The originally underdog competitor they've known and
| battled for well over a decade?
| DenisM wrote:
| Snark is against the rules on HN.
|
| > Don't be snarky.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| dig1 wrote:
| Maybe this is sarcasm, but the chief captain of the Titanic
| (Edward Smith) was not responsible for the iceberg jumping at
| the boat but _was_ responsible for steering the ship at high
| speed through water known to have icebergs. He even said in
| an interview that he could not "imagine any condition which
| would cause a ship to founder. Modern shipbuilding has gone
| beyond that".
|
| I can imagine a similar analogy with M. Baker.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| I used to think this in my 20s.
|
| No, the CEO(and board) are completely responsible. That is
| the point of leadership, to move the boat before it hits the
| iceburg or at least have a way of dealing with it.
|
| Firefox is buggy but heavily advertised(or astroturfed, I
| dont know) on social media. Everyone knows about firefox, we
| don't need the ad. We need firefox not to suck.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| Firefox being "heavily advertised (or astroturfed)" on
| social media isn't something I personally have ever seen in
| the last decade. (Unless one includes Mastodon as social
| media, even though its userbase is nowhere near
| representative of the general public.) And today a
| substantial number of internet users are mainly using
| smartphones, and the default browser on that smartphone,
| and the very idea that one can use a different browser has
| faded from the culture compared to the early millennium.
| tiahura wrote:
| Holy S***!!!
|
| Isn't there a board?
|
| Edit: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/who-we-are/leadership/
| And you thought openai's board was a joke.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| The board of any startupy tech company focused on "innovation
| and changing the world" seem to be carbon copies of the
| fictional boards on the Silicon Valley satire show.
| sgift wrote:
| What is so bad about the board? Besides not reigning in the
| CEO compensation.
| DeIlliad wrote:
| I know nothing about these people on the board but you
| clearly do since you think they are a joke so please go on.
| throitallaway wrote:
| > Sarah Allen, Senior Director, MozFest > Juan Barani, Senior
| Director, Gift Planning
|
| Not to pick on these two people, but it's interesting that
| they have senior directors for a conference and gift
| planning.
| khuey wrote:
| "gift planning" here means "getting rich people to give us
| large checks".
| sowbug wrote:
| The "planning" term should be read the same way as
| "estate planning" or "financial planning." They're a
| charity, so they have employees dedicated to ensuring a
| continuous stream of donations. For example, someone
| might pledge to give $X over the next 10 years, or to
| give a percentage of their estate to the foundation when
| they die.
|
| This branch of the company is often called "development,"
| but R&D organizations sometimes need to come up with
| different names because that term gets overloaded.
| smallerfish wrote:
| Interesting that only 1 out of 17 people in the senior
| management group is a technologist, and she's a senior
| director. No VPE, no CTO. Says a lot about the organization's
| priorities.
| blackhaz wrote:
| Motherfuck! Mozilla's board and their funding projects almost
| makes me want to abandon Firefox and go to Chrome.
| kemotep wrote:
| Despite all this nonsense about the board, Firefox remains
| the best browser in my experience. It isn't cramming an AI
| chatbot and coupon codes during checkout into my browser
| experience or working to eliminate ad blocking.
| culi wrote:
| They also don't ban and lie about anti-tracking
| extensions like AdNausium (a data poisoning
| adblocker[0]). Chrome banned it from their store. As well
| as other extensions like Bypass Paywalls Clean.
| Ultimately the Firefox addon ecosystem is simply freer
|
| [0] https://adnauseam.io/
| culi wrote:
| After Microsoft giving up on their rendering engine and
| joining the Chromium train I think the internet is in a
| perilous place. We're down to Blink, Gecko, and WebKit.
| Apple's monopoly on iOS browsers (soon to be undone) is
| unfortunately one of the last things keeping us from
| recreating the dark ages of IE's near monopoly on the
| market. I'd recommend at least supporting a non-Blink based
| browser like: * Lunascape (actually has all
| 3 major engines built in. Great for web dev) * Pale
| Moon - uses Goanna, a fork of Gecko * Waterfox -
| focused on speed and privacy and compatible with Firefox
| addons
|
| See also: Floorp, IceCat, and SeaMonkey
| danaris wrote:
| This sounds very much like cutting off your nose to spite
| your face.
|
| The Mozilla board might be largely incompetent and/or
| corrupt, but they aren't _actively_ trying to steal your
| data to profit from, and Firefox is still genuinely a less
| user-hostile product than Chrome.
| tiahura wrote:
| I'll just add.
|
| As we are in the holidays and reflecting on things we are
| grateful for - Thank God for Linus!
| 12345hn6789 wrote:
| Suddenly things make more sense about Firefox...
| slig wrote:
| I would be that all of them use iPhones and neither of them
| uses FF mobile.
| oldpersonintx wrote:
| Firefox will be better off longterm as a true community project
| free from Mozilla.org.
|
| Let Mozilla.org die.
| freedomben wrote:
| I'm sadly almost in this camp. Firefox is incredibly
| important to me and is critical for the open web to survive.
|
| Mozilla has proven to be really bad stewards, and as long as
| they exist nobody is going to pick up firefox. They've had
| many years to wake and up correct the course but choose not
| to, so it may be time to die. If Mozilla disappeared, a new
| organization could pick it up and run with it. If it weren't
| so overloaded in tech already, I might even call it "Phoenix"
| as it arose from the ashes of Firefox.
| fragmede wrote:
| Since implementing EME, I'm not sure Firefox is critical
| for an _open_ web, since by almost definition, EME isn 't
| open. As a practical matter I can understand why they chose
| to implement it (though that was not without controversy),
| but let's not fool ourselves here.
| freedomben wrote:
| that's an interesting point to consider. I wonder what
| would have happened had they _not_ done it? Would it have
| accelerated the decline? Or would it have been enough to
| get services not to use DRM? I 'm not sure, but I think
| FF may have just dropped to irrelevancy faster had they
| not done it.
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| I doubt this. Maintaining and developing a competitive
| browser is serious work, and needs skilled professionals
| working on it full time, as well as getting stuck in to the
| web standards process. That requires a level of funding that
| most community projects only dream of. I can't see any
| incentive for industry to put money behind it in the way that
| they do with Linux.
|
| I have very few complaints about Firefox as software. I only
| wish more people would use it. (That includes you, dear
| reader!) It is actually great, and if you've ever complained
| about AMP, WEI or anything like that, using a non-Google
| derived browser is one of the few things you can actually do
| to reduce Google's power here.
|
| Firefox are up against the power of OS defaults and dirty
| tricks in an age where most people don't really know what a
| web browser is. But if you have any awareness or concern
| about the health of the open web, you are absolutely educated
| enough to use Firefox. Of course there will be the odd minor
| workflow thing to get used to. But Firefox is great. All you
| really need is the motivation to choose something other than
| the default.
| aembleton wrote:
| You could fork it
| aaomidi wrote:
| If Mozilla is looking for a new CEO I'll sign myself up.
| moron4hire wrote:
| I'll even give them a deal. I'll run the company into the
| ground at twice the speed for half the money.
| slig wrote:
| How? I feel that _anything_ different than what 's been
| done will improve their presence.
|
| edit: username checks out.
| devit wrote:
| Presumably they have captured the Mozilla foundation board?
| dheera wrote:
| I feel like it's not that high for a CEO salary at a mature
| compnay. Staff-level engineers are routinely paid upwards of 1M
| these days (yay inflation). 6M for a CEO doesn't sound
| unreasonable.
|
| If these numbers sound high ... $1M today was $500K in 1996.
| _dark_matter_ wrote:
| Routinely??? I don't know of one staff level that gets paid
| that much
| dheera wrote:
| https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software
| -...
|
| https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-
| en...
|
| https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-
| en...
|
| https://www.levels.fyi/companies/apple/salaries/software-
| eng...
| tehbeard wrote:
| Strange how none of those listed are Mozilla...
|
| https://www.levels.fyi/companies/mozilla/salaries/softwar
| e-e...
|
| Looks arround the $170-200k level....
| mattl wrote:
| Distinguished engineers aren't really 'staff-level'
| dheera wrote:
| Oh bleh, distinguished members of "the staff" that works
| there, one of those things, either way, these are all far
| below the CEO and 1M+
| underdeserver wrote:
| These are all senior staff and up. Not one of these is
| staff level.
| qwertywert_ wrote:
| Those aren't staff.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> Staff-level engineers are routinely paid upwards of 1M
| these days_
|
| Yeah, at successful high performing trillion dolar tech
| companies like Nvidia or Apple, not broke*ss underperforming
| companies like Mozilla.
|
| _> 6M for a CEO doesn't sound unreasonable._
|
| It's unreasonable when you take into account Mozilla's lack
| of performance over the years. Where is their success, other
| than being kept on life support by being bankrolled by Google
| who's doing it solely to avoid anti-trust litigations over
| their monopoly on the browser market.
|
| In a way, this is actually harming Firefox, knowing that
| they'll always be funded no matter how their product
| performs, just so that Alphabet has a legal David to their
| Goliath, gives them little incentive to try to be
| competitive.
| dheera wrote:
| > Where is their success
|
| Huh what? I use Firefox and I'm actually very happy with
| it.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| We clearly have different definitions of what product and
| business success represents for a large tech company.
| benjaminsuch wrote:
| Sure, but this is not the criteria for a company to be
| successful or not.
| dheera wrote:
| Since when do you get to define the criteria?
|
| I'm a happy user, I consider that a success in my book.
| sgift wrote:
| The point is that less and less people use Firefox, so
| there seems to be a problem with success in that area,
| even if you are someone who still uses it (as am I).
| tomashubelbauer wrote:
| I am also a happy Firefox user, but that doesn't preclude
| me from seeing that Mozilla is a failing steward of
| Firefox.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| As a happy Firefox user, I want Firefox to make me happy
| tomorrow as well, not just today.
| seniorivn wrote:
| and what about their book? inability to put yourself into
| someone else's shoes, is a very big flag. A red one in my
| book.
| bcrl wrote:
| Performance of Firefox has steadily gotten worse lately.
| My bank's website has massive lag when scrolling (1
| second to redraw? Great!), but it works perfectly fine in
| Chrome. Firefox also gets into a state where screen
| updates in Streeview are laggy after anywhere from a few
| hours to a couple of days, but I can't figure out a way
| to predictably reproduce it on demand. Meanwhile, Chrome
| is snappy all the time. I also have to manually enable
| one of the acceleration settings under Linux. The end
| result is that I'm forced to use Chrome more and more as
| the Firefox user experience just plain sucks in these
| scenarios.
| freedomben wrote:
| This is probably much more your bank's fault than it is
| FF. I think Mozilla has badly neglected FF to the point
| they probably deserve to die so a new org can take their
| place, but the blame for that most likely falls at the
| feet of the bank for not testing on FF.
| dheera wrote:
| These websites also keep adding bloat on top of bloat,
| hell, a goddamn button is 56 layers of nested divs these
| days instead of just styling the shit out of <button>.
|
| Or they do some batshit insane "polyfill" nonsense that
| turns the <button> into 56 layers of nested divs behind
| the hood.
|
| HTML hasn't caught up either, there's no <toggle_switch>
| that invokes the native toggle switch that every OS
| already has, devs are forced to mimic the toggle with 85
| layers of nested divs.
| Chabsff wrote:
| Somehow, I don't think a single person enjoying the
| browser justifies 6 Million dollars a year in executive
| overhead alone.
|
| That's what what success means in this context: Something
| that makes that expense worthwhile.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| ... what about two people though?
| Jcampuzano2 wrote:
| Even if it were "not that high" for a CEO, what would justify
| a 7x increase while things have been looking downhill for
| years?
|
| If anything, the board should have gotten rid of her at this
| point and hired someone else, even if at this higher salary
| it would make more sense than sticking with someone who
| obviously hasn't been leading the company to growth or
| sustainability (since they are trending downards).
| matwood wrote:
| I'll agree with you that the CEO salary is fine. What isn't
| fine is the CEO's performance. They should be replaced.
| LegitShady wrote:
| damn I wish I'd get x7 increase in salary in 7 years. This guy
| must know where some bodies are buried.
| tristan957 wrote:
| She is a woman.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Doesn't make the bodies any less dead :D
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| > Genuine question. What is justifying Mozilla Corporation CEO
| Mitchell Baker's salary?
|
| Nothing, of course. Absolutely nothing.
| lolc wrote:
| Their friends make more!
| jeroenhd wrote:
| > Genuine question. What is justifying Mozilla Corporation CEO
| Mitchell Baker's salary?
|
| This question is why I don't expect Mozilla to last at its
| current course. I like their work, but the endless increases in
| CEO salary while their most important money maker is fledgling
| is not justifiable.
| api wrote:
| Sounds like our entire civilization in microcosm.
| dehrmann wrote:
| The increases look reasonable to me, but not when you
| consider their declining market share. I guess she only
| returned to the role of CEO in 2020, but she's been in
| leadership for a long time, and the org's performance has
| been poor.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_salary.
| ..
| Longhanks wrote:
| In what world is DOUBLING one's salary within two years
| while the company overall and, most importantly, the
| company's absolute flagship product are in continuous
| decline "reasonable"?
| SilasX wrote:
| From the link:
|
| >>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."
|
| So I bet it's something like:
|
| Baker: "If you don't pay me market rates for comparable
| work, I'll leave and go mess up a _different_ organization.
| "
|
| Google: "No, wait, stop, we'll get you the money!"
|
| Considering all the unforced errors on Mozilla's part, I'm
| only half joking there (i.e. that Google is influencing the
| decision, via their search placement deals, to keep Firefox
| bad).
| jampekka wrote:
| There's nothing reasonable in these salaries.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| I expect it to last as a Zombie company in some sorts. Not a
| true, government subsidized zombie company, but a way for
| Google to pretend they don't decide the internet.
|
| Google says 'Don't spend your money on bug fixes and you can
| get 400M for default search, and you get your 3M bonus.'
|
| Oops, we arent allowed to speculate on HN? I'm just jaded...
| godelski wrote:
| So what do you care about more? Mozilla CEO making too much
| or Chrome getting to dictate the web?
|
| Unfortunately there will always be things to complain about
| and no system is perfect. But we have to make choices like
| this and these are the results. You cannot complain about
| Google's control/dominance over the web and refuse to turn
| away from their products to use reasonable alternatives (when
| they exist). Firefox is by no means a bad browser and it is
| easy to switch over. You can also still use firefox and
| complain about Baker's salary but is this really a killer
| issue?
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I want Firefox to continue existing and I want it to become
| a major player again. If not Firefox, maybe a newcomer,
| just anyone other than Apple and Google.
|
| I use Firefox on every device and I recommend others to do
| the same. That doesn't mean I agree with Mozilla, though,
| and their misplacement of funds make me worry about the
| future of Mozilla and Firefox as a browser. After firing
| the Rust team working on Servo, you'd expect austerity
| measures across the board, as Servo was clearly too
| expensive to continue investing in, yet Mozilla saw fit to
| continue rising Baker's wages, despite having just laid off
| 25% of its workforce.
|
| I wonder about how much longer Mozilla will be able to
| exist. It's oriented around activism first, Firefox second,
| yet most of its income comes from its browser, and only
| because Google is scared of being branded a monopoly. If
| any other platform rises to popularity (and there are a few
| rising browser engines in the works, mostly as hobbies, but
| still) and Google switches to funding that project rather
| than Mozilla, I don't see how Firefox can survive.
| e2le wrote:
| >Firefox's market share has been on the decline since 2010.
|
| Its decline is also visible in Mozilla's own data [1], 252M
| users in January 2019 down to 188M in November 2023.
|
| MAU has remained at around 188M since October, I would like to
| believe this is because of MV3 and the YouTube drama, but that
| would be naive.
|
| Going forward I think there should be a position on the
| foundation [2] and corporation board [3] held by a community
| representative. At least then the community would have some say
| in the direction Mozilla is taking.
|
| [1]: https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
|
| [2]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Board
|
| [3]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/moco/
| agumonkey wrote:
| imagine what would happen if all the upper layers were removed
| and all them millions would fall into contributors :)
| Vvector wrote:
| Raise your hand if you also got a 7x raise over the last seven
| years.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Okay, now keep them raised if you were also performing worse
| on every metric each year.
| culi wrote:
| I actually don't think you'd see that many raised hands go
| down
| fouc wrote:
| The implied joke is they're talking about regular
| employees. Seems like you're thinking of CEOs?
| plugin-baby wrote:
| Now keep them raised if you didn't change company...
| timthelion wrote:
| I did, went from working for a small non profit in the
| sustainable transport/urbanism sector to management in the
| telco industry. Sallary jumped almost 10x.
| timthelion wrote:
| Now I'm making bank. My anual sallary is around what
| mozilla CEO makes in two workdays.
| nine_k wrote:
| I can imagine that the CEO, or maybe a few other top officers,
| may say: "This is me who is bringing in all the search deals,
| which means all the money. Come on and try to oust me."
|
| Mozilla is an open-source project. When an open-source project
| somehow loses its way, it's often forked by a new team of
| contributors who have a better idea. This happened several
| times: Open Office / Libre Office, MySQL / MariaDB, X86 /
| X11.org, hell, even GCC / egcs in the 1990s.
|
| But this likely cannot happen to Mozilla, which is basically
| kept afloat by Google handing it some money for keeping it as a
| default search engine, about $400M a year currently [1]. There
| is little chance that an alternative "Better Mozilla"
| organization would collect as much, or at least half as much,
| to support a fork. It would e.g. take 33M users who agree to
| pay $5/mo for a Mozilla "support subscription" to collect $400M
| a year.
|
| Maybe a web browser can be maintained for less than 400M, but
| likely not _much_ less. The modern web is fiendishly complex,
| and you need both a desktop version (three platforms) and a
| mobile version.
|
| [1]: https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-
| go...
| ink_13 wrote:
| > When an open-source project somehow loses its way, it's
| often forked by a new team of contributors who have a better
| idea
|
| Perhaps ironically, this was also the genesis of Firefox
| lucideer wrote:
| > _Perhaps ironically, this was also the genesis of
| Firefox_
|
| That's not entirely accurate (or at least, while accurate,
| is missing a lot of significant context) Mozilla was
| creating within Netscape, not in opposition to it, as a
| steward org for the open-sourcing of Navigator &
| Communicator. Even when Netscape was acquired by AOL, AOL
| continued to fund[0] Mozilla for years after the
| acquisition.
|
| [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20050324025052/http://www.w
| ired....
| stonogo wrote:
| Firefox, however, was not. It was created because people
| didn't use most of the tools built into the Mozilla
| suite, and they were difficult to port (because they had
| a Motif frontend AND a GTK frontend).
|
| https://website-
| archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_...
| cuu508 wrote:
| But after that, IIRC Mozilla Suite was big, clunky and
| stagnating. And Phoenix, I mean, Firebird, I mean,
| Firefox was a lean spin-off.
| lucideer wrote:
| It was a spin-off within Mozilla though - not a rival
| fork.
| amiga386 wrote:
| That is the case, but even then Firefox really _was_ a
| fork, _within_ Mozilla.
|
| Mozilla was created in 1998 to open-source Netscape
| Communicator suite. Mozilla released its own suite, also
| called "Mozilla" (e.g. "Mozilla 1.0" [0])
|
| Independently of that effort, Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross
| made an experimenal, cut-down version of just the browser
| part of the suite, which they called "Phoenix", as in a
| Phoenix rising from the ashes. That's a fork. That's a
| fork by any metric.
|
| They later rebranded Phoenix as Firefox, and eventually
| the Mozilla suite was abandoned. Mozilla changed tack in
| 2003 and switched to developing Firefox and Thunderbird
| as independent products [1]
|
| [0] https://www-archive.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla1.0
|
| [1] https://www-
| archive.mozilla.org/roadmap/roadmap-02-apr-2003
| tnorthcutt wrote:
| _It would e.g. take 33M users who agree to pay $5 /mo for a
| Mozilla "support subscription" to collect $400M a year._
|
| Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but when I do the math (33M x 5
| x 12) I get $1.98B.
|
| Maybe you meant $1/month?
| rdm_blackhole wrote:
| If you pay yearly, you usually get a discount so you cant
| multiply by 12.
| widdershins wrote:
| Yep, you're right. At 5$/month they'd need 6.66M subscribed
| users. Still a lot, but more acheivable.
| abirch wrote:
| Most people don't want to pay for anything. Look at all
| of the workarounds for news sites. I try to pay or donate
| for most of what I use but there seem to be a lot of
| people who want to get everything for free.
| nine_k wrote:
| I totally won't mind paying for the occasional article I
| open, if micropayments were a thing! Pay a quarter, read
| something worthy.
|
| The problem is that micropayments are not interesting for
| most news outlets: the friction of current solutions is
| high, the resulting revenue stream, unsteady. Monthly /
| yearly subscriptions bring a better revenue stream, and
| cost way less.
|
| If micropayments were indeed zero-friction, _and_
| effectively zero-cost, maybe they 'd be (reluctantly)
| integrated.
| abrahms wrote:
| My experience w/ most news outlets is that they have a
| random article I'm linked to. That's not worth a
| subscription in my mind. A news service you have an
| ongoing relationship with is.
| mariusor wrote:
| I'm deeply disturbed of this normalization of software as a
| subscription service. I want the return of good old days
| when people could pay once for their software and use it in
| perpetuity.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| subscription is a significantly fairer revenue model for
| software which undergoes regular upgrades and has
| support, which is most software nowadays.
|
| It makes sure that people who continue to use continue to
| pay. Upfront charges are often either too low with long
| term users free-riding or too high, in case the project
| is abandoned. Subscription makes it much more likely to
| price products correctly.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > subscription is a significantly fairer revenue model
| for software which undergoes regular upgrades and has
| support
|
| I could not disagree more. Subscriptions for software are
| a deeply unfair approach. Great for the companies, of
| course, but not for users.
|
| A more fair approach is to charge for upgrades and
| support instead. At least that way, users only pay
| if/when they choose to obtain additional value.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Leaving nonpaying users on old versions on browsers with
| security issues and who will no longer support the latest
| web standards will be bad for the web.
| JohnFen wrote:
| How would it be bad for the web?
|
| If users want to stay on an old version, why shouldn't
| they be allowed to? Sure, there may be additional
| security considerations or missing functionality, but
| there's nothing wrong with a user making that choice.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >How would it be bad for the web?
|
| It results in users having a broken experience or sites
| being very conservative in what features they use.
| TheGRS wrote:
| This model gets implemented, and then the comments
| section is littered with "I prefer when I didn't need to
| pay for software upgrades and backward compatibility!"
| JohnFen wrote:
| Yeah, people can get irrational about such things (like
| ignoring that they're only paying when they choose to
| rather than paying every month automatically).
|
| But the solution to this is to offer both forms, as
| several companies do.
| gottorf wrote:
| I hate the "subscriptionification" of everything as much
| as anybody, but there is a cost to ongoing updates to
| software. Especially on something like a browser, where
| both standards and exceptional behavior contrary to the
| standards change rapidly.
|
| Maybe we could go back to where people paid once and
| could pay separately for support?
| abirch wrote:
| I remember the forced obsolescence. There were a few good
| software packages but many would frequently force you to
| upgrade from version 12.31 to 13.0 which isn't backward
| compatible i.e., "This software doesn't run on Windows
| XP"
| tcbawo wrote:
| At least with Microsoft, they are fanatics about
| backwards compatibility. It is pretty rare for something
| designed for an OS prior to Windows XP to not run on
| current Windows OS versions.
| nine_k wrote:
| This is not a subscription _to use_ the browser. You can
| always build it from source and use for free, as
| designed.
|
| This is a _commitment to support_ the development,
| because the development should be oingoing. Not Netflix-
| style, but Patreon-style.
|
| (Also see how JetBrains handles "subscriptions" to their
| closed-source software. Once you've paid, the version is
| forever yours. Updates are bought with some additional
| sums if desired.)
| LaGrange wrote:
| I mean yes, but I read that more as "patronizing." I.e.
| how many patrons (of some sort) Mozilla would need.
| matwood wrote:
| > I want the return of good old days when people could
| pay once for their software and use it in perpetuity.
|
| This simply does not exist for any software that is
| internet connected.
| jampekka wrote:
| All my software is that. My monthly subscription is 0$.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| Of all the types of software where you should be ok
| paying a subscription, browsers are the ones where should
| be _most_ ok with it. Browsers, more than anything else,
| need constant updates because they 're by far the biggest
| and juiciest attack surface for hackers, and also web
| devs will just stop supporting you if you're not on top
| of the treadmill of browser standard updates.
|
| It's not feasible at all to call a browser "done" and
| leave it alone, so if you want one that's independent
| from adtech, a subscription is kind of your only option.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The EU could have a privacy-friendly browser if it funded
| Mozilla or a Mozilla fork.
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| I, for one, won't trust a government to ensure my privacy.
|
| The EU does better than the US for consumer-related privacy
| issues. But I don't think the same can be said when the
| government wants to slap a label of "national security"
| onto something. That puts us into a whole different world
| of "anything goes".
| rdm_blackhole wrote:
| That would be a no from me. Considering the recent
| headlines from the EU wanting to scan every private message
| on the phones of it's citizens in order to "protect the
| children".
| vlabakje90 wrote:
| FIY, that has been rejected:
| https://fortune.com/europe/2023/10/26/eu-chat-control-
| csam-e...
| wkat4242 wrote:
| For now yes. I'm sure it will be back on the agenda in
| some form or other before we know it.
| rdm_blackhole wrote:
| For now, but it's not over.
|
| If not this time then the next. Just the fact that the
| commission was allowed to propose such a blatant privacy
| invading law is enough for me to know that privacy is not
| a something that the EU is serious about.
| jampekka wrote:
| Private corporations do the same without you knowing,
| without any pretence and without even illusion of
| accountability.
|
| Non-profit is better than gov but private is way worse
| than even gov.
| orangepurple wrote:
| Is this the same EU that is forcing browsers to accept
| government mandated certificate authorities?
|
| Article 45 of eIDAS 2.0 will roll back web security by 12
| years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38181114 - Nov
| 2023 (77 comments)
|
| Joint statement of scientists and NGOs on the EU's proposed
| eIDAS reform -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38126997 - Nov 2023
| (63 comments)
|
| Last Chance to fix eIDAS: Secret EU law threatens Internet
| security - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38109494 -
| Nov 2023 (299 comments)
|
| EFF about EU: EIDAS 2.0 Sets a Dangerous Precedent for Web
| Security - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33966364 -
| Dec 2022 (44 comments)
|
| EU legislation eIDAS article 45.2 may force inclusion of
| insecure QWAC root CAs -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32093891 - July 2022
| (36 comments)
|
| Mozilla and the EFF publish letter about the danger of
| Article 45.2 -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30549119 - March 2022
| (13 comments)
| wkat4242 wrote:
| > Maybe a web browser can be maintained for less than 400M,
| but likely not much less.
|
| I doubt that. Mozilla wastes a ton, not only on CEO salaries
| but tangential projects and other dogoodery.
| cozzyd wrote:
| While I have no idea about any of the aspects of Mitchell
| Baker's salary, I don't see this questioning of corporate
| CEO's. A generous reading might be that this is the salary
| required to avoid losing the CEO to some random VC selling
| useless widgets.
| toyg wrote:
| Looking at results since she got the job, maybe they should
| pay the money to such useless-widget company to poach her.
| I'm all for social enterprises but FF lost the plot.
| taosx wrote:
| I hope mozilla the corporation dies faster so we could then
| focus on the browser. As someone said, the board is a joke.
| Certhas wrote:
| Am I reading the documents you link right?
|
| Mozilla is wildly profitable.
|
| They made a profit of roughly 150 Million dollars last year.
|
| They have 1.2 Billion dollars in assets.
|
| They have increased revenue from non-search deals significantly
| (56M -> 75M, up one third).
|
| Despite all the gnashing of teeth in this comment section about
| woke Mozilla, they spent only 5 Million on grants last year.
| The vast majority goes towards developing Firefox and building
| up assets.
|
| I had always just taken the statements that she is absurdly
| overpaid at face value and never looked into this myself. But
| Baker has overseen the rise of revenue and net income from
| almost zero to current numbers. If that doesn't look like a
| successfully run NGO, what does?
|
| Not a big fan of CEO compensation in general, but I feel the
| one-sided focus on market share, which I feel is somewhat out
| of Mozillas control (can't even compete on the dominant mobile
| computing platform, anti-competitive Google leveraging its
| search monopoloy and advertising Chrome extremely aggresively,
| etc... ), while ignoring the actual financial health of the
| organisation is really biased.
| RyanHamilton wrote:
| If this was a for profit company I could agree with your
| focus on profit. Their mission statement is: "Mozilla is a
| global nonprofit dedicated to keeping the Internet a global
| public resource that is open and accessible to all.". You
| could argue the importance of market share at some
| percentages but below ~5% has to be considered a priority one
| emergency, if your goal is to keep the internet accessible
| for all. If their market share fell below 1% they would have
| effectively almost zero ability to steer standards.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > If this was a for profit company I could agree with your
| focus on profit.
|
| There are two parts to Mozilla: a for-profit company and a
| non-profit company. They are separate. You are reading the
| mission statement of mozilla.org, not mozilla.com. Mitchell
| Baker is the CEO of the for-profit company, not the non-
| profit.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Isn't she chief lizard wrangler at both?
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| No. Mark Surman is the executive director of the non-
| profit (executive director is the term used for CEO at
| non-profits). She is the chair of the non-profit board,
| which is probably not a paid position (or paid very small
| token amount).
| wodenokoto wrote:
| It kinda is a for profit organization.
|
| Basically all revenue is made through the Mozilla
| Corporation.
| nine_k wrote:
| A non-profit company is not a zero-revenue company. It's a
| company that reinvests all profits into its designated
| cause. A non-profit org with a billion-dollar revenue is a
| _great_ non-profit org as it can finance the work on its
| cause really well.
| Certhas wrote:
| The question is, can you change the market share?
| Specifically as long as you depend on Google for your
| income.
|
| If not, then the goal should be to build up assets and
| alternative revenue streams.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| MAUs are down though and a non profit is supposed to be
| mission driven not revenue driven. The focus on market share
| is the belief that a better internet (Mozilla's mission)
| starts by having a non profit browser leading the way. There
| might be some other metric but the financial health of
| Mozilla can only be one factor. Besides, at some point they
| get down to 0 market share and then the search deal revenue
| will go down (not sure again the next time they will be
| negotiating the deal)
| pennybanks wrote:
| i assume instead of google outright purchasing the company
| due to monopoly issues and internet outrage, they instead are
| just doing what they are doing now. thought i read they are
| up to 90% funded by google.. so its a little silly how these
| browser warriors champion their precious firefox or whatever
| other browser and condemn the evil chrome. but if you think
| about it they are all basically chrome developers. building
| ontop of chromium or working on firefox where those devs and
| chromes collab.
|
| but in my opinion that isnt the reason google keeps firefox
| funded. i just think they do it for goodness sakes and not to
| cannibalize the only "competition". it really wasnt too long
| ago when it was chrome and firefox the two sleek awesome
| browsers saving the internet from nasty slow internet
| explorer.
| Yoric wrote:
| If I read correctly your message, you seem to assume that
| Firefox is a variant of Chromium. That's not the case.
| fallingknife wrote:
| A CEO making almost 5% of the company's profit is absolutely
| massive for a company that size.
| thayne wrote:
| So that means instead of investing money into making the
| browser better and clawing back some market share, Mozilla
| Corporation is sending money up to the owning Mozilla
| Foundation, in the form of profits, to spend on non-browser
| initiatives.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| The only amount of money that can claw back market share is
| a number big enough to buy Google. Google controls the
| leading web properties and pushes its browsers through
| there.
| mcfedr wrote:
| Features. Be as good as chrome and id use it.
| Certhas wrote:
| That's absurd. Firefox has been at parity with Chrome for
| a long time, both are extremely mature technologies.
| Sometimes one is ahead of the other in one way or the
| other, but they are largely identical. The exception is
| when Google or Microsoft "accidentally" break their
| websites on Firefox.
|
| It's pure fantasy to insist that the market share of
| Firefox is primarily driven by technical merit.
| Otherwise, you couldn't explain why Firefox is still at
| 20% in Germany, for example.
| mcfedr wrote:
| Multiple profiles from chrome is such an important
| feature for me, I don't know people cope without it.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Firefox has separate profiles and multiple containers per
| profile.
| lucideer wrote:
| > _They have increased revenue from non-search deals
| significantly (56M - > 75M, up one third)._
|
| I'd love to feel optimistic about an increase in non-Google
| revenue, but 19M when the CEO alone is paying herself 7M of
| that alongside a 85M increase in expenses... it's still
| pretty hard to see it as a net positive here.
|
| & of course the headline of this HN post is declining usage -
| that trumps profit either way imo
| jampekka wrote:
| > What is justifying Mozilla Corporation CEO Mitchell Baker's
| salary?
|
| The same thing that is justifying obscene salaries in general.
| A circle of greed where obscenely paid people decide what
| obscenely paid people should be paid.
| digging wrote:
| I will say in their defense, they have a legitimate argument.
|
| Offering a low-paying CEO role means you'll attract lower
| quality CEOs. The best CEOs have personal incentive to take
| the highest paying jobs. This element of competition does
| exist.
|
| However, this ignores a few factors.
|
| 1. Mozilla don't seem to have a great CEO despite the pay.
|
| 2. Self-interest and CEO skills are not necessarily tightly
| coupled. They could be orthogonal. So a great CEO might be
| willing to take lower pay, especially a CEO that might be
| great for a company that is itself forgoing disgusting
| amounts of (ad) revenue in the interest of ethics.
|
| 3. (Not Mozilla specific but it's important to mention when
| this comes up) Decent regulations capping CEO pay would in
| fact remove this entire element of competition, freeing up
| companies from having to decide how much profit to sacrifice
| on the altar of business gods.
| triceratops wrote:
| > Offering a low-paying CEO role means you'll attract lower
| quality CEOs
|
| Maybe in the private sector.
|
| > The best CEOs have personal incentive to take the highest
| paying jobs
|
| It has to be said again: in the private sector.
|
| Non-profit CEOs shouldn't expect to be compensated as well
| as their private sector counterparts. The feeling of doing
| good is part of the reward.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| About Baker's salary, turns out there's a section about it on
| her Wikipedia page:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Netscape_Commun...
| .
|
| The relevant quote is "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."
|
| In other words, there's an assumption every corporation is
| required to have a CEO/Lawyer from the Technorati class who
| acts as a drain on the finances of the corporation, why should
| Mozilla be any different? Since the Mozilla Foundation is not a
| widely held corporation (and is a 501c3) there are only a few
| institutional directors ( from https://www.mozilla.org/en-
| US/about/leadership/#boards ): Baker (AOL), Chambers
| (McKinsey), Cooper (Walmart), Lakhani (MIT/Harvard), Lisbonne
| (Stanford GSB), Molotsi (Intuit) and Lund.
|
| If you think Baker's pay should be cut, Lakhani is probably the
| person to talk to, he's chair of the compensation committee.
|
| After watching VCs from the 70s to the current time (yes, I'm
| that old) I have a theory about tech startups. Their primary
| concern is to pump money from old school monied interests to
| old school monied interests' children. So if you have cash you
| want to give to your kids more or less tax free (or tax
| reduced), you send them to Stanford or MIT, then you arrange a
| meeting for them w/ your old school chum who's now a VC in San
| Jose or Palo Alto. You give the VC cash which is treated as an
| investment by the IRS, and then the VC gives the money to
| whatever bizarre tech startup is being run by their old school
| chum's kids. If you're lucky, you get a return on your
| investment and you pay whatever capital gains tax you need to
| pay (which is most often taxed at a rate considerably below
| that for earned income.) Your kids get a decent salary for a
| few years, and if they're lucky and smart, they git bought out
| by a big firm that makes them a VP or something. The VC
| _should_ be lucky enough over time to make enough money on the
| 10% of deals that make it to acquisition to pay for the 90%
| that fail completely or get acquired on bad terms.
|
| Mozilla always seemed to me to demonstrate this also works for
| non-profits.
|
| Also... the story of "using money to transfer generational
| wealth in the upper class" is clearly not a universal. There
| are clearly startups that are innovative. They _may_ be helmed
| by a handsome 20-something from Stanford, but that 's just an
| historical accident. I am sure _YOUR_ startup is in this
| category. But the "using VC investment as a money laundering
| scheme to evade generational tax" happens often enough my inner
| marxian shouts every time I drive down El Camino in Palo Alto.
|
| And this part is purely opinion. I appreciate you probably have
| a different opinion and absolutely do not think less of you for
| having a unique perspective:
|
| And besides, the goal of tech money is now just to keep the
| party going. The web is shit, intended to distribute content
| from major content producers or to be festooned with ads
| (twitch and youtube). iProducts are there to look sleek and
| provide just enough functionality to convince you to buy
| another iProduct. Though you're probably not in the target
| demographic anymore since China and India are at the beginning
| of the growth curve. Protocols and programs we used to use:
| SMTP/IMAP/eMail, (S)FTP/File Transfer,
| Veronica/Archie/WAIS/Search, etc. are pretty much dead or owned
| by Google, Microsoft or Yahoo's corpse.
|
| I think the reason olds are nostalgic for Commodore 64's, Atari
| 800's and even TI 99/4A's (and that there are a few kids who
| like leenucks and BSD) is they're systems that could operate
| without being attached to the dystopian cyberspace Carmen
| Hermosillo described in Pandora's Vox. The only
| "infrastructure" I needed for my 99/4 was a power outlet and a
| factory somewhere cranking out cassette tapes, 5.25" floppies
| and ribbons for my MX-80.
|
| </opinion>
|
| But I have digressed. If the resolution is that Mozilla has
| lost it's way, I would argue for the affirmative. Or rather
| argue it was sort of set up to fail. And heck, I didn't even
| once mention the management fiasco that was Boot to Gecko.
| rsaz wrote:
| Is this bad for Google too? I thought Chrome needs Firefox to be
| somewhat successful so competition exists and the browser space
| doesn't become a monopoly. Does the rising popularity of Safari
| and Edge negate this?
| troupo wrote:
| Yeah, they can now pretend that Edge is a different independent
| browser
| sunng wrote:
| Like linux, most firefox users has tracking protection so data is
| not collected for them.
| lucasRW wrote:
| I am shocked to realize that Firefox is that close to 2%, I
| thought it was way above that level. Google monopoly is to be
| avoided at all costs.
| risho wrote:
| Mozilla has been a horrible steward for their project. They
| receive hundreds of millions of dollars a year and I have no idea
| where this money goes. It also doesn't help that their
| organization is full of purity testing and social activism
| nonsense that has nothing to do with making a good web browser.
| At this point I'm convinced that the reason that google is paying
| them so much is because they actually know that firefox is a
| failed project and keeping it alive as a zombie project actively
| protects them from anti-trust violations.
| ekianjo wrote:
| They do a lot of PR campaigns and pay their execs well
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| This rings true.
| BossingAround wrote:
| MS is investing hundreds of millions of dollars in Windows as
| well and yet I have no idea where that money goes. It's not
| like you can see all of the investments in mature products...
| tiahura wrote:
| Mozilla is the Washington Generals to Google's Harlem
| Globetrotters.
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| It gets spent on awards and grants to non-browser related
| things that please the CEO and board:
|
| https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/
| dralley wrote:
| The Mozilla Foundation is not the Mozilla Corporation.
| Mozilla Corporation is the entity that develops Firefox and
| realizes revenue from Firefox.
| theboywho wrote:
| A lot of people around me are switching back to firefox as chrome
| is showing signs of cracks, especially with the Youtube/ad-
| blocking saga on chrome.
|
| Also, I don't think the US govt guidelines are going to have a
| dramatic worldwide impact on firefox numbers, the US is no longer
| the major online player it once was.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Yes, people that believe that Google will forever own the web
| are the same people that used to believe that Microsoft would
| forever own it. MS got arrogant and lost. Google looks like
| they are repeating that mistake.
|
| A few things that could go against this:
|
| - If enough people use Firefox, no commercial business in their
| right mind will tell these people to "please leave, we don't
| serve your kind". Seems to be true for obscure versions of
| internet explorer still in use. Definitely true for Firefox for
| some time to come.
|
| - Legislation might force the market to open up on mobile.
| Right now Apple is blocking the Chrome and Firefox rendering
| engines (well they allow similarly named shells around safari).
| And Google of course "owns" the search and browsing experience
| on Android by default and twists every OEM into signing a
| restrictive licensing deal. At least you can install firefox on
| Android. There are some signs this might start changing. A lot
| of outrage around privacy and ad blockers might speed this up.
|
| - People can still vote with their feet. If you watch Youtube
| on a laptop and you don't have an effective ad blocker, Firefox
| is blocking them very nicely. I watch a lot of youtube and 100%
| ad free, just saying.
| beej71 wrote:
| > Yes, people that believe that Google will forever own the
| web are the same people that used to believe that Microsoft
| would forever own it. MS got arrogant and lost. Google looks
| like they are repeating that mistake.
|
| I don't believe Google will forever own the web. But, like
| Microsoft did, I believe they will cause us a lot of pain
| before they're through.
| worik wrote:
| > especially with the Youtube/ad-blocking saga
|
| I am afraid to say in my world if Google degrades Firefox for
| YouTube most people I know will switch to Chrome
|
| I have had success persuading people to switch to FF (I am one
| of those people) but a degraded YouTube- even the outright
| criminality that involves - would be a deal breaker
|
| The ad blocking blocking will work the other way.....
| bee_rider wrote:
| The government should really have a requirement to support at
| least one fully open option. I don't care about the secondary
| effects; I'm happy not to use sites by lazy devs who can't
| support two JavaScript engines. But there aren't many alternative
| providers for government services.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Why is the US government even supporting specific browsers? It
| should support a _standard_ like HTML 4 with no CSS or JS
| required. i.e. make the actual functionality on their sites
| simple to reduce the chance it doesn 't work somewhere.
|
| They're not Spotify. They're not trying to growth hack. They
| don't need to look pretty and have fancy animations and match
| some designer's dream down to the pixel. They can add CSS etc. to
| make things a bit nicer, but government sites should _work_ with
| as simple of a browser as possible.
|
| Highly regulated critical infrastructure like banks should be
| required to do this too.
| DrBazza wrote:
| > It should support a standard like HTML 4 with no CSS or JS
| required. i.e. make the actual functionality on their sites
| simple to reduce the chance it doesn't work somewhere.
|
| You're right of course.
|
| It's not really a case of 'supporting' browsers, it's a case of
| testing their sites against other browsers in case developers
| have accidentally written some non-portable Chrome only code.
|
| This was very much the case in the IE6 era. Developers wrote
| and tested their sites for and with IE6, and were then
| surprised they rendered (in)correctly on Firefox and looked
| wrong. At least these days there are shim libraries, rather
| than having to explicitly rely on things like the box-model
| hack.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| > Developers wrote and tested their sites for and with IE6,
| and were then surprised they rendered (in)correctly on
| Firefox and looked wrong
|
| But that's the point: rendering shouldn't really matter. For
| things that are important like government systems, we should
| treat web "apps" much like TeX encourages: you specify the
| semantics, and let the rendering engine do what it will.
| Don't try to precisely control it. You can and should assume
| that users can totally override rendering with a custom
| agent, that browsers will disagree on default rendering, and
| that they may ignore your CSS instructions.
|
| Like if someone wants to use a browser that always renders
| h1, h2, p, etc. with specific fonts and colors, totally
| ignores any CSS, and adds buttons to each table column header
| to sort on that column, that should all just work. Or if you
| want to use a braille output or screen reader.
|
| For important tools and information, not
| entertainment/shopping, functionality should trump all other
| concerns.
|
| My bank and now my power company have issues where I need to
| use chromium to fill out a form, and I don't understand it. I
| know Firefox supports forms. For whatever reason, javascript
| is loading the thing and screwing up somehow. I don't see why
| js is even involved, but frankly it screams incompetence to
| me. The easiest thing in the world to build, and they've
| broken it trying to make it look nice.
|
| I don't go to my power company website for fun. I'm there to
| pay a bill. I need a form with 5 inputs and a submit button,
| and _that 's it_. The rest of the screen can be plain white
| for all I care. Literally something I could put together in 2
| minutes when I was 11, and it does not work. Paper should not
| have a better UI than a website.
|
| Incidentally, this is why I'm not too worried about AI. If
| companies wanted cheap/easy/reliable systems, that's been
| doable on the web the whole time. People can't resist making
| things difficult for themselves, and they'll pay very good
| money to do it.
| pavon wrote:
| None of that negates the need to test on various browsers
| to ensure compatibility.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| What compatibility? If Firefox breaks forms, then Firefox
| broke forms and needs to fix it. Not your bug. If Chrome
| renders differently from edge because they decided the
| default color on .gov sites will be pink on white and all
| padding will be multiplied by 1.5, then that's fine. Not
| a bug. Chrome just decided to present a different look.
|
| If it's even possible for basic functionality to break in
| a way where you wouldn't obviously say the browser is
| broken, then you've built it wrong. That means you need
| to test that TLS/HTTP protocols are implemented correctly
| and that your documents conform to a schema.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _then Firefox broke forms and needs to fix it. Not your
| bug._
|
| Not in the real world. In the real world, you've
| delivered a site that doesn't work and contractually, you
| can be sued or not paid for not fulfilling your contract.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| That's the whole point of a standard (note that I said
| for .gov): the government says what standard they interop
| with. They either conform or don't. If other
| implementations don't conform, they are wrong. If the
| site doesn't conform, it is wrong. If it's not in scope
| for the standard (e.g. layout/font), it's out of scope.
| If the standard is underspecified or wrong somehow, you
| fix that and .gov now targets the new revision.
|
| The government doesn't need to worry about market share.
| They can just dictate that this is what your browser
| needs to do to work with government systems. This is both
| more fair and _easier_ for everyone; you don 't have a
| moving target to aim for, and can just refer to the
| standard for what to do.
| crazygringo wrote:
| But government don't exist to serve standards.
|
| Governments exist to serve their citizens -- their users.
|
| It's extremely user/citizen-hostile to say, "well our
| site works but no commercial browsers do, so I guess you
| can't register for a health plan this year over the web."
|
| And I don't know about you, but I _sure_ don 't want the
| government building its own standards-based browser
| required for accessing government websites...
| ndriscoll wrote:
| The government should _set_ or _adopt_ standards, not
| serve them. And they can and should provide a reference
| implementation.
|
| We could easily and reliably do forms on mainframes. This
| is not complicated. And de facto, every browser supports
| HTML 4 forms anyway, so that's a non-concern.
|
| They already set standards for things like needing to
| support TLS 1.3 with specific cipher suites. There's no
| reason they can't say HTML 4 forms and links are required
| for browsers to work on their sites.
| crazygringo wrote:
| No -- I don't want the US government (or any other)
| involved in setting web standards. The W3C is not going
| to be helped by being run by governments instead.
|
| No -- I don't want the US government providing a
| reference implementation of web browsers.
|
| No -- I don't want to log into a mainframe computer to
| fill out my taxes or sign up for Medicaid or a health
| plan.
|
| The government should simply build services that work, in
| practical ways that are familiar and friendly to their
| citizens, _according to the tools and habits their
| citizens are already accustomed to_.
|
| That means websites and apps for popular OS'es and
| browsers. It means phone numbers that work with existing
| telephones. It means offices in population centers.
|
| Good governments come to where users/citizens _already
| are_. The shouldn 't make users/citizens jump through
| hurdles to come to _it_ , any more than necessary.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Like I said, the US government should just _adopt_ the
| existing W3C standard.
|
| It's crazy to me that 10 years ago people were against
| the standard for government documents being essentially
| "whatever Microsoft office does", but in 2023, we've
| decided it makes sense for the standard for government
| web sites to be "whatever Chrome and Safari do".
|
| And as I've pointed out, for historical reasons, we
| already _have_ an adequate standard that the major
| browsers already support. So just target that standard.
| It happens that this is also the cheapest, simplest, most
| reliable way to do things anyway.
| crazygringo wrote:
| But you're saying that the government should create
| websites according to those standards, and if it breaks
| in Chrome or Safari, the government _shouldn 't_ test and
| fix it. Rather, the browsers should fix it.
|
| That's a position I just can't get behind. These are all
| just tools. The point isn't to follow some ideology, the
| point is to _function_.
|
| And no, the government shouldn't formally "adopt" any
| specific W3C standard either, because standards evolve,
| and we don't want the government to get stuck in time. It
| should just write and maintain websites that _work_.
|
| This isn't complicated. Businesses all seem to manage it
| just fine. The government doesn't need to do it any
| differently.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| If a browser breaks _forms_ somehow, then yeah I don 't
| think it's reasonable for anyone to try to fix their
| website to somehow work (if it's even possible). Same as
| if they break links, or TLS, or HTTP. The government
| should just say "chrome 287 doesn't work".
|
| The "evolving" standards of browsers mostly add a bunch
| of useless toys that create security vulnerabilities.
| There's no reason for serious sites to target them. The
| old standards do everything you need to quickly and
| easily make a functional tool that will require no
| maintenance for years or decades, which is exactly what
| you want from tools.
| pavon wrote:
| You are assuming that your developers were perfect and
| write sites exactly to the standard every time. In the
| real world they don't and XHTML lost, so all browsers
| tolerate and mask non-compliant pages to various degrees
| and in various ways, and will surface different bugs in
| your work. So it behooves you to test with the browsers
| your users are using to find those bugs before they do.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| I am assuming that a professional can do their job, yes.
|
| The whole XHTML thing where allegedly it never caught on
| because people can't write valid markup has never made
| sense to me. They're able to get typescript to compile
| now, right? If a dev couldn't write react code that
| compiles, we would fire them, right?
|
| We have tools to check that your document parses and
| conforms a schema. We've had them for 20 years. It's easy
| enough to have that be part of your CI pipeline. The
| tooling is 1000x simpler than modern frameworks, and the
| thing that was allegedly difficult was that if you
| enabled conformance mode (which was opt-in based on DTD
| and/or MIME type), you had to open _and_ close your tags
| instead of just opening them. Surely any middle schooler
| understands when you open a parenthesis, you need to
| close it?
| sunshowers wrote:
| Testing on target platforms is an inherent part of
| shipping production software.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Not if you're targeting a standard.
|
| I worked on fibre channel networks at IBM. They were all
| about high touch customer service, and had great data
| gathering and would debug issues that ultimately were
| caused by some other vendor breaking the standard. After
| proving we were doing the right thing, our answer would
| always be to tell the customer to turn off the broken
| feature on their other vendor's device (other vendors
| would do things like inject fake ACKs for large transfers
| to reduce latency ("acceleration"), which is kind of a
| no-no in reliable networks. We lowered latency in a
| standard compliant way by using multiple concurrent
| exchanges that we put together at the application level).
|
| We did test with some other vendors, but IIRC only at a
| fairly basic level, and didn't support any of their non-
| standard behavior. We just used them to validate our own
| compliance to standards.
| sunshowers wrote:
| To clarify, I think it would be very bad if the
| government merely "targeted a standard" and did not test
| its websites on various browsers. I would consider it
| irresponsible professional behavior.
| NegativeK wrote:
| US government websites, as they exist, are often ancient,
| decrepit, and poorly funded. This will make them all
| worse and it will cost more. It will get in the way of
| people actually trying to interact with the government,
| and the leaders in the government will crap all over the
| project due to the angry calls they'll get from their
| constituents.
|
| If we try to stick to pure ideals without any
| consideration for reality, reality will ignore us and
| move on. Or, to borrow an example from another field: in
| infosec, the most secure computer is the one that's never
| turned on.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| They're not decrepit; they're unfashionable. Programs and
| websites that were somewhat decently written 20 years ago
| should and pretty much do run exactly the same today as
| they did then. It's not until "web 2.0" and SaaS that you
| find things that stop working after a few years/months.
|
| That's exactly what you need for "poorly funded" sites,
| and I don't see why a site that's meant to be functional
| needs a Hollywood budget.
| crazygringo wrote:
| You're asking government websites to run differently from
| 99.9% of commercial websites out there.
|
| First of all, that's just not going to happen for all sorts
| of practical reasons.
|
| But secondly, you're totally ignoring UX and design.
| "Specifying semantics, and let the rendering engine do what
| it will" might work for developers who are used to
| interacting with API's. It will _not_ work for regular
| users.
|
| Regular users need to understand which button is the
| primary action. They need to understand which part of the
| content is the main body, versus a sidebar versus a header.
| They want columns that are correctly sized for their
| content. They don't want to have to scroll horizontally.
| They want responsive design that works on mobile too. They
| want something that _looks trustworthy and familiar_.
|
| Websites are apps now. Asking to go back from presentation
| to semantics is like asking people to use the command line
| instead of GUI's. It's not going to happen, nor should it,
| because it's _not user-friendly_.
|
| The only people it's friendly to are a niche set of
| developers with certain ideological beliefs that most web
| technologies shouldn't be used.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| The things you describe aren't prevented by focusing on
| semantics, and are in fact enabled by it. Every modern
| app looks different for branding purposes, so users _don
| 't_ know what the buttons do. Things are complicated
| _because_ we abandoned standard UIs that used to use the
| same widgets across every application.
|
| And government stuff should work differently from 99.9%
| of commercial websites. Again, the goal should be for it
| to _work_. The government does not need to do marketing
| and make you feel like they are trustworthy. If you want
| to interact with social security, you go to ssa.gov. If
| you want to interact with the IRS, you go to irs.gov. End
| of story. They don 't need to act like commercial
| entities because they do not have to worry about market
| share. Their share is always 100%. They need to just make
| their stuff reliably work, easy to figure out, and should
| make it cheap and easy to build. Basic HTML with minimal
| optional styles checks all of those boxes.
|
| If you view the computer as a tool instead of a toy, you
| see that you really just need most websites to be a more
| convenient version of paper forms. It doesn't need to
| look fancy. It needs some boxes to type information, it
| needs to always work, and ideally every form on every
| website would stick to the same 5 or so types of input
| (rendered consistently by your OS) with no surprises.
| Government sites should take the tool approach.
| Commercial sites can sell toys.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _so users don 't know what the buttons do._
|
| They do, though. People are able to figure out commercial
| websites _orders of magnitude more easily_ than figuring
| out how to fill out their 1040.
|
| > _They need to just make their stuff reliably work_
|
| Which is what UX and design _help_ with.
|
| > _Basic HTML with minimal optional styles checks all of
| those boxes._
|
| It doesn't. Layout and design are tools that _help_ with
| clarify and ease-of-use.
|
| > _you see that you really just need most websites to be
| a more convenient version of paper forms._
|
| Nothing could be farther from the truth.
|
| Do you similarly think that your iPhone or desktop
| interface would be improved if the UX was "a more
| convenient version of paper forms"?
|
| Paper forms are an _extremely_ limiting form of UX. Why
| would you ever want to throw out all of the progress we
| 've made with usability?
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Filling out your 1040 is "hard" because people don't
| understand what the words mean, there's a 100 page
| instruction manual that defines the terms, and it might
| require filling out other forms too (which you might just
| need to know somehow that you need to fill them out too).
| Other than that, the actual UI design is straightforward.
| You write/type numbers into numbered boxes, top to
| bottom, occasionally referring back to numbers you've
| already completed. You could progressively enhance with
| automatic calculations for relevant fields, but hand
| calculations work as a fallback.
|
| Reliability is unrelated from UI, except insofar as
| simple UIs are easy to build, and therefore less likely
| to break. A paper form 1040 is perfectly reliable; it's
| not going to burst into flames when you're filling it
| out. As I said above, I couldn't even fill out my payment
| form on a modern site. It did not work at all. The form
| did not appear. That is not reliable. It also makes no
| sense if you know the page is ultimately using HTML, and
| that HTML has forms _built directly in_ , and they always
| work fine.
|
| And yeah, when I'm doing something like making a payment,
| setting up a transfer, doing my taxes, or even ordering a
| pizza, something like a slightly advanced paper form
| (e.g. with drop downs for options) would work great on my
| phone or desktop. Have a special request for your pizza
| that's not on the form? Put it in the free-form
| instructions box.
|
| The "progress" we've made in the last few years is that I
| can't do bank transfers without switching browsers, which
| requires selecting a "to" account from a drop-down, a
| "from" account from a drop-down, and typing an amount. I
| don't see how something so basic can be so hard to do
| correctly. There's literally no need for any javascript
| at all. I don't see the usability gain from whatever
| they're doing.
| aembleton wrote:
| > It needs some boxes to type information
|
| Would an address lookup service be acceptable? One of
| those where you start typing your address into a box and
| it fills in all of the address fields based on which
| address you select.
|
| If a new version of this is created, shouldn't it be
| tested on browsers? Which browsers should it be tested
| on?
| vorticalbox wrote:
| We could simple put an input for each part of the address
| and let the user fill it out.
|
| Requires exactly zero lines of javascript, no third party
| api that may or may not work.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Exactly this -- it's about testing and ensuring something
| works.
|
| And no matter how "standardized" things get, there are always
| going to be implementation differences (whether due to
| mistakes or underspecified specs or partial implementation)
| and also just straight-up bugs between browsers.
| stcredzero wrote:
| _At least these days there are shim libraries, rather than
| having to explicitly rely on things like the box-model hack._
|
| Are people actually now using the older term, "shim," and not
| the newer "polyfill?" I was a grumpy old man when people
| started to tout the new terminology, when there were
| perfectly good terms already.
| fishpen0 wrote:
| The main issue is every startup and small business ties
| themselves to the gsuite apps and ultimately falls down the path
| of using and then requiring gsuite auth and often chrome as a
| whole for all work browsing. It is quintessentially the new IE.
| almost all my browsing during the day has to be chrome whether I
| like it or not and that has been true at my last 4 organizations.
| Three of which are multi billion dollar companies and two with
| tens of thousands of employees
| JohnBooty wrote:
| We're pretty GSuite/GAuth-oriented too but the parts we use
| work just fine on Firefox.
|
| What parts of that are forcing you guys to be Chrome exclusive?
| timw4mail wrote:
| IT staff browser management
| jeromenerf wrote:
| Some google meet features are chrome only (background blur,
| picture in picture).
|
| I can't say I have noticed much else, so I use chrome for
| gsuite and firefox for everything else -\\_(tsu)_/-
| aembleton wrote:
| > Some google meet features are chrome only (background
| blur, picture in picture).
|
| They work for me on Firefox 120 on Gnome 45.2.
| crabmusket wrote:
| I think this is a recent change. Background blur
| certainly did not work for me before, but the other week
| I noticed it did.
| busterarm wrote:
| I'm not sure anymore that "The Web" is worth saving anymore. I
| find myself browsing less and less original content. The content
| that dominates is polarized between Internet Hate Machines on one
| extreme and Corporate Astroturfing on the other.
|
| A lot of the interesting people I follow are already using Gemini
| (though I remain unconvinced that that's a way forward).
| rjprins wrote:
| Can recommend Firefox for android, and as a bonus it supports
| many plugins.
| K0nserv wrote:
| Two things about this:
|
| 1. Firefox blocks various analytics and tracking quite
| aggressively by default. Additionally, users of Firefox are, by
| and large, privacy minded and will have further mitigations. Any
| count of Firefox users is likely to be undercounting.
|
| 2. For the kind of basic web stuff(simple pages, forms etc) that
| USWDS supports it shouldn't matter greatly if Firefox is not
| supported. Theses standards are mature and Firefox supports them
| well, most thing should just work. Now, if websites go out of
| their way to block Firefox users that's a different problem.
| slig wrote:
| FF is at 4% usage on Cloudflare Radar [1] which doesn't use
| JavaScript to measure usage.
|
| [1]: https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-usage
| athrowaway3z wrote:
| I use Random User-Agent (Switcher).
|
| ---
|
| But i doubt that will drive the numbers. On a side note, I
| think percentages will overstate firfox's decline. The number
| of devices with browsers per person will influence it heavily
| and that number is ever increasing.
|
| I think the average person in my circle has more than 3 and
| many have more than 4 devices with they use to visit .gov
| sites (i.e. ipads, phones, laptops, but not including the
| fridge, car, tv, etc)
| bouncycastle wrote:
| And yet, Mozilla earned close to $600 million in 2022
|
| https://www.ghacks.net/2023/12/05/mozilla-earned-close-to-60...
|
| Surely enough funding to keep going?
| aio2 wrote:
| The article is quite pessimistic, example being that the FF usage
| graph has flatlined. It's not going down soon.
|
| I understand things are bad, but this is a little too dramatic.
| RyanHamilton wrote:
| If that graph was your annual income would you feel the same?
| I'd be very very worried, upset and considering drastic action.
| jdlyga wrote:
| Firefox needs to focus all their effort on making a good web
| browser _first_. If the browser is slow, has a clunky interface,
| or lags behind on features, then people won 't use it. Mozilla
| focus way too much of their attention on privacy and non-browser
| related projects.
|
| Look at how much attention that The Browser Company has gotten
| for their Arc browser on Mac. Their primary focus is great UI and
| making an excellent browser for their users. What has Firefox
| been doing with all their money and time?
| sp332 wrote:
| Firefox is fast though.
| trealira wrote:
| Yeah. Although I'm not trying to discount what others
| experience, I'm always confused to hear that Firefox is slow,
| because it seems just as fast as Chromium on my computer.
| Filligree wrote:
| It uses a lot more CPU on Youtube than chrome/safari, and
| seems laggy there.
| mrinterweb wrote:
| There was some recent concern that Youtube may be slowing
| down FF https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz
| /youtube_ha...
| HackerThemAll wrote:
| It used to be slow, and many people who then switched, won't
| be looking back until Chrome stops working.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| chrome by way of google is making sure it's the only thing
| that youtube still properly works in.
|
| When MS tried this shit they got slapped with anti-trust.
| What google is doing is worse in every dimension.
| vkou wrote:
| When MS tried this shit, there weren't companies that
| were selling you locked-down hardware running a locked-
| down OS running a locked-down App Store, while taking a
| 30% cut of every economic transaction on that store...
| galangalalgol wrote:
| YouTube works fine in all my Firefox browsers on mobile
| amd desktop. And despite reported difficulty by others
| UBO continues to ensure I see no ads there.
| ryandrake wrote:
| A little obscure, but Firefox still does not support HDR
| video playback on Windows and Linux. I understand they
| very recently introduced support on Mac finally, which is
| a good sign.
| digging wrote:
| In which case, focusing on edging out more performance from
| the browser is perhaps the worst use of their time/money,
| no?
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I don't really get what you're on about. I switched from Chrome
| to Firefox a couple months ago and... it's great. I don't
| notice any differences in performance (if anything, snappier)
| and the only thing that's "missing" that I had in Chrome is
| that Chrome had all my credit-card and password data associated
| with my Google account, which, well, that's not something I
| _want_ Firefox to have.
|
| TLDR: Firefox is a good web browser. It's not failing in the
| market because it's not a good browser. It's failing because
| consumers don't seem to actually care one way or the other.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| The pig doesn't have any problem with the farmer until he
| shows up with the axe. Thus it is with chrome users.
| deepspace wrote:
| That axe may just be Chrome's war on ad blockers.
| kelnos wrote:
| I'd like to believe this, but what percentage of Chrome
| users actually use an ad blocker? My general feeling is
| that we on HN think ad blocking is a lot more common than
| it actually is.
| digging wrote:
| It can't be that niche, or else why would they spend so
| much effort fighting ad blockers? They've surely done
| some research that uncovers a decent userbase of people
| who _do_ use an ad blocker but will turn it off at a
| prompt.
| nottorp wrote:
| No the question is how can you trust an ad blocker will
| be allowed to do its job in Chrome? Even without Manifest
| v33333 or whatever.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Yep, in my case it was disgust about the (apparently now
| abandoned) attestation efforts.
|
| I worked at Google for 10 years, so my tolerance of them is
| higher than some, I guess. But also, now, my distrust.
|
| Anyways, Firefox is fine. Nice, in fact.
| encom wrote:
| In my opinion, Firefox has been at war with its own users for
| years. I finally had enough a few years ago, and switched to
| Vivaldi. Every Firefox upgrade was a gamble on what feature or
| functionality they'd remove or change this time, or what bone-
| headed UI design change they'd make. And every time there'd be
| a Bugzilla bug with a of horde users who just had their
| favorite feature removed, and every time, without fail, it
| would get arrogantly WONTFIXed and eventually locked. This
| cycle has repeated for most of Firefox's existence, but it has
| accelerated.
|
| Vivaldi can customise damn near every aspect of its user
| interface. I can set up every menu how I want it. Remove things
| I done use, and move the most used item to the top. I can dock
| my tab-bar wherever I want. I can have a proper status bar. The
| list goes on. It's what Firefox should have been.
| ako wrote:
| Users are just different, I've been a happy Firefox (and
| pocket) user for many years, and wouldn't be happy with these
| so called improvements. I don't need customizability, just
| need it to work good enough out of the box. Definitely don't
| feel that Firefox is at war with me.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| > In my opinion, Firefox has been at war with its own users
| for years.
|
| citation fucking needed.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Citation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38532851,
| where the primary source for encom's opinions (encom
| himself) says that it's his opinion.
|
| Seriously dude, it's an opinion and he provides some
| rationale behind it. Feel free to disagree, but then just
| say you disagree. This isn't a factual claim that can be
| proven or disproven.
| inversetelecine wrote:
| The citation is right there: "In my opinion"
| jjav wrote:
| > Every Firefox upgrade was a gamble on what feature or
| functionality they'd remove or change this time
|
| Every upgrade?
|
| I've been using firefox since forever (as long as it has
| existed) and while I was very annoyed when they removed the
| customizable UI support a few years ago, that's really the
| one and only time when they broke functionality as far as
| I've ever been able to notice.
| jen20 wrote:
| Privacy must be a tier 1 feature of a web browser.
|
| The fact the market leader goes out of their way to shit all
| over privacy concerns says more about their marketing pull than
| the quality of their browser.
| aembleton wrote:
| That privacy prevents organisations such as USWDS from seeing
| that it is in use as analytics are blocked.
| jen20 wrote:
| That means that using telemetry to determine browser market
| share is a flawed approach.
| zlg_codes wrote:
| Nobody has a right to research you or your behavior. We
| shouldn't be leaving holes in our software because the
| methods chosen rely on leaky and chatty protocols to gleam
| info.
|
| The user agent string shouldn't exist to begin with. It was
| a boneheaded decision to allow that sort of easy
| discrimination baked right into the protocol.
| whakim wrote:
| I always see comments like this on HN, and I struggle to
| understand why. Firefox is plenty fast. Its interface is
| extremely similar to most of its competitors. It works well.
| What special sauce do you expect Mozilla to implement that'll
| suddenly change their fortunes? It's a browser, after all. And
| why do you think that such features aren't being implemented
| due to lack of resources or muddled priorities - surely Mozilla
| can walk and chew gum?
| worik wrote:
| > I always see comments like this on HN, and I struggle to
| understand why.
|
| Many years ago Firfox was very slow
|
| It has improved enormously, obviously, but some people never
| forget
|
| It is a lesson. Never take your eye off the ball. Firefox
| did, back in the day, and Google ate their lunch
| ruszki wrote:
| They rely on 10 years old information in IT. It's extremely
| naive, and this mindset definitely hurts them in long term.
| davidelettieri wrote:
| It is quite slow on android IMHO. At least for me, in
| comparison with Chrome.
|
| I also use ublock origin in android which should make loading
| page faster I guess but unless the page is absolutely awful,
| chrome remains faster even with ads on.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| > I always see comments like this on HN, and I struggle to
| understand why.
|
| I think its OSX and Windows people talking past each other.
|
| On a Mac, Firefox is pale in comparison to Safari.
| zamadatix wrote:
| For a long time it was absolutely awful on Android as well.
| Not sure about Android, but at least on macOS Firefox has
| about identical performance as of this year now. They did a
| lot of work, some macOS specific, in recent times.
|
| That said your average person isn't trying out every
| browser multiple times per year to see how fast it is
| today.
| nottorp wrote:
| > On a Mac, Firefox is pale in comparison to Safari.
|
| How does that help when you can't run uBlock Origin on
| Safari?
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| I have two PWAs that I use all the time and Firefox doesn't
| appear to support PWAs.
|
| There is a third party extension for it but I'm generally
| reluctant to install browser extensions because I worry about
| security.
| MadWombat wrote:
| "What special sauce do you expect Mozilla to implement
| that'll suddenly change their fortunes?"
|
| XUL extensions maybe? The reason I gave up on Firefox after
| literally decades of using it was because they kept removing
| features I was actively using without fixing any of the
| problems. What's the point of using a niche browser if it is
| exactly like the non-niche browser, but with more
| compatibility issues?
| yonatan8070 wrote:
| I daily drive Firefox, it's fast, responsive, and works well
| for everything I do on the web
| r00fus wrote:
| Firefox on my Macs is more feature-complete and faster than
| Chrome for me. And the Aweseomebar is truly a replacement for
| bookmarks for me (full text search showing URLs and titles from
| years ago with a few keywords is truly amazing).
|
| Once manifestv3 starts really making waves, Firefox will be the
| best place to go for ublock origin and other adblockers.
| marricks wrote:
| That would be my personal preference, laser focus on their
| browser, but Perhaps they didn't because it's already good and
| the reason they're falling is combating monopolies. Safari/Edge
| are defaults in their space and have OS's that can nudge.
|
| Google owns huge swaths of the internet and can nudge people as
| well and break other OS's on whim.
|
| Mozilla probably felt the need to have other offerings and
| leadership to winback something when "being a great browser"
| wasn't enough in the past 14 years.
| dralley wrote:
| >Firefox needs to focus all their effort on making a good web
| browser first. If the browser is slow, has a clunky interface,
| or lags behind on features, then people won't use it.
|
| People don't use one browser over another because of
| performance, full stop. Certainly not over 10% to 20%
| differences. Even years ago when Chrome did have an advantage,
| they would never have gained marketshare so quickly if they
| hadn't spammed Firefox users visiting google.com with Chrome
| ads.
|
| Even features don't matter. People use Safari, Safari is
| severely lacking in "features". 99% of users aren't power
| users.
| cwales95 wrote:
| Something has to change. Firefox is a GREAT browser. I think a
| lot of these things boil down to poor marketing. Things like
| these have to appear 'cool' and appeal to people. There has to be
| a reason for people to go out and actively want to download
| Firefox. Something akin to Apple's privacy adverts is how I'd go
| about it.
| rumdz wrote:
| I agree. I'm not a Firefox fanboy. It has literally run better
| for me than Chrome for a few years now.
| laurent123456 wrote:
| I'm always surprised to read claims that Firefox is the same
| or better than Chrome.
|
| I switched to Firefox recently and many sites don't quite
| work: for example the pull request popup menu on GitHub
| appears off screen so can't be clicked on; the "new post"
| panel in Discourse is obstructed by the keyboard; FastMail
| alert box buttons don't work, and many other such annoyances.
|
| It can be used as a main browser but it does have problems. I
| wouldn't bother with it if it wasn't for the manifest v3
| situation
| cwales95 wrote:
| I use GitHub frequently and have never came across that
| issue; can't speak for the other sites though. If you're
| sure it's not the website's fault I'd encourage you to
| submit feedback: https://webcompat.com/issues/new
| laurent123456 wrote:
| There's an open issue about it, so hopefully github
| should fix it eventually. It's on firefox mobile
| gbear605 wrote:
| My experience is that Chrome winds up being consistently
| slower than Firefox, and I've gotten multiple friends (who
| aren't techies) to switch because they've tried it out and
| agreed that it was more performant.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| I am regular and long time user of Fastmail in Firefox and
| I'm surprised at your report of issues in Firefox. Can you
| describe the steps to reproduce the issues you found?
| layer8 wrote:
| > obstructed by the keyboard
|
| You seem to be talking about the mobile version?
| maldev wrote:
| They've been trying that and it just pushes people away. I
| stopped using Firefox when Mozilla tried to score social
| brownie points. And the numbers seem to collaborate with
| shrinking and shrinking marketshare, especially after these
| campaigns. Since on the flip side of what you said, why would
| people swap from Firefox to chrome, Chrome doesn't bring
| anything shiny.
| cwales95 wrote:
| I agree with some of what you said about social brownie
| points. Advertising can be really off putting (I'm very anti-
| advertisement but I'm not really their target audience since
| I mostly use Firefox these days). However, they have to do
| something to get the word out. There needs to be a reason for
| people to care to install Firefox.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Every time I see these articles, I feel like I have to reiterate
| this: Firefox contains tracking protection that blocks a lot of
| analytics websites, like Statcounter. 2% of Statcounter's
| visitors being Firefox doesn't say much about the actual Firefox
| visitors on the websites themselves.
|
| If you're deciding to drop Firefox, ignore Statcounter or any
| other data mining sources. Use passive analytics and your
| website's actual visitors (GDPR/CCPA restrictions may apply).
| slig wrote:
| See the stats from Cloudflare Radar [1], which do not use
| client side tracking and should be very diverse.
|
| [1]: https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-usage
| slmkbh wrote:
| Could we get numbers from the rest of the world before we make a
| verdict? There is 10 times the people outside the US, as
| inside...
| JohnBooty wrote:
| The article is specifically about the browser usage
| distribution among users accessing US Government websites.
|
| We should always try to avoid needless USA-centrism! But I
| think the USA-centric focus here is appropriate.
| spenrose wrote:
| Seventy-one upvotes in the first 18 minutes for a story about a
| browser with < 10% usage. My fellow Mozillians (I worked there
| for four years) are wildly overrepresented among HN voters, which
| suggests that HN voters have a large contingent of tech veterans
| as opposed to startup coders. Meanwhile the other 30 stories most
| recently submitted, several of them excellent and on important
| topics, are getting 0, 1, or 2 upvotes.
|
| Maybe it's time to let go of the '00s.
| hs86 wrote:
| I switched over after the Manifest v3 debacle, and after a couple
| of months, I wonder if the implications of using a browser with a
| lower market share are overblown.
|
| I haven't encountered any site that misbehaves, and the only
| missing feature so far is within the Google Drive web app because
| it uses a Chrome-only extension [1].
|
| Maybe the ongoing standardization of the web shows its effects
| here, and using a standard-conform niche browser is not that bad
| anymore.
|
| [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/application-
| launch...
| preinheimer wrote:
| Specific problems I've had as a firefox user:
|
| - I can't pay municipal license fees (Site says "Use Chrome")
|
| - I can't use the Vendor management portal for
| $largePopularTechCompany type company for my small business
| ("We support Chrome")
|
| - Xero my small business accounting software just doesn't work
| properly ("Use Chrome")
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| i assume this is just a user-agent check though i don't
| expect regular users to know how to switch.
| zamadatix wrote:
| This is also a double edge sword in that if it's just a
| user-agent check the site tends to lack a well coded
| fallback for any functionality that is actually not
| supported and the page can silently break during usage. Not
| necessarily a problem for those that already know how to
| switch, but even just installing an extension for other
| people doesn't mean the sites are suddenly actually
| compatible. Sometimes even big sites like Microsoft Teams
| have this kind of problem for years at a time.
| amanzi wrote:
| I've used Xero for years with Firefox without issues.
| neltnerb wrote:
| Maybe you can share your configuration? I wonder if you are
| lucky or they are unlucky.
| amanzi wrote:
| I run Firefox with uBlock Origin enabled and set the
| Firefox enhanced privacy settings to the strictest
| settings. I haven't done anything special to get Xero
| working - never had any issues.
| crabmusket wrote:
| Same here, though I only use a small subset of Xero
| features.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| Some Xero products don't work properly no matter what your
| browser is.
|
| For me, Mozilla has bugs or weaknesses in Linux. YouTube
| chews my cpu (hardware acceleration is broken, at least for
| me). Tabs 'freeze' due to a bug in an X11 lib. Pop up bubbles
| (do you want to enable gps to this site type bubbles) if
| visible before switching workspaces appear on all workspaces
| but cannot be actioned and appear on top.
|
| Mozilla as a company appears to be attempting poor
| monetisation models like attempting to build social networks
| etc. I would consider paying them a yearly fee if I thought
| they'd use money wisely, but at the moment executive appear
| more interested in vanity projects.
| neltnerb wrote:
| I have had several sites refuse to work properly (American
| Airlines maybe? It was some airline) with every single add-in
| disabled and with every security feature I could find disabled.
|
| I am with you that it's super rare, I have only had to open
| chrome due to it being _that bad_ a few times, usually I just
| need to disable javascript blocking or enable more cookies. But
| there are legitimately sites that are just so badly written
| that they won 't take your money if you use Firefox.
|
| I guess Google meet has frozen video for me on Firefox, but I
| expect Google to intentionally break their website for people
| not using Chrome after the "DRM Website" thing struck them as a
| great idea. Using Google products at this point is just asking
| for more lockin when we should really all know better. At least
| Zoom is a different company from Google...
|
| But overblown for sure, if I disable javascript blocking and
| cookie autodelete and temporary containers that keep the site
| from realizing I already logged in -- pretty reasonable issues
| -- 99.99% of the issues I have vanish.
| nightpool wrote:
| I just bought tickets on AA a few months ago with Firefox and
| didn't have any issues
| nophunphil wrote:
| Echoing this. Just bought AA tickets through the airline's
| website yesterday using FF and it worked.
| mmcgaha wrote:
| I have been using FF as my primary browser for a few years now.
| I have not found any site that does not work but sometimes I
| have to turn off uBlock Origin.
| rozap wrote:
| I agree it seems overblown. I haven't encountered a site that
| doesn't work. Even google meet and zoom's web client work
| great.
|
| Not sure what all the fuss is about. It's a great browser.
| Chrome got very, very aggravating and I've had no problems
| since switching maybe 4 years ago. Even FF mobile works well.
| aboodman wrote:
| Speaking as a library developer, Firefox is expensive for us to
| support in https://replicache.dev and https://reflect.net due
| to lots of long-open bugs, particularly in the storage system.
| Firefox also generally has the slowest performance which
| affects us.
|
| I'm not bagging on the team, it's frankly amazing they've been
| able to mostly keep up, it's just a fact that maintaining a
| competitive web browser is a gargantuan task that requires a
| large team and investment.
| asdff wrote:
| When people say firefox is more performant than other
| browsers, they mean to say you can use actual powerful
| adblockers like ublock origin that then make it a totally
| rigged race against other browsers in terms of real world
| performance.
| usr1106 wrote:
| Which is a good thing. Running ads is triple pollution. On
| the servers, on the browser, and by the manipulated
| comsumers buying crap they don't need in the first place.
|
| (Yes, I do pay for content I care about.)
| spacechild1 wrote:
| Same for me! I have been always using Firefox as my main
| browser for at least 15 years and never had any problems.
| Actually, I don't really understand why so many tech-savvy
| people continue to use Chrome... Just switch to Firefox, for
| foxs sake!
| matteoraso wrote:
| Agreed. Even if Firefox makes up a small part of the market
| share, any website that serves millions of people will want to
| support it. Imagine if you have a website with 1,000,000
| monthly visitors, and 2% of them use Firefox. Dropping support
| will mean 20,000 less monthly visitors. This gives us an idea
| of how much you should spend on support. If you make an average
| of $0.10 a month per user, you should be okay with spending at
| least $2000 a month on Firefox. That's a pretty big budget, and
| it's reasonable to go much higher than that if your website is
| rapidly growing. The big players like Google and Facebook will
| also be comfortable supporting Firefox at a loss, since you
| don't want to bleed users and create market space for a
| competitor. At most, you lose a few small websites that you
| probably weren't going to visit anyways.
| parineum wrote:
| > Imagine if you have a website with 1,000,000 monthly
| visitors, and 2% of them use Firefox. Dropping support will
| mean 20,000 less monthly visitors.
|
| It will always be 2% which will always be, at maximum, 2%
| more revenue. That's probably negligible if you have to
| support them and there's an opportunity cost to that money.
| You'd probably be better off spending that money on
| advertising than Firefox support, especially since Firefox
| users typically know when a page isn't working, it's probably
| them and they have a backup solution available.
|
| I used Firefox for a long time but switched because I just
| got tired of switching all the time and I started regularly
| using a site that didn't work in Firefox (I don't remember
| now but I think it was my credit card).
| riversflow wrote:
| > they have a backup solution available.
|
| Im a decade+ daily driver of Firefox. If a website doesnt
| support it, I make a mental note that I hate this company
| now, close the tab, and move on. I don't open it in a V8
| browser, i look for an alternative.
| mtVessel wrote:
| Not sure how so many in the thread are using FF problem-free?
| In the past few years I've encountered more and more sites that
| don't work properly with FF. Most of the issues are around
| modals that won't dismiss or even display at all. Other issues
| I can't identify, but the site becomes unresponsive or some
| content won't load. I think the Ticketmaster ticket selection
| page was the last one I couldn't use at all with FF. My cable
| company's site became Chromium only sometime this year and it
| still is.
|
| Sometimes the cause is uBlock Origin, so I always try turning
| it off and refreshing. Rarely it's due to enhanced tracking
| protection. A few times I restarted FF in safe mode to rule out
| add-ins. It's always just FF.
| ImaCake wrote:
| I had some issues with several sites around 2-3 years ago but
| I haven't been experiencing them recently.
|
| I guess FF has issues on a fairly small set of sites which
| some users use a fair bit while most users don't see those
| sites at all.
|
| The only site I use regularly which has issues is google
| earth and the reason why is obvious.
| alextingle wrote:
| Another FF user here. Very, very few issues.
|
| I had a problem with a shopping web-site the other day. I
| disabled uBlock origin, and then all extensions, but it still
| refused to work. I thought I'd finally found one of these
| mythical "Chrome-only" sites, but no - exactly the same
| broken site in Chrome, so the site was just totally broken.
| Nothing to do with FF.
| Ikatza wrote:
| For one, HN misbehaves pretty badly on mobile.
| zizee wrote:
| It does? In what way? I have used Firefox mobile for years on
| HN without noticing issues. What am I missing?
|
| Edit: I used Firefox on Android, the issues you describe
| might be Firefox on iOS, which is a different beast.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I use Firefox as my daily driver at work and at home. I rarely
| if ever encounter a problem with compatibility, but when I do I
| just open chrome and use it for that one site. I only use
| chrome on a case by case basis.
|
| I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm not the kind of
| person who would be swayed to switch browsers because of
| infrequent compatibility issues. Even if something like 20-30%
| of sites would fail to work on Firefox I'd still just separate
| my browsing between browsers than go full-chrome.
| hadrien01 wrote:
| Since analytics.usa.gov uses Google Analytics, this doesn't seem
| like a very representative datapoint...
| hexo wrote:
| Beware - a rant ahead:
|
| We can thank mozilla mgmt for consistently making "great"
| decisions, with UX changes, making it worse and worse over time.
| Introducing "features" not many really need or want. And of
| course making it less and less configurable, taking away options
| from power users "for sake of users", which of course are long
| gone and not coming back. They pretty much alienated their user
| base with every release more infuriating than previous. I've
| "upgraded" laptop to one with 16G ram, only to find firefox
| consistently eating up all my ram to the point when it's either
| killed by OOM (speaking of which - in-kernel oom killer got
| enshitified so bad it takes 1.5h+ to decide what to kill, unless
| you spend days researching how to setup your system) or by other
| precautionary means. For past few months I'm launching this
| browser in memory-restricted cgroup, it gets 7gigs. And you know
| what? It gets killed about 15-25 times a day because it eats
| more. The ram upgrade did not help. At all. They even took away
| option to limit process count, so now it spawns whatever amount
| it wants. As if the browser was the only thing running on
| computer. This is the primary reason folks left. The browser got
| maddeningly bad in terms of resource usage, UI and
| configurability. The rest 2.2% users have to suffer this. I
| suspect this is not going to change at all and I feel there is
| strong ($500M+) incentive from google for stuff to not improve at
| all.
| zelon88 wrote:
| So all Google has to do is spam US government websites with
| scrapers reporting Chrome UA and Firefox is done for?
| slig wrote:
| They want FF to be on life support, not end it. Their half a
| billion a year is buying exactly that.
| pelorat wrote:
| I'm one of those who rarely uses Firefox. I have it installed,
| but Google is just to integrated in my life. Gmail, Drive,
| YouTube, Android, etc.
|
| Now, I just launched Firefox (on Windows), and the fonts look
| absolutely atrocious compared to Chrome. What's up with that?
|
| Edit: "gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.enhanced_contrast 0"
| made it a lot better, but not quite as nice a Chrome. Still a
| whole lot better than the default setting.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Google is just to integrated in my life. Gmail, Drive, YouTube
|
| I use these all day too and they work perfectly on FF for me.
|
| I know there was the recent "5 second YT delay on FF" debacle.
| But, I actually have a paid YT subscription, so I never saw/see
| it. Now, I just launched Firefox (on
| Windows), and the fonts look absolutely atrocious
| compared to Chrome.
|
| Something I've noticed is that when you spend enough time
| looking at one style of font rendering, the others look "wrong"
| and I think that's what you're experiencing.
|
| Used to see this a lot with Mac and Windows in the pre
| retina/hidpi days. Users switching from one to the other would
| be shocked at how "wrong" the fonts were. In reality, neither
| one was "right" or "wrong" but they sure were different.
|
| FWIW FF and Chrome's fonts both look fine to me on Windows 10
| but again, that's just my purely subjective view.
| cheekibreeki2 wrote:
| I stopped using ff when it stopped being a browser and became
| some weird political tool.
| biosed wrote:
| Genuinely curious, what do you mean?
| xcv123 wrote:
| Examples that I could find. Not sure that the browser itself
| is a political tool (yet). But the leadership has been
| strongly in favour of implementing some dystopic ideas. Crazy
| ultra far left weirdos.
|
| "MOZILLA CEO CALLS FOR INCREASED CENSORSHIP: 'WE NEED MORE
| THAN DEPLATFORMING'"
|
| https://www.movieguide.org/news-articles/mozilla-ceo-
| calls-f...
|
| "Notes on Implementing Vaccine Passports"
|
| https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/notes-on-
| impl...
|
| And the usual corporate social justice / diversity bullshit:
|
| https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozilla-
| racia...
|
| https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/careers/diversity/
| JohnBooty wrote:
| If you care about the web, use Firefox. It's as simple as that.
| beej71 wrote:
| Understated but true. Or I might modify to say if you care
| about the web, you don't run Chrome. For us to have a nice web,
| we need interoperability. And for that to happen, we need
| multiple players implementing a single standard.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| I'd say, "if you care about the web, don't use a Chromium-
| based browser, but also Safari does not need your help w.r.t.
| marketshare" so.... yeah. Use FF basically.
| jessehattabaugh wrote:
| Web Developers shouldn't need to "support" particular browsers at
| all, that's what standards are for. Nobody should be "supporting"
| any non-standard functionality at all.
| azangru wrote:
| > Web Developers shouldn't need to "support" particular
| browsers at all, that's what standards are for.
|
| I agree. But different standards get adopted by different
| browsers at different rates. Case in point: Firefox still has
| not released support for declarative shadow DOM.
|
| As a side note, although related to standards: I thought
| Firefox insisted several years ago that they were not going to
| support File System Access API. But now MDN lists it among
| supporting browsers.
| godshatter wrote:
| In this case, though, a government website should be aiming
| to support the lowest common denominator in web standards.
| They shouldn't be writing websites that require something
| like the shadow DOM or the File System Access API. Standards
| low enough that actually testing against different browsers
| is an afterthought.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| Just because gov. websites might discontinue support for Firefox
| doesn't mean that is going to impact the browser's, lots of use
| cases are outside of that industry.
| llIIllIIllIIl wrote:
| Oh, so we're back to square 1 with IE6 (it's just called Chrome
| this time) and marginalities. Thank god this time we already have
| jquery so we don't throw it out of our projects too aggressively
| it may save a day once again.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| what the hell happened?
|
| Firefox was the chosen one.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| A bunch of smart idiots fell into Google's convenient embrace,
| just like everybody falling into Microsoft's arms 15-20 years
| ago, because this industry learns absolutely nothing, perhaps
| because we age out most of our competent engineers after 10
| years or less.
|
| What's sad about this time around is that Firefox was fine this
| whole time. It has been my daily driver for 8+ hours per day
| since like 2001.
|
| I have spent many thousands of hours with Chrome as well for
| various jobs. I literally never felt a perceivable overall
| performance gap. I've always had pretty well-specced machines;
| maybe there were points when Chrome was noticeably better on
| low-spec machines.
|
| I guess I shouldn't be surprised that we sold out.
|
| But just sad that our price was so f'ing cheap.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| ... sold out to chrome to become the crop instead of the
| farmer.
| 127361 wrote:
| We'll see what happens after Manifest V3 becomes mandatory in
| Chrome. That might trigger an influx of users?
| nulcow wrote:
| > In fact, because the iPhone is so popular in the U.S. -- which
| is obvious from what you see on that aforementioned government
| analytics page -- Safari pulls large numbers that also hurt
| Firefox.
|
| This makes me dislike smartphones more than I already did. Not
| only has iOS Safari overtaken Firefox in terms of market share,
| it has also overshadowed macOS Safari, a much better browser than
| iOS Safari for a much better operating system than iOS.
| superlupo wrote:
| I can only recommend to give Firefox another go, if you don't use
| it by default. It really has improved the last years, it also had
| made much progress in privacy features, and doesn't want to kill
| ad-blocker like Google wants. Also, Firefox on Android finally
| started supporting extensions.
|
| Another thing: Because no other browser engines are allowed to be
| installed on iOS, those numbers should be subtracted from the
| total.
| deanc wrote:
| I hear this everytime a thread on HN pops up. Everyone talks
| about the major improvements, how it performs well nowadays
| etc. after a few years of perf. issues. But it runs like shit
| on my Macbook Pro 2019 (Intel) 32GB RAM. Videos freeze, it
| takes ages to cold start. Every interaction feels slow to me
| compared to chrome.
| bambax wrote:
| > _I am personally unaware of any serious reason to believe that
| Firefox's numbers will improve soon._
|
| Is it possible that Manifest V3 will help Firefox?
|
| Of course most people don't know or care about Manifest V3, but
| if uBlock Origin or other effective ad blockers cease to work
| satisfactorily on Chrome, won't that make some users switch?
|
| I'd rather go back to fetching web pages from a terminal than
| suffering the insanity of modern web ads. I can't be the only
| one.
| beaugunderson wrote:
| I'm in the process of switching after many years as a Chrome
| user... just have to find equivalents for the last of my
| extensions.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| I don't think browser compatibility testing matters so much
| anymore. It's not like we're going back to the IE-only days. If
| an application works in both Chrome and Safari, its almost
| certainly going to work in Firefox without any special care.
| fab13n wrote:
| If Google succeeds at banning ad blockers from Chromium-based
| browsers, there's no doubt that Firefox' usage will go back up.
| causality0 wrote:
| Personally I wonder if Google's recent decisions kicking their
| war on adblocking into high gear could result in increased
| Firefox usage.
| pasttense01 wrote:
| "I am personally unaware of any serious reason to believe that
| Firefox's numbers will improve soon."
|
| There is a serious reason: Youtube ad-blocking. The combination
| of Firefox and Ublock Origin (or perhaps other ad-blockers)
| allows you to watch Youtube while blocking ads. Increasingly (and
| definitely in 2024) you will not be able to do this with Chrome.
| throw7 wrote:
| Having your rules based on % of marketplace usage is terrible...
| just one reason (out of many) is that is a moving target.
| Unbelievable (believable?) shortsightedness. I guess we're back
| to IE5 days. Everything is circular ehhh?
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > I am personally unaware of any serious reason to believe that
| Firefox's numbers will improve soon
|
| MV3 in Chrome
| billiam wrote:
| The organization that gave the world Rust, Web Assembly, and
| countless other useful technologies is in a probable death
| spiral, and most of the blame goes to Mitchell Baker. If Mozilla
| was not primarily driven by greed and laziness, smart people that
| still exist in around Firefox would have made the difficult
| technical decisions needed to continue to ship a useful product
| that protects user privacy while still being easy to support in a
| world dominated by Chrome and Safari.
| beretguy wrote:
| Firefox needs new useful features to attract people. Like tab
| groups, tab position, other useful stuff...
| nwah1 wrote:
| I, personally, hate those features. Tab groups were just
| added to my browser, and my first thought was how to turn it
| off.
|
| Firefox initially won users by being the fastest. And then
| lost users when it wasn't the fastest.
| nojvek wrote:
| Firefox letting go of many important teams such as MDN, Rust
| etc was its death knell in developer community.
|
| Mitchell Baker will surely get a golden parachute even if
| Firefox is sold for scraps.
| quesera wrote:
| If it takes a hundred million dollars to get Mitchell to
| leave Mozilla, it would be money well-spent.
|
| Just do it soon.
| 21eleven wrote:
| Shout out to Firefox Mobile. I have it as the default browser on
| my android phone and the experience is great. I don't miss chrome
| at all. Once you get used to the minor UI differences you won't
| even notice you are not on chrome.
| abirch wrote:
| I think these metrics are going to be jacked in a few years.
|
| 1) Firefox will be the only browser to support ad blocking
|
| 2) Internet Sites that are funded by ads will block Firefox
|
| 3) Firefox or a Firefox Extension will change the User Agent
| field to a corporate browser
|
| 4) All of these browser market share metrics are going to be
| incorrect.
| aporetics wrote:
| I wish they had been working on an endowment like Wikipedia, that
| would be a better model in terms of the importance of an
| independent, open source browser. Maybe Wiki and take them under
| their wing.
| qwertox wrote:
| I'm just preparing to fully move over to Firefox.
| zaphod420 wrote:
| FireFox is so good these days. This post is nonsense.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I'm not so worried.
|
| I don't visit any US government sites ever, and very few
| corporate sites. The ones that I have problems with (Microsoft
| O365 in particular!!) are easily faked by setting the user agent
| to Edge on Windows. That magically solves everything (proving
| that Microsoft is deliberately breaking the experience on
| Firefox!).
|
| But "Supporting" a browser doesn't really mean very much. As long
| as the browser is standards compliant it will still work.
| kdmccormick wrote:
| > But "Supporting" a browser doesn't really mean very much. As
| long as the browser is standards compliant _and websites
| continue to build to the standard_ it will still work.
|
| FTFY
|
| "This website is best viewed in IE" was not just a misguided
| suggestion from the webmasters. It was a statement that the
| site may rely on nonstandard IE-specific features.
|
| How confident are you that Apple and Google will never agree to
| add some matching non-standard "extension APIs" to Safari and
| Chrome?
| ericskiff wrote:
| This discounts the number of people who see manifest v3 and the
| neutering of adblockers as a dealbreaker, forcing them to switch
| away from Chrome. Now, when they try Firefox it's as fast and
| stable as Chrome (which was not the case a few years ago, they've
| made great strides)
|
| I'm hopeful that yields a nice bump in user ship. I was a diehard
| Firefox fan in the beginning, switched to chrome because it was
| just better on Mac for years, and now have switched back to
| running Firefox for 2 years without a hitch. The only thing I
| keep chrome around for is a dedicated Google Meet app
| dcsommer wrote:
| Google may pay less for search placement on Firefox if all
| their users block their ads.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| I think I'm finally okay with this. Firefox/Mozilla cannot handle
| their responsibility. With the death of their dominance, we can
| hope a new player comes forward.
|
| I'm sick of cheerleading Firefox when it is slower than Chromium,
| heavier, and buggier. The only benefit is less creepy google.
|
| I'm sorry Mozilla, when FOSS teams that are unfunded can make
| browsers, I expect much much much more.
| ako wrote:
| What should Firefox do for you to select it as your default
| browser? (It's my default browser, I'm pretty happy with it, also
| use the pocket functionality quite bit)
| rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote:
| Come up with their own privacy-focused computer and mobile OS,
| and mobile devices, really. I don't think that browsers can
| survive as standalone software anymore. We've come to a point
| where default browsers are so tightly integrated with
| smartphone or computer OSes that a browser by itself offers too
| little value without integration. It's going to be expensive,
| but they can compete with Linux distros that try to do the same
| but which all cannot gain any traction, polish, and long-term
| support.
| anovick wrote:
| Add this feature (Chosen Bookmark Shortcut Indicator):
|
| https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/feature-suggestion-fire...
| breischl wrote:
| It is my default, but keep a Brave install around just for the
| ability to "fake" a site into being an app. ie, it gets a
| separate launcher shortcut, a separate icon, etc. Very useful
| for sites I use constantly so they're not trapped in the same
| window as random surfing.
| mcfedr wrote:
| Multiple profiles
| beej71 wrote:
| It could use smoother UI support, but I've been using
| multiple profiles on FF for years. I'm using them right now.
| dralley wrote:
| Firefox _has_ multiple profiles, I have used them every day
| for years. The UI is poor, particularly in terms of
| discovering that they exist, but they do.
| lazycouchpotato wrote:
| I'm not sure what your use case is, but Firefox has
| Containers [1], allowing you to isolate different online
| identities into containers. It separates the cookies and
| storage for each container.
|
| An example of where I use this is for separating my personal
| Gmail from my uni's Google's Workspace account. It's annoying
| clicking on a uni Google Doc link only for it to block me
| because it chose my default login which is my personal Gmail.
| I have to switch between Google accounts (which I believe
| wasn't possible until recently?). With Containers however, I
| just open the link in my "Uni" container and I'm good to go.
| No fuss.
|
| I have seen classmates use Chrome profiles for the same
| example above, but from what they showed me they couldn't
| have their personal profile and their school profile open at
| the same time - they had to switch between profiles each
| time. With Containers, I can access tabs from all containers
| at the same time. Containers are colour coded so you know
| which is which.
|
| There are additional containers available. If you don't like
| Meta snooping on you outside of their websites, there's a
| Facebook container by Mozilla [2] that isolates your web
| activity from Facebook.
|
| Other than that, Firefox does appear to support profiles, but
| it appears to be a bit clunky. [3] I've never used it and
| until @dralley's comment didn't even know it existed.
|
| [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-
| account...
|
| [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-
| cont...
|
| [3] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-
| create-...
| ninkendo wrote:
| about:profiles
| quesera wrote:
| Enter "about:profiles" into the URL field.
|
| The UI on this page is rough, but once you have more than one
| profile you will get a popup at launch to select from your
| list or to create more.
|
| I have dozens of profiles, custom launchers etc. I run four
| or five simultaneously most of the time. If you only need a
| couple profiles, the standard launch UI will do.
|
| ...
|
| But, see also "Multi-Account Containers" which segregate
| cookies between sites so you can have multiple simultaneous
| logins to various services in a single profile.
|
| Containers share preferences and browser config (and window),
| but segregate cookies. Profiles are completely independent.
|
| I use both, extensively. E.g. my work profile has containers
| for user, admin, owner, and machine accounts at GitHub. My
| personal profile has my private personal GitHub account only.
| kps wrote:
| Personally:
|
| 1. Let me install extensions locally (without making me hunt
| down some alternate build that harasses me to upgrade every
| day).
|
| 2. Fix using the GUI key for GUI shortcuts, which has been
| buggy since the Quantum transition.
|
| 3. I like Chrome's collapsible tab groups. I think Firefox also
| once had some sort of tab grouping I liked.
| quesera wrote:
| To #3, extension Sidebery is great.
| layer8 wrote:
| According to https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/browser-market-
| share-20..., Firefox still has 4.7 % global market share, 4.9 %
| in the US, and significantly more in some relevant countries,
| like Germany with 15 %. So this may be a bit premature. It's
| still a significant-enough market share to support. Of course, if
| it continues to decline further, Firefox will eventually become
| irrelevant. Let's hope this won't happen.
| the_third_wave wrote:
| Here's an idea on how to turn this ship in the right direction:
| get Musk interested in funding a project which will fork the code
| base, clean up the cruft - pocket etc. - and relaunch
| Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox. That is what a Phoenix is supposed to
| do after all, when the time has come to die it will burn to ashes
| from which it arises all new and fresh.
|
| Why Musk? The choice seems clear as are the tangents to his other
| activities. He is one of the few "tech zillionaires" who does not
| kowtow to the demands of the censorious identity politics crowd
| which has instantly turned him from one of the darlings of
| "progressives" to "undesired person #1". He seems to have the
| drive to keep that crowd from dominating the 'net. Having all
| major browsers - Chrome, Safari, Edge and Firefox - under the
| control of that same crowd in one way or another is not conducive
| to the diversity of opinion on the 'net, the only type of
| diversity which really matters and yet the one type of diversity
| which is shunned by the aforementioned I.P. crowd.
|
| What is needed is developers ("developers, developers,
| developers!" [1]), funding and mindshare. The latter is probably
| fairly easy to get given that there are many who are more than
| tired of all that identity politicking. Funding should not be
| that hard to arrange either given the way money is being thrown
| around. Developers who are versed in the Gecko code base _and_
| are willing to work for a project which explicitly states to be
| politically neutral - as in 'does not push any narrative' - is
| more of a question. If there is anyone here who works/worked at
| Mozilla who can shine a light on that it would be helpful. Do
| those who work/worked there actually support Baker's push towards
| politicising the Mozilla project while the flagship product -
| Firefox - is heading towards oblivion?
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33grif58qO8
| the_third_wave wrote:
| To the downvoters: tell us what you think instead of trying to
| get an opinion contrary to your own greyed out. Is it just that
| I mention _undesirable person #1_ which caught your ire, is it
| that you do not think a fork would be a good idea, is it
| because you do not agree that Mozilla has been abused by Baker?
| Discuss, do not just click that down-vote button.
| kemotep wrote:
| People are probably turned off to the comment because of all
| the complaining about "identity politics".
|
| There also exists several forks of Firefox already.
| Suggesting the nth idealogical fork that will be funded out
| of the kindness of a billionaire's heart doesn't sound
| productive. Why not donate to Librewolf? Why must Musk
| actually have any involvement besides funding?
| sleepybrett wrote:
| ... on the brink of being awesome. Every time i see someone using
| chrome I shudder. I wonder how much the youtube adblock bullshit
| debacle is going to effect these numbers and how.
| taf2 wrote:
| I can't be alone in my view that open source won. Just not the
| original Mozilla open source browser. Instead the re-invented one
| spear headed by Google - Chrome. Chrome is like the 2.0 of
| everything the IE6 team and Mozilla team learned the hard way. It
| was built by many of the original founding members of those
| teams. It's not a bad thing when Microsoft now uses the open
| source Blink rendering engine. It's not a bad thing that Apple
| uses the open source Webkit engine. My feeling is "we won". The
| web is so much better today thanks in part to the amazing teams
| that came together sponsored by Google to build Chrome. Time
| marches forward and there are plenty of interesting problems to
| overcome for the web as a platform. I just think we can move on
| from M$ bad, Mozilla good... Mozilla showed us we could have a
| better browser and helped break the web free from the shackles of
| Microsoft. There's new problems to solve new fights to win just
| this one, is IMO, over.
| dhimes wrote:
| We don't move on until Google lets us protect our privacy.
| Containers would be a good start.
| Closi wrote:
| That would be great, if Chrome was actually open source, and if
| the Chromium and Chrome projects weren't run by a company with
| perverse incentives (see: Manifest v3).
| coldbrewed wrote:
| Open source won the browser battle versus proprietary browsers,
| but it feels like FSF style "free software" is losing the war.
| Chrome is certainly open source but product development is
| completely dominated by Google. Google drives the web
| standards; they design the "reference" browser; as Google
| shifts to maintain ad-driven profit margins they're positioned
| to displace ad blockers.
|
| It doesn't matter if they Manifest V3 implementation is open
| sourced; If Web Environment Integrity is ultimately implemented
| then having access to the source doesn't really buy you
| anything. In a future where WEI is mandatory then being able to
| build Chromium without WEI empowers you to run a browser that's
| summarily locked out of services that demand WEI.
|
| Open source mattered much more when simple access to source
| code gave users meaningful freedom but we're transitioning away
| from that era. Google is on the path to make open source
| irrelevant by providing an open source browser that must be
| built with the Google-specified set of features in order to
| operate correctly.
|
| We can't claim a victory when open source software implements
| embrace-extend-extingush semantics.
| theteapot wrote:
| Google stands ready to snatch our victory away.
| zlg_codes wrote:
| Honestly I feel like the world would have been better without
| Google and Microsoft.
|
| The Web has been co-opted, and until those entities lose
| influence over standards, the environment is at risk.
|
| They should have moved onto their own protocol already.
| linuxhansl wrote:
| This is really frustrating to hear!
|
| It continues to boggle my mind how Chrome - partly closed source,
| questionable goals related to advertising - has almost 50% market
| share; while Firefox is declining.
| passion__desire wrote:
| One feature which is stopping me from switching is Google
| account sync between devices.
| digging wrote:
| Firefox has account sync!
| geysersam wrote:
| I had the same concern until recently. But the switch to FF,
| keeping my bookmarks/passwords etc, was quick and entirely
| painless. I use FF on all my devices and it syncs just as
| well as chrome.
| locallost wrote:
| The decline is exacerbated by mobile. It's become the dominant
| form of using the web, but almost everyone uses the default that
| comes with the phone and Firefox is nowhere to be seen.
| Additionally it's been on the decline even with the developer
| population, my guess is because Chrome and the team around it has
| been much better in explaining how to e.g. write better
| performing code and critically how to actually use devtools to
| measure.
|
| Anyway, I think Firefox is toast mostly because of its leadership
| which seems less interested in actually doing something
| interesting, and more interested in draining what's left until
| they can stick a fork in it.
| Animats wrote:
| If only Firefox still worked.
|
| Every time I open Firefox on Linux, it does disk I/O for about
| two minutes before it is usable. No idea why.
|
| On current Ubuntu, about once a day, Firefox stops accepting
| keyboard input. Sometimes right in the middle of a text box.
| Other windows still accept input. Restarting Firefox is usually
| necessary.
| worik wrote:
| > Every time I open Firefox on Linux, it does disk I/O for
| about two minutes before it is usable. No idea why.
|
| I have no idea either
|
| But I do not think it is Firefox. I open it regularly on three
| computers, Ubuntu, mint, and Debian 12 and I don't see that
| theteapot wrote:
| I've used Firefox on Debian for years. Boot time is perceptibly
| zero. Performance is on par with Chrome. And I can't remember
| it ever crashing except for maybe a tab crashing every now and
| then due to some errant Javascript.
| Animats wrote:
| Maybe it has to be on an SSD disk now.
| 28304283409234 wrote:
| Please oh dear god just let me pay for Firefox. This isn't the
| nineties. I can and will afford it. I pay for Bitwarden,
| Fastmail, NordVPN, ElementaryOS. Just give me a paid version,
| Mozilla.
| hughw wrote:
| You can make monthly donations to the Mozilla Foundation.
| Karunamon wrote:
| That only results in your money going to miscellaneous
| secondary concerns and administrative bloat.
| dralley wrote:
| Not really the same thing. The best thing you could do to
| fund Firefox is not to donate, but to pay for a service like
| Mozilla VPN
| nojvek wrote:
| That chart is sad. Like most things, the decline is gradual for
| decades and then all at once.
|
| It doesn't help that iPhone can have no other browser engine
| other than Safari.
|
| Big Tech dominance is powerful that many nation states when it
| comes to internet.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Lately I've been using Firefox as a primary browser again, mostly
| to get used to it before ad blockers stop working in Chrome.
| Mostly it's good, though some things I'm still adjusting to:
| Firefox wants to claim the ESC key to get out of full-screen,
| resulting in a number of sites with different behavior (namely,
| many sites use ESC to close modals)
| indymike wrote:
| A quick look at Mozilla's product page with 12 products of which
| five are different browsers, explains why the decline has
| happened:
|
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/products/
|
| That's a lot of products to support. Add to that this list of 27
| discontinued products:
|
| https://killedbymozilla.com/
|
| And you can understand why the struggle is real for firefox. It
| should be the best, bar none at this point.
| rbanffy wrote:
| All the browsers are probably counted as Firefox.
|
| A better guidance would be to count based on engines (Chrome,
| Edge, and Safari are all variations on WebKit) and have a
| device preventing an engine monopoly.
| indymike wrote:
| > All the browsers are probably counted as Firefox.
|
| Firefox for iOS uses WebKit as the rendering engine, and the
| others are significantly divergent from Firefox proper and
| take significant development resources away from the core
| product, so I disagree with counting the products as a single
| browser.
| ape4 wrote:
| They should run some ads - they have a great product
| macinjosh wrote:
| If Firefox goes away, we need serious anti-trust scrutiny on
| Google/Chrome.
|
| To me they are in a similar place that MS was when IE got them
| into trouble.
|
| They dominate PIM/Office tools with the google suite and design
| them to work best in Chrome. The only major difference is that
| Chrome is open sourced, but their software we need Chrome for
| isn't so that doesn't affect their moat at all.
| deviantbit wrote:
| I am always suspect of these surveys. I saw one the other day
| that claimed C# was the top language being used. I'll continue to
| donate to Firefox and Thunderbird.
| xwowsersx wrote:
| I use Firefox. I started using it because I liked the Multi-
| Account Containers and I've just stuck with it. I am absolutely
| shocked that FF's market share is ~2%. I had no idea it was that
| low, wow!
| neilv wrote:
| Instead of government leaving it up to "market share", in an
| industry with decades of documented history of underhanded anti-
| competitive behavior, how about:
|
| 1. All government Web frontends must be compliant with one of the
| government-defined profiles of browser features, which are
| defined in terms of W3C (not WHAT, not Chrome) open standards.
| With sufficient penalties to motivate compliance.
|
| 2. As a practical matter, developers of government Web-based
| systems -- in addition to developing to documented open
| standards, and using open standards-based libraries/frameworks --
| will be motivated to test with multiple browsers, including
| Firefox, because that's the most likely way that end users will
| discover and report noncompliance with the standards and
| profiles.
|
| 3. Government "apps" for non-Web platforms, such as Apple iOS and
| Google Android, are strongly discouraged. Furthermore, such non-
| Web apps by default are not compliant unless complete comparable
| functionality is available via compliant government Web
| frontends/apps. (To get permission for exceptions in
| extraordinary circumstances, there will be an onerous and
| uncertain process, and thus the motivation is to invest in the
| open standard Web platform for any "extraordinary" platform
| facilities that might be needed.)
|
| (Also there would be regulations about backend implementations;
| that's just about browsers.)
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Nos. 1 and 3 will win you the developer pico-vote while royally
| pissing everyone else off.
|
| No. 2 is the matter at hand. You need a cut-off for the
| multiple browsers requirement. If you don't, you'll find
| contracts to CronyCorp for testing every site against the
| CronyCorp browser.
| stuff4ben wrote:
| Similar to what Microsoft did, Apple should stop working on
| Safari and switch to Firefox for MacOS and IOS.
| quietpain wrote:
| I recently installed the STM32 Cube IDE from ST [1] and
| discovered that it contains a stealth binary of Google's Chrome
| in my home directory. The fans started spinning and I found the
| culprit pretty fast, but if you delete the Chrome executable in
| the double-hidden directory it just gets installed again at the
| next run of the IDE.
|
| I wonder what percentage of market share can be attributed to
| this kind of clients that are used not for browsing but for
| lazily loading some web interface or product page.
|
| [1] https://www.st.com/en/development-tools/stm32cubeide.html
| rewmie wrote:
| That's a great point. Both Chrome and Edge are widely used as
| WebView drivers by some applications, and whether the user
| likes it or not they end up using one of the browsers that's
| dubbed market leader. Does Firefox even provide any webview-
| capable deployment option? If they managed to put together one
| that didn't weight around 100MB or phoned home, I'm sure it
| would be widely adopted once it's out.
| sreejithr wrote:
| Firefox is the only browser that has reliable ad-blocking. Chrome
| allows ads by default because you know, it's from Google. Edge is
| no better the last I used it. Websites are simply faster on
| Firefox. But I guess people like me are fast becoming a minority.
| nkg wrote:
| I'm with you!
| crowcroft wrote:
| My rebuttal is that a lot of web devs have already moved on from
| actively supporting Firefox (although most websites still work
| just fine), and if anything the USDS is a laggard.
|
| The laggards all moving away from Firefox might actually be a big
| problem though, the enterprise laggards kept Internet Explorer on
| life support way past its best before date, but FF won't get
| that.
| G3rn0ti wrote:
| Are all those overall market share numbers aggregated over device
| types? In the 2000s most internet users were sitting in front of
| a desktop PC, while nowadays most web surfers are doing it from
| the palm of their hand. Of course, in that case people primarily
| choose their platform's native browser i.e. either Chrome or
| Safari. The latter is even forced onto its users (not that it is
| a really bad browser). So the decline of Firefox's market share
| really tells us a story of the rise of the mobile web.
| iteratethis wrote:
| Firefox was already statistically irrelevant 5 years ago. On our
| dashboard, a global e-commerce site with billions of views per
| year, it's not even in the top 10. Even regional browsers
| sometimes surpass it.
|
| Firefox is also no longer a developer-default browser. This too
| has been true for years now.
|
| There's very little Mozilla can do about it. Chrome and Safari
| are big because they're shipped as a default to platforms with
| billions of users. And the web works well on both of those
| browsers. It's not an engineering problem. You can't improve
| Firefox and expect market share to rise.
|
| It's pretty much a done deal, and Microsoft (as well as Brave)
| using Chromium cemented that deal.
| usr1106 wrote:
| Sorry, nothing personal. But as a 100% Firefox user I would
| very likely avoid to visit any global ecommerce site. It's the
| same world I want to avoid by not using Google products.
|
| I know I am a small minority, but you don't even see that
| minority.
| hnav wrote:
| Mozilla should develop a rudimentary Blink or Webkit mode for FF
| that allows it to fallback to a better supported engine (with
| obvious limitations wrt extensions, privacy policy) for select
| websites. I think once the user has opened Chrome/Safari because
| something rendered all fucked up in FF, they're likely to keep
| using it. The telemetry from fallbacks could be used to
| prioritize compatibility issues and drive down the number of
| sites that require it. Oh and replace its own netstack with
| something better like the one from chrome.
| graypegg wrote:
| I'm not sure if the specifics but I think embedding an
| alternative rendering engine within a browser already built
| around a different one would be a significant chunk of work.
|
| I could imagine a sort of quirks mode though, just a few hand
| selected chrome bugs/features implemented in gecko to make it
| behave just a little more like chrome. What a horrible future
| but it's a possibility.
| hnav wrote:
| I just don't see a viable alternative once your market share
| has fallen low enough for devs not to care about testing on
| your browser.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Are web standards that bleak that specific browsers need
| attention still?
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > I surely hope I'm wrong about this, but I fear I'm not.
|
| I suspect that the remaining Firefox users are likely to be quite
| "sticky". If there are websites that don't work in Firefox (but
| work in Chrome and Safari), I haven't yet blundered into one. My
| guess is that those would be mainly corporate intranet
| sites/apps, which I don't have to deal with.
|
| No platform deploys Firefox by default; you have to deliberately
| choose it. That is NOT true of Chrome or Edge. I doubt anyone has
| ever deliberately chosen Edge; you can only get Edge on Windows,
| where it's the default anyway. And the only people I know that
| have deliberately chosen Chrome over the OS default are
| developers.
| zahllos wrote:
| Slight nitpick but you can get edge on both Mac and Linux. They
| package both a deb and an rpm here:
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/business/download?form=...
| and it is also available on Mac.
|
| The main reason for using this is to run edge on windows
| subsystem for Linux on windows and wonder if anyone would have
| predicted that in the year 2000.
|
| (I actually have edge installed on some Linux machines as well,
| but it isn't my main browser except when I need to teams).
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Hah! I am now better-informed. Thanks.
| uticus wrote:
| If Firefox stops being a supported codebase, would Rust
| popularity be another domino to fall? Since it is the largest
| (and probably best known) Rust project in the world.
| fooker wrote:
| Firefox is mostly written in C++.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I don't think Firefox's usage of Rust is in any way relevant to
| Rust's popularity (or lack thereof) at this point in Rust's
| life, nor going forward.
|
| (I also suspect it's neither the largest nor best known project
| that uses Rust, but that's very difficult to quantify.)
| askonomm wrote:
| I've worked with a ton of start-ups and digital agencies on
| countless projects by now in my career, and I can honestly say
| supporting Firefox has never been a priority. I've tried to push
| for cross-browser testing many times, but according to the stats
| (which management makes these decisions with) Firefox users are
| such a tiny, insignificant amount of most websites and products
| that it doesn't make a lot of sense, which I'm sure even further
| adds to abysmal Firefox usage when sites work badly or don't work
| at all because nobody tests anything with it. Ce'st la vie, I
| guess.
| WWLink wrote:
| The fact is a bunch of web devs are lazy fucks that want to see
| Firefox die because they are lazy and refuse to develop for
| anything but chrome. :S
| kiwijamo wrote:
| Just like in the good old days of IE.
| EchoReflection wrote:
| seems like if FF leadership is smart they will figure out some
| way to tweak their product so that it is compliant or they will
| start spending money on advertising. I have never once in my
| entire life (I'm 36) seen an ad for FF. Personally I like FF but
| find the browser to be TOO tight in terms of things like needing
| 2FA to sync. My number one browser is Vivaldi, which is Chromium-
| based (obviously) but does have enhanced tracking protection.
|
| https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-powerful-privacy-settings/
| merotiskonel wrote:
| People who should know better keep on using chrome just as people
| who should know better keep on using vscode. I guess that's the
| zeitgeist, accepting the corporate trojan gift. Let's just hope
| alternatives like Firefox don't completely vanish.
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