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Comment by byuu | Hacker News Reader

> Mozilla's revenue in 2014 was $323 million

It's amazing that there's such a massive amount of money even for having ~10% market share and declining.

Given how many people are clamoring for something like what Firefox used to be, you'd really think someone would step in to make a really first-rate browser. One could even be forgiven for using existing engines (Webkit, Blink, V8, etc), so long as the UI were exceptional. Instead, all of the Webkit frontends are barely usable at all (Midori, Vivaldi, etc.)

The lack of serious competition in the browser market is quite unsettling.

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If people want something conservative, why don't they try SeaMonkey? That's still run by Mozilla and under active development.

I've just noticed a tendency for these Firefox discussions to completely ignore SeaMonkey.

I like SeaMonkey a lot, but I'm quite worried about its long-term health. They've had a lot of trouble building new releases lately.

It also takes a lot of work (not just userchrome.css hacks, but outright extracting omni.ja(r) [and its intentionally corrupt header that prevents most tools from being able to extract it], hacking at the XUL layout, etc) to make it look even remotely like it belongs in 2015 (the default is right out of 1995.)

And then there's quite a few serious limitations. The cookie manager is all but impossible to use, there is no web inspector (required to use Adblock well these days), no network debugger tools (great for writing/debugging web servers), fullscreen controls don't work at all, etc.

That said, SeaMonkey's probably my best shot going forward. I keep trying to switch to Chrome, but it's just so darned inflexible.

I have no idea what you're on about with what decade it looks like it belongs in.

Cookie manager works fine for me.

For the development stuff, I use Firebug.

They have about 15%, and that's 15% of a huge market: every single person with an Internet access uses a web browser. That's about 3 billion people last time I checked.

15% of 3 billion is still 450 million, which is a lot of users.

In addition, a web browser is pretty easy to monetize because it's the entry point for the web. The default search engine has the lion share but there are other revenue streams (like non-default search engine, for ex. Amazon, the unfamous pocket button...)

From the number you said, they're monetizing less than $1 per user per year, and actually I think it's a bit low. It may be due to them not monetizing on European users where they have a strong market share (about 22%).

> The lack of serious competition in the browser market is quite unsettling.

Is there any major corner of software with competition as healthy as the browser market?

>The lack of serious competition in the browser market is quite unsettling.

A browser is just the most complicated piece of software that there is.

The rendering backend and Javascript portion, absolutely. The total lines of code for all of Firefox (Gecko, Spidermonkey, etc) rivals the Linux kernel.

But I fail to see why we can't have a full-featured browser front-end that uses Webkit, V8, etc as libraries. We have a lot of these projects, but they are always very spartan on feature-set, portability, extensibility, etc. It's almost always a team of 1-5 hobbyists, instead of a serious team of full-time employees. At $30m per 1% of the market, there's a whole lot of money to be made.

Just make it look like a native app on each major OS (Windows, OSX, Linux, BSD), let me move all the toolbar buttons around, let me put my tabs where I want them, let me load my ad blocker and script injector, don't spy on me, don't pack it full of adware, and I'm a happy camper.

There have been companies that tried to commercialize rebranded Chromium: RockMelt comes to mind. They did not succeed.

The reason, to my mind, is simple: unless your underlying technology is better, there's little reason why users should choose your fork over the engine's official skin, which is always going to have better integration, will be first to get new features, gets security updates first, etc.

For ~$30M per 1% share of the browser market, I'm surprised that:

1) There aren't more competitors 2) A subgroup of them hasn't agreed to a conformant subset of HTML/Javascript/CSS and stuck to it

When one of your competitors (Google) controls a bunch of the most widely-visited web properties (Google Search, Gmail, YouTube), it's pretty hard to not implement the things they want to use there.

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