Chrome Won
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andreasgal.com
I worked for Mozilla for a few years, after seeing John Lily (CEO at the time) speak. It was right after Chrome started getting popular, and a smug person in the crowd asked him about how he felt about Chrome.
John's response was awesome. "This is the web that we wanted. We exist not because we want everyone to use Firefox, but because we wanted people to have a choice" Firefox was a response to a world of "best viewed in IE" badges, and it changed the browser landscape.
Now, we have options. Chrome is great, but so are Safari, Edge, Brave, Opera and Firefox. There's a lot of options out there, and they're all standards compliment. And that's thanks to Mozilla.
So, in my mind, Mozilla won. It's a non-profit, and it forced us into an open web. We got the world they wanted. Maybe the world is a bit Chrome-heavy currently, but at least it's a standards compliment world.
I hope Mozilla sees that. I hope they take credit, and move on to what's next: privacy and net neutrality. Our privacy is under attack, and Mozilla is one of the few companies that can (and would want to) help. I know, I know. Nobody cares about privacy. Nobody cared about web standards, either, but Mozilla bundled it into an attractive package and it worked. It's time for Mozilla to declare victory, high five the Chrome team, and move on to the next big challenge.
We really need someone to fight for our privacy and neutrality. And I really believe that this could be Mozilla's swan song.
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EDIT: Hey cbeard - My email is in my profile; I'd love to talk.
I definitely run into sites that only work on chrome and not in any other browser.
In my opinion chrome isn't doing a good job either. It's a massive energy hog and waste more CPU than it needs to. Unlike IE and FireFox and Safari it comes from a company that is notorious for wanting to know everything about you.
The time to celebrate victory was a few years ago. Now it's starting to look like the new boss is the same as the old, maybe worse.
"Always after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again." -- Gandalf
This hasn't happened to me in a while, except for occasionally government or bank sites which require "IE or Chrome". In many cases, spoofing the user agent works just fine for those. I agree it's bad, though.
The one exception I've noticed is Yubikey (U2F) support for Google services. Firefox has an add-on that provides Yubikey support, but last I checked, Google blocked access to those (I believe even if you spoof the user-agent).
God I miss the old Opera....
As for privacy you could use the open source chromium, there's a fork somewhere which has all the Google removed.
You spend too much time working lurking around HN sites and young web developers.
That's not true. Microsoft has now gotten into the spying business, and is infamous for the Windows 10 telemetry. They're basically copying Google.
Firefox and Safari are the only ones that come from companies that aren't notorious for wanting to know everything about you. And Firefox doesn't try to get you to spend scads of money on massively overpriced but mediocre hardware that locks you into their ecosystem.
Firefox has its warts, but it's the only choice that really makes sense if you care about privacy and freedom and avoiding vendor lock-in.
May be.
I see this as truly the case of making the pie bigger.
All devices include 2 Billion Android devices. That's a bigger pie that Chrome owns now, but FireFox can target in future.
Are you suggesting that Chrome gathers data about you? Because unless you tick that box (which they show pretty prominently) it doesn't. It doesn't by default in most linux distribution packages.
> Unlike IE
I don't know if you've been following, but Microsoft is now the king of knowing everything about you. They record things about their customers' computer activity which should horrify anyone. Sometimes they don't respect user selections either, even all the way up to Enterprise editions (where it is often mission-critical not to send competitive information to Microsoft by accident in a core dump), which is infuriating.
> In my opinion chrome isn't doing a good job either. It's a massive energy hog and waste more CPU than it needs to.
My impression is that at this point, most unique performance problems in Chrome are either an inherent cost of multi-process, a mediocre implementation choice in that model, or a performance tradeoff toward better application latency at the cost of heavy initialization. Chrome could display many pages more quickly if they ignored the GPU, but they use it across the board so that they don't have to restart into "GPU mode" when they realize there is a lot of compositing on the page. Chrome has converged toward other browsers recently, they'll now run multiple tabs on the same process as long as they share a FQDN (sites that host together, crash together), I suspect they do this to save memory.
If we're talking about runtime speed of real web apps and sites, Chrome has everyone matched or beat.
> The time to celebrate victory was a few years ago. Now it's starting to look like the new boss is the same as the old, maybe worse.
The problem with IE6 was not Microsoft, or IE6 itself. Microsoft did not win by literally forcing people to use IE6. The problem was, and probably always will be, greedy unscrupulous web developers (and their managers) who want all the cool new toys at any cost. Microsoft was doing the cool, "html5, bro!" type browser innovation that google is doing now, and developers (and their managers) lapped it up. People forget that Microsoft made box-model: border-box, XMLHttpRequest, favicons, <ruby>, and bi-directional text on the web. They did this all in IE5, this put IE6 ahead, and people loved it too. Microsoft did the right thing and didn't break compat for honest customers who just wanted their webpage to work, so IE5 quirks are the way of the web.
The problem is not that nobody likes the boss, the problem is that everyone likes the boss.
A world with Google owning a monopoly on web browsing isn't any less bad than if it were Microsoft.
Now with the web, it's much easier to make something work across all platforms, except at the bleeding edge, which is generally where you'll find those sites. Almost all the ones I've seen were tech demos of new browser tech that wasn't available everywhere yet.
If the internet exploded and we had to rebuild it from the ground up, there would be no html/web, and no 3rd party search engine which attempts to reconstruct the web by viewing it as a blackbox. We would build search into DNS, since that's basically what DNS is supposed to be for, and along with the monetization of search (register your site for x search keywords, pay the root DNS for additional keywords.) All of Google's revenue is but a hack of a patch on a chaotically formed system.
Google needs the web, but the web is terrible. It's made for showing static documents with hyperlinks to other static documents. But that's clearly not what people want to view or build, they want apps. So we have 1 million javascript frameworks trying to vie for support on various browsers on various operating systems. All this infrastructure to support 'web apps' that can only call into http and dom manipulation apis. Mobile apps have proven there are other ways to make apps, with security and containerization and allowing full (but secured) access to all OS apis, and easier compatibility. All Google's endearing endeavors to create cool, web-based tech, are just efforts to prop up the terrible web platform, to prevent it from being superseded by a better open system. Facebook (which uses the web only non-exclusively) shows us a better system is possible, but it is not open.
So, back on topic, Google won't stop being good to the web, because the greatest evil of Google is that they're good to a platform which doesn't deserve it.
IE was (is) closed source
Servo and Webrender[0] will completely shake up the browser landscape, and will allow web apps to match (maybe even surpass?) native mobile apps in terms of rendering performance. Unless Chrome, IE, and Safari can develop an answer to Servo and Webrender by the time those technologies are ready for prime time, I wouldn't be surprised to see "Best viewed in Firefox" badges start popping up everywhere.
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Mozilla won the browser war. Firefox lost the browser fight. But there's many wars left to fight, and I hope Mozilla dives into a new one.
Not that anyone cares, because MathJax...
Unless Firefox (and Servo) gets it GUI to not feel alien and clunky, it wont matter if it has a faster rendering engine. Rendering engines are plenty fast as it is anyway, it's CPU use and battery impact that matters to users. And when performance does matter, it's mostly Javascript performance, which Servo doesn't address.
It also wont matter for mobile, since Android will still keep Chrome browser, and iOS will still keep Mobile Safari -- they're both made by the platform's creators.
As Servo would be a mobile app itself, I think no ;)
Sucks that they don't have an IOS version, but Apple is the problem there, not Mozilla.
Adblocking is more than pure resource blocking (which afaik Brave, Samsung, iOS et. al.) currently implement. In fact, the smaller amount of ads I would see would be blocked this way.
I have Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, reddit and in the past Tumblr ad free due to element hiding capabilities that are non-present in any other browser I know except Firefox mobile with ublock origin.
Edit: I replied to the wrong comment. I guess it's early.
I think the idea of TFA is that soon we wont have as many options, since Chrome seems to be dominating. Opera is also using Chrome's engine, ditto for Brave, so they're basically just sells. And Safari is from the same DNA, and only really relevant on Mobile and OS X.
So Windows users basically have just Chrome and Firefox, and Linux users basically have just Chrome, Firefox and Edge. And even in Windows, Chrome dominates, almost to the point that IE dominated back in the day.
So where's the choice? If it's just about availability of other rendering engines, people still had choice in the "optimized for IE" days. But it's mostly about rendering engines having competing market shares, and nowadays they increasingly do not.
Plus, who will keep paying search placement money to Firefox if it gets to small single digits of use? And without those, how will development be continued?
>> We really need someone to fight for our privacy and neutrality. And I really believe that this could be Mozilla's swan song.
I deeply care about privacy. I fight for privacy. I work in information security. Every day I help my customers write code a little more securely. I educate them about implementing end to end encrypted communication systems. I am slowly migrating away from systems that don't respect privacy or can't function at scale without violating privacy.
You have made a great point, and we do need big organizations to fight for privacy too. But the "someone" also has to be you and me. We have to reject operating systems like Windows 10. We have to make Linux and open source tools the ones we want to use. Even merely quitting Macbooks, which trendy firms and developers are so fond of, even if just one more person does that /today/ matters.
We have to claw our data back. Byte by byte, we must earn it back and never accept being the product again. We must suffer the almost inconceivable inconvenience of perhaps not using Amazon for every online purchase. Amazon, Facebook, Google... they are slowly eating the world and even if they are "good" that sort of absolute domination enforces a mono-culture onto the world.
Well said.
I certainly hope it is not a PR stunt, but WordPress is probably the other big player in the fight for the open web. It might actually benefit all of us if Automattic starts making a lot of noise about privacy.
And ultimately, its not as if anyone wants any of these tech giants to completely fail (well, maybe Facebook). What we want is to not have the nature of the web changed to suit the whims of a handful of companies.
I feel like we're ten years late for this concern.
Mozilla _is_ fighting that fight. See their posts here: https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/
i disagree. Google built chrome to protect their monopoly in search. and they have protected that monopoly well, and added another one: browser.
i dont disparage Google for doing it, in fact both are great products that I use. But to say mozilla did it to 'give people a choice' and that they 'won' doesnt seem right to me.
sure, but if Chrome de facto controls standards does that really matter?
I'm much less pessimistic.
Besides a cross platform and extensible browser we see also the following coming out of Mozilla:
* Rust, a modern low-level programming language with cutting edge "safety" build in at zero runt time cost, luring many system programmers.
* Servo, tomorrow browser, from scratch, in Rust.
* Thunderbird, x-platform desktop email client (interesting for those not trusting the cloud enough).
* MDN, everything MSDN and w3school wish they could be. :)
A lot with revolve around privacy and safety in the future, a space that Mozilla is very well positioned to florish in.
Chrome is a good product. But I prefer Firefox. And seeing what is becoming of Servo I will soon start using that. Form me Firefox has won, and is not at all losing. I dont need the "most popular" browser, I need the most secure one.
And when I see what programming languages Google came up with... (Seriously? Is Go the best money can buy?) Then I think Rust shows single handedly that Mozilla beats Google in that arena as well.
1. A programming language, that hasn't yet shown "escape velocity" to go beyond D and other would-be-C++-successors in traction.
2. The only major application of that language... a pre-alpha browser engine, which may or may not eventually replace the engine in a browser that is seriously declining in market share with no reversal in sight.
3. A desktop email client, from which Mozilla has repeatedly made clear their intentions to divest and move on.
4. A JavaScript and HTML reference manual.
Mozilla is an organization with over $400 million in annual revenue. Where that money is going baffles me.
You may be interested in https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/friends.html.
From FY2015, actual budget is $372 million. $227 million is applied toward investments - mutual funds, bonds, etc, presumably to ensure longevity and continuity. They paid $29 million in income taxes, $6 million in employee benefits. I can't really comprehend rest of the audit report in any practical terms I understand, but that leaves about $100 million to try to understand and rationalize (actually probably a lot less than that.)
At 1,000 employees, that's $100k per person on average, which doesn't sound so far-fetched (of course in reality it's a curve, but it suddenly doesn't look so alarming). Somewhat noteworthy, they donate about $300k/year and a full-time employee to Let's Encrypt. Which, well, I personally benefited from that, so kudos.
I think you meant this disparagingly, but such a reference is remarkable. Comprehensive disscussion of a massive standard, in a well-written, usable form is a huge accomplishment.
There are other promising applications. For example, it could be used for web technologies-based applications (e.g. hybrid mobile apps, Electron, ...).
This is astonishing. Anyone looked at their accounts?
The amount of funding they get is in direct correlation to how much market share they have in Firefox at the time they negotiate a search deal with one of the big search sites.
I love Rust, and advocate it among other memory safe systems programming languages, but right now it still has an uphill battle against Swift, C++17 and .NET Native, on the desktop and mobile OSes.
Adoption is growing slowly, even Microsoft has recently added a Rust library to VS Code, but it will take years to become a major systems language.
Google may focus on specific types of exploits, but they let everyone bad just walk right in the front door.
then you really ought to be using chrome
Servo is an "experimental" browser engine. While Chromium is cranking out features, servo is yet to reach version 1.0.
Thunderbird - was "discontinued" by Mozilla
MDN is a mess. The topics are all over the place and its hard to navigate. php.net docs is much more organized.
You can criticize Go but it has a more thriving ecosystem than Rust.
As much I'd like them to succeed, I dont think Mozilla is doing very good right now. They churn out technologically good products, but business wise, they dont know what they're doing. And without money, they wont be able to fight the big companies like Google, MS, FB.
This is just one of many examples!
This would be a more convincing point if any of memory safety, parallel styling, parallel layout, retained mode rendering as suggested by the GPU vendors, and so forth were on Chromium's roadmap.
I think Go has already become unavoidable for those working in cloud like environments, thanks to Docker and Kubernetes.
Anyone working on those areas needs a working knowledge of Go, even he/she dislikes the language.
It's definitely put it firmly on my radar as something to pick up recently, and since I don't already know C or C++ it feels like a good starting point.
There are not a ton but there are more than zero.
Some problems with Mozilla are that they don't do community management well any more. In the old days, there were amazing grassroots-driven projects like spreadfirefox.com. It is not like that any more. Grassroots supporters have trouble participating, even if they try.
For example, I tried to create a Firefox programmers' meetup group in Berkeley, and even though some community people from Mozilla joined the group, no one from Mozilla would reply to my inquiries. (I still would like to restart that idea, but I don't have time to chase them down. We have 4,000 members in our various meetup groups at the moment.)
Another problem is that they are doing things that make their most-dedicated core users lose interest. They should have realized the incredible enthusiasm for Firefox that plugins like Pentadactyl were creating. They're killing off the API that it depends on. Instead, they should have funded the development of Pentadactyl and made it a reason why tech-savvy users choose Firefox. Tech-savvy users drive adoption, but they have abandoned many of their tech-savvy supporters.
There is still hope for Firefox if they are able to get the messages about privacy across. Chrome is slower to use out of the box, partially because of the auto-completion algorithm that tends to send people to Google Search to click on ads before reaching their destination. The older Firefox search box didn't waste users' time like that. (Recently it changed so that it shows titles rather than URLs, which is also slow, because there is an extra security risk of going to phishing sites, if you don't stop to look at the URLs.)
Also, Firefox is the only mobile browser that allows add-ons, so that's another benefit that they should be promoting.
For Chrome on the other hand, its near-monopoly situation is worrisome but it's actually a pretty good product. So there is no pragmatic reasons to leave it for Firefox, only ideological reasons and it's a driver nearly not as powerful as suffering every day.
Chrome sold people on the promise of a much faster, lighter-weight browser than the heavy but competent Firefox of the time, a promise that Chrome no longer delivers on. The "added users" Mozilla has claimed in 2016 were developers realizing Chrome wasn't light or speedy anymore and if they were going to use a browser hogging all the RAM on their system they may as well use one with a functional extensions ecosystem.
Chrome may not be comparatively "as bad" as IE was at the peak of Firefox's success, but it's still suffering from the same disease.
If Firefox can deliver near-Chrome features with better battery life, I'll switch and never look back.
Many of those core supporters have been lost, because Mozilla stopped listening to them.
Chrome was able to gain users rapidly, because Google put a Google Chrome ad in the corner of the search results pages, claiming that it was faster, even when that claim became dubious.
These two suggestions -- Mozilla getting involved in meetups and not deprecating an API allowing vim navigation in the browser -- would take Mozilla even farther from relevance, assuming any nonzero opportunity cost to those actions.
I think that they do to some extent. People ask their tech-savvy friends what to buy/use, or they use what work computers provide, which are configured by tech-savvy users.
> Mozilla getting involved in meetups
Not only meetups -- I'm talking about the feeling of the community in general. I've been using the browser since Mozilla Application Suite and was a very active early evangelist. The community was much different back then.
> not deprecating an API allowing vim navigation in the browser
I think that you are underestimating the enthusiasm people have for some of those Firefox tools. :)
> would take Mozilla even farther from relevance
Re-creating the grassroots-driven community would not make Mozilla less relevant. It's exactly what they need to do to survive.
Because they have to. Firefox could remain an unusable single-threaded XML behemoth, but what point is there in your wonderful extensible browser if it's an unmaintainable slow mess?
For me, firefox became completely unusable few months ago when somebody decided that pulseaudio is the way to go and nothing else should be supported.
Maybe, but they're getting rid of extensions instead, so they're effectively committing suicide.
I don't understand this perspective. Browsers are legacy technologies that are not particularly influential? What?
I feel like the web dominates our lives more than ever, and everyone uses a laptop or desktop for any actual work they have to do, professional or hobby. While people use their phones for internet access throughout the day as they move about, it must be one in 1000 or fewer who uses their phone or tablet for real work.
Does someone see a replacement on the horizon for the supposedly "legacy" laptop/desktop power combo?
While my perspective isn't as strategic or metrics-driven as his, I had a lot of time to observe and think as both a community member and Mozilla employee. FxOS also wasn't my baby, so there's that. Note also that I speak for myself here and my own observations and paraphrases--whatever I say that pisses someone off is something I'm saying, not that Mozilla said verbatim.
My primary takeaways were twofold:
(Long, TL;DR at bottom)
1) I agree with you. Desktop and mobile are two separate markets, period. The first mostly serves a workplace audience and the second a personal audience, but most people with a desk job at the very least will use a web browser as part of their day. Desktop may be a minority of the overall, but it's a minority that won't go away anytime soon and so will continue to influence HTML and standards disproportionate to pure market share.
That's important because Mozilla's gambit for preserving the open web was pretty simple (I say was because I think they're just not that focused at this point):
Have enough people using your browser that websites absolutely have to support the emerging standards that browser relies on-- and perhaps in doing so make it less attractive for site providers and browser providers to spend time on proprietary tech that isn't significantly better than those standards, thereby making other browsers move to those standards too.
Doesn't mean these people have to use it everywhere, or that it has to be a majority share (10%+ was what I commonly heard as "enough") or otherwise "win". But it does have to be enough that people will complain if the website doesn't support their browser and that testers are influenced to test the site against it.
(BTW, as a test professional, the fact that Firefox no longer appears in most test matrixes I encounter due to lack of a blip on analytics is very telling, and Firefox has a serious risk growing around site incompatibility or instability in their browser).
That brings me to my second takeaway:
2) The grand majority of people don't use a web browser because of the browser itself; they use it for one of a few reasons:
a) It's default on their system.
You will not win these people over because they're not there for any reason other than it being the easiest or most integrated path. Note that this is pretty much the whole mobile market, and why it was a dire mistake for Mozilla to conflate the two markets, decide mobile was more important due to combined market share, then go tilting at windmills.
It's also, any altruistic reasons aside, why the moonshot was to create an OS so Firefox could be the default mobile experience.
b) Ethics/Community. This was a relatively small but very vocal part of Firefox's userbase. Probably more people were there "against Chrome" than "for Firefox," but whatever. Firefox succeeded in the first place because of "against Internet Explorer" so it's a valid reason to be there. The nice thing about these people is they pull in more people.
Unfortunately, one side effect of Firefox OS as a project was working with proprietary partners who emphasized confidentiality such that you couldn't share with the community in the way Mozilla did before. When Mozilla diverted most of their effort to Firefox OS, it froze out a lot of the community efforts.
I think Mozilla-the-org also became less skilled at working with community, both for that shift and perhaps because they brought in a lot of people from the mobile and other sectors who didn't have that background.
Whatever the case, this base wasn't well-maintained, and I don't think operates as a core in the same way it might once have, at least for Firefox.
c) Customization, and this is really why Firefox (and Mozilla) is where it is today IMO:
The add-on ecosystem is the most compelling reason both to start using but especially continue using a non-default browser, and Mozilla chased theirs away.
Here's the thing:
You have one browser, whose job is to get the hell out of the way of the content and fade into the background, and several installed extensions whose jobs are to solve specific problems you have. 1 browser. Several extensions. 1 invisible, generic browser. Several hand-chosen extensions that make it your own.
Which bit are you sticking around for? Probably the extensions. The browser is a platform, a means, not an end--not just for the web but for its own functionality.
That's why all the complaints are performance and crashes and things that make you notice the browser, not generally native features or UI. It's the whole rationale behind browser-as-OS efforts in the first place.
Syncs and reading lists are nice, but with an ecosystem you can get them after the fact. With no ecosystem, you'd better either really like what you're handed or be trapped into using it a la iOS--and even Apple has figured out they have to be somewhat customizable or people will even switch OSes to get it.
That's where Chrome won.
Specifically, when Mozilla pretty much cargo-culted Google's rapid release program without first creating a version-independent extension store and add-on API, they seriously fucked up.
A ton of add-ons couldn't keep up with release and broke--Firefox's add-on "API" was to either essentially monkeypatch the internals or to create binary extensions, neither of which had any real abstraction from implementation. The need to manually update the compatibility version number and reupload to AMO for every single release froze more out (this was fixed server-side by auto-incing the number but it was just a workaround to a real problem as now extensions might not be really compatible). AMO always had a problem with turnaround on submissions, and this didn't help.
In general Mozilla sent the message of being out of touch with the add-on community, and that it wasn't a clear priority.
Jetpack/Add-Ons SDK was there as a not-really-mature portability measure to mitigate this, but it wasn't powerful enough to support a lot of the best extensions. It also happened in parallel with the rapid release shift, not before it when it was strategically needed. Then Jetpack kind of died off, probably partially because of the shift in efforts towards mobile/FxOS and partially because Jetpack never really became kick-ass enough to make the type of impact that gets more resources.
Meanwhile, right before Firefox stepped into this and never stepped out again, the Chrome Web Store opens in 2010, ready to receive any disenfranchised add-on makers. Talk about right place at the right time. Now Mozilla finally is adopting Chrome's extension API, both because it probably works better with multiprocess but maybe also to get some cross-platform extensions back. I imagine that'll work OK, but maybe too little too late.
AMO isn't what it used to be at all. Meanwhile, Chrome's Web Store is phenomenal. Combined with the (yes, unfair) Google Suite integration in Chrome there's a lot of friction to keep people on Chrome as a platform, and short of Chrome making a huge mistake that shakes people off like Mozilla/Firefox did, there isn't much reason to switch browsers for a cross-platform extension that's already on the one you use.
And when I look at the blog posts re: Firefox improvements, etc., I keep coming back to "it's a platform, not an app" and wonder if they'll ever take that ground back. Maybe if they somehow completely redefine the browser experience or otherwise stay deeply opinionated (Opera is sort of going this route) but otherwise, it'll just be parity and parity doesn't move people.
I'm thoroughly convinced Mozilla won't achieve much impact with Firefox until they understand and execute on building the ecosystem as the vast majority use case and never damage it again. However, that means them also understanding that people came to and left Firefox for any number of reasons other than Firefox itself or its native features, interface, etc., and I don't see that yet institutionally in their execution.
Some bright spots: Rust and WebAssembly are both fantastic. In general, I think Mozilla has been great at addressing the developer segment, both with the browser dev tools themselves and especially with MDN. Maybe what'll eventually preserve Mozilla is getting drummed out of the web browser business and into more of a core tech business. Regaining browser relevance is going to be a heck of an uphill for them.
TL;DR: Mozilla should never have gone full-tilt at mobile and made a grave mistake in assuming desktop was becoming irrelevant to their mission; and by far the biggest fuckup was alienating the add-on community since customization is the most compelling reason why people would use a non-default browser. It's entirely possible they won't come back from that. Their biggest recent impacts have been peripheral to or completely orthogonal to the browser, and might be their brighter future.
The extension ecosystem was always one of the strongest distinguishing facets of Firefox. I think Mozilla panicked when Chrome threatened Firefox's market share, and started trying to compete hard on things like being at the forefront of new technology adoption at the expense of the existing extension ecosystem. And in the process, Mozilla lost control of the messaging and it came to be seen as constantly doing little more than aping Chrome. The Web Extensions stuff is an example of the marketing issue. Mozilla new as far back as 2010 that extensions were the biggest stumbling block to getting multiprocess working. What they should have done was start developing the new extension APIs that far back, and made Firefox use multiprocess mode only if no legacy extensions were installed.
This point is proven again by Mozilla forcing the new extension API before the extensions are ready.
What do you think about Firefox mobile, the only browser that supports add-ons , could it use it to get some relevance or is that battle lost too ?
The reality is that computers are still computers. Mobile is the new TV.
I run EUC in a large diversified enterprise. We have about 0.05% pure mobile users, mostly iPad based. That is growing quickly, but probably won't exceed 3% in the next 5 years based on the current pipeline. There are exceptions, iirc Comcast has 50k iPads. Other field service orgs are similar.
Server based computing is a thing though. There's alot of BYOD and thin clients in our future. Thin clients are approaching $100 and going lower. VDI/Citrix has a positive ROI for me.
I think the future looks more like Issac Asimov's multivac.
I wish people on HN would use less unexplained acronyms.
Thanks for this. It summarizes succinctly my uneasy observations of large numbers of mobile users.
For desktop power users, however, the mobile is somewhat an extension of their desktop.
It scares me, to be honest. I wonder where this tendency in people will lead in the very long run, particularly when you consider the ideas suggested by companies like Neuralink. It brings Black Mirror to mind.
Will people permanently have an inexhaustible feed of vapid garbage playing in their mind while they ignore most of everything going on in reality, in their actual real life?
However, this is unrelated to the original point. Just a side thought.
And that's precisely why mobile is eating the world. Facebook, Instagram, and other social platforms drive a lot of traffic.
Another time she had tried to open a link to a Word Doc and didn't realize it downloaded it. I showed her where it was in the downloads folder and she proceeded to upload it to Google Drive to open it instead of using Word.
Very few functions kids do these days require a specialist app, just a particular browser.
Her sister was complaining about having to log into Netflix and I suggested she install the App. Her response was "I don't like Apps, I prefer websites."
And those fume hallucinations inspired the 'convergence' bandwagon which lead Canonical/Ubuntu, the Gnome project and Microsoft astray for years before they finally started rolling back those dumb decisions.
The markets for smartphones and tablets are now at absolute saturation point and, to a first approximation, no-one is abandoning their laptops/desktops en-masse in favour of working off of a 6 inch screen.
On light days about an hour.
I'm usually on a laptop/desktop for 8-10 hours a day.
Even on a phone/tablet, communication often includes web hyperlinks. The obsession with mobile is a reflection of business model. If you are in the advertising / surveillance capitalism business, mobile ("sensor phone") devices provide non-desktop signals that can be monetized.
Unfortunately, desktop software was hurt by piracy, with a few large ISVs making the most money. Today, Apple makes money on desktop hardware rather than desktop software. Microoft has tilted Windows 10 towards hosted services and data collection, but ISVs cannot abandon the large incumbent Win32 device market.
As laptop/desktop security improves, operating sytems could be reducing desktop software piracy and improving the profitability of ISVs. Instead, "app stores" are following two leaders who don't care about ISVs: Apple (hardware revenue, 30% ISV tax = tiny ISVs) and Google (data revenue, "free" apps).
We have the security technology and social network/marketing experience to design laptop/desktop software ecosystems that protect data/IP and support new ISVs. If Mozilla/Firefox wants to help, they can make it easier for web/extension developers and content creators to get paid.
They're market shares & hence bounded by 0 and 1, so exponential seems pretty unrealistic. The logistic curve is a better starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function#In_economics...
Saying "Chrome won" now feels like saying "IE won" in 2002 or so. Look at the chart here:
What strikes me is the diversity. Chrome has mostly been stealing market share from IE; Safari is growing too and is by no means dead; FF has been declining, but not that much. There are 4-ish strong browsers in the market now when before there was only 1 (IE) and a half (Mozilla). Certainly a different picture from the chart in the article.
They remove anything that violates the terms of service of a website. Like popular extensions that modified youtube or reddit in ways the sites didn't approve of. The only reason they don't remove adblock is because it has so much momentum and there would be an uproar if they did. But they do pay to have their ads whitelisted on the most popular adblock extension, and see to it that it's the top result.
They also try to be a minimalist browser and shove any functionality to extensions that can be shoved there. Since 99.999% of people never change the default settings on anything, they miss out. I wonder if a browser could be successful going the other way. Being "batteries included" and bundling it with lots of useful extensions and features.
If anything, I'd say my experience between the Chrome and Firefox extensions are completely opposite to yours. For one, Firefox has some 1-3 different extension types/apis, so you have first understand which one to use from their convoluted developer docs. Secondly, when you submit the extension, some volunteer "reviews" it whenever they have the time, which can take days to weeks. Once I got feedback and got rejected because there was a typo in the extension.
With Chrome it's very easy to create an extension, you basically only need that manifest.json file and then you can submit it to the store and it's online less than an hour.
I thought Firefox allowed third party extensions, have they changed that?
I wouldn't be surprised if a sizeable portion of Chrome users were in a similar boat, quietly waiting for some small aspect of Firefox to improve.
Just installed Chromium to compare. When maximized, the Chromium title bar is 65px high on my system, whereas Firefox's takes 70px. I should note, though, that I have set my window manager to hide the default window decoration on maximized windows, which helps.
We'll see.
I started Firefox OS in 2011 because already back then I
was convinced that desktops and browsers were dead.
Not immediately–here we are 6 years later and both
are still around–but both are legacy technologies that
are not particularly influential going forward.
...snip...
To stick with the transportation metaphor: Google makes the
best horses in the world and they clearly won
the horse race. I just don’t think that race matters
much going forward.
But the browser certainly still matters to all those Firefox users who switched to Chrome, and are using it every day.
"Legacy" isn't seen as sexy in tech. It might not be exciting for someone who wants to explore the next frontier or create the next platform. But, legacy is important for users (customers). Legacy is your brand. It's your influence. The foothold that will help you set the direction of what happens next. It's what you bootstrap your play in the next tech wave upon. Legacy is yesterday's hard earned success ready to be leveraged as a head start for tomorrow. (It's just important that you remember to do the leveraging part, and not just sit pretty and self-satisfied with your legacy).
Firefox's decline is abysmal and a failure of leadership.
FirefoxOS was a terrible, terrible decision.
How much influence does Mozilla really have on the direction of web if they have don't have influence on the desktop? Don't many features in mobile browsers start on the desktop browser first?
I hope whoever is in charge of Firefox now is a true believer of the power and importance of the web browser, and the desktop that it's used on, by the most influential band of users you can wish to have: creators.
Edits: formatting
So now Firefox has to look for more partners but there is little sense in partnering with a browser vendor for anything outside of websites. Among those nothing is as lucrative as and ubiquitous as a search engine.
Now a OS vendor could maybe get funded and promoted by a manufacturer or a phone service company.
To me, this article was written from the perspective of a zero sum game mentality. The author clearly wanted to be #1. Does this mean Firefox is failing? I think the evidence is lacking there. And all the guy really offers as evidence is, "From these graphs it’s pretty clear that Firefox is not going anywhere." But Firefox market share was going up at some point... by the same standard, why wasn't that valuable evidence that Firefox would take over everything? As an explanation, it's devoid.
The article would more sense if it were critical to Mozilla's mission that Firefox have a dominant market share. But 18% of desktop installs is far more than sufficient to influence standards (recent studies show that as little of 3-5% of a market can basically set standards).
IMO Mozilla should just focus on a browser that 10-30% of users -- especially 'influencers' and those who care about digital freedom -- love, and consider that success.
A response is that even if Firefox's share falls, that the absolute number of Firefox users continues to rise. ie that the total market is growing. In this case Mozilla would still be generating the revenue it needs to keep going. The author brushes this possibility off in the beginning of the article, saying that browsers are a thing of the past.
What would the browser war look like if google.com advertised Firefox instead?
This motivated me to go even further. I'm sick of the 1999 style popups and redirects I get on mobile sites, especially the Android webviews that so many applications have. I'm setting the AdBlock Browser to my default and disabling in-app web browsers where possible. Until I can trust mobile sites to have respectable ads, they lose revenue.
The more I think about this, the more annoyed I'm getting. The Youtube app has also been redesigned to have a less 'friction free' UI. You now open a video, see an ad first. Ok, that's fine. Back out of a video, it minimizes and you view 'suggested videos' (which feel like more ads). Swipe video away, you're still on the ad screen. Back out of Youtube. I want to watch a video and get out, maybe be pestered by 1 skippable ad for a relevant product. Not hit back 8 times and swipe a video away.
The time might be right for disruption. On the other hand, I might just be spoiled by debt supplemented user acquisition strategies that have very low monetization. We'll see.
It's a tossup for me whether I'll go back to Chrome or Safari (there's positives and negatives for both of them in my case).
YMMV.
What should the conclusion have been from growth graphs back when IE was growing? Everyone else just give up?
The growth of phones doesn’t make desktop irrelevant. Phones can’t replace the desktop paradigm for many tasks, so desktops will stick around. When they stick around, things are better if desktop browsers stay in good health.
As for mobile, people do browse the Web a lot of mobile. Maybe the numbers for Facebook and Twitter apps are even greater in terms of minutes of use, but that doesn’t make the Web on mobile irrelevant or not worth caring about.
Whether on mobile or desktop, we’d all be worse off if the Web becomes less healthy due to neglect arising from being thought as not growing enough to be cool or being left to only to operating-system-bundled browsers. (The low switching cost of browsers due to not having to switch devices keeps the browser space competitive even if also tough for Mozilla when Mozilla doesn’t have an OS as an anchor.)
Sure, non-Web things (IoT and other) will exist and individual people may be a bit tired of doing Web and go do those other things. That doesn’t mean that the Web isn’t worth caring about anymore or that it doesn’t continue to be important for the health of the Web for Mozilla to be there with an independent engine–doing what Mozilla has always done without pivots to new shiny.
When individuals grow tired of Mozilla or the Web, going to do some other thing elsewhere for a change is cool, but I think spreading defeatism about what those of us who stay do is not cool.
Google Chrome is not Open Source and your privacy is not guaranteed, you don't know what's happening under the hood.
Please wait for the Servo project to complete, then you'll know who won.
Mozilla Firefox is not just a browser, it's the community of freedom, it's what I have grown up with. Finally Firefox with Ublock Origin is just enough to enjoy the Web. #MozillaFirefoxMasterRace
If you read the end though, he really is just using an attention grabbing headline and article to bring up his startup. Not very classy.
The entire article he didn't take any ownership for this failing and then goes on to mention how he is heading up another company.
> All browsers work pretty well, and being slightly faster or using slightly less memory is unlikely to sway users.
I call BS. When Chrome came out it was a lot better experience than Firefox. That is IMO how chrome got so much velocity. Chrome was more stable and faster. Now that may not be true now but it was the early technical failure of Firefox that caused a great deal of uptake of chrome.
But once you make it to the top these days even after failure you still get funding and get to to lead another company.
Andreas is rightfully very impressive but maybe he shouldn't be an executive.
In fact I would visit https://arewee10syet.com every couple of months and sigh for years wanting to switch back.
On Firefox I used to have hundreds of tabs open and no visible ui chrome most of the time, just vimperator/pentadactyl and usually hidden treestyle tabs. Along with a rotating collection of adblockers and privacy extensions.
These days? I just use Safari on a Macbook with Content Blockers (https://webkit.org/blog/3476/content-blockers-first-look/). My battery lasts double digit hours and everything is always snappy. Readability and integrated 'read it offline later' mode is a cherry on top.
Ultimately I think we forget that with Flash being truly dead and buried on pages with no junky javascript trackers even a NeXT computer, far less powerful than your phone, should be enough.
And all the browsers are now able to limit the damage a heavy/crappy page (like gmail) does to its own tab.
tldr; And Jesus wept for there were no more worlds to conquer.
Pocket was a good move, but it is still not fully integrated to Firefox like the 'read it offline later' mode of Safari. I really wish it was.
This rings untrue to me, because I cannot believe he wrote this on his smartphone. I get that desktop/laptop are no longer the main entry device to the connected world, but they are essential to the connected world in a way that horses are not important to the world of transportation.
I stuck with Firefox through the times where it was much slower than Chrome for idealistic reasons as well, but now I feel like speed is less of an issue because they are both pretty even.
Having said that, Firefox also has its issues. It is so unresponsive sometimes, giving long hangs. That's the main problem to me. There are others, like it being slower in some pages and some of its extensions UI give me a pre-web 2.0 vibe or look abandoned. (But its Mendeley importer extension is way better than Chrome's).
Multiprocess Windows 0/1 (Disabled by add-ons)
Asynchronous Pan/Zoom none
EDIT: I tried toggling browser.tabs.remote.autostart to true in about:config, but it still gives the same message. Looking into it now.
EDIT2: I did it!
Multiprocess Windows 1/1 (Enabled by user)
Asynchronous Pan/Zoom wheel input enabled
EDIT3: Wow!! This is so much better! I didn't know project Electrolysis was already out. Thanks!
This is what you get when you force a perfectly technical CEO out and let the MBA types steer the ship. A browser is a forever bleeding edge tech; you need engineers all the way to the top. They chose political correctness over technical prowess and the product has lost the edge.
Firefox had a big decade because Microsoft put IE on a starvation diet after Netscape folded but Google shows no sign of making a similar level of error. Firefox has never been better technically but at the end of the day they're fighting on the wrong side of a war which will be decided by budgets.
How about Brave [1]?
And if you think it's as simple as "political correctness"... I don't even know how to begin talking to you.
Remember: we're not talking about someone "just expressing an opinion" here (as many discussions tried to claim at the time). Brendan didn't just say something, or write something: he actively worked to have his personal opinion -- of whose lifestyle was acceptable and whose lifestyle wasn't -- written into the fundamental law of the state where Mozilla is headquartered. And that opinion, once it became law, hurt employees of the company he was trying to lead, and told them they were effectively second-class citizens.
Such a complete and utter lack of regard for one's fellow humans is disqualifying no matter how much "technical prowess" someone might have. His only choices at that point were to come back in line with the bare-minimum requirements of a free society (such as equality of all people before the law), or be shown the door. And any attempt to dismiss that as "political correctness" reveals a lot about the nature of the person attempting to dismiss it.
"Since then, there has been a great deal of misinformation. Two facts have been most commonly misreported: 1. Brendan was not fired and was not asked by the Board to resign. Brendan voluntarily submitted his resignation. The Board acted in response by inviting him to remain at Mozilla in another C-level position. Brendan declined that offer. The Board respects his decision." [1]
The only people who were "forced out" against their will were the Californian citizens who were forced out of their existing legal same-sex marriages, thanks to the anti-gay propaganda than Brendan Eich willingly and unapologetically paid for.
You're the one who is choosing to propagate the political correctness of homophobic politicians fighting against marriage equality, by misstating the facts and parroting lies to make a politically motivated point in the defense of bigotry, then projecting your own political correctness onto other people.
And you're also wrong to believe that he could have steered the ship away from where it was inextricably headed. Or do you honestly believe that homophobes are the growth market for web browsers, so as a high profile anti-gay-marriage pro-Prop-8 poster child, his bigotry-inclusive outreach to countries like Indonesia, which he claims have many oppressed gay-marriage opponents who support him but don't "have quite the megaphone", could have turned the ship around? [2]
"Now, in his first interview on the subject, Eich is responding with a message that Mozilla is at its core inclusive -- not just of gay-marriage supporters but also of people like him or gay-marriage opponents in Indonesia who also are part of the Mozilla cause."
"For Mozilla, it's problematic because of our principles of inclusiveness, because the Indonesian community supports me but doesn't have quite the megaphone."
Eich also stressed that Firefox worked globally, including in countries like Indonesia with "different opinions," and LGBT marriage was "not considered universal human rights yet, and maybe they will be, but that's in the future, right now we're in a world where we have to be global to have effect." [3]
"Actually, Mr. Eich, right now we’re in a world where you have to not be a bigot if you want to be an effective leader of an organization like Mozilla. And it’s about time."
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat...
[2] https://www.cnet.com/au/news/mozilla-ceo-gay-marriage-firest...
[3] http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/04/03/brendan_e...
Faster browsing and less memory use is the only reason I've ever heard anyone switch browsers outside of privacy issues. If Servo is significantly faster and uses less memory, and if it can keep that up for years like Chrome did, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see this flipping in a few years. Thankfully, he's no longer CTO at Mozilla so this actually has a chance of happening.
Stability.
License, at least for me. I would only use a free as in speech browser.
Add-ons and success blocking ads.
The author is right that Chrome has a massive share, but everyone knows that. Any analysis more specific than that requires more than just overplotting exponentials on a graph.
- If it is indeed too challenging for Firefox to compete against Chrome with a separate browser, there might be value in Mozilla maintaining an open-source fork of Chrome. This would allow Mozilla to borrow the good bits of Chrome for relatively low effort, and focus development effort on the the things that Google might not value so much (e.g privacy). It would also be a hedge against a Google monopoly by having an open source competitor available.
- I'd love to see a solid open source clone of Android—including a full clone of Google Play Services. I think Mozilla could help a lot here, especially if they integrated their fork of the browser.
Then that would mark the day when I no longer use Mozilla's software. There'd be no point.
The world doesn't need yet another Chromium-based browser. Firefox's continued development of Gecko and new development of Servo are among the main forces (alongside Safari, maybe) preventing Chrome from becoming the next Internet Explorer.
As for an open source clone of Android, it already exists and it's called Replicant. Mozilla already tried the mobile OS thing and failed. Not sure why you think they would suddenly have success. It's all about ecosystems in the mobile space and Mozilla doesn't have it nor will they ever.
I have been using the Web since 1993.
I always thought the Web had the definition given in its Wikipedia entry.
Web servers and hyperlinks.
Apparently some people believe "the Web" is actually a browser, or a small set of them.
This is like suggesting a galaxy is actually a telescope, or a small set of "standards compliant" telescopes.
Browser-centrism is truly myopic.
What is relevant is the ever expanding practice of installing web servers into all sorts of devices, not simply racks of computers in server rooms and offsite data centers.
If I used this argument 16 years ago it would have meant "Internet Explorer won". Browsers will rise and fall and eventually a series of bad decisions by Google will pave the way for a new leader.
I will never leave Firefox as long as Mozilla fights the good fight. As internet privacy becomes an increasingly public issue, Google will face evermore scrutiny over Chrome and all it takes is one fuckup on their part for people to realize they've been supporting the wrong company.
Vivaldi is basically Chrome without the annoying Google bits.
I still use Firefox occasionally, but mostly for testing.
I'll admit I hold a rather strong resentment towards Internet Explorer. Aside from having made me waste countless hours dealing with its quirks, I also feel a bit better supporting browsers that are more open. I haven't heard a single person in real-life saying they use Edge as their main browser.
Also the unsung heroes behind KHTML, the HTML layout engine from the Konqueror web browser (part of KDE), the ancestor of Webkit and Blink, the technologies that power modern web browsers such as as Chrome, Safari and Opera.
The proliferation of Android devices with Chrome is where that popularity is coming from. Ironically, had FirefoxOS been a success, we'd probably see a very different graph. Safari shows up for the same reason, just a different platform.
As for a turnaround, I'm using Firefox to type this. It's easy to think desktops don't matter in a world of tablets, phones and mobile devices but they do.
Firefox is about choice and an open web. Chrome is about user tracking and advertising. As long as Firefox exists, there will be people using it.
I'm hoping Servo will change that.
(I know you can launch multiple Firefox profiles, but it's awkward at best.)
On Android, Firefox is my favorite browser. So much better than Chrome. Thank you Mozilla :-) Now please make using multiple profiles on the desktop as easy as Chrome does.
Either built-in (activate with `privacy.userContext.enabled` and `privacy.userContext.ui.enabled` in about:config) or if you don't mind some telemetry (non-sensitive stuff but YMMV) and random updates you can use their Test Pilot experiment https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/containers (or you can just grab yourself an XPI and update on manual basis).
Mozilla can choose to be arrogant. Well.. guess what? We can also choose to move on without you.
Broken apps make users to switch browsers. It's that simple. Mozilla can only blame itself for the vicious cycle.
Oh, and I don't like that Google tracks everything I do while using it...
If you're looking for a Chrome experience without the privacy concerns, take a look at http://iridiumbrowser.de. It's Chrome will (supposedly, I've not personally verified) all the Google tracking stripped out to the extent possible.
On the Windows machines at work, I use both Firefox and Chrome all day long for customer support and light web development. They're both pretty interchangeable for me, neither really being any better than the other. Since such high adoption of Chrome means the general public are using it, not just the more tech-saavy people like us, I doubt the reason is any deep developer niceties. So I don't really know why...
Edit:
Err correction, looks like 3,294 of those FF hits are from a bot trying to break into my fake wp-login.php page with an agent id of "Firefox/34". But still, minus those hits, FF is neck and neck with Chrome.
There's a pretty popular sort-of-fork of Chromium called Electron. People claim it's bloated though. Could Servo do better?
Also, this looks interesting from a privacy standpoint: https://beakerbrowser.com/
Do you think all this people is wasting their efforts in trying to make web apps much more like native apps?
Well, there's an addon for that: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compat...
If you install it, it will mark on the panel which of your extensions are not using the new plugin API, and it will tell you at the top of the panel if Multiprocess Firefox is enabled. I got mine enabled by cleaning house. I'm curious to see how well it behaves under load now!
Also use about:support to see if e10s and async pan/zoom are enabled.
This helped a lot of developers to switch from Firefox (which was the best at the time) to Chrome and the result was that most websites were first Chrome compatble, then the others. Visitors quickly understood it, and made the switch too.
I sincerely believe that the core reason is the developers, and if Firefox would focus more on that part, it would help get back many of it's old users.
I don't say here that the dev toolkit on Firefox is garbage, absolutely not, but it feels clumsy, and a lot of elements are not evident to use and requires more thinking than Chrome. (this is MY opinion).
I'm curious to know if you feel the same?
With IE Microsoft was originally driven to use the web to maintain Windows lock in, to control the platform.
Google (I would assume) is driven by the desire to keep the web as desireable a development platform overall. Web usage means ad sales. Google has knocked it out of the park on this one. Chrome really is an incredible piece of software.
IE by comparison has always been a piece of shit because it never mattered. Microsoft was leveraging it for OS adoption not a successful web.
Today it's the web vs. apps and who knows what it will be in the future. This may sound crazy to some but the web will become a "truck" to some other technology's "car". Sort of how desktop office productivity apps are a monoculture and no one really cares.
Based on this I wonder whether web browser benchmarks should be based on how fast they are after adverts are blocked, not only their rendering engine per se.
If you're going to make a new browser engine from scratch, why not use a language that already exist? I understand there's reasons but stuff like that is just wtf imho.
Also, they've done stuff like Firefox Hello, that login thing etc. Many were good ideas but they should really focus on their core product and making it solid as a fucking rock. I still feel that Chromes developer tools are better, that Chrome is snappier and doesn't crash as often etc. etc.
I use Chrome at my work computer but Firefox at home because Chrome developer tools is still better when it comes to stuff like debugging, viewing json and profiling.
I mean why is that not more awesome in Firefox?
All of your complaints are technical.
> They do stuff like Rust which must be an incredible investment of time.
Rust is a very small team.
> If you're going to make a new browser engine from scratch, why not use a language that already exist?
Because no language other than Rust offers good support for safe concurrency and memory safety without performance compromises.
> I understand there's reasons but stuff like that is just wtf imho.
> Many were good ideas but they should really focus on their core product and making it solid as a fucking rock.
The desire to do that is the reason for Rust.
The two biggest internet trends over the last decade have been app store distribution of mobile apps and the social graph.
Mozilla has did little, maybe nothing to make either of those open and accessible to all. This is due to an ongoing lack of vision and leadership for an organization that tries to do 1000 things and fails at doing the 1 or 2 important things.
It's pretty safe to say that the nextgen decentralized internet will be built, but it won't be built by Mozilla. Instead, they will do probably do something silly like buy Brave. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'd really want to see a browser that's a collection of very loosely coupled independent cooperating programs. There are Uzbl and Surf, but they're only modular systems around a big monolithic core.
That would mean the real end of the browser war, because there won't be any browsers. There will be rendering engines, there will be UI layers, cookie storages and databases, data synchronization programs, etc - and compilations of those (because while everyone wants to have flexibility options and ability to customize and control, no one normally wants to build system piece by piece).
I doubt something like this would happen.
Then let's see how long does it take from start to watch a youtube video. Will beat default Chrome experience anywhere between 20-90 secs. Let's see whether Google can match that.
Very true. There is absolutely no point in spending dev hours on a browser that might net you . . . I don't know . . . a fraction of a percent of whatever audience or target you're after? I had to do that before, it makes the developers upset and their managers even more upset.
performance is great already. but firefox would be even better if it 'loaned' these two features from chrome.
1. built-in flash player. i do not like that i have to install chrome just so that i can view flash videos on ubuntu. html5 is not everywhere yet.
2. better debugging. although i like the ui, the debugger suffers from a real flaw. today i was evaluating the value of some piece of code in the debugger. i expected it to be 1. it reported a 0 because the code had not executed yet. chrome does this better and does not report anything. then after the code has executed it gives the correct value, 1.
these two issues make firefox hard to recommend to 1. users and 2. developers, unless they are vim addicts.
oh yeah: perhaps firefox should do something to support vimperator. perhaps incorporate it into firefox. support it. vim users are a small group but they are the people who will be advising others on technical things.
FireFox probably had the greatest contribution ever to modern browsing though giving us developer tools, plugins, and tabbed browsing.
I personally wouldn't switch to chrome just because it doesn't have tabs on the side (tree style tabs on firefox). This headline doesn't make much sense for many of us.
i try it usually once a year to confirm there is no progress and experienced this few weeks ago, loading and rendering pages it's slowest compared to Chrome, CAF browsers or Brave, heck Firefox doesn't even have pull down to refresh which is showstopper, add-ons are nice but most of the users don't care and i can block ads just with adaway
as for desktop, again unable to handle more tabs properly, freezing and unresponsive while no such problems on Chrome
i dunno maybe Chrome devs test their browser on actual real life desktops and mobiles, while Firefox devs think everyone has flagship and computer with 16gb of RAM?
TLDR: Firefox is significantly (not slightly as article honey talk) slower on mobile and freezing and unresponsive on desktop compared to Chrome and real users notice this, they don't care about add-ons
Personally, I never understood Chrome hype, though I admit, that Mozilla's focus on FirefoxOS was distracting, and slowed down their desktop progress. It's good they are back on track now.
Do you really believe that? The way I see it, most people just don't care. At all. Else they wouldn't sell their souls to private companies (e.g. Facebook and Google) without a second thought and we'd see more outrage against government surveillance that's being pushed in nearly every country all over the world.
Firefox is unlikely to gain much of a market share with only privacy-focused changes. People care about ease of use and especially performance. FF lost a lot of market share due to its horrible performance, compared to Chrome.
Besides, why is it a competition? It's not a zero sum game to see who is the biggest, best browser.
Wakeup Mozilla, this sounds silly.
Right there is why Chrome is eating Firefox's lunch.
These days with chome being so popular linux users can feel like a first class citizen. Reminds me of the comic showing a dog using a computer and "On the internet nobody knows you are a dog". With chrome nobody on the internet knows you are running linux.
You can even gasp use office/adobe clouds based apps.
Er, Firefox and Mozilla are/were both Gecko.
Everytime FireFox got some new feature I checked if they still don't support GPU accelerated Video on my Linux machine. No. They don't. They don't to this day.
This is how I imagine FireFox Devs: https://xkcd.com/619/
Chrome is simple and fast. And that's why it won. I wonder when the Google devs will forget about it and some other browser will take over by focussing on making core features work fast and flawless.
From My Memory:
If we look back now from a grand Overview, IE5, IE6 and IE 7 wasn't that much difference. And these browsers were formed and used widely during the Internet explosive growth era. M$ didn't care about Web Standard, and they dont want to improve either. So in the very early stage of Web and Internet we have a Industry Giant stopping all the improvement to make the Web usable.
And the Firefox "movement" started, not only is Firefox leaner, faster, better and there were a lot of love and organisation pushing for it, at least from a Web standard prospective, they ALL wanted something better then IE. From Macromedia, Adobe, Yahoo, etc.
And Firefox wasnt that good of a browser, it was simply better then IE. So you could argue Mozilla were simply in the right place at the right time. And it didn't really succeed like Chrome had now, at its best Firefox only had 30% of the market share.
We all wanted a faster browser. And Firefox didn't deliver, somewhere around 2008 Google show the world what a fast browser really meant. In reality we already knew how fast it was possible looking at ( old ) Opera. ( Opera failed to gain traction because it wasn't playing well with old IE code. ) Being Google they get a lot of press about it. And since Google being the Gateway to the Internet, we all knew if your site dont play well with Chrome, what the possible consequence were.
If I remember correctly, 2008 was around Firefox 3 time. Lot of bloat were already added to Firefox. People wanted a Multi Process ( a la Chrome ) and a much faster browser. And e10s ( Electrolysis ) were born. What was suppose to be an Firefox 4 features nearly became Duke Nukem Forever, shipped sometimes this year, in Firefox 5x.
Reading from the post and comment, Mozilla never intend Firefox to win the browser war and hence it didn't matter. Sometimes in 2010 or 2011, Firefox 4 was released, If I remember it was a long delay at the time when Chrome was rapidly improving. But Mozilla didn't give a damn, they thought offering an alternative was enough. And they were happy with their market share. They thought both Firefox and Chrome will both eat into IE's market.
They thought they were safe on the Desktop, or they didn't care, or they really think they could do another Firefox in Mobile Market. So they decide to neglect the much needed attention of Desktop Firefox, and start chasing the Firefox OS for Mobile. Only this time, their oppenont is no longer Microsoft sitting still with IE, it was Apple who has a head start of nearly 10 years if you include the R&D spent before the release of first iPhone. And Google who has a head start of nearly 5 years with 100x the resources of Mozilla, and Google actually has an Engineering company culture compared to Microsoft.
You could argue Mozilla were very noble to put up a fight ( if it was ever a fight at all ), or they were, silly. Not only did they choose the worst possible tools to develop on, ( They wanted EVERYTHING to be Javascript ) they also aimed at the WORST possible market segment, the low end $25- $50 dollar Smartphone. So they want to use an inefficient system + tools with the lowest end Smartphone. And they thought it was an good Idea.
Fast forward a few years where they still could not accept defeat on their Mobile OS, no pivot, their Desktop Firefox was making a slow death. Browser Market share used to an Interesting Story, Ars used to run an article on it every month, and now no one cares.
And Later Firefox OS was stopped, my guess were the new Desktop Firefox finance wasn't enough to continue it. Mozilla relent and supported H.264, which it didn't support for the longest time it could. The Never Firefox on iOS became an Abandoned Firefox Sync, discontinued, and reappeared on iOS again.
So Mozilla, by putting it Values and Ideals first, even if it is against its own users' interest or UX, lost its user base, and with that also lose the influence it onces ( barely ) had on the Web.
All it took to make that prediction was a basic understanding of network effects and the history of client platform businesses.
Jumping into the mobile market after Google and Apple had carved it up was insanity. As a consumer, changing the platform you use to access your apps and services carries a high switching cost--most likely you'll lose some of those apps and services and be forced to find replacements.
Customers don't like to make that switch because it's hard, and it's exceedingly hard to think of cases where it's happened. Microsoft established its dominance over the APIs for building IBM PC software in the 1980s and is still the only game in town. It established its dominance over the formats for business documents in the 1990s and is still the only game in town (nearly - Google Docs is at around 20%). Facebook established its dominance over the social graph by the end of the aughts and, you guessed it, is still the only game in town.
Now the web platform is an interesting case because Mozilla and Google really did succeed in wresting that away from Microsoft, but this situation was special for two reasons: one, because Microsoft stopped investing in its browser for more than half a decade (discouraged in part by government action), and two, because the web platform was largely standardized so most sites that worked with IE worked with other browsers. But it was still a tough fight.
Perhaps winning that battle made Mozilla overconfident and contributed to their belief that they could lay a claim to the mobile platform as well. But it was almost impossible from the beginning because there were no users left to win. Once people have settled on a platform they just don't want to leave it. Mozilla did identify the necessary strategy: you have to go after people who aren't yet locked in, and it was their intent to do that in emerging markets. But there really weren't that many people left who were ready to own phones yet didn't, and this time they were facing incumbents who weren't asleep at the wheel.
So, they lost, and underinvested in the desktop browser market in the process, and lost market share there too.
When your management team makes bets it can't win and loses its core market in the process, it's just called bad management. Anyone who was involved in these decisions and is still at Mozilla should be sacked. I think Andreas is wrong about the desktop browser market being lost because in 2017 a website will still render just as well in Firefox as it does in Chrome. In 2022 that might not be the case.
As an aside, with a $400M annual budget and a big win against Microsoft back in the day under their belt, I can see how hubris could have gotten the better of Mozilla. But what I cannot see is how Mark Shuttleworth went and did the same thing: fighting an unwinnable platform war against Apple and Google. He is a smart guy. The decision to do Ubuntu Phone boggled my mind from day one.
If I were at Mozilla I would focus on the desktop browser and I would aim to win there. It's where they have the best shot. If they lose and Google comes to truly dominate the market then Google will use every dirty trick they can to lock it down, control it, and turn it into profits, they are a corporation. If they're going to try to fight some other battle, it should be for a blue ocean, preferably one they can leverage their existing position into.
Removal of Firefox Hello took only 6 months: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1287827
Videos are not seekable in Chrome unless the server implements HTTP 206.
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=66631
This has been a bug since 2010. I simply cannot seek in arbitrary h264 videos without glitching and failure in any version of Chrome.
But I trust it a bit more than I do chrome. I don't feel like they are storing all my data like Chrome does. Maybe that's the angle they should be pursuing.
Not really. Buy a cheap laptop and see Firefox freeze all the time rendering pages while Chrome keeps up like a champ.
All your remaining users are the die-hard users like me, who stay because they like the addons, or some other thing. But Mozilla has decided they'll remove those too, so...
Not to mention the million hooks Google's apps put into Chrome search, browsing history, etc. If you use the Google Search launcher to open an app, it sends which app and the time it was opened to Google!
I'm disappointed that the death of Firefox OS and Ubuntu phone leaves us with little choice for FOSS smartphones.
Heck, even Microsoft Edge can run ad blockers now. There's no shortage of options if ads are the primary thing keeping you away from competitors.