After the discussion yesterday I was thinking, and the passion that went into this full two page marketing campaign in the NY Times is what is needed to save Firefox.
They need to get themselves back to this place mentally, get the community rooting for them again. And spend some money on a passion based marketing campaign.
Edit:
Just to add, back then Firefox had an army of advocates installing Firefox on their family’s and friends computers, basically making them use it. Google co-opted the same army just four years later with similar marketing to get everyone installing Chrome on their family’s and friends computers.
They need to find a way to get that to happen again. I don’t have the answers but suspect privacy and security may be the angle to take.
I suspect the thing holding them back is the danger that attacking Google on privacy grounds in order to push themselves as better could damage the lucrative revenue that they receive from Google.
> Just to add, back then Firefox had an army of advocates installing Firefox on their family’s and friends computers, basically making them use it. Google co-opted the same arm just four years later with similar marketing to get everyone installing Chrome on their family’s and friends computers.
> They need to find a way to get that to happen again. I don’t have the answers but suspect privacy and security may be the angle to take.
This worked because, at the time, Firefox was genuinely, and more importantly, visibly better. You can't honestly say that about Firefox nowadays, and after Mozilla's management laid off tons of their engineering talent, there's been no plausible path for them to get there.
Mozilla systematically shut down all the reasons to advocate for them back around 2015-2016 when they assassinated their extensions. After they switched away from that, almost everything Firefox can do Chrome can do better.
Firefox advocates are reduced to trying to defend using Firefox based on either trivialities or philosophical concerns. And the philosophical concerns seem weak to me since, like Chrome, Mozilla seems to ultimately draw funding from Google.
I'm not against the idea of people keeping up the effort to maintain an independent engine, but it really is hard to justify why given Google's permissive licencing. I am overcome with the irony that the most interesting challenger browser I'm aware of - Brave, run by ex-Mozilla people - is itself using the Blink engine. A pretty sad statement of the strength of the Gecko engine as a renderer.
They needed that groundswell support of lots of extension developers and they torpedoed it. I hope the price was worth it.
> Mozilla systematically shut down all the reasons to advocate for them back around 2015-2016 when they assassinated their extensions
I don't think most people advocating Firefox did it for the extensions. My non-technical family and friends don't care about that.
Firefox used to be just better, obviously better, than what people were using before. Chrome changed that, but still Firefox was the one you could trust not to syphoon your data without your knowledge. It was about having the web not be mediated by a for-profit company that only wants you for your data.
Having competition in the browser-engine space is important, but outside of the HN crowd I don't think most FF advocates did it for that reason. If you didn't suffer IE, it doesn't seem that important.
FF lost because a) it stopped being perceived as better than the competition, b) Chrome took a lot of it's ground through attractive design and marketing, c) Chrome was perceived as better (and I'd argue it was in many respects, at least for a while), and d) Mozilla ended losing a lot of the trust of its previous advocates (with the pocket thing, the Mr Robot marketing stint...).
> Mozilla seems to ultimately draw funding from Google.
I never felt that bad about this point, but may be I was deluding myself. I trusted Mozilla to take Google money without compromising on making FF private and secure.
> t the most interesting challenger browser I'm aware of - Brave, run by ex-Mozilla people - is itself using the Blink engine
Here I agree. There can be lots of innovation in the browser space; may be not the engine, but I'm not sure we totally need it as long as the engine is OSS and there are other companies using it.
Brave does some interesting stuff, but I still would love to see more innovation in how we experience the web. The UX/UI of a browser hasn't changed in a long time.
Extensions were a major selling point, even though as you say, most regular people didn't use them. But the advocates were almost all power users. Mozilla co-opted power users by making a browser that power users wanted and convincing them to evangelize it to regular people.
Through various decisions over the years, but especially the extensions, Mozilla totally nuked the power user case - they decided they wanted to make a browser for the average grandma, not power users. So their core group of supporters lost enthusiasm as they removed feature after feature, and grandma isn't going out and downloading her own web browser, unless...
...it's pushed by a multibillion dollar megacorporation that pushed it relentlessly on all the biggest web properties (Google and YouTube), TV commercials, and had it packaged in installers for other software. That's why Firefox lost: there was no possible way it could complete with Google's marketing of Chrome, while at the same time it alienated its core of supporters with very poor leadership decisions that fundamentally failed to recognize who its constituency was.
I never noticed Chrome itself being noticeably better than Firefox - I'm sure it was in some ways, but it was definitely never the kind of difference we had between IE6 and Firefox.
I remember this NYT ad very well. It was an incredible moment of positive energy. It's really sad Mozilla blew it, and to this day their leadership doesn't seem to recognize what went wrong.
These sort of "which-browser?" discussions come up regularly. In 2014 I would have been laying down 10-15 interesting extensions that gave Firefox capabilities that Chrome didn't have.
Instead the points raised here are
a) Perceptions
b) Design & marketing
c) Perception
d) Trust
Just saying, there used to be real technical ammo to bring to the table. Might have helped shore up the userbase if there were great reasons to use Firefox. Maybe users don't use software for its capabilities, but it isn't like Firefox is bringing much else to the table now.
> Just saying, there used to be real technical ammo to bring to the table
You're right, but those are 2 different discussions. On the one hand, why did Firefox stop being a relevant web browser in the general consumer base. On the other, why did it stop being so great for advanced users. There is some connection between both, of course, but...
Not even all technical users who were promoting Firefox originally actually did use that many advanced extensions. Even if you or I may think FF went to shit, for most even FF advocates, it didn't change that much. That's not why they stopped promoting it.
For me, personally, it was losing Pentadactyl. I'm using Vimium now but it's not even close. I'm still mad about losing that.
I remember how much I freaked out when I found that that extension was installed. I had not installed it myself, the title and the description were pretty weird, there were no hits on Google (yet), etc. I thought that I had been hacked and that my browser data, including passwords, had been exfiltrated somewhere else. And all in the name of advertising for a telly show! This broke my trust with Mozilla forever and I haven't used Firefox ever since.
That's one of a couple of times[1] in my life where I felt what I think people describe as my blood freezing. I knew I hadn't installed that thing and I had no clue how it had gotten there and I too thought I had gotten some malware that even I had neither managed to evade nor caught immediately (I can think of two cases of the latter from the top of my head, one drive by on a completely innocent blog and one where a previously nice program suddenly bundled ad or malware).
Somewhat fortunately for me in the long run I am such a wasted brat when it comes to software that I had to forgive them - I can't stand working in Chrome or Vivaldi, and not only because I don't like Google because I did back then, but for my use cases it is so clumsy (the way tabs work, how it can't handle a few hundred tabs, how it still doesn't support vertical tabs etc).
[1]: the other time being when I had been married a couple of years and found a letter in the paper bin saying that one of my mortgages had defaulted - long story short it went well but I was shivering at the time).
I used to hop between browsers often, and for a few years Firefox felt significantly slower. Does that really matter that much? I don't think so.
I often think that Firefox never really got bad, the difference between FF and Chrome was never massive. It's a bit unfair that FF lost so much market share for that small difference.
Because, at the end of the day, the internet is one big social network, there are huge positive feedback loops that will drive minor differences into massive market share differences.
If one browser is 2% faster than the other, and the cost to choose one or the other is near zero, then expect huge switching.
... And that's before we factor in the far more dominant network effects, like "What comes pre-installed" and "which integrates with my accounts and syncs my aggregated data and preferences history onto a new machine transparently."
The crazy memory usage! I switched from Firefox to chrome due to FF taking so much memory. Then I switched back to FF due to chrome chewing so much memory. It’s still true today. I installed a chrome on my laptop in December. Opened it and left it on the landing page. After a Day it was chewing 3gb of memory…
webSQL /1/ for one thing, killed off in the cradle because of 'developer aesthetics' https://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/06/beyond-html5-database-apis... Ask anyone working with databases today about aesthetics of using indexeddb without wrappers hiding the shittines of mozilla brain child.
1/ yes its depreciated on paper, but it still works
> You can't honestly say that about Firefox nowadays
That's the big problem. Looking at this only from an average user perspective, it's absolutely right, and "oh yeah well that doesn't work as well as in Chrome because Google pushed an overly complicated unnecessary feature into the standards that requires a company the size of Google to actually maintain and develop it", will only get you blank stares.
I hope I'm wrong, but can't help feeling this war is lost. I can't see how you compete when the rules are being written out by your adversary.
For what it's worth though, Firefox for _me_ is better than the other options in every way; container tabs, easy privacy options, clean interface, etc. I love it.
Google is a convenient scapegoat, but the current state of Firefox is 100% Mozilla's fault, and until you realise that you will be far away from a solution.
People who have Firefox installed are not being hypnotized into switching to Chrome. Switching to Chrome involves figuring out an entirely new application for dubious marginal benefit. Or at least that used to be true, until Firefox completely remade their only product to be an imitation of their competitor; now the difference is unnoticeable (other than Firefox is slightly worse.) This is not something Chrome did, this is something Firefox did.
Firefox was a superior browser in almost every way to Chrome, the only selling point to Chrome was that you could crash a tab without crashing the entire browser. Firefox conquered massive engineering challenges and aggressively fought its own users for its current position as an also-ran/historical footnote.
edit: and an indication that Firefox doesn't care is that so many Firefox remoaners feel like they can't switch because they rely on Tree-Style Tabs, and Firefox not only doesn't hire the developer and pull the project in-house, they actively sabotage the project through UI intrusions and inflexibility about those intrusions that require the kind of technical confidence to fix that average people don't have (or want.) And they periodically break even that.
I think Tree-Style Tabs will be as seamless as they were on Firefox 5 years ago on Chrome before they will be so on Firefox again.
> People who have Firefox installed are not being hypnotized into switching to Chrome.
I have personally set up Internet users who I started out on Firefox, and that I later found out were using Chrome as their primary browser because in their words, "[X Webapp] told them to install it", and then it got set as their default.
>People who have Firefox installed are not being hypnotized into switching to Chrome.
They don't have to, because there's a whole market beyond Firefox users, that's where I'm getting.
Edge is the default browser for Windows, but when you visit google, you're asked if you want to download Google browser. Google is a known brand, at this point, after years of people talking about chrome, unless you don't know much about the internet you'll default to chrome.
Other instance: Android, default browser is Chrome for the majority of phones.
Google has years of hammering Chrome into people. Even if Firefox because up to your standards, the struggle would be the same.
> Firefox conquered massive engineering challenges and aggressively fought its own users for its current position as an also-ran/historical footnote.
I regret that I have but one upvote to give. I still use Firefox, but from switching from a secure password-sync system to driving out Brendan Eich to the Mr. Robot fiasco to deprecating the powerful old extensions to almost completely eliminating extensions on Android to constantly changing and damaging the UI (at least on Debian the packagers eliminate a lot of the nonsense), it increasingly feels like either they don't want me to use it — or they simply lack adult supervision.
> Firefox was a superior browser in almost every way to Chrome, the only selling point to Chrome was that you could crash a tab without crashing the entire browser.
In what ways was Firefox clearly so much better?
I know it once had more UI customization (XUL era) but much of that was dropped because of maintenance costs and security concerns (line of death and add-ons conflicting). Today I still use TST and the biggest lingering difference I see is it now has a name block which isn't easily hidden. (Though with userChroms.css it may be possible to do so.)
As soon as I visit every website I am asked to install an app. That doesn't mean I install any. People will only switch browsers if they are discontent with what they have.
At this point in time, people wholeheartedly trust Google. Chrome works well enough for the majority of people.
Would Firefox improvements make such a difference in comparison to Chrome? With the current processing power we have on our hands and laptops, I doubt people would care.
As a marketer, the only way to go about this would be "the path of privacy", and maybe try to get traction in the EU market where privacy is being valued to the point of having proper legislation in place.
If Firefox became the standard for privacy, I can see large public organizations start to make the shift, even if it was for compliance reasons. Then maybe people who use those browsers at work will start to use them at home.
Of course I'm pulling this out of my ass, but it's A path I can see as an hypothesis.
I think people's general dissatisfaction with bloated sites and slow internet will make them try Chrome when Google, a company they mostly trust, tells them its better. Then Chrome will prompt them to become the default and for a lot people that will be it.
No: it would be "Chrome", as the feature doesn't work in Firefox as well "as in Chrome" due to requiring the aforementioned army to develop and maintain.
> This worked because, at the time, Firefox was genuinely, and more importantly, visibly better.
With Manifest V3 in Chrome stopping the use of uBlock and friends, Firefox could be a real alternative that provides users with a visibly better experience. Firefox will soon become one of only a few browsers capable of blocking the CPU unfriendly visual pollution that pervades every webpage nowadays.
Users are going to leave Chrome and I would prefer they don't flee to Brave. If Mozilla fails to position themselves to capture these users (uBlock and AdBlock each have more than 10 million users), they wont be getting another opportunity like this for a very long time.
> "Firefox will soon become one of only a few browsers capable of blocking the CPU unfriendly visual pollution that pervades every webpage nowadays."
Not only CPU-unfriendly, but network bandwidth stealing adverts like auto-play full-motion video ads (in a world where every one of the major "mini-monopoly" ISPs impose bandwidth usage caps with insane overage penalty billing), not to mention the security and privacy risks of some advertising "services"…
> With Manifest V3 in Chrome stopping the use of uBlock and friends, Firefox could be a real alternative that provides users with a visibly better experience.
Coincidentally a similar issue is why a number of people I know shifted away from FF to Chrome: breaking changes in the add-ons system which meant a lot of old ones stopped working completely and some major ones were slower to update then you'd expect. Moving onto better maintained extensions is a good thing in the end in terms of security and stability, but the hassle of needing to find/choose new options meant one of the sources of friction stopping people move to Chrome then existing even if they stayed with FF.
> If Mozilla fails to position themselves to capture these users
Hopefully they'll remember the other side of the coin and organise to make sure those users are aware their option is viable. I don't currently use FF much (though I've experienced some irritations in Chrome in recent months so maybe it is time for my bi-/tri-annual switch of primary browser) but the existence of a significant browser that isn't essentially a reskin of Chromium and isn't locked to one platform is important to avoid the monoculture issues we experienced in IE6's 90+% market share days.
Just want to advocate that, while the difference isn't currently so large that it's obviously visible, Firefox already has better Ublock Origin support than Chrome (and by extension, Brave) have.
This kind of comes down to what your tolerance is for the occasional ad slipping through -- if you need the best Ublock Origin support right now, use Firefox right now. If you only care at the point where it becomes really noticeable, then maybe that won't matter until after Manifest V3 becomes a requirement.
Anecdotally I run into people who say that Safari's adblocking is fine, and if those people feel that way about Safari, they aren't going to view the loss in effectiveness on Chrome as being a dealbreaker post Manifest V3. So I also kind of wonder how many people are actually going to switch just because they lose Ublock Origin.
If they position themselves as THE privacy-first/ad-free browser they could get people back. It would truly be a better experience (specially the ad-free part) which is the only way to get the non-IT crowd interested.
Other features like memory, speed, etc are a commodity now, both browsers are good enough for non power users, but Chrome is stuck with ads because of Google. Firefox is free from this and can use it to disrupt the market.
Maybe a little over a year ago, I switched from Chrome to Firefox (phone, desktop, etc...). I didn't really see much difference, and I liked using Pocket. Plus, I wanted to support Firefox.
Fast forward to last week and I'm considering switching back. It's not because of any sites that Firefox hasn't supported. It's because I recently needed to start using a webapp to access to email from $WORK. They locked up email and now my local Mail.app client won't connect to $WORK.
My preferred way of handling this is to wrap the webapp as a desktop shortcut, so the entire site is wrapped in it's own window, etc. I also have a couple of other work webapps that I like to treat as applications. Chrome makes this easy/possible. Firefox does not.
This used to be something I did with Firefox, but now, it's not possible (or at least easily, on a Mac). Firefox was something you could embed. And now, I have no idea.
Small little features like this are where Firefox starts to lose users. Right now I have both running, but I can't see that lasting long.
I'm glad to know that I wasn't just imagining things. I could have sworn that I could do this a few years ago. But I wasn't sure that I wasn't just mis-remembering.
I learned about it because I happened across a post from Peppermint OS leveraging it heavily to get lightweight 'apps'. Unless you were following specific posts about the feature, you would never have known about it. SSB had bugs for sure (and sot much dev attention was given), but it could have been a great alternative to Electron in a PWA landscape.
I don't know about the details other than from your comment, but if true, that sounds like a scene from a satirical TV show. "We hid this flag in a place most people won't find it. Oh, you didn't find it and use it anyway? Fine, we're taking it away instead of making it more visible. There, that'll teach ya!"
It performs significantly worse than Chrome for me on both desktop Linux and Android (although Chrome mobile not supporting extensions means I use Firefox anyway).
On privacy, I tentatively agree (but Mozilla's actions with Pocket etc. casts doubt), but Firefox is significantly behind Chrome when it comes to safety. Firefox's sandbox is substantially weaker (e.g. it's basically worthless on linux, because you can reach the X server from inside the "sandbox").
> It performs significantly worse than Chrome for me on both desktop Linux and Android
Not sure about Android, as I can’t remember how Chrome performs, but I regularly test things in Chrome on Desktop (or when sites are so third-party heavy, I can’t figure out a sensible way to enable sites), and on Windows the performance for both is indistinguishable, and that’s despite tons of extensions for FF and none for Chrome.
I find Firefox less resource hungry and don't see much performance difference on Linux.
Any resources on the sandbox weaknesses? I know it was the case a while back but I thought those issues had been addressed since.
Firefox works really well on Wayland though, which addresses X's problems (and a few other regarding input and clipboard).
It's better in terms of configurability. It's going to become even better when Manifest V3 comes around because ad blockers on Chrome will no longer be as effective.
> after Mozilla's management laid off tons of their engineering talent, there's been no plausible path for them to get there
Not saying Moz's management isn't crap, but IMO we shouldn't jump to conclusions into either direction here. From what juicy details we have, it might very well be the case that Moz's Rust advocacy (Servo project) turned out to be a cesspool of dictatorship, lack of accountability, and nepotism, and overall just not delivering much value to the endeavor of developing a web browser relative to an increasingly untenable situation and/or risk of PR catastrophe waiting to happen.
> You can't honestly say that about Firefox nowadays
I guess I need to start advocating for this more, because people genuinely don't seem to know: Firefox is, today, straight-up better than Chrome on privacy in user-visible ways; albeit maybe not immediately obvious ways.
Just off the top of my head, Ublock Origin on Chrome doesn't reliably start up when the browser starts up. If you have a page set as your homepage on Chrome, it might get loaded with ads on it even if you have Ublock Origin installed, because Chrome doesn't supply a mechanism for them to defer requests until after extensions load.
I don't know if that counts as visible though, because I see people who argue that even Safari's adblocking is "good enough". Maybe stuff like blocking ads just isn't obvious enough? Certainly all of the privacy improvements in Firefox (and I'll make the same claim, Firefox is just straight-up better than Chrome on a technical level where privacy is concerned) -- but those privacy features are not visible to even technical users, even people on HN don't notice those features.
I would think that being one of the only big browsers on mobile that has good adblocking would be enough of a selling point that almost everyone on HN with an Android phone would be running Firefox on that at least, to me that's a user-visible feature. But I know a lot of technical people who still use Chrome on Android, and I've run into people who straight-up don't know that Firefox supports adblocking on Android.
Informal poll, how many people here with an Android device are currently running Chrome on it, even though Chrome doesn't block ads on Android? If that number is high among technical users, then either adblocking doesn't count as user-visible, or people just don't know? I'm not sure what to make of that.
But I want to push back against this narrative a little bit that Firefox just doesn't have anything going for it anymore. Firefox is indisputably the best mainstream browser available available today outside of Tor for privacy, adblocking, and (even with the decline of functionality) extension support. I'm just not sure that stuff matters for market share; or maybe the gap isn't wide enough that people care.
> Firefox is indisputably the best mainstream browser available available today outside of Tor for privacy, adblocking
The thing is, while things like privacy and adblocking are important, they are passive defensive features made necessary by others; they aren't things that make you feel good, they just make you feel less bad about certain things. When an extension could customize your browser exactly the way you wanted, that was exciting; when TreeStyleTabs felt integrated into the browser, instead of taking several seconds to load and feeling bolted on, it felt like an amazing part of _Firefox_; when mouse gestures worked reliably on every page, including new tab pages and plaintext-mime pages (really, sort this out Mozilla! No reason other than bad coding for extensions to not work on text/plain pages), it felt like a part of the browser, like Firefox was super-charged.
These are the things people can get excited about, and so gets people to show them off to others and recommend it. It's hard to talk about how this nuanced privacy feature is better for X complex reason, in casual conversation; much easier to demonstrate how you're able make the browser fit you like a glove with customizations A, B, and C (and it's more psychologically natural to want to show off positive additive features, too).
> and (even with the decline of functionality) extension support
Extension support, yes, but in terms of actual extensions, it's a yes-and-no situation. The thing about this and other customization that Mozilla doesn't seem to understand is, it's not enough to have "better" extension support, it needs to be "better enough" to overcome the difference in popularity between Firefox and Chrome, and hence the difference in availability/motivation of addon developers.
I still use Firefox as my main browser, but the extension support is not "better enough" for me anymore (see issues mentioned in the first para above), and so for the first in time actual decades, after switching from IE6 to Firefox back in the day, I'm considering switching or partially switching to another browser for my daily use (and have been doing so little by little, with Brave and qutebrowser).
I use Edge at $JOB (because we live in Windows land and Edge integrates better with Windows stuff) and Firefox at home. I also used Chrome in the past.
Whereas I agree Firefox used to be way better than IE when I first used it, I can't really perceive any notable difference on performance for those 3 browsers.
There are some minor diffs (edge has veritcal tabs and allows login in with your AD account), but that's it.
More important in this day and age is since Firefox 91 there is a checkbox in privacy and security to automagically SSO using the account on the Windows 10/11 Account Settings page that Edge uses.
> back then Firefox had an army of advocates installing Firefox on their family’s and friends computers.....
Yeah. I did that. Probably closing to a thousand, from pushing inside Enterprise to libraries and Uni Campus. And I watched first hand how they all slowly migrate themselves to Chrome. Because it was faster. I still have vivid memory of it happening.
>I don’t have the answers but suspect privacy and security may be the angle to take.
I did that too. Against Google. Heck That was before anyone on the internet even suspect Google was a privacy nightmare. Every single one believed their Do No Evil BS. ( Even Mozilla ). I was the contrarian then. And that didn't work either.
I was there in 2004 NY Times Ad. Or even pre Firefox era. Firefox was a better browser than IE6. And even then fighting against IE6 was hard. Very hard. The lesson I learned was that most people dont care much about ideology. ( As long as it doesn't hurt their interest ) They just want a browser that worked. And would only switch if it was better. I dont think Firefox is a bad browser in 2022, but I also dont think it is faster or better than Chrome either.
At the end of the day people can only do so much to help push Firefox. It ultimately falls back on Mozilla. It is Mozilla that needs to change or up the game. Unfortunately history dictate the only way to solve this problem is Mozilla think of it as a problem. Otherwise its current status at ~10% marketshare is enough to sustain its operation. Nothing bad enough is happening, no interest or incentive for changes. Inertia. Let's keep thing this way. The exec keeps getting paid.
So yes, it is counter intuitive. The only way to save Mozilla ( or change Mozilla's direction, I guess the word "save" is a hyperbole, at least from Mozilla's perspective. ) isn't trying to get more user to use it. It is actually to push people to abandon it.
>its current status at ~10% marketshare is enough to sustain its operation. Nothing bad enough is happening, no interest or incentive for changes. Inertia.
To take the role of devil's advocate, what should Mozilla's goal be here? They're a self-sustaining nonprofit competing against titans of the modern business landscape. Should they aim for 100% market share? 2%? Why?
Maybe, counter-intuitively, instead their focus should be on fair, reasonable standard-setting that allows 50 2% market share flavors, rather than themselves achieving 100%? The scuttlebutt on these boards is Chrome achieves it's advantage by unfairly or aggressively pushing standards or proprietary features that become a de-facto standard, so maybe Mozilla's derivative mission should be lobbying for sector-specific binding rules on common standards and interoperability for dominant technologies? That's a public policy problem not unique to browsers or a single dominant vendor, and one Mozilla is well positioned to address, maybe even politely enough not to disrupt its primary income stream
My ideal has always been 30% in total. Large enough to have a voice on many web issues, and not small enough to be pushed side. And interestingly enough, Firefox at its peak was around 30% during its battle against IE and web sites finally had to test their site against Firefox.
Right now it is 10% "Desktop" only ( I should have been clear ), Firefox get practically zero on Mobile. ( You can ignore Statscunter's Global All Platform numbers which somehow points to ~5% for Firefox. I never had time to dig up how they arrive at the number as it doesn't make any sense ). A combined market share including tablet would be 2-3% if not less.
It wont ever be a 100% because Mozilla dont own any platform. They try to have their own platform with Firefox OS. Which was at the time painful to watch.
And of course, may be Mozilla dont have to change. Some people only wants to break their reliance on Google. You could always have another competing browser with chromium.
>After the discussion yesterday I was thinking, and the passion that went into this full two page marketing campaign in the NY Times is what is needed to save Firefox.
I've been thinking too and really I feel the only way to save Firefox at this point is to destroy it. Mozilla is too bloated and the executives have zero interest in working on a browser and extremely wasteful spending, firing engineering teams.
The best thing that could ever happen to Firefox at this point is Mozilla running out of funds and disbanding and something new made from the ashes and the codebase.
If you think I'm wrong, remember Firefox was originally called Phoenix for a reason.
IMO the angle back then was the mission to free the web from a corporate stranglehold — “Take Back the Web”. I believed this mission was Mozilla's primary focus.
That mission is even more relevant now than it was 18 (!) years ago, and yet Firefox is trying to be just another pushy lifestyle brand. They're friendly like a used car salesman.
Firefox should show people (show, not “tell loudly”) that software can be a useful tool that isn't trying to trick them. A lot of people expect computers and phones to be hostile, because that's all they've ever known.
Spin up a virtual machine and compare Firefox's first-run experience with GNOME Web's first-run experience. Which feels more like a tool you're in control of?
The pure browser business doesn't bring in any money. Browsers are a commodity, you sell them as a vehicle for the real thing. Much like razor handles for the razor blades.
Firefox is a great handle but nobody wants or needs their blades.
I think this is what the Mozilla execs believe and also why Firefox likely wont exist at all in 15 years.
Making a web browser in the hopes of getting people to subscribe to your VPN or relay systems seems an absurd engineering and management cost, surely if you just want to sell VPN subs there are easier ways than taking on one of the most complex engineering tasks in tech.
Of course, I don't think Mozilla should be selling VPN subs at all but their exec team certainly think it's a major priority.
Low vision, low ambition, riding on past success till they sink. Confident I'll see the headline "Mozilla switches Firefox engine to Blink" within the next 10 years.
I don't know why you think Mozilla VPN is a "major priority" for anyone. The service is repackaged Mullvad, and I doubt the WireGuard wrapper or the website have some huge development cost. It seems like an easy way to try and earn a few extra bucks, not a major priority.
A link on the homepage is not some huge deal, who even goes to Mozilla's homepage? People that want Firefox will search for Firefox, with no VPN mentioned.
I don't think the burden of making the VPN client forced them to fire the developers.
Meanwhile, everyone else complains that they take search money from Google.
What would be acceptable to you as a monetization model for Mozilla? Google makes money from Chrome because Chrome fits into their larger advertising goals. Apple makes money from Safari because it fits into their larger goals about platform control, particularly on iOS. Brave makes money because they inject ads into the browsing experience.
What should Mozilla make money on? They apparently shouldn't take money from Google because that makes them dependent on a competitor. They also apparently shouldn't focus on platforms like Pocket or Email because those are independent of the browser. And they also apparently shouldn't sell VPN subs that are directly integrated into the browser because those are bad. Should they charge directly for the browser itself? That's a good way of crashing your browser market share.
Off the top of my head, I wish Mozilla took direct donations for Firefox, but I also don't think that would be enough. I wish Mozilla would do more donation campaigns for specific features, that would be really cool, but also not a solution on its own. I wish we saw more sponsorship of the browser, but people seem to be angry about sponsorship, particularly when it comes from large tech companies. Outside of those partial solutions, I really like that Mozilla is doing subscription features around the browser. I don't personally feel like the subscription features they're currently offering are particularly strong, I wish they would make some more compelling stuff that's easier for me to recommend to people. But it's not the core idea of subscriptions that upsets me.
> I think this is what the Mozilla execs believe and also why Firefox likely wont exist at all in 15 years.
Nobody in the current market monetizes browsers directly with the exception of Brave, and Brave's monetization model is toxic and should be rejected. Everybody else is using browsers to further other interests that they have. Vivaldi is partner deals and secondary services. Safari is iOS. Chrome is Google dominance and other services. Edge is Bing/Windows. Who is selling browsers successfully as its core product?
Bringing a lot of money doesn’t mean it’s stable. Search traffic to google is putting all of your eggs in one basket and putting you at odds with your users interest.
There you go. What the rest of the comments in your reply don't tell you is that Mozilla's expenses outweigh their income for years, which means they are constantly losing money. [0]
Given that Google is their only source of income, (excluding one-time payments) it is indeed very unstable and they are ultimately at the mercy of Google, despite 14 years ago promising [1] to move away from being completely dependent on their income. At this point, Mozilla is on life support.
Privacy (which is their main selling point) to Mozilla is also a joke to them. If Google wasn't bad enough, why not work with Meta on 'ads' too? Not exactly 'privacy first' - they might as well drop that claim.
> I don’t have the answers but suspect privacy and security may be the angle to take.
They are close to being best here.
Fix extensions is on top of my personal list.
But so far you get moderated (edit: for advocacy even, what an irony given the title of this post!) if you try to remind them about the parts they broke a few years ago, see all the hidden comments at the bottom of this bug for an example: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1332447
Personally I am moving to LibreWolf these days (Firefox with minor fixes). LibreWolf can halfway expect to see donations this spring. If they also fix the extension API it will become a "must have" product for me.
So, as the OP, just want to add my current advocacy thoughts.
I have advocated for my family to use three different browsers of the last 20 years. First Firefox, then Chrome, now I push them all to just use Safari. They have all slowly migrated to Apple completely, fist with iPhones then to Macs.
Over the last 5 years I have pushed them to all use Safari, as it has better battery usage on all Apple devices, a “just works” sync across devices, and better default privacy situation than Chrome.
For me to advocate for Firefox (and move to it myself) it would need to be better at at least two of those three things than Safari.
I have no idea how representative my views are, but despite liking the browser, I find Mozilla's current marketing creepy, and it puts me off donating to the company. For one example, they send the same weird Valentine's day marketing email every year (that Cupid and the Grinch thing), which I wouldn't mind too much, except that the way it's written comes across like it's trying to trick the reader into thinking it's relating a recent conversation. I also find the tone of the email offputting; the first time I saw it, it made me feel like I was eavesdropping on someone's in-joke with their friend, while I didn't know anyone involved. This may be too much attention to give to one marketing email, but then they do send the same exchange every year!
Also, personally I would prefer them to focus on privacy and security and avoid anything more partisan; I haven't counted up but it feels like the majority of their campaign emails are about battling 'unsafe' content online, and I have no reason to trust them to be the judges of what qualifies as unsafe. So it puts me off donating any money for the things I do care about, because I can't trust they won't use it for something I completely oppose. I also would expect that a company that starts getting into the business of content moderation is going to find it conflicts with any privacy and security work they're doing, sooner or later.
Was it Ubuntu or Firefox that would mail you a free sticker pack if you asked? sometime between 2002-2005. I think that era is my favorite internet era that I experienced. Mid 90s was cool too.
I still try Firefox every few years, and then go right back to Chrome because the FF renderer doesn't feel as fast as Chrome's. Goosing performance would go a hell of a way towards piquing my interest again.
I use Firefox and Chrome on a daily basis (Firefox for browsing, Chrome because it's well integrated with a lot of IDEs) and I'd argue it's false to say, in 2022, that Firefox is a bloated slow mess. I would not say either that it's faster than Chrome but I honestly doesn't feel any difference.
If I had to choose between the two without the ideological side, I honestly don't know which one I would choose. Probably Firefox for tabs containerization.
Totally agree. At least on KDE I really don't notice any difference in performance and always have both installed.
I use Firefox 99% of the time though. I think it is something about the tabs that I like better but it is a minor difference and purely based on personal taste.
It is too late. Firefox is just a reskinned chrome. The only reason i still have firefox on my computers is because there are websites who only work in chrome or firefox.
Isn't that way too extreme? Firefox and Chrome don't share a lot of similarities, except arguably both implementing manifest v3 after Google's push, but even those are fairly different.
Firefox is one of the few browsers left that isn't a reskinned Chrome: its a completely independent implementation. Perhaps you're thinking of Edge, Brave, or Vivaldi?
I think the new extension architecture is fantastic, and I think it is great that they encourage people to use it.
However I don't think it was smart to kill the raw power of the old extension API. I would have loved for them to add scary warnings to the store, and ruthlessly break backwards compatibility. However they went so far to make it impossible for the average user to run these extensions. You need different versions of Firefox and you can't load them on the store.
As I user of Firefox for ~ 13 years who switched to Chrome a few years ago, I think the ultimate question is what would the users want, what would distinguish Firefox from Chrome and how many actual users would care about that.
In my opinion privacy focus of firefox is important, but I doubt it'll be enough to bring large number of users from Chrome. I.e. have ublock, but I also use a lot of google products so the inconvenience of changing the browser, installing new extensions etc is not worth some hard-to-measure increase in privacy.
Back in the day the reason why I liked firefox is because of so many extensions for everything, but when they broke many of them 4-5 years ago, that was a moment I switched to chrome.
It is a lesser evil when Mozilla is not changing my browser's default search engine to Google and when Mozilla isn't forcing my browser to open "We value your privacy" sites infected with Analytics or Tag Manager after updating.
Firefox, too, is beholden to the ad industry. That's the problem.
They could get popular fast by blocking ads by default, but of course, they'd have no income then.
Nevertheless, there's a bunch of other stuff they could do to help their popularity that they aren't currently doing, I'm sure. I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
I mean the alternative to free and ad-driven is a paid service; what could a browser offer to make people (companies, consumers) pay for a browser? Ideally a subscription fee. I can think of a few things.
The big one: Highly efficient, network-level ad blocking by default, as well as other nuisance blockers (newsletter sign-ups, cookie opt-in, etc). This one would be very popular since it removes 80% of the bulk and annoyances of the modern internet, but it would likely become problematic as they would get blocked by websites everywhere.
Built-in VPN / TOR. Difficult because those get blocked a lot. I wouldn't want my computer to be used as a TOR exit node either if I paid a monthly subscription for my browser, putting me at risk for investigations by local law enforcement.
Access to other services like e.g. youtube premium, again in the name of an ad free experience. That would require Google being on board with it though, and since their income is mainly ads they would be quite antagonistic.
I still think if Chrome hobbles ad blockers it'll be a great day for Firefox. Whenever I set up a new machine for family members an ad blocker is one of the first things I install. It's not just to get rid of the digital pollution that most sites engage in now, it's also a security improvement to block ads.
>Honest question, what is there to fix in Firefox ?
If it's not broken why do so many devs refuse to support it because things they code in Chrome don't work in it.
Not that I condone that, but it's what I experience working with dev teams the past few years they all just complain that features are missing from Chrome so it will be too much work to test/support FF.
> If it's not broken why do so many devs refuse to support it because things they code in Chrome don't work in it.
You'll surely meet a lot of people doing what you mention. I would bet most of them are young enough to not have gone through the so-called "browser wars" [1], at least what they now call the first one, the one that ultimately led to the creation of Firefox.
Their attitude does not mean at all that there's something actually broken in Firefox, just that it is so much easier -and lazier- supporting a single browser's quirks and ignoring the rest. Even if that means discarding standards and compatibility. Specially if it means that, because you will take advantage of those particularities.
I was doing front end dev in the IE6/5.5 era so yeah it’s incredibly frustrating to hear it over and over when you’re right deep down it’s all excuses because supporting one browser is less effort.
> If it's not broken why do so many devs refuse to support it because things they code in Chrome don't work in it.
This mentality is exactly why Internet Explorer was dominant for so long. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. There are many differences between 2000s Microsoft and 2020s Google but there are also quite a few similarities, even down to funding their opposition to avoid the appearance of a monopoly.
Getting extensions as customizable as they were before the great purge? They promised replacement-APIs with the new extensions system which they still haven't delivered.
I have spent years advocating for mozilla and firefox but now I do the opposite. They are a blight that needs to be put down. I honestly think they are worse than the googlopoly at this point because of the manipulation and dishonesty involved in trying to keep some semblance of "moral high ground" when all they do is work against the common interest of the FOSS community.
Sorry, edited the comment. Didn't mean it in a bad way. I meant at that time it was way ahead in terms everything (developer tools, browsing experience etc) Browsers have since levelled the playing by working closely on standards and implementing features.
Well if Brave is the spiritual successor to firefox I'm done with the web.
This is not a jab on you or Brave. I'm simply completely disenfranchised by the whole browser / web thing. Firefox keeps alienating me, Brave is not the answer as it never passed the smell test with all their crypto bullshit. The web itself is run by corporations trying to mine and sell our attention.
More and more I feel like gemini is the only answer to these issues. I will keep the general web as a gateaway to email and bank accounts and forget that it exist.
I already pay premium for some things for the sake of not being a part of the ad economy. Sam Harris's podcast being one example.
How about selling a premium version of Firefox, with polished versions of uMatrix and uBlock included? I might pay a small renewing subscription for that and for other things like that.
Firefox apparently has less than 200 million users left. 0.1% of those taking part of such a thing (say $5/mo) would mean a monthly revenue of 10 million. That would make some sort of a dent in their finances and if they communicated this clearly, it would be harmonious with their mission.
"Mozilla Foundation places two-page
advocacy ad in The New York Times (2004)"
Okay, I will respond with some feedback
intended to be helpful. I'm a long time
Firefox user. Until recently Firefox was
my "default" Web browser.
I'm trying to remain a good and happy
Firefox user, trying REALLY hard, but
Mozilla is trying even harder to have me
quit using Firefox. Mozilla has already
in the last few weeks finally gotten me to
tell Windows that my default browser is
Chrome and no longer Firefox. I WANT
Firefox back as my default Web browser,
but for that Mozilla has to stop working
so incredibly hard to have me quit using
Firefox.
"Mozilla, NO, greater than 99 44/100% of
the time I do NOT want a proctology exam,
an unanesthetized root canal procedure, a
piercing for a nose ring, a tattoo, a
Firefox update, a popup window, a
popup window announcing another Firefox
update, or the Firefox update that
enabled those 10s of thousands of popup
windows I have gotten in the last few
months.
A Firefox popup window is where Mozilla
believes that it has some information for
my eyes, attention, and work more
important to me than the Web page the
popup window is covering and that I was
trying to read, and that belief is nearly
always badly WRONG.
A popup window is where Firefox stops
and refuses to continue until I stop what
I'm doing, pay attention to why my
computer has stopped, move my hand, and
click on NO once more of the tens of
thousands of times recently. I can be
patient, but somewhere on the way to >
20,000 times, I can become infuriated.
I HATE, to be more clear, deeply,
profoundly, bitterly HATE and despise, am
outraged and infuriated by, unwanted
updates and popups.
In the last few months I have declined
Firefox updates announced in popup windows
literally, conservatively > 20,000 times.
To be fully clear, did I mention, I HATE
nearly all updates and popups."
Here is some feedback on some of the
current disaster:
From some Firefox update, that I did not,
NOT,
N.O.T.
approve, my current version of Firefox is
badly broken. Why: When I try to have
Firefox display a Web page, from a URL on
the Internet, a tree name on Windows, or
the Web site that has my email, I get a
popup that says that Firefox is not my
default Web browser, which was false, or a
popup saying that Firefox is starting in
"safe mode", which from all I could tell
was inappropriate. Then I get another
popup window announcing that a Firefox
update is available.
My suggestions:
(1) Cut WAY back on the popup windows. If
there is a really serious computer
security problem, then announce that via a
popup window. Announce it no more than
three times. On average, there should be
less than one such serious problem a year.
(2) Restore the option that permits a user
to decline updates and also decline
announcements of updates.
(3) Document your work. There is a lot to
usage of Firefox -- DOCUMENT that work in
TEXT in high quality technical writing.
(4) For options, be willing to write the
option values to a text file with a simple
syntax, a file that a user can edit with a
standard text editor and then specify to
Firefox as the options to be used.
They need to get themselves back to this place mentally, get the community rooting for them again. And spend some money on a passion based marketing campaign.
Edit:
Just to add, back then Firefox had an army of advocates installing Firefox on their family’s and friends computers, basically making them use it. Google co-opted the same army just four years later with similar marketing to get everyone installing Chrome on their family’s and friends computers.
They need to find a way to get that to happen again. I don’t have the answers but suspect privacy and security may be the angle to take.
I suspect the thing holding them back is the danger that attacking Google on privacy grounds in order to push themselves as better could damage the lucrative revenue that they receive from Google.