Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Firefox Mozilla

Can Firefox Be Saved? (zdnet.com) 318

Posted by EditorDavid from the endangered-browsers dept.
"Even with another infusion of cash from Google, you have to wonder just how long Firefox will survive as a viable, mainstream web browser," argues ZDNet contributing editor Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: I've been using Mozilla's Firefox browser since it was still in beta. In 2004, for a while, it was my favorite web browser. Not because it was open-source, but because it was so much better and more secure than Internet Explorer. That was then. This is now. Firefox is in real danger of dying off...

Mozilla and Firefox still produced important work. You need to look no further than the JavaScript, Rust, and WebAssembly languages. They were also champions of security and privacy. Projects such as embracing DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) and overall security improvements were great, but users didn't care. With the arrival of Google's Chrome browser, users turned from Firefox to Chrome as their favorite browser...

Firefox is on its way to irrelevance. Making matters even worse, Mozilla's just had its second round of layoffs... As technology writer Matthew MacDonald put it, "Mozilla "." Firefox's security and development teams have also been hard hit. This is bad. In January. Mitchell Baker, Mozilla Corporation CEO and Mozilla Foundation chairperson, said it let people go because of declining interest in Firefox, and thus reduced earnings, and that Mozilla was looking for more revenue from "sources outside of search" but "this did not happen." It still isn't happening. According to Mozilla's latest annual report, the majority of its revenue is still generated from global browser search partnerships. This includes the deal negotiated with Google in 2017... Baker assured onlookers that Mozilla would "ship new products faster and develop new revenue streams." These include its bookmarking app Pocket; its virtual rooms Hubs; and its $4.99-a-month Firefox VPN. Excuse me if I don't buy any of these new revenue sources....

Firefox will live on in one way or the other. It's open source after all. But Firefox as an important browser, or Mozilla as a significant open-source developer hub? No. I can't see it. Those days are done. Firefox is officially on my endangered species list.
Technology writer Matthew MacDonald ended his Medium essay on a more hopeful note. "If you have the skills and time, the best possible support is to join the Mozilla community and contribute to their code base."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Can Firefox Be Saved? More

Can Firefox Be Saved?

Comments Filter:

  • I still love Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Captain Kirk ( 148843 ) on Sunday August 16, 2020 @05:44AM (#60406049) Homepage Journal

    I don't get why the Mozilla Foundation doesn't simply maintain Firefox with incremental improvements and stop trying new silly products. Its open source - we don't care what percentage of users use it - we care about having a free software browser.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ormy ( 1430821 )
      This. TFS says "Firefox will live on in one way or the other. It's open source after all." That's enough for me. I could not care less if Mozilla withers and dies. As long as some kind soul(s) steps in to continue keeping firefox alive, updated, secure, and forever open source I will be more than happy. It has all the features I want, a wealth of quality privacy extension, and it's not owned by a multi-billion dollar advertising outfit.

      • Re:I still love Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)

        by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Sunday August 16, 2020 @07:45AM (#60406279)

        >"I could not care less if Mozilla withers and dies. As long as some kind soul(s) steps in to continue keeping firefox alive"

        Don't underestimate just how complex and time-consuming actual maintenance of Firefox is. It is not something some "kind soul" can do. It is one thing to fork something that is modern and maintained to make your own browser. It is quite another to maintain the basis of what you forked.

        • Need to strip it down (Score:5, Insightful)

          by sycodon ( 149926 ) on Sunday August 16, 2020 @07:54AM (#60406309)

          Every browser that's come along has done so with one primary marketing pitch: We are learner, cleaner and faster.

          But then as time goes by, they start bolting shit on and before you know it, the GT40 you thought you had turns out to be an under powered station wagon.

          Someone has to have the nerve to build something great and leave it alone .

          • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

            by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday August 16, 2020 @08:19AM (#60406381)
            Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • Someone has to have the nerve to build something great and leave it alone .

            The difficulty is, who decides when it's optimally great? Sure, I loved Firefox in the beginning - almost everybody did. But would I have willingly left just-pre-Australis Firefox in favour of the Firefox that existed circa 2005? Hell no! For me, (and probably lots of other folks), the sweet spot for FF was just prior to Australis. But for many others, the Golden Age was probably back near the beginning.

            Now my sweet spot is Pale Moon, and I hope to hell it stays around and doesn't jump the shark the way Fir

            • Someone has to have the nerve to build something great and leave it alone .

              The difficulty is, who decides when it's optimally great?

              Stop thrashing the code, you're not making it better.

              The premise is not that we should stop making changes because we've achieved perfection, the premise is that we should stop making changes because code thrash demonstrably reduces the code quality over time and results in bloated monstrosities that have to be abandoned to be escaped; not because they can't be fixed, but merely because the maintenance developers refuse to stop making changes, and if they start over they've written less code and so it will

        • Um...didn't three "kind souls" create Firexox by de-crufting Netscape Navigator?

          Why did this browser need 200+ apparently expendable (no matter how good or talented) people to keep it maintained? More than three are needed for sure, but who says a browser props up a corporation?

          • Those people weren't maintaining it. They were tripping over themselves trying to add new features to it, at the expense of letting great features fall by the wayside or removing them altogether. That was the problem.

            Way back in the day, Firefox had an almost infinitely configurable UI. You could take elements (like the URL bar, home button, bookmarks, button, etc) and just drag them around. Rearrange them however you please. I came up with a config which worked really well for me - took up minimal s

      • Will it go on? I doubt it. Once there's not enough money to pay developers on a constant basis, you'll get people doing it on a part-time basis.

        And lots of infighting on things like different features, some of which are incompatible with others, so fork it â¦

        And fixing bugs without being paid for it is boring when you can be scratching your own itch â¦

        Google threw them a bone this time to keep the EU antitrust people away. That won't work if they have so few users that they're no

    • Re: I still love Firefox (Score:5, Informative)

      by longk ( 2637033 ) on Sunday August 16, 2020 @06:18AM (#60406109)

      Exactly. Launching VPN services and other nonsense just turns me off. I donate for a browser not all this other stuff.

      I get it, if you launch a product that takes off you can start raking in the big bucks. And in fantasyland that money could go to Firefox.

      But money is addictive and such a product will undoubtedly take priority over Firefox. It will either end Firefox, or turn it into Chrome.

      • Re: I still love Firefox (Score:5, Informative)

        by vrt3 ( 62368 ) on Sunday August 16, 2020 @11:11AM (#60406877) Homepage

        > I donate for a browser

        Actually you don't, and this is something very important to be aware of. When you donate, you donate to the Mozilla Foundation, which has all kinds of initiatives toward "Building a healthier internet". Developing Firefox is not one of them: that falls under the Mozilla Corporation. The Mozilla Foundation is partly financed by the Mozilla Corporation, so it's not like your donations to the Foundation eventually end op in the Corporation.

        This is a common misconception. I had no idea about any of this. I learned about it from a number of comments on a recent Ars Technica article. And it's true: the donation page (https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/) says "Contributions go to the Mozilla Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization based in Mountain View, California, to be used in its discretion for its charitable purposes. They are tax-deductible in the U.S. to the fullest extent permitted by law." Here's the Foundation's homepage: https://foundation.mozilla.org... [mozilla.org]. Nothing there talks about developing Firefox. And according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]: "The Mozilla Foundation is funded by donations and 2% of annual net revenues from the Mozilla Corporation, amounting to over US$8.3 million in 2016."

        So there is actually not even a way to donate to help support Firefox development! The only way to help, I guess, is to actively contribute to the code.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      As long as the current management remains (Mitchell Baker and cronies) there is no hope for Fireofx. Not only are they completely incompetent, they have repeadedly put their giant egos ahead of everything else.

    • I can only guess: Because
      1. They are technically still a business, as opposed to Linux. As in: They still think they are Netscape.
      3. Google basically forces them to. As Google adds pointless kitchen sinks every month, and stupid developers and users go "Oooh, shiny!", and switch away from Firefox, or keep Chrome on their new PC/device that got set up by somebody indirectly paid/forced by Google. (Like Android.) Or like Flappy Bird/WhatsApp/Facebook: "Because everyone's using it! (He says, while nobody's usi

      • I am not in disagreement with you, that the control needs to change.

        But Linux is different. Ignoring Linux is headed by Linus who is literally the guy who created the kernel, and not only profits from its success, wants it to succeed, but is contributed to by other companies so you get crazy situations where Microsoft's Patented exfat is having Samsung's latest Android incarnation patched into the kernel.

        Mozilla is some kind of charity business hybrid run donationware for a handful of search engines so they

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Abysmally bad management at Mozilla.

      • Re:I still love Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Sunday August 16, 2020 @09:47AM (#60406613) Homepage Journal

        I think that's a bit harsh if you look at where Firefox was when Chrome came along and took the lion's share of the market.

        Firefox was single threaded and it showed. Chrome's performance was lightyears ahead and back when Flash was still a thing one tab crashing didn't bring the whole browser down.

        Firefox also had a huge amount of legacy cruft in the codebase and the add-on system was fundamentally insecure and incompatible with a multi-threaded architecture.

        So they had two huge problems that could never be fixed without years of work and a lot of pain. And to their credit they did fix them and Firefox is one of the fastest browsers out there now, while being better than Chrome on memory usage.

        • I think if we look at history, Mozilla's management has been pretty terrible. That's a subjective statement, of course. But objectively, it's pretty clear there were a number of very serious gaffs and missed opportunities. Who else do you blame but management?

          What you said is true, but they reacted to all those issues *painfully* slowly as an organization. By the time they did (in 2017), they're basically now "as good as" Chrome (perhaps even slightly better), but being "as good as" a different product

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by DrXym ( 126579 )
      Because they are trying to make money. The money goes back to fund those improvements and allow them to diversify.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by znrt ( 2424692 )

      you don't need 750 employees to maintain an open source and privacy concerned browser. that's a business. and they have been ...

      "looking for more revenue from "sources outside of search" but "this did not happen."

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Start cutting (Score:5, Insightful)

    by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Sunday August 16, 2020 @05:48AM (#60406057)

    And I don't mean personnel. Start cutting the mountains of useless code from Firefox and make it a user friendly browser again. Stop hiding configuration settings in some nebulous listing the average user can't find or won't be willing to seek out or removing them completely. Stop trying to force out updates every six minutes. Stop adding non-browser related cruft.

    Firefox used to be slim, fast, simple but instead of listening to the end users, all these overpaid hacks known as developers assumed the "We know better than you because we're developers" attitude.

    And this is the result. Mozilla has no one to blame but themselves for Firefox's downfall.

    • I am totally down with having a more useful 'configuration' dialog with an advanced button, rather than the purposefully hidden About:Config page.

      For other things though, I dont really have too much problem with firefox. Edge is just awful and broken, and Chrome seems to want to date every nefarious bit of web software out there and make-out on the first date.

      I have a preference for Firefox over Chrome simply because of how it operates too. It could definitely use some improvements, not the least of which

    • They do not do that by choice, I think.

      It's just that when Google announces its latest set of kitchen sinks, they have no choice but to follow along or be shunned by stupid users and developers.

      To make matters worse, we learned during IE6 times, that simply being feature-for-feature equal is not enough. You need to add something that distinguishes you, to give anyone any reason to choose you over others.
      And to give anyone any reason to *switch* to you, you even need something *more*, to overcome the cost o

      • They do not do that by choice, I think.
        It's just that when Google announces its latest set of kitchen sinks, they have no choice but to follow along or be shunned by stupid users and developers.

        They absolutely do have a choice. They can make additional functionality an add-on, or they can bake it into the browser. That was the whole fucking point of Firefox originally, where it was "a platform", it was simple, and you could extend it as you wanted, not as some foundation decided you wanted it extended.

        When Mozilla started cramming shit into Firefox that nobody asked for whose purpose is to spy on your activity (i.e. Pocket) and furthermore spending donation money buying it and integrating it they

    • Re:Start cutting (Score:5, Insightful)

      by _merlin ( 160982 ) on Sunday August 16, 2020 @07:06AM (#60406189) Homepage Journal

      But when they do cut "useless" or at least little-used code like the RSS features, Slashdot readers are up in arms about it. Same when they removed the mountain of crud known as XUL. No-one can agree on what the useless features are (except for Pocket - that's the one thing everyone agrees shouldn't be in Firefox).

    • >"instead of listening to the end users, all these overpaid hacks known as developers assumed the "We know better than you because we're developers" attitude."

      I agree with you on that. However, Chom*/Google is no better in that regard. Perhaps even worse.

      >"Mozilla has no one to blame but themselves for Firefox's downfall."

      That is not entirely true. Google thew TONS of power/money/mindshare/advertising behind Chom*. And after capturing all the other non-Firefox browsers (except the single-platform

      • instead of listening to the end users, all these overpaid hacks known as developers assumed the "We know better than you because we're developers" attitude.

        They got GNOME DISEASE.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dwpro ( 520418 )
        I disagree, the portable document format should render natively in a browser, full stop.

      • Fuck having to install Adobe. The browser should do that. Basically you're telling all Linux users they should install proprietary software in order to read a common data format.

    • Re:Start cutting (Score:5, Insightful)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Sunday August 16, 2020 @09:58AM (#60406651) Homepage Journal

      What actual crud is there in Firefox now? I'll give you Pocket, but other than that?

      They ripped out the old NSAPI, XUL, the RSS reader, FTP support, that tab organizing thing the name of which I can't remember now... Apart from Pocket it's a pretty lean browser these days.

  • There sure are a lot of attacks against firefox (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Spit ( 23158 ) on Sunday August 16, 2020 @05:50AM (#60406059)

    I wonder who would have a vendetta against a browser which supports DoH, blocking trackers, a privacy dashboard, containers and out of the box isolation for facebook.

    • Re: There sure are a lot of attacks against firefo (Score:4, Insightful)

      by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 ) on Sunday August 16, 2020 @06:19AM (#60406111)

      > DoH, blocking trackers, a privacy dashboard, containers and out of the box isolation

      One of them is not like the other ...

      *I* am against Mozilla punching a hole in my own VPN/DNS/CA to get exclusive spying rights for them and any government its employees are under, escpecially in light of the current Mozilla commercialization move. So are you saying I am Facebook?

      And I am against being so batshit insane retarded that you wrap a lower layer protocol into a higher layer protocol that needs the lower layer protocol for no reason at all, except to web-ify ALL the things!
      Like there isn't a solution that doesn't involve the software design anti-pattern known as the inner-platform effect that the WhatWG lives off of...

      • Re: There sure are a lot of attacks against firefo (Score:4, Insightful)

        by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Sunday August 16, 2020 @09:58AM (#60406655) Journal

        *I* am against Mozilla punching a hole in my own VPN/DNS/CA to get exclusive spying rights

        Dial back the hyperbole.

        Mozilla have announced it repeatedly and have clear instructions on how to disable it. It's not like they either forced you into it or tricked you. Just because you don't personally want it doesn't mean it isn't a sound default for the majority of users.

        • Re: There sure are a lot of attacks against firefo (Score:4, Informative)

          by alexo ( 9335 ) on Sunday August 16, 2020 @10:48AM (#60406817) Journal

          *I* am against Mozilla punching a hole in my own VPN/DNS/CA to get exclusive spying rights

          Dial back the hyperbole.

          Mozilla have announced it repeatedly and have clear instructions on how to disable it. It's not like they either forced you into it or tricked you. Just because you don't personally want it doesn't mean it isn't a sound default for the majority of users.

          I have a guest WiFi on my router which uses a DNS provider that allows me to block some addresses. DoH allows anyone to circumvent the "my house, my rules" policy since I don't have control over the browser they are using.

    • "Security theatre" costs time, money, and stability. DNS over HTTPS, for example, is not that useful of a security feature. It sends your DNS requuests to a centtralized off-site server, which can, itself, track your DNS requests. It's a "performance enhancement" to allow that off-site DNS server to perform better than your local ISP resolver, but that that off-site server has not, so far, proven to benefit local users at all.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Indeed. There is actually zero need for this. The only thing DNS over HTTPS allows is that centralized tracking. The security benefit for the user is likely negative.

      • Cloudflare is the default provider for DoH in Firefox. Its a decision people can make about whether they want Cloudflare having a log of their web traffic, or their local isp. My local ISP is Comcast, I can just about guarantee they are mining my DNS log for everything its worth. Cloudflare, on the other hand, has a page that they detail, legally binding, how privacy will be protected- logs won't be kept beyond 24hr etc https://wiki.mozilla.org/Secur... [mozilla.org]

  • Just copy it to an external drive...

  • It's a smartphone world (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tuppe666 ( 904118 ) on Sunday August 16, 2020 @06:00AM (#60406073)

    They burnt both their next generation engine...which would have been one of my choices.

    They burnt security which puts their VPN business in a bad light so that option looks weak.

    They need to fix the UI...and it doesn't need a overpriced massive team of *nudge* *nudge* mates.

    I think their main choice is to go "mobile first". mobile looks like an unloved stepchild and was wonderful...till they broke it with a confusing UI. With proper promotion.

    Launch antitrust against Apple in mobile to get full Firefox on iOS. The wind is in the right direction...nobody is gonna want that skin on iOS.

    But the bottom line is there is something wrong with the finance at Firefox...it is like middle management is siphoning of the Money from the search engines. It needs to run like a... business.

  • Anecdotally XUL seemed to kill it for me (Score:3)

    by inflex ( 123318 ) on Sunday August 16, 2020 @06:02AM (#60406075) Homepage Journal

    I remember when they (Moz) put all the effort in to the XUL UI system, and maybe it was coincidental but I recall performance going to the dogs after that. Above and beyond everything else, the lacklustre performance keeps pushing me back to Chrome over Firefox, which is sad, as I've been using Firefox from back in the days when it was first spawned from the Netscape code and Phoenix ( still prefer the name :( ).

    • The general idea of a UI description language is not wrong though. It is a very useful concept.

      The problem was more with it being an interpreted XML-based language with a bad intertreter too.

      Of course, with me being in the camp of generating all UI straight from the data model and a theme, want any of that to be killed with fire anyway. :)

  • Saved how? Browsers were always a popularity war. (Score:3)

    by foxalopex ( 522681 ) on Sunday August 16, 2020 @06:03AM (#60406077)

    The sad reality is that the general public will always use the browser that works "best" for them. It was never about security or anything that any browser company ever did. People for example use Google because it works for them. They'll drop it faster than you can blink if they can find something that works better. Mozilla was for a while able to build their business model on that popularity but as anyone knows the public can be fickle. I use Seamonkey for example, probably the most direct descendant of Netscape for nostalgic reasons. It doesn't work as well as Chrome or probably even Firefox but I hardly expect it to be "saved" for that simple reason.

    • Users are prone to inertia. They have a hard time evaluating against any reasonable metric, so I don't agree.

      You can see how Firefox came to dominate, and Chrome, but that market share was years to gain...and lose.

      Firefox has a 1.2 Billion guaranteed money for 3 years and some market share, but we can't see it's direction changing.

      • Users use what is lying close at hand, until it won't do something they want to do. Then and only then will they go looking for an alternative, if then.

        Users used Aieee! until it fell behind. Then they switched to Firefox.

        Then Chrome started to be preinstalled, bundled etc., so they switched to Chrome.

        • ...but Winifred Mitchell Baker is not pursuing anticompetitive complaints against Apple, Google or Microsoft.

          #FreeFortnite

  • Firefox needs to be saved from Mozilla (Score:4, Informative)

    by xack ( 5304745 ) on Sunday August 16, 2020 @06:05AM (#60406083)
    A real fork by the community, working on the current codebase instead of old codebases like current forks, putting power users front and centre as they are the people most likely to migrate to a new browser. I’ve been calling for a proper fork for years, but people would rather complain rather than take action.

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by fenrif ( 991024 )

      So you have come here to complain instead of taking action yourself?

    • There are forks around, but Firefox unlike say Libreoffice with ran on half a million...runns on over 400million a year. Nothing will change until that is taken away.

    • Iâ(TM)ve been calling for a proper fork for years, but people would rather complain rather than take action.

      It's a big job and it's going to take a lot of talent, because it's baroque.

      I'd love to help, but I'm not a programmer. I can write docs, though. If you organize an effort, put me down to do that.

      If all you want to do is whine, well, whine on! That's all I'm doing. But it's also all you're doing.

  • Not after they gutted their developers while increasing their yearly budget. That strategy allows for a short term profit in exchange for sacrificing the business. Are there any anonymous cowards willing to leak to whom funds are going now? Has everyone with the technical know-how to obtain this information already been laid off due to 'loss of funding' or 'covid19'?

  • Embracing DoH? Really? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 ) on Sunday August 16, 2020 @06:09AM (#60406091)

    Of all the things, you had to display DoH as if it was a good thing?

    This only shows that all your statements regarding security are worthless, since you are clueless.

    DoH only means Mozilla gets exclusive DNS spying rights, and furder enroachment of pointlessly web-ifying ALL the things. That's literally all it does.

    You probably believe TLS with CAs by people you never met built into your browser is secure too ... --.--

    • DoH only means Mozilla gets exclusive DNS spying rights, and furder enroachment of pointlessly web-ifying ALL the things. That's literally all it does.

      Except Mozilla doesn't get your DoH queries. They go to Cloudflare if your ISP is not running a DoH server, and there is a strict privacy policy [mozilla.org]. And it provides secure name service to users who can't otherwise get it. So it literally provides a needed service to some users, and it literally doesn't give DNS spying rights to Mozilla. It literally does nothing you claim it does.

  • Browsers are a commodity. I've watched my friends and family switch browsers since Netscape days. When do they switch? When the current browser becomes a pain to use and the alternative is better. I personally noticed myself doing the exact same thing, except with some security and battery life aspects in consideration. I switched to and from Firefox 3 times since it's been around, switched out every time the browser became painfully slow, a resource hog, or not able to properly render pages I wanted to see

    • Firefox is my go-to browser for using the Zotero bibliographic citation software, and without Zotero, I would be dead-in-the-water with respect to any scholarly publishing.

    • Exactly this. I kept Firefox for a long time even when most people I knew had switched to Chrome. I was using their developer tools and their password manager so I really didn't want to switch but I finally switched because Firefox was too much of a memory hog. Now that I've switched, I likely won't look for a new browser until I find a problem with Chrome that is compelling enough to want to go thru the hassle of switching.

  • still the only major browser (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fred6666 ( 4718031 ) on Sunday August 16, 2020 @07:24AM (#60406219)

    Which is available on both desktop and mobile and which supports ad blocking.
    For that reason alone, it will always be useful.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by indytx ( 825419 )

      Which is available on both desktop and mobile and which supports ad blocking.
      For that reason alone, it will always be useful.

      I personally wish all of the UI settings would stay the same between updates. I really don't understand the need to change any settings or UI. That being said, it's not like I'm going to switch to something else. Ad blocking, script blocking, and deleting all of my private date each time I close the browser. This is absolutely why I use Firefox as my primary browser when I'm . . . browsing.

    • Vivaldi [vivaldi.com] is an excellent, highly customizable, chromium based browser with integrated ad blocking on desktop and Android. I recommend it.

  • Chom* Borg (Score:5, Insightful)

    by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Sunday August 16, 2020 @07:40AM (#60406253)

    >"If you have the skills and time, the best possible support is to join the Mozilla community and contribute to their code base."

    The best possible thing, is to just download, install, and use Firefox. It costs nothing and requires no "skills" or hardly any time. That is what keeps it relevant. Web developers and sites then see it being used and can't pull crap like the "IE Only days", only this time with Chom* [Google].

    Make no mistake- there is only one non-Chom* alternative in the multiplatform browser space, and it is Firefox. If that is lost, not only have we lost browser choice, there is then nothing left to prevent Google from pushing any "standard" it wants (unless you count Safari, which only runs on Apple gear, and most Apple users probably are using Chom* now, too). Google is already flexing its muscles, the writing is on the wall. The only reason Google donates anything to Mozilla/Firefox is to keep Firefox around as a token of competition.

    If you value privacy, standards, choice, configurability, and security- then you should not only be using Firefox now, but encouraging family and friends to do the same. Users switched away from Firefox because of Google's constant harassment banners on their near-monopoly search engine and other products. And for the performance BEFORE Firefox Quantum. Once Firefox converted to Quantum, almost 3 YEARS ago now, Firefox has been on-par with Chom*'s speed and features, and better in many other ways. And now the threat of the other Chom* from Microsoft, who is pushing it HARD. If you have not used Firefox in the last 3 years (especially the 2), then any per-conceived negative notions you have about it are almost certainly wrong.

    This doesn't mean I want a world with ONLY Firefox- but there is no fear of that. If it had even, say, 20% of the users, that would be enough to prevent it from being ignored and keep the pressure of real competition present. The web is supposed to be about standards, not a single browser (full or engine), controlled by a single company, whose motivations are absolutely not aligned with actual privacy, choice, or open/community-based-standards.

    • Re:Chom* Borg (Score:4, Insightful)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Sunday August 16, 2020 @07:59AM (#60406319) Homepage Journal

      If you value privacy, standards, choice, configurability, and security- then you should not only be using Firefox now, but encouraging family and friends to do the same.

      If only the Mozilla foundation valued those things more, they would put less crap we didn't ask for into the browser, and work harder on bug fixes. I know they're not as resume-building as putting in new features, but they're much more important.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rastos1 ( 601318 )

      ... you should not only be using Firefox now, but encouraging family and friends to do the same.

      I do. But I also think that Mozilla lacks the feedback on new features because everyone turns the telemetry off. I'm torn on that. On one hand I don't want anyone to collect data on my browsing and other habits, on other hand how is Mozilla supposed to know that I turn off URL formatting and trimming, DoH, disable autoupdate, ask for download, external application for pdf, ...

  • Winifred Mitchell Baker (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tuppe666 ( 904118 ) on Sunday August 16, 2020 @07:40AM (#60406255)

    Remove Winifred Mitchell Baker, she is getting 2.5 million and by every measure she is not earning it.

    Incompetence should not be rewarded.

    • Whoa... she's the CEO, and she still is the CEO. With this type of discussion about Firefox, she's still the CEO? Firefox is dying on her watch.
  • They are doing things to chrome no consumer is asking for. Such as the recent move to obscure the url bar. Seems like this is a phishing risk but hey I don't get paid the big bucks coming up with ideas for things no one wants.
  • I still have my Firefox - Take Back The Web t-shirt, and it is relevant now more than it was back in the day. Mozilla needs to take privacy more seriously, and stop covertly installing data-slurping Windows Tasks. Mozilla needs to stop pissing off the add-in developers with the constantly changing add-in API (this goes for Thunderbird also). I've lost much needed functionality because of those API changes. And Mozilla needs to stop loading up Firefox with superfluous cute features. It's a browser. Per

  • Firefox is on its way to irrelevance. Making matters even worse, Mozilla's just had its second round of layoffs.

    First, there's nothing about Firefox' offerings that make it irrelevant. Second, the only problem it has is money. And money's an issue because everyone's reducing expenditure due to the GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS brought on by the GLOBAL PANDEMIC.

  • Never Google's chrome browser (Score:3)

    by TuballoyThunder ( 534063 ) on Sunday August 16, 2020 @08:34AM (#60406413)
    I will give up on using a web browser before using Google's chrome browser on my personal or business machines.

  • For all these people who are complaining, are they using the latest version.
    I say that because generally later versions of things use more memory.
    I use an older one. It also has all the bells that people like that are removed in whatever is more modern.
    As for other browsers, what choices are there, on desktop of course?

  • Just pry it out of the Mozilla Foundation's (cold dead) hands. The MF has long outlived its usefulness, and has become nothing but yet another corporate shill. There are plenty of those already.

Slashdot Top Deals

The unfacts, did we have them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude.

Close