With Growing Revenue But Slipping Market Share - Is Firefox Okay? 242
Industry analysts and former Mozilla employees are concerned about Firefox's future, reports Ars Technica, warning that the ultimate fate of Firefox "has larger implications for the web as a whole."
Since its release in 2008, [Google's] Chrome has become synonymous with the web: it's used by around 65 percent of everyone online and has a huge influence on how people experience the Internet. When Google launched its AMP publishing standard, websites jumped to implement it. Similar plans to replace third-party cookies in Chrome — a move that will impact millions of marketers and publishers — are shaped in Google's image.
"Chrome has won the desktop browser war," says one former Firefox staff member, who worked on browser development at Mozilla but does not want to be named, as they still work in the industry. Their hopes for a Firefox revival are not high. "It's not super reasonable for Firefox to expect to win back even any browser share at this point." Another former Mozilla employee, who also asked not to be named for fear of career repercussions, says: "They're just going to have to accept the reality that Firefox is not going to come back from the ashes...."
Mozilla's financial declarations from 2020 said that despite the layoffs it is in a healthy place, and it expects its financial results for 2021 to show revenue growth. However, Mozilla and Firefox acknowledge that for its long-term future it needs to diversify the ways it makes money. These efforts have ramped up since 2019. The company owns read-it-later service Pocket, which includes a paid premium subscription service. It has also launched two similar VPN-style products that people can subscribe to. And the company is pushing more into advertising as well, placing ads on new tabs that are opened in the Firefox browser.... Selena Deckelmann, senior vice president of Firefox, says Firefox is likely to continue looking for ways to keep personalizing people's online browsing. "I'm not sure that what's going to come out of that is going to be what people traditionally expect from a browser, but the intention will always be to put people first," she says. Just this week, Firefox announced a partnership with Disney — linked to a new Pixar film — that involves changing the color of the browser and ads to win subscriptions to Disney+. The deal speaks both to Firefox's personalization push and the strange roads its search for revenue streams can lead down.
Deckelmann adds that Firefox doesn't need to be as big as Chrome or Apple's Safari, the second largest browser, to succeed. "All we really want is to be a viable choice," Deckelmann says. "Because we think that this makes a better Internet for everybody to have these different options."
Interesting stats from the article:
"Chrome has won the desktop browser war," says one former Firefox staff member, who worked on browser development at Mozilla but does not want to be named, as they still work in the industry. Their hopes for a Firefox revival are not high. "It's not super reasonable for Firefox to expect to win back even any browser share at this point." Another former Mozilla employee, who also asked not to be named for fear of career repercussions, says: "They're just going to have to accept the reality that Firefox is not going to come back from the ashes...."
Mozilla's financial declarations from 2020 said that despite the layoffs it is in a healthy place, and it expects its financial results for 2021 to show revenue growth. However, Mozilla and Firefox acknowledge that for its long-term future it needs to diversify the ways it makes money. These efforts have ramped up since 2019. The company owns read-it-later service Pocket, which includes a paid premium subscription service. It has also launched two similar VPN-style products that people can subscribe to. And the company is pushing more into advertising as well, placing ads on new tabs that are opened in the Firefox browser.... Selena Deckelmann, senior vice president of Firefox, says Firefox is likely to continue looking for ways to keep personalizing people's online browsing. "I'm not sure that what's going to come out of that is going to be what people traditionally expect from a browser, but the intention will always be to put people first," she says. Just this week, Firefox announced a partnership with Disney — linked to a new Pixar film — that involves changing the color of the browser and ads to win subscriptions to Disney+. The deal speaks both to Firefox's personalization push and the strange roads its search for revenue streams can lead down.
Deckelmann adds that Firefox doesn't need to be as big as Chrome or Apple's Safari, the second largest browser, to succeed. "All we really want is to be a viable choice," Deckelmann says. "Because we think that this makes a better Internet for everybody to have these different options."
Interesting stats from the article:
- "Mozilla's own statistics show a drop of around 30 million monthly active users from the start of 2019 to the start of 2022."
- Mozilla's figures now also show around 215 million Firefox Desktop clients active in the past 28 days — a number which has stayed stable.
- Yet In 2008, a full 20% of the 1.5 billion people online were using Firefox to surf the web — including more than half the web surfers in Indonesia, Macedonia, and Slovenia.
- "Across all devices, the browser has slid to less than 4 percent of the market," writes Ars Technica. "On mobile it's a measly half a percent..."
- Next year, Firefox's "lucrative search deal with Google — responsible for the vast majority of its revenue" — is set to expire.
Oh come on (Score:5, Insightful)
By this logic, everyone should have given up 15 years ago and just conceded the web to Internet Explorer.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Oh come on (Score:5, Interesting)
Very almost. It's still guided by Google. For example there is no way of hosting your own sync server (for syncing Bookmarks, Open tabs, history and passwords etc). People have added bug reports but have been told it just won't happen.It's very clear vendor lock-in.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
This sounds like nonsense, honestly. None of these things are part of Chromium to my knowledge. If you submit CDP bugs they will be addressed, I've done it.
You can save passwords locally but for remotely stored passwords your only option is with google, this is easily verified by checking the available options in settings. I find it very easy to believe that they wont add a way to store passwords remotely until there's a standardized way to do so and that they are not interested in open sourcing the remote password server code although I'm unable to find bugs requesting any of this at https://bugs.chromium.org/p/ch... [chromium.org]
Re: Oh come on (Score:2)
Thatâ(TM)s the beauty of F/OSS, youâ(TM)re free to fork it.
Re:Oh come on (Score:5, Informative)
That's not entirely true. Google removed the ability to use Google's servers for sync in Chromium, and removed the code that syncs to them. They aren't interested in maintaining it, but there is nothing stopping anyone else adding an open sync capability. For example, Opera offers Opera Sync and Microsoft Edge offers to sync to your Microsoft account.
Re:Oh come on (Score:5, Insightful)
Open Source does not automatically equal good. Google has from the beginning been able to use the open source label to divert attention from their true goals, access to all information.
Re: (Score:3)
Open Source does not automatically equal good. Google has from the beginning been able to use the open source label to divert attention from their true goals, access to all information.
Open source doesn't mean good or bad, it means people can fork and start their own version. That really restricts your ability to make crippleware but open source projects sponsored by big companies are typically run almost exclusively by that company (would you want to donate your time to Chrome when Google Devs are getting paid to develop it for the benefit of Google?).
But yeah, Google doesn't really care about keeping the source secret because they care about the information instead, but they're not doin
Re: (Score:2)
If Google doesn't want something in Chrome, Chromium isn't going to have it.
Re:Oh come on (Score:5, Insightful)
Not following. The article says it's important to have a choice of browser engines. How does your statement follow from that premise?
Firefox was important 20 years ago as a counterweight to IE, and is important now as a counterweight to Chrome.
Re:Oh come on (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree on this point, the major problem with Firefox is that each time they do a change to the UI or API for the plugins then it drives away users and no users are gained.
It's possible to do a lot of things to improve the experience without disturbing and annoying the users.
Re:Oh come on (Score:4, Informative)
If they hadn't changed the add-on API then Firefox would be dead by now.
Firstly it was needed to allow Firefox to become multi-threaded and to add proper sandboxing for security. Having add-ons written in Javascript that can screw with the internals of the browser is powerful, but also means there is a huge attack surface that Mozilla can't control or even quantify, and that necessary performance and security fixes can't be made.
Secondly it would mean that add-ons are completely different between Firefox and every other browser. By adopting a common API (with Firefox extensions) most add-ons can use the same code-base for both the Firefox and Chromium versions. Without that, developers wouldn't bother supporting Firefox in many cases. A lot of the old extensions were already stale and half broken due to lack of updates.
Firefox is a good browser. What drives people away is competition from other browsers and lack of mobile versions.
Re:Oh come on (Score:5, Informative)
Well what drove me away was the UI changes. It used to be a good working UI that they then started making worse and worse continuously.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I made a few tweaks when they made the last change but that's it. It seems okay to me, what bothers you about it and what did you switch to?
Re: (Score:3)
There have been a lot, but the thing that finally "broke the camels back" so to say, was the tabs.
As in: why did hey remove tab borders?
There is a real reason why in real programs all UI elements normally have some sort of clear border..
But there were a lot of other things along the way before that as it got worse and worse over time.
I switched to a combination of Chrome and Opera.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not a fan of the new tabs either, but they weren't bad enough to stop me using the browser.
Re: (Score:3)
Typically it's a case of finding which straw breaks a camel's back. For me it was the dumbfuckery about changing the "Copy Link" shortcut key from A to L. It seems minor but it typifies everything which is wrong with Firefox today. The thought process went as follows:
"Copy Link Loc(a)tion" was too complicated for people to understand so it had to be "Copy Link"
"Copy Link" doesn't have an 'a' in it so that couldn't stay the keyboard shortcut. The fact that "Inspect (Q)" doesn't have a fucking 'q' in it was c
Re:Oh come on (Score:4, Insightful)
The tabs are definitely awful. Fortunately I can still userChrome them to look half-decent, and I can even do tabs under the url bar still if I try hard. At least until they remove userChrome, which I'm sure they will in the next year or two.
Firefox has completely abandoned the vary users who make up their core userbase. Why not let the end user decide how to make his tabs look? And come to that, why not just allow the user to put the tabs where she wants, even if that's "tabs on bottom." Like the Gnome project, they have a fetish with making the UI less customizable and more beginner friendly, yet they forget that beginners generally don't use firefox. It's the users who've used Firefox for many years who are their bread and butter. Chasing these mythical new users isn't going to benefit anyone. Besides, the UI was already usable before by new users. I really don't understand this self-destructive behavior.
When I can no longer make firefox look and act the way I want it to, then there's no point in even using it and I'll just have to use Chromium (more likely I'll switch to Vivaldi). It's hard to understand how the Mozilla foundation cannot understand their core users, who are the reason Firefox exists at all in browser share.
Re:Oh come on (Score:5, Insightful)
>yet they forget that beginners generally don't use firefox. I
It is more fundamental than that really. I cannot count the number of people who I got to use Firefox instead of Internet explorer back in the day, but it was dozens.
Basically each "enthusiast" has a potential to influence a lot of family and friends who are less tech savvy on what tech produtcts use. Thus making your product less favored by them, you potentially hurt the use by others too.
So a good combination would really be "easy enough to use directly" but at at the same time customizable and powerful enough for power users.
Firefox seems to have totally forgotten the second part.
Re: (Score:3)
Very good point. I also did likewise back in the day. In fact I rolled out Firefox to nearly 1000 computers in my uni department. You're absolutely correct about the enthusiasts being the key to Firefox's success, and that alienating them is Mozilla's core problem.
Today if someone asks me what to use (usually on Windows), I just tell them to use whatever they'd like, usually Chrome or Edge, because Firefox doesn't add much for them. Most of the privacy extensions are available for Chrome and Edge, mainl
Re:Oh come on (Score:5, Insightful)
The UI drove you away to what browser, with what great UI?
Firefox is still the least bad of all browsers, and there is no reason to expect that to change.
Re: (Score:3)
Not great UI, but workable. Mostly the other browsers have UIs that are not designed by the company in Dilbert as Firefox seems to be.
I mean this one: https://dilbert.com/strip/2022... [dilbert.com]
Re: (Score:2)
The UI still available in Seamonkey.
The other browsers don't have any better UI.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, the tab borders are actually visible both in opera and chrome. It is only Firefox that has felt the need to make it harder to see tabs.
Re: (Score:2)
No download statusbar since the extension suck now.
Re: (Score:3)
Having add-ons written in Javascript that can screw with the internals of the browser is powerful, but also means there is a huge attack surface that Mozilla can't control or even quantify, and that necessary performance and security fixes can't be made.
The problem with this line of argumentation is that it applies to anything powerful. Example:
"Having applications running directly on the hardware instead of through a VM and that can request higher privileges and screw with the internals of the OS is powerful, but also means there is a huge attack surface that Microsoft/Apple/Ubuntu/Whomever can't control or even quantify, and that necessary performance and security fixes can't be made."
Followed by defending that everything should be locked down into only
Re: (Score:3)
If they hadn't changed it, I'd still be using it. So would be other people in my family and friends circle who's software choice amounts to asking me "what do you think is best?" And at least one major local company IT would still support having FF on their machines most likely, because I and a close circle of my friends that pushed for its adoption from IE, and it was the same circle that now pressed for ending it as something that offered no additional value post Quantum to spend any IT resources on it.
An
Re: (Score:2)
, and is important now as a counterweight to Chrome.
Except that Firefox fails miserably at that point and has done so for over a decade.
Re: (Score:3)
That doesn't make any sense to me. As a browser, it's fantastic. As far as your privacy is concerned, you won't find a better option.
You'd think a site like Slashdot would be actively promoting the thing like they did in the old days.
Besides, on mobile, you can use uBlock Origin and other extensions. This isn't possible on Chrome. That alone makes it the only reasonable choice for mobile browsing.
Re:Oh come on (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know what the problem at Mozilla is but they seem to be focused on the wrong things. Firefox gets a lot of work on the core browser engine and some cosmetic changes, but they leave deal breaking bug there for a decade or more. The kind of bugs that stop people using their browser.
I would switch to Firefox immediately if they fixed the Android version, but it's been broken on Pixel devices since Pixel devices came out all those years ago. I've reported the bugs, I've tried to fix it myself even. I really want Firefox to work for me, but Mozilla doesn't seem motivated to get me as a user.
Firefox on desktop is a lot better, but these days sync between desktop and mobile is very important to a lot of users and Mozilla doesn't seem to understand that. Their Android browser is just bad, and doesn't get a lot of attention. If they want to recover market share they should bring it up to the same standard as desktop.
Re: (Score:3)
What bugs do you notice on pixel?
It crashes for me maybe once a month. The only plugin I use is ublock origin.
Re: (Score:3)
Font sizing is broken.
There are actually two separate bugs. The first one, which was fixed, was that Firefox Android when set to automatic font sizing chose a font that was way too small due to a miscalculation that only seems to affect Pixels (and presumably other devices with the unusual screen size/resolution/PPI data it returns).
The second on, which is still there, is that the manual font sizing doesn't work. It appears to be the same issue, something about the screen data the API returns screws up the
Re: (Score:3)
I use it on android (not a pixel) and it crashes at least once a week and while I submit bugs seemingly the same issue has persisted for a couple of years. I stopped using the desktop version as my main browser when they broke the add-on for gnome-password-manager integration some years ago, there's a bug but nobody is working on it.
Re: (Score:3)
There's a bug in Firefox that has persisted literally for years where it stops loading new pages until restarted. For some reason I have this bug reliably on my Win7 box. They'd rather spend their time and effort putting a new theme on Firefox every few months than fixing major bugs.
If it was really a users' browser I'd be able to save a webpage as displayed, too. I used to use Scrapbook+ for this, but when they broke the extension API used for filesystem access they broke it, too... presumably to force me
Re: (Score:3)
Am I the only person not affected by these mysterious problems? Or is this like the memory leak people complained about for more than a decade after it was fixed?
I ran Firefox on Windows 7 as my primary browser for years and never once had this problem. This is the first time I've seen anyone make this complaint.
. I used to use Scrapbook+ for this, but when they broke the extension API used for filesystem access they broke it, too... presumably to force me to use Pocket.
Yeah, I'm not going buy into insane conspiracies, but there are tons of different extensions that are actually maintained that will meet that need for you.
Firefox switched to web extensions years
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm *still* running Firefox 68 on Android since the addons are *still* not working. It's been a YEAR since they added the convoluted way of installing custom addons ( https://blog.mozilla.org/addon... [mozilla.org] ) in Nightly. How long does it take until getting possibility to install whatever I want without creating accounts and collections?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's not really what the article is about. It's just about Firefox specifically being in trouble, not some direction towards a single browser ecosystem - there are plenty of browsers out there other than just Firefox and Chrome.
But I think the article is right, I think Firefox is in trouble, what amazes me is that people have only just realised. Firefox's marketshare plummeted long ago, and for good reason - a lack of interest in users opinions, severe defects like memory leaks and freezes that made it un
Firefox is not resisting (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason Firefox became popular was the add-ons and being otherwise highly configurable.
It succeeded because nerds used and recommended it for those specific reasons. If Mozilla gave a fuck they would listen to the users who left not the few who remained.
I'm glad they're happy with low market share which reflects their chain of obviously carefully considered chain of adult choices, but I don't care for what Firefox became so being beyond redemption I'd prefer Mozilla die the Firefox be forked. As Phoenix rose from the ashes of Nutscrape Aggravator so something else can rise from the ashes of Firefox but its continued existence merely serves as an obstacle to change.
Re:Firefox is not resisting (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason Firefox became popular was that IE sucked and was a security mess.
Nerds recommended it for security, and used it because it was faster.
It will struggle to come back because chrome, Safari, and Edge are all pretty good. It's hard to get people to change away from pretty good.
Re:Firefox is not resisting (Score:4, Interesting)
Until people discover that using Chrome, Safari and Edge puts them into the hell-hole of being tracked by the manufacturers.
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
From a comment under another story:
> If a career software professional who keeps up to date can't point to tangible downside [of online tracking], casual users certainly won't care.
I can't point to anything that will hurt now. I can point to Trudeau's blackface affair, I can point to this https://medium.com/@hansdezwar... [medium.com]
But all people discount the future. Won't budge.
The only people I know that do budge fast are those that felt the power of the KGB under the USSR. i.e. very few...
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
That's the thing, it doesn't. Chrome sends a single installation ID when checking for updates, and Safari and Edge both have tracking protection built in and don't send your browsing history to the developers.
Firefox is no better in that regard. It has similar defaults (e.g. Google for search) and similar tracking protection features. It too does not send your browsing history to Mozilla. Anyone who cares about privacy will have a bunch of add-ons, and to be fair Firefox is a little better in that regard as
Re:Firefox is not resisting (Score:4, Informative)
The safe browsing feature does not send your browsing history to Google.
It downloads a list of known malicious URLs in the background, and queries it locally. You can verify this by looking at the source code and checking with a packet capture tool.
Re:Firefox is not resisting (Score:5, Interesting)
Firefox also succeeded in a very different environment. It's not 2002 any more, and most users just don't care how they view facetube. Only the turbo nerds will "configure" anything beyond dark theme or something like that. Hell, even extensions, it seems that only about 5 million people use uBlock, which is the most popular extension by far: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-... [mozilla.org] so the vast, vast majority don't care.
They might've retained a few more users if they didn't chase the Chrome trends but in the end Google would've rolled over them anyway through their search and content dominance.
I've always used Opera back in the day until they sold out, but in the end switched to Firefox because at least it's better than Chrome and isn't Google.
Re: (Score:2)
You can opt for Vivaldi these days, created in the spirit, similar to Opera, by the same entrepreneur, yet it is still Chromium platform.
To maintain browser platform is serious responsibility, therefore there hardly can be many of them long term. Which is the fundamental value of Mozilla/Firefox: to be solid option. Which will continue to carry the value further on. Apple was not numerous, and was considered as a dying platform just before becoming huge explosion of success. It is important innovator today,
Re:Firefox is not resisting (Score:5, Informative)
The current state of Firefox add-ons is probably the best of any browser. Best of all they are making some progress on mobile add-ons. There are browsers that let you install add-ons in Chromium based Android browsers, but because most don't have a mobile UI they are often unusable.
Overall I find Firefox for desktop performs very well. It's fast, doesn't use too much RAM, it's got a wide selection of add-ons that meet all my needs. It's the lack of a decent mobile offering that keeps me from switching.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Oh come on (Score:4, Insightful)
More specifically, conceded to IE6!
Honestly, I think most users don't know what a web browser is let alone know that there's a choice between them or why they may be better off with X browser instead of Y. Whichever default browser the OS ships with is the one that gets the biggest user share. A browser has to be really, really bad, i.e. IE6-bad, before substantial numbers of people start looking for alternatives.
Re: (Score:2)
Everyone did pretty much concede the web to Internet Explorer, until Microsoft stopped developing it. The 5 years between Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7 were what lent so much momentum to other browsers to allow the internet to move forward.
Re:Oh come on (Score:4, Interesting)
For me the speed is the least of the problems since the speed primarily depends on the ability for other sites to serve information.
And with uBlock installed the speed improves a lot.
I'd take stability and standards compliance over speed as long as it's not getting absurd when it comes to speed.
Meta (Score:5, Funny)
Browsers are dead. In the future we will live in Meta. Slashdot will not be a website, but rather a hall, the article will be on a monitor but you wont be able to read or watch it, not with various fools ranting about useless shit. Yeah when you teleport into slashdot-meta you will immediately encounter trolls. First a guy peeing Fr0st p1st then the guy with who hates the modern internet ranting about how he cannot do anything on Meta these days because you must have an avatar with pants.
Re: (Score:2)
No one said anything about pants!
(Actually, animated legs are problematic as it is :)
Re: (Score:3)
Eventually in Meta, your avatars will watch it for you. At the end of the week, you get a 5 short sentence paragraph on what you missed.
Re: (Score:2)
Slashdot will not be a website, but rather a hall,
Don't be silly. The future will be nothing like you describe. Slashdot will be a zoo cage and the users will be monkey avatars throwing poo at each other, so just like now only in 3D.
Re: (Score:3)
you must have an avatar with pants.
Meta avatars are not allowed to have pants.
Mobile AdBlock (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Mobile AdBlock (Score:5, Informative)
Who still uses AdBlock? It's corporate owned and doesn't perform as well as the competition. I thought everyone had moved over to uBlock Origin now.
Re: (Score:2)
I do, but will explore uBlock from info in this discussion, whether it is good for my set of browsers, or only some of them.
Was disappointed by AdBlock Plus, not that much AdBlock.
Re: (Score:2)
ublock origin and noscript both work on mobile firefox.
Personally I find the web unusable without them, so I'd rather switch phones than switch browsers. Works fine on my rather venerable Galaxy S8+.
Remember when nerds recommeded Firefox? (Score:5, Interesting)
Firefox fans should know and understand THEY are not why it's losing market share but they like Mozilla prefer their bubble.
The changes which made Firefox less appealing to previous hordes of techie users were inflicted on them unasked.
Firefox makes hundreds of millions more than Canonical so money is no excuse.
"Chrome has won the desktop browser war" (Score:2, Informative)
I wasn't aware there was a war, it's just down to personal choice and marketing might - and a good product.
I don't want to open a can of worms on this, because it's like a damn religion for some folk, but aside from the obvious data privacy concerns, Chrome is the better browser - in MY opinion - and a lot of other people feel the same way.
Browser choice on a level where you are actually aware there's a choice, is generally one for individuals who have more than a passing interest in computing and the inter
Re:"Chrome has won the desktop browser war" (Score:4, Interesting)
I still use Firefox mainly because of the much lower memory footprint. Sure Chrome is nice and everything but it's extremely bloated and it basically does not work on machines with 4gigs of RAM or less. Firefox is a more sensible option for older computers. I have no idea why we need 8 Gigs of RAM or more to display web content.
Re: (Score:2)
I still use Firefox mainly because of the much lower memory footprint. Sure Chrome is nice and everything but it's extremely bloated and it basically does not work on machines with 4gigs of RAM or less. Firefox is a more sensible option for older computers. I have no idea why we need 8 Gigs of RAM or more to display web content.
Citation Needed. Basically these days all modern feature comparable browsers use the same amount of RAM. Firefox used to have slightly lower RAM usage back when the browser was a security shitshow without sandboxing or per tab process isolation, but these days it's no better than Chrome (or any other modern browser).
"bloated" is not the way to describe the reason why memory usage on a modern browser is high any more than then feature set of a car is "bloated" because it has ABS and airbags.
Re: (Score:3)
Reality tells a different story. The browsers do not behave identically on resource constrained systems.
I co-founded a non-profit that, among other things, operates a community computer lab. Some years back, during the Windows 7 era, we were still running XP on aging hardware. We had between 512 - 1GB of RAM in each machine, if that means anything to you. Chrome was completely unusable, taking sometimes up to 10 minutes just to load the home page and would constantly thrash the disk. We ultimately unin
Firefox became unstable (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I wasn't aware there was a war, it's just down to personal choice and marketing might - and a good product.
I wasn't aware there was a war, it's just down to two groups of people over there using guns to shoot at each other and who has the best weapons.
Seriously just because *you* are not at war, doesn't mean there isn't a war going on.
They shot themselves in the foot with Proton UI (Score:3)
It's horrendous.
A degraded experience for ordinary users (Score:3)
I still use firefox as my primary browser both on desktop and phone, but people around me have stopped using it because it is apparently prone to crashes (that I somehow never experience). My SO complained that Firefox crashed 3 times this morning.
It gets me wondering what is the difference between their use case (crashy trashy) and mine (works pretty well, thank you)? Could it be that I use noscript to remove most of the tracking and ads, thus eliminating a number of javascript-related bugs? I feel that most tracking and ads are specifically designed to work with Chrome.
Re: (Score:2)
I never see a crash, using ublock origin, privacy badger and containers. I have seen that, probably ublock, leaks memory from so much ad blocking. I have multiple windows and 100+ tabs open and over a few days it invariably gets to 25+ GB of ram and I'm forced to restart shit, but never crashes. I also use it on my phones, including a Pixel work phone, without issues.
Currently, there's no good browser choice (Score:3)
We're totally screwed with the browser situation at the moment. Chrome is a pprivacy nightmare and their latest introduction of Manifest v3 breaks extensions, including adblockers. Firefox now has a horrendous UI (Proton) and Opera just removed the ability to disable fast tabs, another horrendous and unnecessary features which annoyed thousands. There truly is no viable long-term choice out there at the moment. We're doomed. (say the last sence in the voice of Sheldon Cooper for more drama)
They should listen to the users (Score:5, Insightful)
Firefox instead of getting better has been getting "worse", loosing functionality to look better.
Firefox used to be the browser that power users used, but new development has stripped useful, and sometimes just necessary functionality, like reordering tabs in FF mobile, in the proces of trying to "beautify" the interface. Also, no about:config for mainstream FF android build, else it confuses the little number of users it has.
If they are going to try to copy chrome and be a dumb browser what is the point of having another browser?
Seriously, I cant remember them providing new and useful functionality in forever withouth also screwing it up the interface, remember Quantum, and that was the last time they made meaningful improvements to the browser...
They don't want to bite the hand that feeds them? (Score:4, Interesting)
The strange thing is, there is opportunity for growth. Chrome really has become horendous, from privacy issues to memory use. And most people complain about Chrome too.
Yet this doesn't translate to people switching to Firefox somehow.
In a way it seems more like a branding problem. Mozilla could perhaps do more to explain how Chrome is a surveillance nightmare, and set themselves apart.. but I suspect they don't want to bite the hand that feeds them?
A related issue, to me, is their current mission statement. They care about "the open web", but that mission doesn't technically oppose the web becoming a surveillance paradise. "We don't mind if everthing is connected, as long as it's done through open standards" is not a very strong position in an age where the connections are the problem.
Re: (Score:2)
What are the privacy issues in Chrome?
The only one I'm aware of is FLoC and the new version of it, both of which are just proposals. FLoC was available as an optional opt-in but has been removed now.
Sinking but not yet sunk (Score:2)
The problem is in the assumption. (Score:2, Insightful)
The assumption is that it's all about the market share of the web. I am going to argue that market share is a consequence and that you need to look at causes, not effects, if you want to make changes.
By definition, what is on the web is yesterday's technology because nobody can implement a technology that doesn't yet exist and nobody will want to implement a technology nobody can access.
This gives you two options straight off: invent a new technology (the Microsoft, Sun and Adobe approach) or implement one
Re: (Score:3)
Stability suggests limited testing. The version number explosion also suggests this. (If the version number is reaching 100, there are too many major releases, too little in-house testing and inadequate acceptance testing before the release. Firefox hasn't existed 20 times longer than Linux.)
The version numbering may due to end-user expectations, not actual major feature adding.
Other products have had to jump version numbers or change version schemes because users asked "Why is your competitor at version 70 while you still are at 10.1?" (For example: Slackware Linux from version 4.0 to 7.0, etc.)
Severely dislike Chrome. (Score:2)
There are many LOG IN NOW TO GOOGLE! things I hate about LOGIN FOR BEST RESULTS! Chrome but probably the GOOGLE IS NOT YOUR STANDARD SEARCH ENGINE one that annoys me LOGIN TO STORE YOUR SETTINGS the most is th fkd up tbs.
My experience with using FireFox (Score:2)
So on my Windows workstation, I use Cent (a fork of Chrome) and on my various *nix boxes I use Firefox.
Or rather, tried to use firefox. I mean rendering is fine, browsing is fine, speed is fine, all the things we expect from modern browsers. It's the setup that annoys me.
Adding extensions results is far more questions than it should, adding delays in setting up. A minor irritation to be certain, but piled on to the other minor irritations (see below) it becomes a major pain.
The UI is a mess (as I'm sure mo
Re: (Score:2)
and who in Hell uses pocket,
me.
More than once I've inadvertently closed the tab when I was trying to switch to something else.
Not sure how... but it has an easily accessible "reopen closed tab" option.
no ability, or at least none that I've found, to and FF download and open something in one click
Works for me! No idea how to change the settings off hand though. You can also get to the downloaded idem from the downloads button, no need to jump through hoops.
Depends on what Mozilla is after (Score:2)
Do they just want money? Or do they care about the actual browser?
We really need firefox to be thorn in the side of (Score:2)
Fuck no (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not about revenue, it's about the end result, as they have more than enough money to operate. And what I see is that they are deliberately compromising their browser into a PII collection tool by means both obvious and sneaky. Obvious like Pocket, on which they spent $20M. I for one do not even want it in my browser, I want LESS shit in there and not more. And taken together with their changes to the plugin API that prevent local filesystem access, it means a deliberate attempt to collect your information. I used to be able to use Scrapbook+ to save web pages as displayed in the browser and now if you want that you have to use Pocket, which sends information on what you're saving to Mozilla. Similarly, I deliberately set things in about:config to prevent the new browser version page being displayed, and they reverted my settings. This page is loaded not from within the browser, but from Mozilla's page; this lets them fingerprint your browser.
Mozilla has turned Firefox into a little snitch by putting stuff in it that has no business being there, and taking away functionality I was actually using. I can see a time fast approaching when there will be no point whatsoever to using it. The Mozilla foundation is either willfully or cluelessly compromising Firefox, which will lead to its destruction. The promise was a light and fast browser-as-platform with anything unnecessary kept out, and installable via add-ons. Mozilla has broken that promise.
no (Score:2)
Keep mangling the product and find out (Score:3)
So long as the team at Mozilla keeps screwing around with something which should be so simple, they will continue to lose market share. For example, taking away the option to never be notified of any update, making it more difficult to customize Firefox through menu options, adding bloat (Wallet anyone?), and so on.
If they would return to their roots of a simple, fast browser, market share would increase. And I say this as someone who used it back in the 0.8 Phoenix days.
Where did 200-400 million a year go exactly? (Score:3, Interesting)
Firefox is being steered into the ground (Score:2)
Like all problematic companies, this is entirely on management. They had an incredible product and they've only managed to make it worse
Blocking auto-play video (Score:4, Informative)
This is the only reason I use Firefox, it has an option to block auto-play video. No other major browser does that.
But Firefox makes that option hard to find, and it only applies to video with sound. WHY? Make it prominent, make it apply to all video, and I'm sold. I'll be a lot of other people would use Firefox for the same reason.
There are things Firefox could do, they just don't.
They freaked me out on a major scale! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I use Waterfox and it's fantastic. (Score:2)
I was using Brave but got fed up with all the unnecessary and unexplained disk activity.
Waterfox just cuts out some of the unnecessary Firefox stuff. I've made some optimizations for privacy and speed based on the Tor browser config. I only have a few addons and have a strong privacy config, no unique fingerprint, no ads whatsoever and everything runs fast.
Firefox hasn't been changing their UI constantly for a long time now. There were kink going to the current look but it's been stable for a long time now,
IE is dead, long live Edge (Score:2)
When the default user experience doesn't suck people will have little reason to change to a different experience. Sin
Force updates finished it for me (Score:2)
Their policy of forcing updates finished it off for me. I have ZERO interest in being on some sort of continual treadmill where they continually f*** about with the GUI, remove features I want, add features I have ZERO interest in (e.g. Pocket etc.), and then force an update when I'm in the middle of doing work.
We still have Firefox in some VMs at work and it really pisses me off when it restarts itself when I'm in the middle of doing something. At home I'm using the last build that doesn't force updates
To Win the Browser Wars You Must Force it on Users (Score:4, Interesting)
I can't help but feel like the story (and a lot of the Slashdot crowd) is missing a very important fact in all of this: Firefox is the only major browser that isn't backed by a large corporation and is the platform default. More specifically, it's the only browser that isn't being forced upon users in some fashion.
The browser wars have become a bare-knuckles, no holds barred affair. Google has long leveraged their search monopoly to browbeat desktop users into switching to Chrome. And when that wasn't enough, they have a suspicious history of designing their collection of highly trafficked sites in such a way that they perform poorly on competing (non-Chromium) browsers. It's become the website equivalent of making sure to break Lotus 1-2-3.
Meanwhile Microsoft has grown sick of this shit and regularly tries to hijack the default browser on Windows in ways that would make even late 90s Microsoft blush. Changing filetype handlers, forcing users updating their OS to revisit the browser selection screen, auto-opening Edge, etc. Since no one has stopped Google from leveraging their platform advantage, apparently Microsoft is going that way as well.
And then the Mac platform is all about the integration of Apple's own ecosystem. Apple doesn't do anything notable keep desktop users on Safari, but then if you're on a Mac, you probably want to use Safari in the first place. So third party software is always at a disadvantage there.
Which to get to the point, how is Firefox meant to compete when everyone else is forcing their browsers on users? If it's never the default browser for any platform, and Google/Microsoft have been (and still are) actively trying to force users to switch to their respective browsers. You damn near get punished for using Firefox these days.
To be sure, Mozilla has their own share of missteps that have cost them some market share, and more significantly credit with the geek community. But UI changes aren't what lead to Firefox's large user base in its golden age, and those changes aren't what caused the user base to drop to what it is now.
In other words, Mozilla could have done everything right, and they still would have lost all of that market share all the same. As a browser developer (and only a browser developer), they simply do not have the leverage required to force anyone to use Firefox. And no one is going to go out of their way to switch browsers if the browser they've already been forced to use is good enough to begin with.
The browser wars are no longer a war of browsers, they're a war of platforms. And the winner is going to be whoever can do the best job of taking the choice out of the hands of desktop users. Competing on quality is a sucker's bet, at this point.
Don't worry, they hear you (Score:2)
Don't worry, they hear you. How about they "chang[e] the color of the browser and ads to win subscriptions to Disney+?" Sounds like a great feature that won't alienate the users that have been avoiding the advertising behemoth's browser.
Who wouldn't want their UIs changed to match advertisements?
Pros and Cons (Score:2)
Just last night I discovered that Firefox now blocks document downloads over HTTP by default, and had to spend time figuring out what the workaround was for that.
On the other hand, Firefox is still willing to wipe browsing history data automatically on exit, whereas Chrome will probably never permit that.
Re: (Score:3)
IF you change the UI, you should always offer the new one as an option, as part of Beta testing, and see if people want to change before making it the default, because you might want to roll back the change before you lose any more users.
Remember:
A change is as good as a kick in the nuts
The average computer user these days has a 50% chance of being stupid enough to vote for Trump,
Learning a new UI is likely to take longer than it takes Mozilla to come up with a new, different, and
Re: (Score:3)
Because I don't want to use the touch design for and by dumb fucks.