A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
Posted Mar 31, 2023 19:35 UTC (Fri) by donbarry (guest, #10485)In reply to: A quarter century of Mozilla by Shiba
Parent article: A quarter century of Mozilla
Posted Mar 31, 2023 20:12 UTC (Fri)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (33 responses)
Posted Mar 31, 2023 20:56 UTC (Fri)
by donbarry (guest, #10485)
[Link] (19 responses)
When you get to the point where you have to say Firefox's primary advantage is that "it's not Google's Chrome," there's a real problem. And that's because in a certain way it is, just one step removed, because Google remains far and above Mozilla's primary sugar daddy.
Posted Mar 31, 2023 21:28 UTC (Fri)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link] (8 responses)
Eh.
Firefox never had the advantage of being the default browser on most platforms. Everyone installing it had to make an explicit choice to do so. Back in the day, that was an easy choice to make, as its competition (mainly MSIE) was so awful that Firefox was objectively better in every respect, even for non-technically-inclined "to use the internet click on the E icon" folks.
Today however, the default platform browsers (Chrome, MS Chrome, and Safari) are more or less equivalent feature-wise, and Firefox continues to lack not only a default browser advantage, but also doesn't control any common www destinations, unlike its competition who continues to push "this site best experienced on Chrome / Edge / Safari". Meanwhile, the corporate market never embraced Firefox, instead switching from IE to Chrome.
So yes. from an end-user's perspective, all Firefox really has going for it is "better privacy". Unfortunately there aren't that many folks who genuinely care about that stuff -- And even among those who do, when you spend all day logged into Facebook, Google/Gmail, O365/MS/Github, Facebook, and so forth, what privacy are you protecting any more?
Posted Apr 3, 2023 8:23 UTC (Mon)
by leromarinvit (subscriber, #56850)
[Link] (4 responses)
Firefox has containers, something that AFAIK no other browser offers. I too need to be logged into a few of these for work (and some others I choose voluntarily, like this fine site), but only in the respective container. They don't see each other, and every other random site I visit gets a pristine session that's deleted when I leave (courtesy of the Temporary Containers extension).
This is one of the main reason I won't even consider switching to any other browser for regular use, despite all the screw-ups and questionable decisions Mozilla has made over the years.
Posted Apr 7, 2023 2:40 UTC (Fri)
by rjones (subscriber, #159862)
[Link] (3 responses)
By default the quick change UI is hidden. Once you make more then one profile it pops up.
Posted Apr 7, 2023 11:54 UTC (Fri)
by leromarinvit (subscriber, #56850)
[Link]
This is only one part of the setup I currently have in Firefox. I've got it set up to create temporary containers with an empty session whenever I follow a link to a different domain (besides a few sites that automatically get assigned to their own permanent containers), which seems impossible with Chrome currently. That way, even if I click a link on a site where I'm logged in, the target gets a new session and any cross-site tracking will have a harder time linking the two visits.
Now, I'm sure my setup isn't for everyone, since now it matters how you arrived at a particular site, which is probably confusing if you don't expect it (there can be any number of sessions for any particular domain). But I find that property useful, since it trivially enables multiple different logins to the same site without any setup (just manually open a new tab and open the site, and you've got a new session).
I'm (usually) happy with Firefox, so I won't invest a lot of time to recreate this setup with Chrome for now. But it's good to know that this workflow could probably be implemented there with some effort, in case Firefox for some reason ceases to be a viable browser (which I hope it won't).
Posted Apr 7, 2023 18:52 UTC (Fri)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link]
Not quite. Chrome can't run two parallel profiles in the same window. For example, I use containers in Firefox to log into multiple AWS accounts (with color-coding for prod/non-prod accounts) using a small plugin: https://imgur.com/a/S9uhNTv
Posted Apr 10, 2023 18:59 UTC (Mon)
by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
[Link]
I suspect it works just fine if you use OAuth to separate your accounts, but I try to avoid cross-linking accounts whenever possible.
Posted Apr 4, 2023 13:18 UTC (Tue)
by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
[Link] (2 responses)
With web offerings replacing traditional local apps they had a golden chance to make the FLOSS desktop shine, growing with it (and the multiplicity of distributions is a protection against someone taking over their success via a fork).
Instead, they blew it first by chasing proprietary platforms that were all too happy to get their features first while limiting their platform share, second by trying to corner this opportunity with their own Firefox OS, and third getting distracted from their core competencies favouring the startups of their buddies.
Posted Apr 20, 2023 16:07 UTC (Thu)
by immibis (subscriber, #105511)
[Link] (1 responses)
Power corrupts.
Posted Apr 30, 2023 14:44 UTC (Sun)
by sammythesnake (guest, #17693)
[Link]
Let's not forget that the flipside is also true: "Corruption Empowers". I.e. those who play fair and eschew evilness miss out on successful (shitty, but undeniably successful) strategies to gain market share / revenue / control...
That's why "enshittification" is so endemic, why legal tools like anti-trust legislation, monopoly commissions etc. exist (with somewhat limited success) and so on.
Sadly, we live in a world where those with the influence (obviously this involves money, but not *just* money) to do so are so richly rewarded for using that influence primarily as a tool to get more influence that inevitably the top of the pile is utterly dominated by those whose priorities heavily lean that way. Any influence spent elsewhere means getting behind on the race to own The World.
Those with enough influence can outspend governments on finding bugs in the legal code, and even influence the drafting of that legal code in the first place through political "donations" etc.
We've reached the point where a handful of people have gained such an egregiously disproportionate share of "The World" that the phrase "The World is Not Enough" starts feeling literally true for them and they start working on projects like "leaving the planet", and "owning lumps of space"
Yay.
Posted Mar 31, 2023 21:37 UTC (Fri)
by roc (subscriber, #30627)
[Link] (9 responses)
I'm a die-hard Firefox user for sentimental reasons but I have to use Chrome at work, and honestly I'd rather not.
Posted Mar 31, 2023 21:38 UTC (Fri)
by roc (subscriber, #30627)
[Link]
Posted Mar 31, 2023 23:35 UTC (Fri)
by flussence (guest, #85566)
[Link] (7 responses)
And this was all before they started doing the _overtly_ evil stuff like evercookie logins (and rolling out dark patterns to punish anyone trying to use their services any other way).
I do not particularly like Mozilla's software, I absolutely loathe their corporate antics… but when the alternative is this hateful shiny thing and everything that it implies around it, the choice is a no-brainer. I expect to still be complaining about it 10 years from now.
Posted Apr 1, 2023 11:02 UTC (Sat)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link] (6 responses)
Yeah. What I don't get are the folks who say stuff like "I don't like/use Firefox for <reason>" but instead use Chrome, which is objectively worse at <reason> [1]
> I do not particularly like Mozilla's software, I absolutely loathe their corporate antics… but when the alternative is this hateful shiny thing and everything that it implies around it, the choice is a no-brainer. I expect to still be complaining about it 10 years from now.
Mozilla's corporate antics barely register on the scale, especially when compared to their competition.
I hope that we have a meaningful/practical option to keep using Firefox in another decade. If some of the antitrust stuff against Google goes through (EU and US) then the sorts of search engine deals that fund nearly all of Mozilla's work will probably go away. That said, Google probably only continues to fund Firefox as an antitrust hedge anyway. I have a hard time seeing how that miniscule market share is otherwise worth the money. Most of Mozilla's "antics" over the last decade and a half have been trying to find alternative (sustainable) revenue streams.
The sad truth is that Firefox/Mozilla's last real shot at remaining relevant in the long term ended well over a decade ago when FirefoxOS failed to make a dent in the Android/iOS duopoly. I can't blame Mozilla for that; even Microsoft (with its significant advantages and far deeper pockets) failed. They're effectively locked out of the corporate market, and completely locked out of the mobile and "chromebook" type markets. And that's _before_ the "we changed default browser" update shenanigans that Windows and so forth _still_ keep pulling. Firefox's only real selling feature these days to the ever-dwindling desktop user base is "with a couple of plugins we're much better at blocking ads and tracking than the competition [2]" which only partially mitigates the ever-growing enshittification of doing anything online. [3]
And let's not pretend that all Linux firefox users ever mattered that much; for all our sense of self-importance, even in Firefox's heydey numerically we were a rounding error of Mozilla's userbase, the overwhelming majority of which was, and continues to be, running Windows. Even amongst the "power user" crowd.
In the end, Mozilla's enduring legacy will probably be as the original creators of Rust.
[1] UI style/paradigm. Plugin architecture, telemetry, A/B UI experiments, stability, performance, ties to Google (!!), "corporate/executive wokeness/antics"... and the list goes on.
Posted Apr 2, 2023 11:57 UTC (Sun)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (5 responses)
Carmack was saying that years ago. But that obvious no-brainer. Rust is something which benefits both industry and the end-user thus it's easy to keep it going. There are lots of technical challenges, but no unavoidable conflicts. Firefox, on the other hand, it something funded by the industry, but which tries to work for the user… that one is very hard to sustain. The fact that Mozilla still continues to do that, even if not perfectly… it's a miracle.
Posted Apr 2, 2023 13:30 UTC (Sun)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link] (2 responses)
Amen.
(And of course I wish they could be/do better, even as I continue to be grateful for their efforts and results)
Posted Apr 3, 2023 5:47 UTC (Mon)
by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404)
[Link] (1 responses)
They earn they're $25 a month from me!
Sometimes I wonder if the race for "relevance" is really... relevant.
Mastodon did fine before it was "relevant", and has resisted ex-Twitter engineers jumping on the platform, pushing them to add features they "knew" users "wanted", because they couldn't get the equivalence of "want" and "engagement" out of their heads.
Maybe they make less money, maybe they have fewer users, but that's fine. Plenty of open-source projects that build complicated stuff get by with fewer users and less money.
Maybe it will even be better when it's not trying to find money any screwball way it can.
And, yes, Rust. Agreed.
Posted Apr 3, 2023 8:51 UTC (Mon)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link]
Yet none of them produce viable brower. They either produce sorta-kinda-browsers that are not usable on many (most?) web sites or they just wrap browser developed elsewhere with their own bells and whistles.
Posted Apr 5, 2023 20:53 UTC (Wed)
by k8to (guest, #15413)
[Link] (1 responses)
I give Libre Office a bit of money every few years when I use it, and periodically donate a bit to Debian, but I suspect the former has a primary funding model from other sources, and the latter would probably work with almost no funding.
The browser is really the heaviest project I rely on besides programming languages, and the OS, both of which seem to work okay on the sort of crowd-labor model.
Posted Apr 5, 2023 22:35 UTC (Wed)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link]
I don't think so. Instead if you want to fund it, you could get things like Mozilla VPN + Firefox Relay and if you are using these features anyway, getting it this way might also be a way to support browser development.
Posted Apr 1, 2023 4:00 UTC (Sat)
by notriddle (subscriber, #130608)
[Link] (12 responses)
As near as I can tell, Firefox has been on a basically unaltered downward trend, leveling off around 1-5% (depending on whether you count mobile?)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f5...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/StatC...
Posted Apr 3, 2023 5:55 UTC (Mon)
by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404)
[Link]
Because if they have *enough users, and *enough contributors - we'll be fine. Web standards don't change like they used to, so the waning influence they have over that probably won't impact usability like it used to (e.g. "please download this ActiveX plugin.." ;) )
Posted Apr 3, 2023 7:24 UTC (Mon)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (10 responses)
Posted Apr 3, 2023 13:44 UTC (Mon)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link] (9 responses)
Point of correction -- Unless you consider "steady loss of market share" fine, everything wasn't "fine".
> (4). The marketshare falls _below_ the initial marketshare in point (1) by a significant margin.
...This completely ignores what the competition was up to, and its effects on Firefox.
For example, the corporate world shifting en-masse from IE to Chrome (and better locking down desktops to make FF non-installable), the rise of Mobile (and Chrome-first), and so forth. And unlike MSIE, Chrome was perfectly usable on a day-to-day basis, so why not use the same thing at home as well as at work, with all your bookmarks etc synchronized with the gmail account you're already signed into anyway?
Posted Apr 3, 2023 15:51 UTC (Mon)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (8 responses)
This has happened multiple times, including the fairly recent UI changes that happened long after the rise of Chrome.
Also, mobile is a case in point. Firefox was a pretty good browser on Android, with plugin support and a better UI than mobile Chrome. Guess what Mozilla did to address this oversight?
Posted Apr 4, 2023 13:03 UTC (Tue)
by foom (subscriber, #14868)
[Link] (2 responses)
It's faster, and it has stopped crashing periodically. And the UI has been progressively improving as well (imo). I feel like Firefox/Gecko is an actually viable alternative browser for Android, in a way it was not when I was first using it.
I am occasionally disappointed that about:config doesn't exist in the stable branch (which is what I use), but not bothered enough to switch to the beta or nightly releases.
Posted Apr 4, 2023 13:15 UTC (Tue)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link] (1 responses)
This mirrors my experience, and I've been using Android Firefox since before it was called Firefox.
Unfortunately Chrome is deeply embedded into Android (==System Webview) so Firefox doesn't get used as much as I'd prefer.
Posted Apr 14, 2023 18:14 UTC (Fri)
by asammoud (guest, #151640)
[Link]
Posted Apr 4, 2023 23:56 UTC (Tue)
by k8to (guest, #15413)
[Link]
Because of the sheer amount of work put in addon support to mobile chromium, it's not going to happen in any of the chromium -alikes, sadly.
Posted Apr 11, 2023 8:45 UTC (Tue)
by gabrielesvelto (guest, #83884)
[Link] (3 responses)
Fenix (aka new Firefox for Android) has picked up a lot more market share than Fennec (aka old Firefox for Android) ever had. So mobile shows the opposite trend you're claiming, with constant growth over the years. In addition to this the modules Fenix is built from (GeckoView & friends) are now used by several other mobile applications outside of Mozilla's perimeter: https://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/details/geckovie...
Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla though I haven't always worked on Firefox
Posted Apr 11, 2023 23:55 UTC (Tue)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (2 responses)
Also, I've just tried Fenix and there's nothing in my Play Store that remotely looks like Firefox with that name. I've re-installed FireFox and it's the same old: no about:config, limited plugin selection.
I really don't understand WTF is Mozilla doing.
Posted Apr 30, 2023 16:58 UTC (Sun)
by sammythesnake (guest, #17693)
[Link] (1 responses)
Fennec apparently struggled with stability & performance and Fenix replaced it in 2020 to be less demanding (in development work and CPU/RAM) but got that in part by omitting some add-on APIs and support for dead mobile platforms.
According to a bit of googling, there's wider support for add-ons coming. The curated list of add-ons seems to be expanding incrementally, but more interestingly, the "Firefox Beta for Testers" and "Firefox Nightly for Developers" streams have support for your own "extension collections" and there's work apparently going on to support more of the add-on API. Time will tell how far/quickly this goes, how well it works, how much of it reaches the stable stream and how easy it'll be UI-wise to install arbitrary add-ons...
Access to add-ons that give *me* control of *my* browsing experience is a "killer feature" for a web browser, IMNSHO (and the #1 reason Firefox is the only contender at the moment) so I hope this work bears bounteous fruit quickly!
Posted Apr 30, 2023 20:51 UTC (Sun)
by malmedal (subscriber, #56172)
[Link]
Fennec runs well on my old Nexus 9, Fenix is painfully slow.
Unfortunately Cloudflare has started blocking Fennec because of its age, I suppose I'll just have to give up on that tablet.
Fenix runs mostly fine on my current phone, but still has not implemented the tab queue feature.
While Fenix Nightly finally after an interminable wait allows me to develop extensions I find it quite annoying that the extensions only work while the USB cable is plugged in. To have it available untethered I have to sign and upload.
I haven't found any websites which work in Fenix but not in Fennec, various features that I would like to use, ServiceWorkers, WebAudio do not work properly in either.
Most featureful Android browser is Kiwi browser, it used to have some stability issues, but has been fine lately.
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
[2] They can't actually say this, much less go full-on down this path because then they'd lose pretty much _all_ of their ongoing funding, which basically depends on the Firefox being useful for delivering ads and otherwise tracking users. And then it won't be long at all before we're all stuck with Chrome or one of its siblings if we want to do interact with the rest of the world.
[3] "doing anyhing online" is such an archaic phrase now, eh?
> In the end, Mozilla's enduring legacy will probably be as the original creators of Rust.
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
> Plenty of open-source projects that build complicated stuff get by with fewer users and less money.
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
(1). Everything's fine.
(2). New redesign goes live in the main channel.
(3). The marketshare spikes for a couple of months.
(4). The marketshare falls _below_ the initial marketshare in point (1) by a significant margin.
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
it also has an annoying bug where a tab will hang, not making progress. I can unblock by killing another tab.