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

I remain a Firefox user but under protest. The corporation has chased the corporate teat for years. Mitchell Baker laid off 250 employees in 2020 and increased her salary to over $3 million. Linux builds don't enable GPS functionality because they don't want to injure the relationship with Google, that benefits from wifi and ip geolocation they get to monetize. Their new walled garden app store and the default builds that prohibit running addons outside of their approval has made them de facto defenders of corporate interests, suppressing tools like "Bypass Paywalls Clean" and threatening to join Google in the long attack on ad-blocking. The "two-tier" Hawaii corporate retreats may be no more but the legacy remains, of programmers in steerage and cocktail-guzzling VPs in first class. I'd flush the lot at the top and return it to a project whose emphasis first and foremost was a quality browser that serves *user* interests.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Mar 31, 2023 20:12 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (33 responses)

And don't forget multiple UI redesigns, each of which resulted in a measurable decrease in the market share.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Mar 31, 2023 20:56 UTC (Fri) by donbarry (guest, #10485) [Link] (19 responses)

The UI redesigns are annoying but ultimately secondary to functionality and privacy. And from a browser that at one time was radio silent on the internet save for what you commanded it to visit, it's now well up the telemetry treadmill, Mozilla having learned nothing from some of its disastrous "experiments" of the past feeding users changes they did not want or ask for.

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.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Mar 31, 2023 21:28 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (8 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.

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?

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 3, 2023 8:23 UTC (Mon) by leromarinvit (subscriber, #56850) [Link] (4 responses)

> 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?

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.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 7, 2023 2:40 UTC (Fri) by rjones (subscriber, #159862) [Link] (3 responses)

Chrome has the ability to juggle multiple profiles, which amounts to the same thing in practice. I don't know how they compare on a technical level besides there is no problems having multiple logins in the same sites at the same time in different profiles.

By default the quick change UI is hidden. Once you make more then one profile it pops up.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 7, 2023 11:54 UTC (Fri) by leromarinvit (subscriber, #56850) [Link]

Interesting, thanks. So the basic ability to separate sessions is there. I quickly tried and failed to find something equivalent to the "Temporary Containers" Firefox extension, so it seems manual action is required to switch profiles.

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).

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 7, 2023 18:52 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> Chrome has the ability to juggle multiple profiles, which amounts to the same thing in practice.

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

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 10, 2023 18:59 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

My understanding (which may very well be out-of-date) is that this is more like Firefox profiles with a completely separate `.mozilla` subdirectory with some helpful selection UI (whereas Firefox profiles are more or less completely oblivious of each other). Firefox containers are allowed to co-exist within a single window and can be for as little as a single website rather than an entire "browser session"

I suspect it works just fine if you use OAuth to separate your accounts, but I try to avoid cross-linking accounts whenever possible.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 4, 2023 13:18 UTC (Tue) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (2 responses)

Mozilla never understood that their success was linked to the success of the FLOSS desktop, because that’s the only established platform where they are not in competition with the platform owner, who has many ways to make sure they never succeed over his own corporate projects.

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.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 20, 2023 16:07 UTC (Thu) by immibis (subscriber, #105511) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't think that Mozilla could have ever been successful and not evil. That's just not a possible outcome within the socio-economic power structures we find ourselves in. A successful version of Mozilla looks like Google - using their technical prowess to form a monopoly in one market and expand to adjacent markets and form monopolies there. Suppose Firefox was the best web browser - Firefox OS might have taken off and we'd all use Firefox Phones and pay for things with Firefox Pay. Pretty much the same position Google is in. We might have Firefox Home voice assistants spying on us instead of Google Home. And I assure you, a detachment of sweaty nerds on LWN would be celebrating 25 years of Google Chrome bravely competing against the evil Firefox monopoly.

Power corrupts.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 30, 2023 14:44 UTC (Sun) by sammythesnake (guest, #17693) [Link]

> Power corrupts.

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.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Mar 31, 2023 21:37 UTC (Fri) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link] (9 responses)

There are still a bunch of mystifyingly bad decisions in Chrome, e.g. when you restart Chrome pinned tabs don't necessarily get loaded eagerly. Chrome has horrific bugs under Wayland on Linux. Also, Chrome doesn't support extensions on mobile --- this is huge.

I'm a die-hard Firefox user for sentimental reasons but I have to use Chrome at work, and honestly I'd rather not.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Mar 31, 2023 21:38 UTC (Fri) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link]

Actually "sentimental reasons" isn't quite right --- using Firefox is a vote for the open Web, which I still care about a lot.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Mar 31, 2023 23:35 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (7 responses)

I went through a phase of flipping between Firefox and Chrome in the early 2010s. Finding out that the latter would start loading pages and running scripts before the window was loaded, let alone content filtering extensions, was one of the things that drove me off it forever. That, and the build time of chromium inexplicably spiking to 72 hours at one point, and the tarball size mushroom-clouding by about 4× in one release cycle with no explanation, and its equivalent of the Places window being nigh &^*$ing useless…

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.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 1, 2023 11:02 UTC (Sat) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (6 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).

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.
[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?

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 2, 2023 11:57 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (5 responses)

> In the end, Mozilla's enduring legacy will probably be as the original creators of Rust.

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.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 2, 2023 13:30 UTC (Sun) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (2 responses)

> The fact that Mozilla still continues to do that, even if not perfectly… it's a miracle.

Amen.

(And of course I wish they could be/do better, even as I continue to be grateful for their efforts and results)

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 3, 2023 5:47 UTC (Mon) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link] (1 responses)

Yup. They're relevant to this user, at least, from back when "firefox" was this new, snazzy thing that was the faster, more broken version of the Mozilla browser (back when it was just "Mozilla"), until now.

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.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 3, 2023 8:51 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

> Plenty of open-source projects that build complicated stuff get by with fewer users and less money.

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.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 5, 2023 20:53 UTC (Wed) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (1 responses)

I wonder if this sort of "heavy" open project can be crowdsourced. I mean, I know Mozilla isn't about to go down that route, but I'm pondering if it's plausible really at all.

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.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 5, 2023 22:35 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

> I wonder if this sort of "heavy" open project can be crowdsourced. I mean, I know Mozilla isn't about to go down that route, but I'm pondering if it's plausible really at all.

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.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 1, 2023 4:00 UTC (Sat) by notriddle (subscriber, #130608) [Link] (12 responses)

Measurable?

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...

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 3, 2023 5:55 UTC (Mon) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link]

Yeah, but harder to gather, and more interesting to me, is the raw totals over the years. They're are likely a lot more people on the web than in the early 2000s.. particularly if you count mobile.

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.." ;) )

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 3, 2023 7:24 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (10 responses)

Yeah, it's measurable. The pattern is:
(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

Posted Apr 3, 2023 13:44 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (9 responses)

> (1). Everything's fine.

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?

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 3, 2023 15:51 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (8 responses)

> ...This completely ignores what the competition was up to, and its effects on Firefox.

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?

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 4, 2023 13:03 UTC (Tue) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link] (2 responses)

I've used Firefox Android every day for years. And, I very much disagree with your comment. Firefox Android is a LOT better now than it was in the past.

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.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 4, 2023 13:15 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 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.

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.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 14, 2023 18:14 UTC (Fri) by asammoud (guest, #151640) [Link]

I have to agree with this .. I only use Firefox on Android CalyxOS. I have zero issues with it.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 4, 2023 23:56 UTC (Tue) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

The android firefox ui churn is tedious, and their constraining of addons to a tiny set is infuriating, but the bar is so low that it's still much better than the default. But I won't be surprised if the limited set of addons die off for various reasons of churn in the APIs, firefox, and the addon ecosystem.

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.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 11, 2023 8:45 UTC (Tue) by gabrielesvelto (guest, #83884) [Link] (3 responses)

> 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?

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

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 11, 2023 23:55 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

Sure. And do you know what would have been even better? Not neutering mobile Firefox in the first place. I understand not porting certain features to mobile, but Mozilla went ahead and _removed_ functionality for no discernible reason.

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.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 30, 2023 16:58 UTC (Sun) by sammythesnake (guest, #17693) [Link] (1 responses)

If I've not got the wrong end of some stick or other, "Firefox" in the Android store *is* Fenix (and previously was Fennec) - "Fenix" and "Fennec" are just code names for the Android variant, and are "marketed" as Firefox just like the desktop variant.

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!

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 30, 2023 20:51 UTC (Sun) by malmedal (subscriber, #56172) [Link]

As a user of both Fennec and Fenix, I will dispute that Fenix is less resource intensive or less buggy.

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.
it also has an annoying bug where a tab will hang, not making progress. I can unblock by killing another tab.

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.