news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28954390
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| | | Ask HN: Can Firefox Be Revived?
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| 29 points by DeathArrow1 hour ago | hide | past | favorite | 12 comments
| Since 2018 and management changes Firefox lost a lot of users. [1] Firefox
has now 3.67% market share.[2]
Mozilla is mismanaged, to quote another commenter from HN:
Mitchell Baker (Mozilla CEO) makes $3 million a year, and Mozilla asks you to
donate "to help a nonprofit organization". >"On the same period, Firefox
marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned
that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive
roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount
to ask people and their families to commit to.""By 2020 her salary had risen to over $3 million, while in the same year the
Mozilla Corporation had to lay off approximately 250 employees due to
shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic."This lady then goes on and on talking about "social justice".
Also Google deal produces 90% of Mozilla's revenue. I would say Mozilla is
really controlled opposition.[3]
Mozilla derives over 90% from it's income from Google deal.[4]
If we take all these points in considerations, it seems Firefox is in peril.
It can either disappear, become totally irrelevant or do what its biggest
customer dictates it to do.
If web becomes a monoculture and only one company will be able to dictate its
features, than the future isn't exactly rosy for users and developers alike.
We need Firefox and other rendering engines and browser to have a healthy
competition.
Is it possible that some company with deep pockets forks Firefox and hires
what it's left from its development team to further develop Firefox and
improve its market share?
Can it be in some big company's interest to push for web competition?
Since many big corps derive their incomes from the web, it should be. If they
let someone control the web, it can be detrimental to their businesses.
[1] https://news.itsfoss.com/firefox-decline/ [2]
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share [3]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28926582&p=2 [4]
https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-google-search-deal-
for-firefox
|
Brave, I know it's a pain in the arse, but can you port your browser to Gecko?
I'm on the fence switching to your product, but I'll do so in a heartbeat if
it was based on Firefox's source code.
Even better, make an optional paid version that has all profits reinvested in
the product. I'm ready to pay for a good browser.
It's a great question, and I don't know the answer. A browser is a very
complex application which requires many FTEs and millions of dollars to
develop and maintain. Donation models don't work well for open source, there's
no way individual users will be contributing (in aggregate) millions of USD
for a browser. There are various forks of Firefox and Chrome but I am
reluctant to use those because they may be out of date or its developers might
have financial or other incentives to install telemetry or backdoors.
Previously, an ideological, established and proud institution like Mozilla
could be trusted to an extent to refrain from such things. A subscription
based model might work but it's hard to say if there's a market fit, as the
qualms that HN users have over Google's monopoly are not shared by the
population at large, who just don't care or even know about these things. A
strategy I have been pondering is to take a browser and drastically simplify
it (just the rendering and networking, no JavaScript/WASM, audio/video and
APIs) and iterate until it's finished and secure; this ought to be manageable
by a modestly funded small team of developers. Then use that to browse the web
where I can, and use Chrome for websites that require the full browser stack
like Youtube. It's a step backwards but this is where we are.
The Mozilla Foundation needs to be a for the greater good political
foundation, give up the Firefox tech and lobby for the Chromium rendering
technology to become a standard and the Chromium team to become a global
public utility under the W3 or similar. Every browser manufacturer then
licences and customises the experience around that rendering technology.
Having a single rendering technology to support would be preferential but it's
direction can't be controlled by just Google.
Of course this would then mean the end of the Foundation and Mitchell Baker's
$3m per year so will never happen.
Having a single rendering technology to support would be preferential
Really? I prefer there are a few, but mostly compatible techs in that space.
This is the VM that runs almost all desktop (client) software these days.
Having only one implementation would IMHO be a disaster.
Java has only single dominant JVM, but in several flavours. It is doing fine.
Maybe one of Firefox's last chances was Microsoft, before they decided to cave
to Chromium. They could have forked Firefox, now we're going to end up stuck
with one web engine.
I am not sure about that. They had their own engine but for some reason, they
didn't want to continue with development.
Sadly I agree they seem to have rotted.
I believe there will be more options but not sure where from…
Mozilla may pivot to VPN and network privacy stuff. But that won't save
Firefox. I would rather have independent party on Chromium source, to balance
large corporations, than half baked alternative engine.
I think it is clear that Mozilla lost their relentless focus on their core
mission a few years ago. The social justice / political theater you’ve alluded
to is an indication of cultural rot. I often view activism in the workplace as
a precursor to the fall of a business, because it very literally is the act of
placing personal employee agendas ahead of customers and products. In this
case, looking at that absurd and undeserved compensation for Baker, I also
wonder if the political theater is actually a shield that helps distract
people from a failing leadership.
otabdeveloper412 minutes ago[–]
Is it really failing?
Mozilla is funded by Google.
IMHO the fact that we are moving towards one reliable engine is not a bad
thing per se. I think it's a step in the right direction, as long as those
contributing to chromium do have a saying in how it should move forward.
As a full stack developer I've battled so many times with weird
implementations or unexpected behaviors across browsers that knowing that I
can assume that the user will be on chromium is just piece of mind.
As a counter argument I don't think that monopolization of internet standards
will be a risk. As long as chromium stays open source and anyone can fork it,
I think that the risk of monopolization on internet is not on how web pages
are rendered, but rather on how users reach content.
I think the latter is the real problem and I don't think that battling
chromium is any good at that regard. Money would be much better spent on
developing new ways to allow discoverability of content beyond Google, walled
app stores and alikes.
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