"Perhaps Mozilla's biggest blunder was its decision to add support for the closed-source DRM W3C standard Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) in Firefox."
It's hard to imagine a perspective from which this is true that isn't very narrowly constrained to anti-DRM activism.
If anything, implementing DRM was a significant positive for Firefox market share, unpleasant as the decision was. The article says:
"Despite Mozilla's kowtowing to the video streaming industries, Firefox users have continued to switch to other browsers anyway"
Yes - and Mozilla would have lost even more users, faster, if they didn't integrate DRM capabilities. The fact that Mozilla continued to lose users after DRM is not evidence that DRM was bad for market share. DRM stemmed the bleeding a bit.
I understand why people don't like DRM, and I'm sympathetic, but almost nobody actually wants to use a browser without DRM because they'd be cut off from doing what they want to do (e.g. watch Netflix, YouTube). Before Mozilla added DRM directly, it supported Flash, which almost everyone had installed, and that was DRM plus a myriad of stability and security nightmares. Firefox didn't "add" DRM so much as they retained it while throwing the rest of Flash out the window. Firefox is clearly better off now.
Mozilla's biggest mistake is simply that after Firefox 3, Firefox was significantly surpassed in quality for many years by at least Chrome, maybe also Safari. Luckily Mozilla has closed the quality gap and is shipping a great browser today, but that painful period is probably going to continue to haunt them for a long time. They lost a lot of users because they weren't shipping a browser that met modern quality standards. That was probably their single biggest mistake, and that's why their market share is what it is today.
I don't think the quality factor is the _most_ significant factor in the decline of Firefox's market share - though it might be a significant factor. Firefox simply lost out to Google doing all they can to push Chrome onto people. Its advertised on their pages, its pushed onto organizations using google tools, etc etc. Even if Chrome was marginally worse than Firefox, it would have a similar market share.
I disagree, though that was certainly a big factor, particularly in speeding up the pace of user loss.
In any case, it's probably not a healthy perspective for Mozilla or its community to just write this off as Firefox being the victim of a big ad campaign for another browser. Mozilla had real problems and missed opportunities, and that's where their focus rightfully should have been.
I'm ex-Netscape, and have been using the various Mozilla browsers primarily since around 2000. The browser has always worked fine in daily use.
I also use the developer tools, and they're also adequate for vanilla-js development.
So based on 2 decades of experience with Mozilla, I'd go with Chrome surpassing it in market share as more to do with promotion than Mozilla not being good enough.
I consider myself concerned enough about Google, and supportive enough of having Firefox as an alternative, that I feel somewhat guilty for giving up on switching to Firefox about once a year (at least). And yet I keep doing so, because for whatever inexplicable reason I prefer Chrome enough, or dislike Firefox enough, to keep switching back to the former.
While your comment prompts me to try again and figure out why this is the case exactly, Google's marketing is not the reason for me (and, unfortunately, others too).
If I had to guess, I'd say it usually boils down to a feeling of clunkiness and weird hogging of memory/processing, whether true or just perceived. I've read some threads that indicate this is a problem for Mac users in particular, but I don't know if this is actually true.
Been using Linux Firefox for over a decade - five years on a toshiba Core 2 Duo laptop with 2 GB ram and a harddisk. Never had any performance complaints even though I sometimes opened >20 tabs.
Could you elaborate on the contents of those tabs? I often have more than 20 tabs open, but even in Chrome this can cause some issues. Nonetheless Firefox seemed worse at it, and perhaps this has to do with the nature of the tabs I have open?
As a university student back in the day I would perpetually have gmail, facebook, university email, youtube open - all js heavy websites. Others tabs were links from HN, wikipedia and/or pdf class notes. Even developed a website for my department at some point, all on firefox.
That's been my experience too, I've never actually noticed the performance problems people are talking in the years I've used it. I mean, I heard ones like 'It bogs down after 100 tabs', but that to me is an extreme edge case and more a personal problem than the browsers fault (bit tongue in cheek, I'm sure there are plenty of valid use cases).
Other developers on teams I've been on certainly pushed it hard (mostly for the dev tools, which I admit I went to Chrome for at times), so there was 'grassroots' support there if I've used that word correctly, whether that came from being hoodwinked by The Great Advertiser I don't know.
Lately, I've had a lot of performance issues with Firefox.
I can pop open Task Manager at random times and see Firefox in the 2GB range (this on an 8Gb machine running Slack, Chrome and PHPStorm at the same time, so it's a little cramped for RAM at the best) and I'm running 20-30 tabs. Even chopping down to a handful still keeps you well over 2Gb.
It won't seize completely the way it used to prior to multiprocess, but you get this weird situation where you get a spinner just switching tabs.
For many years, I defaulted to Firefox because of an extension I loved (FireFTP) which could never make the leap to WebExtensions. I can recall developing on Firefox then patching things to make IE6 happy. But on my home machine I switched to Vivaldi entirely.
Well closing tabs still keeps some tabs (I think 10) in memory for the reopen recent tabs feature. You can always go to about:memory and click clear memory and that should help - though I have never had to do that.
Exactly. People seem to forget the effect it has when Google promotes something on their search engine as well as Youtube (where they also forced you to get a Gmail-account eventually after taking over) etc.
> Mozilla's biggest mistake is simply that after Firefox 3, Firefox was significantly surpassed in quality for many years by at least Chrome, maybe also Safari. Luckily Mozilla has closed the quality gap and is shipping a great browser today, but that painful period is probably going to continue to haunt them for a long time.
There is a surprising amount of parallel here to how IE was surpassed in quality by Mozilla/Firefox after IE 6, and that painful period is still haunting IE/Edge.
Not saying it's exactly the same situation, but history rhymes.
Regardless of user count, adopting EME was a terrible move for Firefox. Does this mean that whatever terrible idea corporations push, Firefox must adopt? I'm glad that Firefox used to simply not implement things that were not a good idea.
And in the long term, I think that by legitimizing DRM like they have, they will still be at a disadvantage, because they've helped give the green light to this class of technologies, where Mozilla will always be at a disadvantage.
The biggest mistake that Mozilla is making is adopting the for-profit paradigm that their competitors have. Mozilla is not a business, and they don't need to convince people who don't care about web browsers or privacy to use their web browser. It would frankly be better if they just used Chrome. Mozilla's vain obsession with their brand and with being popular with people who don't care is frankly toxic to them.
We need to stop using the term marketshare when talking about Firefox, because that implies that there is a market, and there isn't. There might be differing levels of usage between browsers, but comparing usage of Firefox to Chrome or Safari is apples and oranges, because Mozilla's goal is not to open an app store and build a monopolistic for-profit closed platform, as Google and Apple's are. And I think that this pseudo-capitalist mentality is causing them to overcompensate in harmful ways.
Imagine if other staples of OSS started acting this way (some of them already do). Imagine if Ubuntu adopted a Microsoft-style forced updates model. I could honestly see them doing that.
And I bring this up in many of my comments, but I'm so glad that when Firefox first came out, they didn't worship at the feet of Microsoft and try to emulate IE6 the way that they worship at the feet of Google. I'm glad that a decade ago they didn't consider themselves failures because they couldn't win over the AOL users.
> Before Mozilla added DRM directly, it supported Flash, which almost everyone had installed, and that was DRM plus a myriad of stability and security nightmares.
Yes, exactly. I think DRM is conceptually incompatible with an open web browsing ecosystem, so of course it should require ugly hacks to pull off. If a company wants to introduce closed and hostile code to their users, they should be on their own. It is not our job to facilitate them doing bad things.
> Mozilla's biggest mistake is simply that after Firefox 3, Firefox was significantly surpassed in quality for many years by at least Chrome, maybe also Safari. Luckily Mozilla has closed the quality gap and is shipping a great browser today, but that painful period is probably going to continue to haunt them for a long time.
That's highly subjective and I strongly disagree. Chrome's UX is AWFUL. It is constantly doing things behind my back, and I can never rely on it for anything. And thanks to Chrome popularizing forced destructive updates, interfaces have become very unstable, and you cannot rely on a feature in your browser even being there when you wake up in the morning. It could just be silently erased.
Their app store is so terrible and filled with so many misleading low quality or outright hostile extensions it is barely useful. And even if they were better, I couldn't rely on them not dissapearing.
Soon, we won't have address bars and URLs will mostly be used for internal use. Ads will be rendered server-side and stitched into content. Our computers will be completely out of our control and run whatever code Google feels like. And Chrome will be an accomplice.
By this logic they had already long legitimized it through their grudging support for Flash. But don't let that stop you from trying to act like it's magically different.
>where Mozilla will always be at a disadvantage
They were always at a disadvantage in the fight against DRM. They never had any real control over it to begin with, and had to constantly be at a disadvantage while it was Flash-based. The fact that they adopted EME changes nothing at all, except that some people on the Internet took it personally because they wanted to.
>the way that they worship at the feet of Google
Suuuure they do. Just like they worshiped at the feet of Yahoo before.
>The biggest mistake that Mozilla is making is adopting the for-profit paradigm that their competitors have
Some hard evidence for this shift in their mentality would sure be nice. Simply owning a corporation doesn't mean you're suddenly driven by a profit motive. Nor does the fact that you may earn some revenue from things that some people love to hate.
>Mozilla is not a business, and they don't need to convince people who don't care about web browsers or privacy to use their web browser.
They have always been a business. A non-profit organization is legally a type of business. And even by non-legal definitions they are still a business. A business does not mean "a profit-driven venture".
Just like their mission has always been to make products for everyone, whether or not they happen to hold strong beliefs about privacy or DRM or even web browsers.
>We are truly entering a dark age of technology.
I've been hearing that since I was just a kid. I'm sorry that Mozilla didn't win your DRM war for you (and me), but that doesn't mean they've given up on all attempts to avert your "dark age" prophecy. But they're just a couple of thousand people. They won't be able to avert every disaster.
> Mozilla's ill-judged adoption of the EME standard downgraded Firefox from a long-standing beacon of software freedom to a well-featured browser much like any other.
I think we need to level up our understanding of how power structures are changed. Either you have an intense revolution, or you have incremental change marked by constant compromise and iteration. In the absence of revolution, which would entail somehow revamping the copyright regime in every major political region (US, EU, Asia), Mozilla had no choice but to implement this stuff in order to stay in the game.
It's infuriatingly easy to stay pure on the sidelines, just like it's infuriatingly easy to be a senator in a safe state casting moral aspersions towards senators in swing states. But senators in swing states get things done; they're on the front lines of change. Mozilla's getting things done, working against both entrenched corrupt political and corporate interests, and armchair technological purists. The way to help the situation isn't to criticize organizations like Mozilla for compromising. It's to change the environment so compromise with corrupt institutions isn't necessary.
I despise EME and disable it but, I agree, they had no choice. I'm sure that 5% share would be more like 0.001%, all idealistic goofs like me. So "for no gain whatsoever" is not only unprovable, I'm pretty sure it's very wrong. Some choices at at Mozilla have annoyed me greatly but many have made me very happy. I think they've been a net positive influence for user interests.
If I liked Firefox better than Chrome but Firefox didn't let me watch films in my web browser, I'd run Firefox day to day and open Chrome when I wanted to watch a film.
In my experience running a second browser for one particular troublesome site is something not-particularly-technical people often end up doing without worrying about it too much.
Firefox didn’t take significant market share from Internet Explorer because it was open source, but because it was a better browser. Building good software (that happens to be open source) with mass-market appeal does more to further the open source movement than any amount of shouting from soapboxes.
Totally agree. Firefox used to be a breath of fresh air because it worked so well. Now they seem to be just a copy of Chrome. Heck, sometimes I can't even tell whether I have Chrome or Firefox open because they look so similar. I would much prefer if they went to back to building better browsers.
I’m not the person you were replying to, but the single feature that keeps me out of Firefox is their lack of AppleScript support. I (and many other automators) use AppleScript daily, multiple times a day, to control aspects of Chrome and Safari. The fact that I can’t do the same with Firefox puts it completely out of consideration.
Aren’t they then still playing catch-up with Chrome et al instead of doing something new and innovative.
Firefox’s add-ons were influential in spawning today’s App Stores. They introduced tabbed browsing. A JavaScript console and DOM manipulation tools. Internet Explorer had nothing like it, which is why Firefox so quickly caught on.
Innovative features don’t matter if the basic ones I need aren’t present. If Firefox introduced the innovation of tabs[1] but couldn’t render pages, tabs would have been useless.
I wasn’t proposing that implementing AppleScript will shoot up Firefox’s market share, just that until they do, I (and others that care deeply about automation) won’t even look in its general direction as a serious contender to being the main browser.
Android performance, scrolling etc. still isn't up to par. Firefox has ublock origin, cookie auto-delete, containers etc. I don't know if any other open android browser offers these. And that's huge. If they get it up to par, and make some deals with OEMs to bundle firefox, that should help adoption.
I mean they wanted to build an entire phone OS, and get OEMs to ship that. Shipping a browser should be more manageable, don't you think ?
>2. Most of those OEMs are already bundling Chrome in order to get the Play Store.
Exactly. Most OEMs bundle chrome + other third party browsers depending on their deals and motivations. The play store contract doesn't prevent them from bundling additional browsers.
I don't think too much about browsers but things I could think of are speed, adblock, automation, dev tools. Or they could offer something like Electron but better or a Node competitor based on their tech. They could improve their mobile offerings.
It seems they are mainly following Chrome these days.
> Despite Mozilla's kowtowing to the video streaming industries, Firefox users have continued to switch to other browsers anyway: market share has dropped from 14% in 2014 to today's woeful 5%. In other words, Mozilla betrayed its core mission to preserve the open internet, for no gain whatsoever.
I think this is very disingenuous, for three reasons:
1) It pretends like it's a certainty that Mozilla's market share wouldn't have fallen further without the move.
2) It pretends like whatever effect implementing/not implementing EME would have had could be predicted by Mozilla at the time with 100% certainty.
3) The article doesn't at all mention all of Mozilla's efforts to keep EME from being standardised in the first place.
Which is a shame: an otherwise interesting article has an aftertaste of also being a misleading propaganda piece, even if I agree with the goal of the propaganda.
I would say it's an important measure of success though: a lot of what Mozilla can do, it can only do thanks to its market share. This includes influencing the W3C, lobbying politicians with actual experience making a browser, and financially supporting that work. Furthermore, if Mozilla had a market share of 80%, they would have been in a far better position to actually fight EME.
"...market share has dropped from 14% in 2014 to today's woeful 5%. [...] Meanwhile, Mozilla has flourished financially. The most recent "State of Mozilla" report says that in 2016 various deals with search engines brought in an astonishing $520 million."
Just a reminder that Mozilla was able to pull of an unbelievably good deal with Yahoo thanks to Marissa Mayer in November 2014, which made Mozilla winning the lottery in case Yahoo was sold afterwards before 2019.
Yahoo was sold to Verizon shortly after the deal which made it possible for Mozilla to pull out of the deal unilaterally, and still getting a yearly payment until 2019 ($375 Million fixed annually, to be exact).
Please tell me: Who makes a 4 year fixed deal with a browser maker that is losing 10-15% of its users annually? It does not make any sense for Mayer to do this, except if she was completely on the side of Mozilla.
My personal theory is that this free money until the end of 2019 has created a culture of passivity and laziness inside the Mozilla management.
It is hard to overstate the deal with Yahoo. It makes Mozilla basically immune to drops in market share until 2020. The deal with switching to the Yahoo search engine (starting in 2016) was already too good to be true, as Yahoo gave Mozilla way more money than Google had done before, and Google was already paying well.
The result is that for around 3 or more years now Mozilla is living inside a bubble, where basically nothing what they do has financial consequences.
Not only that, they are building up enourmous amounts of financial reserves, so I think we will actually never again see Firefox innovating.
When the finances finally will reflect the state of Firefox, that is when they have used up their reserves somewhere in 2021 or 2022, Firefox won't play an active role anymore. Most of the 1000+ employees will have to leave during the next 5 years.
Mozilla switched back to Google with the aim of getting both the Yahoo money and additional Google money.
I've read somehwere that it is about two questions:
- Is Yahoo obliged to pay anything at all? If Yahoo is succesfull, Mozilla will not get anything.
- Is Yahoo obliged to pay the full $375 million per year or only the difference between the new Google contract and the old Yahoo contract? In the latter case Yahoo would only have to pay Mozilla $375 million minus the Google money if they won.
"My personal theory is that this free money until the end of 2019 has created a culture of passivity and laziness inside the Mozilla management."
What would Mozilla do that it's not doing? I don't see an obvious answer to the marketshare issue (except maybe marketing). It's not that there's nothing that could be done, but what that thing is is unclear.
I suppose it's true that in the face of financial insolvency management might go into a "do anything" mindset, but that's just a death spiral, it can lead to action but I don't think it helps guide correct action.
Google is a good example what can happen with lots of money productively.
But Google, in contrast to Mozilla, has to work hard to innovate and their income is always a reflection of how good they are and they have a management with a long-term vision.
Due to the fixed contract Mozilla will not feel the consequences of their actions for a very long time.
You see this kind of laziness everywhere when money doesn't matter anymore. It is more or less human nature.
To answer your question: It is not about marketshare. Mozilla has always said it is about values and open source, and so on. They could do something great even with 1% marketshare.
Mozilla is basically doing nothing that makes power users say "Wow, I really want to use this browser and will recommend it to my friends and family". Instead for some reason those users are increasingly frustrated with Firefox on multiple levels.
I think there is a slight possibility that the end of 2019 or the beginning of 2020 will be when you see some subtle changes to how Firefox works. Maybe they get their humility back.
> Mozilla is basically doing nothing that makes power users say "Wow, I really want to use this browser and will recommend it to my friends and family". Instead for some reason those users are increasingly frustrated with Firefox on multiple levels.
There are a number of things Mozilla is doing that are appealing to me as a power user.
1. Rust and Firefox Quantum. Mozilla has invested a herculean amount of effort into making Firefox's internals cutting edge, and we've only just started seeing it pay off. The updated CSS rendering component alone made Firefox one of the snappiest browsers, and it's going to get even faster as additional components are rewritten.
2. Firefox is going to start blocking a lot more trackers by default in the coming months; some of this is in beta, more is in nightly. Power users can already do this with extensions, but it's easier for me to recommend a browser that does it by default.
3. Mozilla is reviewing add-ons. There were a lot of complaints about this initially, but I feel safer installing things from Firefox Add-ons than I do from the Chrome Web Store. The review process isn't perfect, but it feels like it's much harder for a Firefox addon to scoop my entire browsing history and get away with it. Allowing me to disable automatic updates for individual extensions is also good; it's a second layer of protection against situations like that Sylish fiasco where an extension suddenly, silently becomes malicious.
4. Add-on APIs. The add-on situation was dire when Mozilla killed XUL extensions and switched to a Chrome-compatible format. But now they're extending it and adding all sorts of functionality for add-ons that Chrome doesn't have, again.
You still didn't really answer what you think Mozilla should be doing with that money. (Besides vaguely hinting that they don't target power users anymore which suggests you're bitter about the switch to web extensions)
Actually I am not bitter. I don't really use extensions with Firefox.
I only try to give an account of general user sentiment. Of course it's very difficult to get an accurate measure of this sentiment, but I see lots of negative comments online, and lots of valid arguments.
Only Mozilla can come up with ways to spend that money.
I think I made it quite clear that it is first and foremost about innovation, and money is only a tool. But usually what you can do in such situation is hiring top people from the industry as leaders.
Maybe they would avoid removing features that some users rely on, like bookmark descriptions. And would focus more on what users need instead of what developers think is cool to implement.
The author says that "Open source has won, so Mozilla's original mission to promote free software is no longer a priority," and that Mozilla should focus on advocacy.
But how can Mozilla's advocacy have any effect if there is not a competitive Mozilla browser? The vendors of popular browsers are able to ignore Mozilla and do whatever they want, because there is little threat that people are going to switch to Mozilla's browser en masse.
It's sort of amazing that Netscape/Mozilla has had two real shots at being the best, most dominant browser in the arena, and squandered both opportunities horribly.
Mozilla lost because they sat on their butts for 10 years under Eich and lost their technical advantage. Firefox got sandbox and multi-process features in 2016 that IE8 had in 2009, they were happy to crash and lose every Pwn2Own before that. Being semi-nonprofit they can't secure any talent so they fake being like Google by blowing money on social activism and rebranding when they're not siphoning it to buy each other's start-ups.
Chrome is proprietary, Edge is proprietary, Safari is proprietary, even Opera is proprietary.
You might say Chromium is free, and that's technically true, but Google makes it intentionally difficult to install and it almost certainly has practically no market share compared to Chrome itself.
Firefox is the only browser with a meaningful market share that is free software.
"Perhaps Mozilla's biggest blunder was its decision to add support for the closed-source DRM W3C standard Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) in Firefox."
It's hard to imagine a perspective from which this is true that isn't very narrowly constrained to anti-DRM activism.
If anything, implementing DRM was a significant positive for Firefox market share, unpleasant as the decision was. The article says:
"Despite Mozilla's kowtowing to the video streaming industries, Firefox users have continued to switch to other browsers anyway"
Yes - and Mozilla would have lost even more users, faster, if they didn't integrate DRM capabilities. The fact that Mozilla continued to lose users after DRM is not evidence that DRM was bad for market share. DRM stemmed the bleeding a bit.
I understand why people don't like DRM, and I'm sympathetic, but almost nobody actually wants to use a browser without DRM because they'd be cut off from doing what they want to do (e.g. watch Netflix, YouTube). Before Mozilla added DRM directly, it supported Flash, which almost everyone had installed, and that was DRM plus a myriad of stability and security nightmares. Firefox didn't "add" DRM so much as they retained it while throwing the rest of Flash out the window. Firefox is clearly better off now.
Mozilla's biggest mistake is simply that after Firefox 3, Firefox was significantly surpassed in quality for many years by at least Chrome, maybe also Safari. Luckily Mozilla has closed the quality gap and is shipping a great browser today, but that painful period is probably going to continue to haunt them for a long time. They lost a lot of users because they weren't shipping a browser that met modern quality standards. That was probably their single biggest mistake, and that's why their market share is what it is today.
I don't think the quality factor is the _most_ significant factor in the decline of Firefox's market share - though it might be a significant factor. Firefox simply lost out to Google doing all they can to push Chrome onto people. Its advertised on their pages, its pushed onto organizations using google tools, etc etc. Even if Chrome was marginally worse than Firefox, it would have a similar market share.
I disagree, though that was certainly a big factor, particularly in speeding up the pace of user loss.
In any case, it's probably not a healthy perspective for Mozilla or its community to just write this off as Firefox being the victim of a big ad campaign for another browser. Mozilla had real problems and missed opportunities, and that's where their focus rightfully should have been.
I'm ex-Netscape, and have been using the various Mozilla browsers primarily since around 2000. The browser has always worked fine in daily use.
I also use the developer tools, and they're also adequate for vanilla-js development.
So based on 2 decades of experience with Mozilla, I'd go with Chrome surpassing it in market share as more to do with promotion than Mozilla not being good enough.
I consider myself concerned enough about Google, and supportive enough of having Firefox as an alternative, that I feel somewhat guilty for giving up on switching to Firefox about once a year (at least). And yet I keep doing so, because for whatever inexplicable reason I prefer Chrome enough, or dislike Firefox enough, to keep switching back to the former.
While your comment prompts me to try again and figure out why this is the case exactly, Google's marketing is not the reason for me (and, unfortunately, others too).
If I had to guess, I'd say it usually boils down to a feeling of clunkiness and weird hogging of memory/processing, whether true or just perceived. I've read some threads that indicate this is a problem for Mac users in particular, but I don't know if this is actually true.
The Mac/Linux Firefox ports have never been good, their success was unearned and they were quickly replaced when a competitor came along.
Been using Linux Firefox for over a decade - five years on a toshiba Core 2 Duo laptop with 2 GB ram and a harddisk. Never had any performance complaints even though I sometimes opened >20 tabs.
Could you elaborate on the contents of those tabs? I often have more than 20 tabs open, but even in Chrome this can cause some issues. Nonetheless Firefox seemed worse at it, and perhaps this has to do with the nature of the tabs I have open?
As a university student back in the day I would perpetually have gmail, facebook, university email, youtube open - all js heavy websites. Others tabs were links from HN, wikipedia and/or pdf class notes. Even developed a website for my department at some point, all on firefox.
That's been my experience too, I've never actually noticed the performance problems people are talking in the years I've used it. I mean, I heard ones like 'It bogs down after 100 tabs', but that to me is an extreme edge case and more a personal problem than the browsers fault (bit tongue in cheek, I'm sure there are plenty of valid use cases).
Other developers on teams I've been on certainly pushed it hard (mostly for the dev tools, which I admit I went to Chrome for at times), so there was 'grassroots' support there if I've used that word correctly, whether that came from being hoodwinked by The Great Advertiser I don't know.
Lately, I've had a lot of performance issues with Firefox.
I can pop open Task Manager at random times and see Firefox in the 2GB range (this on an 8Gb machine running Slack, Chrome and PHPStorm at the same time, so it's a little cramped for RAM at the best) and I'm running 20-30 tabs. Even chopping down to a handful still keeps you well over 2Gb.
It won't seize completely the way it used to prior to multiprocess, but you get this weird situation where you get a spinner just switching tabs.
For many years, I defaulted to Firefox because of an extension I loved (FireFTP) which could never make the leap to WebExtensions. I can recall developing on Firefox then patching things to make IE6 happy. But on my home machine I switched to Vivaldi entirely.
Well closing tabs still keeps some tabs (I think 10) in memory for the reopen recent tabs feature. You can always go to about:memory and click clear memory and that should help - though I have never had to do that.
Browser user here. Chrome was way better. Everybody else copied its UI for a reason.
Exactly. People seem to forget the effect it has when Google promotes something on their search engine as well as Youtube (where they also forced you to get a Gmail-account eventually after taking over) etc.
> Mozilla's biggest mistake is simply that after Firefox 3, Firefox was significantly surpassed in quality for many years by at least Chrome, maybe also Safari. Luckily Mozilla has closed the quality gap and is shipping a great browser today, but that painful period is probably going to continue to haunt them for a long time.
There is a surprising amount of parallel here to how IE was surpassed in quality by Mozilla/Firefox after IE 6, and that painful period is still haunting IE/Edge.
Not saying it's exactly the same situation, but history rhymes.
I was glad they included DRM. I was one of those who switched to other browsers to watch Netflix etc.
Regardless of user count, adopting EME was a terrible move for Firefox. Does this mean that whatever terrible idea corporations push, Firefox must adopt? I'm glad that Firefox used to simply not implement things that were not a good idea.
And in the long term, I think that by legitimizing DRM like they have, they will still be at a disadvantage, because they've helped give the green light to this class of technologies, where Mozilla will always be at a disadvantage.
The biggest mistake that Mozilla is making is adopting the for-profit paradigm that their competitors have. Mozilla is not a business, and they don't need to convince people who don't care about web browsers or privacy to use their web browser. It would frankly be better if they just used Chrome. Mozilla's vain obsession with their brand and with being popular with people who don't care is frankly toxic to them.
We need to stop using the term marketshare when talking about Firefox, because that implies that there is a market, and there isn't. There might be differing levels of usage between browsers, but comparing usage of Firefox to Chrome or Safari is apples and oranges, because Mozilla's goal is not to open an app store and build a monopolistic for-profit closed platform, as Google and Apple's are. And I think that this pseudo-capitalist mentality is causing them to overcompensate in harmful ways.
Imagine if other staples of OSS started acting this way (some of them already do). Imagine if Ubuntu adopted a Microsoft-style forced updates model. I could honestly see them doing that.
And I bring this up in many of my comments, but I'm so glad that when Firefox first came out, they didn't worship at the feet of Microsoft and try to emulate IE6 the way that they worship at the feet of Google. I'm glad that a decade ago they didn't consider themselves failures because they couldn't win over the AOL users.
> Before Mozilla added DRM directly, it supported Flash, which almost everyone had installed, and that was DRM plus a myriad of stability and security nightmares.
Yes, exactly. I think DRM is conceptually incompatible with an open web browsing ecosystem, so of course it should require ugly hacks to pull off. If a company wants to introduce closed and hostile code to their users, they should be on their own. It is not our job to facilitate them doing bad things.
> Mozilla's biggest mistake is simply that after Firefox 3, Firefox was significantly surpassed in quality for many years by at least Chrome, maybe also Safari. Luckily Mozilla has closed the quality gap and is shipping a great browser today, but that painful period is probably going to continue to haunt them for a long time.
That's highly subjective and I strongly disagree. Chrome's UX is AWFUL. It is constantly doing things behind my back, and I can never rely on it for anything. And thanks to Chrome popularizing forced destructive updates, interfaces have become very unstable, and you cannot rely on a feature in your browser even being there when you wake up in the morning. It could just be silently erased.
Their app store is so terrible and filled with so many misleading low quality or outright hostile extensions it is barely useful. And even if they were better, I couldn't rely on them not dissapearing.
Soon, we won't have address bars and URLs will mostly be used for internal use. Ads will be rendered server-side and stitched into content. Our computers will be completely out of our control and run whatever code Google feels like. And Chrome will be an accomplice.
We are truly entering a dark age of technology.
>legitimizing DRM like they have
By this logic they had already long legitimized it through their grudging support for Flash. But don't let that stop you from trying to act like it's magically different.
>where Mozilla will always be at a disadvantage
They were always at a disadvantage in the fight against DRM. They never had any real control over it to begin with, and had to constantly be at a disadvantage while it was Flash-based. The fact that they adopted EME changes nothing at all, except that some people on the Internet took it personally because they wanted to.
>the way that they worship at the feet of Google
Suuuure they do. Just like they worshiped at the feet of Yahoo before.
>The biggest mistake that Mozilla is making is adopting the for-profit paradigm that their competitors have
Some hard evidence for this shift in their mentality would sure be nice. Simply owning a corporation doesn't mean you're suddenly driven by a profit motive. Nor does the fact that you may earn some revenue from things that some people love to hate.
>Mozilla is not a business, and they don't need to convince people who don't care about web browsers or privacy to use their web browser.
They have always been a business. A non-profit organization is legally a type of business. And even by non-legal definitions they are still a business. A business does not mean "a profit-driven venture".
Just like their mission has always been to make products for everyone, whether or not they happen to hold strong beliefs about privacy or DRM or even web browsers.
>We are truly entering a dark age of technology.
I've been hearing that since I was just a kid. I'm sorry that Mozilla didn't win your DRM war for you (and me), but that doesn't mean they've given up on all attempts to avert your "dark age" prophecy. But they're just a couple of thousand people. They won't be able to avert every disaster.
From the article:
> Mozilla's ill-judged adoption of the EME standard downgraded Firefox from a long-standing beacon of software freedom to a well-featured browser much like any other.
I think we need to level up our understanding of how power structures are changed. Either you have an intense revolution, or you have incremental change marked by constant compromise and iteration. In the absence of revolution, which would entail somehow revamping the copyright regime in every major political region (US, EU, Asia), Mozilla had no choice but to implement this stuff in order to stay in the game.
It's infuriatingly easy to stay pure on the sidelines, just like it's infuriatingly easy to be a senator in a safe state casting moral aspersions towards senators in swing states. But senators in swing states get things done; they're on the front lines of change. Mozilla's getting things done, working against both entrenched corrupt political and corporate interests, and armchair technological purists. The way to help the situation isn't to criticize organizations like Mozilla for compromising. It's to change the environment so compromise with corrupt institutions isn't necessary.
I despise EME and disable it but, I agree, they had no choice. I'm sure that 5% share would be more like 0.001%, all idealistic goofs like me. So "for no gain whatsoever" is not only unprovable, I'm pretty sure it's very wrong. Some choices at at Mozilla have annoyed me greatly but many have made me very happy. I think they've been a net positive influence for user interests.
I don't think it would have been so bad for them.
If I liked Firefox better than Chrome but Firefox didn't let me watch films in my web browser, I'd run Firefox day to day and open Chrome when I wanted to watch a film.
In my experience running a second browser for one particular troublesome site is something not-particularly-technical people often end up doing without worrying about it too much.
I did that and it was annoying. I'm glad they've put DRM in, and if you don't want it, you can just ignore the install prompt.
Firefox didn’t take significant market share from Internet Explorer because it was open source, but because it was a better browser. Building good software (that happens to be open source) with mass-market appeal does more to further the open source movement than any amount of shouting from soapboxes.
Totally agree. Firefox used to be a breath of fresh air because it worked so well. Now they seem to be just a copy of Chrome. Heck, sometimes I can't even tell whether I have Chrome or Firefox open because they look so similar. I would much prefer if they went to back to building better browsers.
What do you propose Mozilla do now to build a better browser?
I’m not the person you were replying to, but the single feature that keeps me out of Firefox is their lack of AppleScript support. I (and many other automators) use AppleScript daily, multiple times a day, to control aspects of Chrome and Safari. The fact that I can’t do the same with Firefox puts it completely out of consideration.
Aren’t they then still playing catch-up with Chrome et al instead of doing something new and innovative.
Firefox’s add-ons were influential in spawning today’s App Stores. They introduced tabbed browsing. A JavaScript console and DOM manipulation tools. Internet Explorer had nothing like it, which is why Firefox so quickly caught on.
Innovative features don’t matter if the basic ones I need aren’t present. If Firefox introduced the innovation of tabs[1] but couldn’t render pages, tabs would have been useless.
I wasn’t proposing that implementing AppleScript will shoot up Firefox’s market share, just that until they do, I (and others that care deeply about automation) won’t even look in its general direction as a serious contender to being the main browser.
[1]: They didn’t; NetCaptor did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netcaptor
Pretty sure opera had both tabs and a somewhat recognised brand before Firefox had either.
Android performance, scrolling etc. still isn't up to par. Firefox has ublock origin, cookie auto-delete, containers etc. I don't know if any other open android browser offers these. And that's huge. If they get it up to par, and make some deals with OEMs to bundle firefox, that should help adoption.
> make some deals with OEMs to bundle [Firefox for Android]
1. Using what budget exactly?
2. Most of those OEMs are already bundling Chrome in order to get the Play Store.
>1. Using what budget exactly?
I mean they wanted to build an entire phone OS, and get OEMs to ship that. Shipping a browser should be more manageable, don't you think ?
>2. Most of those OEMs are already bundling Chrome in order to get the Play Store.
Exactly. Most OEMs bundle chrome + other third party browsers depending on their deals and motivations. The play store contract doesn't prevent them from bundling additional browsers.
I don't think too much about browsers but things I could think of are speed, adblock, automation, dev tools. Or they could offer something like Electron but better or a Node competitor based on their tech. They could improve their mobile offerings.
It seems they are mainly following Chrome these days.
> Despite Mozilla's kowtowing to the video streaming industries, Firefox users have continued to switch to other browsers anyway: market share has dropped from 14% in 2014 to today's woeful 5%. In other words, Mozilla betrayed its core mission to preserve the open internet, for no gain whatsoever.
I think this is very disingenuous, for three reasons:
1) It pretends like it's a certainty that Mozilla's market share wouldn't have fallen further without the move. 2) It pretends like whatever effect implementing/not implementing EME would have had could be predicted by Mozilla at the time with 100% certainty. 3) The article doesn't at all mention all of Mozilla's efforts to keep EME from being standardised in the first place.
Which is a shame: an otherwise interesting article has an aftertaste of also being a misleading propaganda piece, even if I agree with the goal of the propaganda.
It's disingenuous firstly because we're treating market share as the only measure of success for a browser.
Obviously if that's the case, it matters little what niche browsers do anyway - because they lost the battle to Chrome years ago.
I would say it's an important measure of success though: a lot of what Mozilla can do, it can only do thanks to its market share. This includes influencing the W3C, lobbying politicians with actual experience making a browser, and financially supporting that work. Furthermore, if Mozilla had a market share of 80%, they would have been in a far better position to actually fight EME.
"...market share has dropped from 14% in 2014 to today's woeful 5%. [...] Meanwhile, Mozilla has flourished financially. The most recent "State of Mozilla" report says that in 2016 various deals with search engines brought in an astonishing $520 million."
Just a reminder that Mozilla was able to pull of an unbelievably good deal with Yahoo thanks to Marissa Mayer in November 2014, which made Mozilla winning the lottery in case Yahoo was sold afterwards before 2019.
Yahoo was sold to Verizon shortly after the deal which made it possible for Mozilla to pull out of the deal unilaterally, and still getting a yearly payment until 2019 ($375 Million fixed annually, to be exact).
Please tell me: Who makes a 4 year fixed deal with a browser maker that is losing 10-15% of its users annually? It does not make any sense for Mayer to do this, except if she was completely on the side of Mozilla.
My personal theory is that this free money until the end of 2019 has created a culture of passivity and laziness inside the Mozilla management.
It is hard to overstate the deal with Yahoo. It makes Mozilla basically immune to drops in market share until 2020. The deal with switching to the Yahoo search engine (starting in 2016) was already too good to be true, as Yahoo gave Mozilla way more money than Google had done before, and Google was already paying well.
The result is that for around 3 or more years now Mozilla is living inside a bubble, where basically nothing what they do has financial consequences.
Not only that, they are building up enourmous amounts of financial reserves, so I think we will actually never again see Firefox innovating.
When the finances finally will reflect the state of Firefox, that is when they have used up their reserves somewhere in 2021 or 2022, Firefox won't play an active role anymore. Most of the 1000+ employees will have to leave during the next 5 years.
Mozilla switched back to Google with the aim of getting both the Yahoo money and additional Google money.
- vanityfair.com/news/2017/12/the-ghost-of-marissa-mayer-is-still-haunting-yahoo
- techcrunch.com/2017/12/06/oath-and-mozilla-are-suing-each-other-after-firefox-switches-back-to-google-search/
Does anyone know what happened with the lawsuit where Yahoo/Oath were trying to get out of paying? Is it still going?
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla_and_Yahoo_Holdings_Oath_Cou... ends at 2018-01-05.
[edit: seems to be still going. The latest thing I can find is Mozilla on the losing end of a discovery dispute in August: http://lawzilla.com/blog/yahoo-holdings-inc-v-mozilla-corpor... ]
I've read somehwere that it is about two questions:
- Is Yahoo obliged to pay anything at all? If Yahoo is succesfull, Mozilla will not get anything.
- Is Yahoo obliged to pay the full $375 million per year or only the difference between the new Google contract and the old Yahoo contract? In the latter case Yahoo would only have to pay Mozilla $375 million minus the Google money if they won.
Unfortunately I don't know more.
"My personal theory is that this free money until the end of 2019 has created a culture of passivity and laziness inside the Mozilla management."
What would Mozilla do that it's not doing? I don't see an obvious answer to the marketshare issue (except maybe marketing). It's not that there's nothing that could be done, but what that thing is is unclear.
I suppose it's true that in the face of financial insolvency management might go into a "do anything" mindset, but that's just a death spiral, it can lead to action but I don't think it helps guide correct action.
Google is a good example what can happen with lots of money productively.
But Google, in contrast to Mozilla, has to work hard to innovate and their income is always a reflection of how good they are and they have a management with a long-term vision.
Due to the fixed contract Mozilla will not feel the consequences of their actions for a very long time.
You see this kind of laziness everywhere when money doesn't matter anymore. It is more or less human nature.
To answer your question: It is not about marketshare. Mozilla has always said it is about values and open source, and so on. They could do something great even with 1% marketshare.
Mozilla is basically doing nothing that makes power users say "Wow, I really want to use this browser and will recommend it to my friends and family". Instead for some reason those users are increasingly frustrated with Firefox on multiple levels.
I think there is a slight possibility that the end of 2019 or the beginning of 2020 will be when you see some subtle changes to how Firefox works. Maybe they get their humility back.
> Mozilla is basically doing nothing that makes power users say "Wow, I really want to use this browser and will recommend it to my friends and family". Instead for some reason those users are increasingly frustrated with Firefox on multiple levels.
There are a number of things Mozilla is doing that are appealing to me as a power user.
1. Rust and Firefox Quantum. Mozilla has invested a herculean amount of effort into making Firefox's internals cutting edge, and we've only just started seeing it pay off. The updated CSS rendering component alone made Firefox one of the snappiest browsers, and it's going to get even faster as additional components are rewritten.
2. Firefox is going to start blocking a lot more trackers by default in the coming months; some of this is in beta, more is in nightly. Power users can already do this with extensions, but it's easier for me to recommend a browser that does it by default.
3. Mozilla is reviewing add-ons. There were a lot of complaints about this initially, but I feel safer installing things from Firefox Add-ons than I do from the Chrome Web Store. The review process isn't perfect, but it feels like it's much harder for a Firefox addon to scoop my entire browsing history and get away with it. Allowing me to disable automatic updates for individual extensions is also good; it's a second layer of protection against situations like that Sylish fiasco where an extension suddenly, silently becomes malicious.
4. Add-on APIs. The add-on situation was dire when Mozilla killed XUL extensions and switched to a Chrome-compatible format. But now they're extending it and adding all sorts of functionality for add-ons that Chrome doesn't have, again.
I think those are good points, and #2 is important.
It's not a coincidence that tracking protection will only come with the first build in 2019. They probably had to rewrite their contract with google.
You still didn't really answer what you think Mozilla should be doing with that money. (Besides vaguely hinting that they don't target power users anymore which suggests you're bitter about the switch to web extensions)
Actually I am not bitter. I don't really use extensions with Firefox.
I only try to give an account of general user sentiment. Of course it's very difficult to get an accurate measure of this sentiment, but I see lots of negative comments online, and lots of valid arguments.
Only Mozilla can come up with ways to spend that money.
I think I made it quite clear that it is first and foremost about innovation, and money is only a tool. But usually what you can do in such situation is hiring top people from the industry as leaders.
Maybe they would avoid removing features that some users rely on, like bookmark descriptions. And would focus more on what users need instead of what developers think is cool to implement.
And yet in that same time they managed to introduce successful innovations such as Rust, and made Firefox enormously faster.
The author says that "Open source has won, so Mozilla's original mission to promote free software is no longer a priority," and that Mozilla should focus on advocacy.
But how can Mozilla's advocacy have any effect if there is not a competitive Mozilla browser? The vendors of popular browsers are able to ignore Mozilla and do whatever they want, because there is little threat that people are going to switch to Mozilla's browser en masse.
It's sort of amazing that Netscape/Mozilla has had two real shots at being the best, most dominant browser in the arena, and squandered both opportunities horribly.
Mozilla lost because they sat on their butts for 10 years under Eich and lost their technical advantage. Firefox got sandbox and multi-process features in 2016 that IE8 had in 2009, they were happy to crash and lose every Pwn2Own before that. Being semi-nonprofit they can't secure any talent so they fake being like Google by blowing money on social activism and rebranding when they're not siphoning it to buy each other's start-ups.
> Open source has won
Chrome is proprietary, Edge is proprietary, Safari is proprietary, even Opera is proprietary.
You might say Chromium is free, and that's technically true, but Google makes it intentionally difficult to install and it almost certainly has practically no market share compared to Chrome itself.
Firefox is the only browser with a meaningful market share that is free software.
I don’t understand how this link got posted again, when I posted it 11 days ago. What am I missing? URLs look identical to me.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17953516
The point of all competition ... to the benefit everyone else, surely?