I've been meaning to write almost exactly this blog post for a while now, glad that someone else did it.<p>Two things that I think are worth calling out:<p>1. In many ways Apple's anti-competitive behaviour on iOS/iPadOS is a blessing. It's one of the few things that keep Chromium's dominance in check. Of course, it's not great that Apple are stifling innovation like this, but consider the alternative: Chromium dominance on all platforms.<p>2. Why it's worth caring about this at all? So what if Chromium is the only engine, it would make things easier for developers after all. To this I say, go read some of the discussions in standard bodies(for example about FLoC). Engineers from Apple and Mozilla are largely our bastion against Google's harmful proposals for the web. Pushback from Apple and Mozilla are only relevant as long as they have market share to speak of. The recent lawsuit against Google(summary[0]) by many US states should be extremely worrying to anyone that cares about the open web and it should make handing over any more control to Google a terrifying prospect.<p>Mozilla maintains a list[1] of their positions on various standard suggestions that is also a useful resource.<p>0: <a href="https://twitter.com/fasterthanlime/status/1452053938195341314" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/fasterthanlime/status/145205393819534131...</a><p>1: <a href="https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/" rel="nofollow">https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/</a>
It's a depressing situation, particularly knowing that Firefox is pretty much kept alive at Google's whim. It makes one seriously wonder whether it is feasible at all to maintain an independent open-source web browser in 2021. People tend to blame Mozilla's management and I'm sure there have been management failures but I'm not sure what they could do to make Firefox a thriving, independent, sustainable browser. It seems that the market niche of tech-capable people who value privacy and customisation over a simplified UX is not capable of sustaining Firefox on its own. So Mozilla tries to move in Chrome's direction, removing configuration options and "dumbing down" the UI, which frustrates its existing user base (including me) while apparently also failing to eat into Chrome's market share.<p>So what to do? Go back to being the quirky, heavily configurable browser we all know and love? That would be great for me, but even assuming Mozilla can afford to do that now (greater configurability leads to greater code complexity and therefore greater maintenance costs), experience seems to suggest it won't be enough to allow Mozilla grow its market share to a sustainable level.<p>Finally, and this is a bit of a tangent, but I've never quite understood why Mozilla got such a hard time from users about telemetry. I understand that telemetry is in general something to be suspicious of, but we're not talking about handing your data over to Google so they can target you with ads; we're talking about sharing technical data with a non-profit organisation to help them maintain and improve the browser you rely on. Mozilla are removing a feature you use daily? Okay, did you enable the telemetry that lets them know you use it? Receiving and analysing user data is increasingly important to delivering a good user experience. If open-source projects can't access the same data as proprietary ones do, we can't expect them to be able to react to user demands in the same way, and so we can't expect them to be able to compete in today's market.
I think part of this discussion needs to be that Firefox, while open source, doesn't provide footing for the community to build browser forks the way Chromium does. This sort of open usage, ironically, feels very fitting to the spirit of Firefox, but they're not even close to Chrom(e|ium).<p>I've been building a browser full time the past year+ (synth.app) and FF core wasn't really even an option. They've done very little to make the engine usable outside of Firefox.<p>Now I'm sure there are a variety of savory and unsavory things that led here, but building that stuff out seems like a good way to grow the ecosystem. At least they would've had a chance at capturing the Brave/Opera/Edge/etc market and those seats at the committees.<p>This isn't to say that I'm not worried about these standards merging like this. I've spent many hours working out weird chromium only behaviors that websites rely on these days to do things (and egregiously so if they detect an agent remotely resembling chrome).
I used to hold the same opinion: Google controls the world because everything is Blink/Chromium based! Must use Firefox to protest!<p>Then I looked closer look at the history of Chromium and Blink.<p>The reality is that a lot of the other "Chromium-based" browsers actually only use the Blink renderer. They don't use many (if any) other Chromium components other than probably V8.<p>In ancient times, Blink itself was a fork of Webkit. So, does that mean Apple controls everything?? But Webkit actually came from KDE's KHTML, didn't it.. Linux wins...<p>The kicker for me is: Blink and V8 are open source, and anyone can fork them at any time. Because of this, Microsoft, Oracle, Brave - every "Chromium" based browser vendor is contributing code. So does Google really control us that much? Blink and V8 make a rock solid browser core and are being worked on by <i>a lot</i> of companies, not just Google. It's like the Linux kernel - kind of a marvel of open source. Not something we need to fight against so viciously, in my opinion.<p>(Edit: "rock solid" might sound extreme to some... The HTML and JS specs are absurdly complex to the point where there's basically no hope of anyone implementing them from 0. There's a lot of bloat in modern web, no doubt. But if you're really worried about crazy JS features cluttering your browsing experience, you can go clone the Chromium source and pull out the crap you don't like.)
The real problem of Firefox is one that nobody cares about: distribution.<p>Let's say Firefox is the most advanced browser of the universe. How can you get people to install Firefox?<p>Chrome has the advantage here because it is preinstalled in every Android phone and Android has more than 90% market share.<p>The second advantage Chrome has is that it cannot be uninstalled from Android. The fact that Android phones have a limited storage space is a compelling reason to not install a second browser.<p>The third advantage Chrome has is the fact that more than 90% of people use Google has search engine and every time you access google.com with a browser other than Chrome you get a "Switch to Chrome" notification telling you that Chrome will help you "hide" annoying ads (without telling you that Google is responsible for the annoying ads) and you will be safe against malware. The regular user fears malwares and viruses more than ads or anything else because they think their bank account info will be stolen, so better security is a compelling reason to install Chrome.<p>Please, tell me, how do Firefox or any other browser can compete with the fact that Google is abusing their dominance of the search engine market and the mobile phone market to "force" people to use Chrome?
Parts of this are comedy.<p>> For me Firefox is the only alternative to a complete Chrome hegemony in the sense that:<p>> it’s open-source in the real sense (a project that’s truly community-driven)<p>I missed when the community wanted to do away with tab groups, compact mode, or keyword searches synced via bookmarks. The project is handled by a corporation with a multimillion dollar advertising deal with one of the EvilCorps. Uhh, yeah.<p>> it has a great track record of fighting for its users and for a better Internet.<p>Last I checked, it's owned by a foundation that's very okay with advocating that others tell me what I should see on the 'net. "We need more than deplatforming" are not words I ever want to hear from a privacy organization's mouth. That and "fighting for its users" don't exactly go together, unless you believe the Foundation's purpose is to be its users' moral custodian in matters that are not tech-related.<p>The whole sales pitch of this thing is "you should use a browser that increasingly sucks, that's increasingly lacking in support, whose stewards get their money from EvilCorp and cheerfully advocate for Internet censorship, all because they use a different browser engine". When my option would be to use browsers that do not suck and actually improve release by release, have revenue streams not so beholden to EvilCorp and put their makers' personal politics aside for user control and privacy.<p>Choices, choices.
> Clearly, that market share was lost solely to Chrome & co.3 I can attribute this decline to various factors:<p>>Google’s massive development resources and marketing machine.
>Most people not thinking about the long-term ramifications of ending up in a market with a single vendor in it.
>Firefox losing its status of a shiny new thing over the years.
>Mozilla’s inability to capitalize on the popularity of Firefox in the past. I think almost all of their revenue came from a search deal with Google.<p>The true reasons Firefox lost market share are:<p>1. Firefox has become a mess<p>2. Mozilla is terribly mismanaged<p>To see Firefox thrive, we have to push towards management change while there's still something to be saved or by forking Firefox
Firefox is compromised by the fact it’s core active users are also its largest liability. It’s the innovators dilemma. They want it to (more or less) stay the same and not move forward and make changes to compete with Chrome. Whereas for them to achieve a larger market share it needs a radical overhaul. Really what Mozilla need to do is build a “new browser” called something different and put their weight behind that. I thought they were on that path with Servo and the HTML based UI they were developing for it, but I think they bit off more than they could chew and did not move quickly enough.<p>The tight relationship between rendering engine and browser has been broken by Chrome and its “children” (and in some way also by Apples enforced usage of their WebKit implementation in ios). Mozilla need to follow suit in order to survive, rip that rendering engine out, build a new browser and a “browser toolkit” to let other people build their own.
<i>I can attribute this decline to various factors:</i><p>In my opinion the author missed a large one: Mozilla chose to chase after Chrome's market share instead of focusing on the reasons people liked Firefox. For <i>years</i> there were a ton of things that made Firefox objectively more powerful for a skilled user than Chrome. Mozilla has burned all of them to the ground.<p>They could have kept us, the ten percent. Instead they chased the 50% and they will end up with nothing at all. When they write the obituary for Firefox, it will begin with the day they decided if Chrome does something then they have to do it as well. Personally I'd peg the terminal diagnosis for June 21st 2011.<p>Mozilla should be comparing their user share to their user demographics. When Firefox had thirty percent of the market its users were talking about all the amazing things they could make Firefox do that other browsers couldn't. In 2021 Firefox users pretty much just talk about getting off on Google not knowing what they're up to. What's that get Mozilla? 3.29%. So why is Mozilla hell-bent on the same attitude and pattern of behavior that's been ruining them for a decade?
I really love Firefox still.. Though they are starting to annoy me. Especially with GUI changes and the lack of customisation thereof. Like Compact mode disappearing. For the most used app on most desktops, customisation is super important. I think they're jumping on the 'opinionated software' bandwagon too much.<p>It still has some powerful features though, like E2E encrypted sync, multi-account containers etc. I'll keep using it. But they're aiming at the mainstream too much which has already given up on them. They need to win back the enthusiasts first instead of alienating us. Only then does it make sense to thing about mainstream adoption again.
I feel the article misses how Firefox's inability to get a foothold on the mobile platform contributed to its decline. There are more people today using web browsers via mobile then desktop. In many poorer countries the first and only access to the open internet for the people is through chrome on Android.<p>I don't blame Mozilla for this though since they did not have a monopoly on a platform to capitalize on unlike the other players.<p>Sadly Safari seems to be the only other option.<p>For a long time Firefox has been dependent on Google for sponsorship. This is a toxic dependency that Firefox hasn't been able to rid itself of and is seeming increasingly less plausible as time goes by.
Firefox would fit neatly in the corporate world in my opinion. You can have a centrally administered configuration file and Firefox is indeed able to just use certificated from your OS. It is just a small toggle. Still, a bit of effort and maybe advertising would do wonders, because there are companies critical of Chrome that think data protection is worth more than personal advertising. I think Edge is trying to fit in here.<p>Sure, Edge can be configured by domain policies and that is easy too. For example disallowing https exceptions is a popular recent policy (that gets reverted pretty quickly).
I recently switched back to Firefox after using Chrome and Edge as my main browsers for the past couple of years. So far:<p>* Performance feels better. Both in terms of being more lean in everyday use, and in not having random issues where CPU/Memory spikes for seemingly no reason.<p>* I'm sure there are websites that don't work with Firefox, but I haven't found any yet.<p>* I don't like that tabs in the tab bar are roundrects instead of "connecting" to the content, but it's no big deal I guess.<p>* Other than that I've basically not noticed that I'm using a different browser, which I mean in the best way possible.<p>I'm going to continue using it for as long as possible, because while I think Mozilla has made some bad decisions in the past I strongly believe in their mission overall.
Web standards in 2001: Everything will be interoperable because we'll all use XML, it'll allow easy embedding of various formats, you'll only need an XML parser and you'll be able to read any document, and with XSL/XPath getting the information you want will be easy.<p>Web standards in 2021: Don't need interoperability if everyone is using Chrome, and thanks to <i>the living standard</i> if you want to compete you'll not only need to implement a spec that is changing daily, but you'll also need to implement all the bugs in Chrome as they'll eventually become part of the spec, and any unrelated specs that disagree with Chrome will end up having to be changed too!<p>Switching to FF is good, but the reality is that nothing can compete with the dominant players in this morass, so we'll never see new entrants. The Chrome team will determine the direction almost all software moves in probably for the next 2-3 decades at least barring some sort of legislative action by the worlds governments
Just as a data-point, I forced myself to use Firefox on Mobile and Desktop in my personal life, and Chrome at work.<p>* Firefox is fine, the sync works well, I don't see any of the drama around management or new-tab or search being an issue, and I get a pile of benefits like sandboxing and better ad-control.<p>* Chrome is faster, but it also has literal billions of investment.<p>There really isn't that much drama about this? Sure I wish Firefox had more market share, but it also runs on a fraction of Chrome's budget, so it's never going to be as good, and I can't judge people for not caring about helping Google.
Among the points missing under the "I can attribute this decline to various factors" section is IMO that Moz/FF have managed to alienate their original user base/plugin developers to become "more like Chrome". Maybe that's an unfair thing to say, but I guess it doesn't matter anymore anyway.
Firefox might be the alternative but Mozilla is no longer a good steward of it.<p>I believe it was very visible, several times, that the execs are only concerned with taking home huge bonuses (there were several submissions here on HN about their balance sheets and budget). At the same time, amazing and strong research teams have been let go. And then Mozilla started doing a very classic corporation things like trying to diversify income while half-arsing almost every such effort (although I do think their VPN offering is a pleasant exception of this rule); an example coming to mind is of course Persona but it's not the only one. To this day I haven't forgiven them for putting Pocket in a right-click menu. It didn't belong there then, it doesn't belong there still to this day. Or has HN forgotten to awful privacy policy that Pocket had at the time? Apparently it has.<p>The way I see it, only Safari and Chrome(-ium) will remain in the next few years. Firefox is doomed when it's managed by Mozilla. And Mozilla hasn't been what they used to be, for a long time now.
I've been using Firefox exclusively on desktop and mobile for a few years now, and it is quite good. Lighter that Chrome (good because I'm a bit of a cheapskate when it comes to hardware), everything works, and it is quick. And they finally got their Linux support up to par (in the late 00s early 10s, Firefox for Linux was a forgotten stepchild, missing most of the newer features and integration present in the other platforms).
The problem is that the web has gotten way too complicated. We're approaching the point where only trillion dollar companies are producing rendering engines. No open source project will ever likely be able to catch up and compete if Firefox can't.<p>It's time to consider stopping to try and save the standard web, and start looking at alternatives like Gemini for a non-corporate controlled alternative.
I've held the same view as the author for some time now. The popularity of "ungoogled-chromium" in some corners of the internet has always struck me as trading the data collection aspect of chrome for furthering the chromium hegemony even further. Same goes for Vivaldi and Brave.
To me that is not good. Firefox just suck.<p>I insisted on Firefox for a while because Google hegemony but in the end I switched to brave.<p>1. Firefox often loses settings<p>2. Also it is really, really bad at saving your session. After losing important tabs I ignited that but...<p>3. After painstakingly preparing a bunch of docked tabs, it lost these too.<p>4. Frequent interface changes, often for the worse (to be honest my favourite interface was firefox 2.0)<p>5. It often breaks extensions too, this is felt heavily on Thunderbird where I have to often teach my family all over again how to do what they want or have to code more extensions myself because some critical extension does not work anymore.
In my experience, such arguments don't move the needle on adoption. "Hegemony" of a specific useful product is a concern to such a small number of people that even getting 100% of those people who are concerned or could be made to be concerned to use an alternative will not make a dent in the "hegemony."<p>The only thing that I have seen work is shipping a better, cheaper, and more useful product and focusing marketing on why a user would prefer to use it on its own merits. Everything else is preaching to the converted.
That's all true. At the same time people on HN of all places still seriously advertise Chrome clones as if they were a complete alternatives for a Google monopoly. I've lost hope and count the days until either Gecko/Quantum will go down or biggest websites will stop supporting it. I'm already encountering at least one not working website every few months, one of them was my bank portal (BNP subsidiary, not some out of the woods small bank).
I've started using it as my main browser both in daily use and dev.<p>In the past I had trouble with client projects or dev tools only working in chrome, but I decided that the only way things get freer is to make myself <i>fix</i> those pain points when I come across them.
I started using Firefox again on my computers and mobile with the hype around Manifest v3 inevitably restricting future adblocking.<p>I see friends switching to Brave, but I dislike how they seem to be focusing their RnD into BAT/crypto features. Firefox also has the advantage of having addons on mobile.<p>It's a pipe dream, but I could see Google reverting to the don't be evil days with the rise of these Chromium forks and other ad agencies. Somehow change their business model away from ads, promote adblocking, and support addons on mobile. Checkmate Brave/Vivaldi/Edge/etc. Other than niche features or those apposed to Google will look elsewhere.
I use Firefox and am pretty happy with. It seems a lot of people are complaining/obsessing about its market share or insisting that chrome is the way to go. All not that relevant. It's fine. It has more than enough market share that most companies can't afford to ignore it. That's all that matters. As long as that's the case you can choose to use it or not. The point is that you still have a choice.<p>Also market share varies by region. Chrome and Safari are a bit over represented in the US and under represented in e.g. Germany.<p>And if people want to use edge, chromium, brave, or get their Chrome experience straight from Google, also fine. IMHO you are dependent on Google either way because it's mostly them doing the heavy lifting on the internals and setting the agenda/roadmap for that. I hear good things about Safari too. Though, I mostly use it to figure out why stuff that works in Firefox and Chrome doesn't work there. That seems to be a recurring annoyance I have to deal with.<p>From my point of view, having three browser engines (Chrome, Safari, and Firefox) is better than just having Chrome and Safari. At worst, it keeps the other two a bit more honest. Especially Google seems to need to have their arm twisted a lot more to actually do the right things.<p>If people don't like their browsers, maybe go and fix them? If you can't, pick the one that best caters to your need and be grateful for what you get for free.
Firefox isn't an acceptable alternative, over the past few years it's completely obvious the priorities of the organization in control of it are not to build a great browser and to de-homogenize the web tech stack.<p>Best thing that could ever happen for the browser problem is for Mozilla to go under and FF be taken over by the community who actually care about the problem that FF is the solution for, not just some overpaid executives who think selling a VPN is a good use of their time between private jet flights.
18ish years ago I was using Firefox as my primary browser and then testing in IE. Now I still run Firefox and instead test in Chrome. Rinse, repeat. Although I'll admit testing and fixing for Chrome is quite easier than it was dealing with IE and it's various versions.
Firefox is a terrific browser. It is the only browser I use for both web development and normal browsing. The only time I use Chrome is when I come across a site that was built to only work on Chrome. Fortunately, those are very rare.
A discussion of WebKit and its features would make this far less clickbait-y: <a href="https://webkit.org/status" rel="nofollow">https://webkit.org/status</a><p>Noting, however, that I use Firefox and Thunderbird as my daily-driver applications, and Edge + Safari when I must.
Anyone who has ever actually worked on OSS or just hangs out in ANY support channel/forum for open source will see that users are endlessly demanding, need lots of support, but will never, ever pay for anything if a free alternative exists.<p>Linus and the “gamers” will compare and try distros, point out tiny flaws, judge developer team strength but the one thing they will almost never, ever do is _pay money_. Even the nicest folks try their best, ask for support politely but they typically will not or cannot pay, and cannot contribute to a project beyond a solid bug report in most cases.<p>Linux OSS fanboys also are allergic to paying for software. God forbid someone charges a dollar for a useful application on a linux distro. Elementary OS is trying to inch towards payment with a “pay what you want” model because developers and teams actually charging for their labor would piss off 99% of the users. They may talk about the virtues of open source but what 95% of (non-technical) users love about open source is the fact that its FREE.<p>Kovid Goyal, creator of Calibre & Kitty gets ~$3000/month on Patreon for software used by millions that he’s built and supported for a decade now. How much does Amazon make on the Kindle instead? Tens or hundreds of millions? This isn’t a case of an evil corporate company not paying for OSS either, its just people who like to read.<p>We could end the Chrome hegemony tomorrow if Firefox was realistically able to charge for a browser, hire folks and not get completely dropped by their userbase. I hang out in the Firefox chats and fixed a bug once. Like most OSS, “community driven” basically means ~1000 people are actually willing and able to contribute to the project in some capacity. The rest is freeloaders, even if they happen to have good intentions. Google figured out an indirect way to get compensated for what they build because they too know users will not pay for a browser, or a search engine, or maps, or cloud storage, or photos, or news or everything else Google just gives us for free. As developers we could help solve this problem too - simply work for Mozilla negotiate a lower salary if you feel so strongly.
I'm Firefox user, but those arguments are ridiculous for me, it almost sounds like conspiracy theory. You just keep convincing people to use software not because it's better, but because of some blurry ideological reasons.<p>I keep reading articles like that on tech-related websites and they all miss the point which is: if Chrome-based browsers one day manage to gain 100% market share, what will it change if it is open source? What stops anyone from just forking that browser if Google makes anything wrong with it? And what did Google do with browsers so far, that we hate it?
Firefox needs to go with a one locked-down process per tab model. There is no excuse these days for a single tab crash to kill off substantial portions of the browser. Moreover, there is no excuse for a tab compromise to allow access to other tabs' memory.<p>I use Chromium because it has both a <i>safer</i> and <i>more reliable</i> design and implementation. If web browsers were OS's, Firefox would be Mac OS 9. If Mozilla wants to understand why they're losing market share, they should try and understand why no one builds OS's like that anymore.
I'm still not over the chicklet tabs.<p>I hope Mozilla can find a more coherent use of their energy. I'm still rooting and using firefox but it's more of an ethical effort than the obvious pleasure it used to be.<p>Good luck
I use Firefox rather than Chrome just to support an alternative to a monoculture. When I was on Mac, I enjoyed using Safari. I'm not a power user--I just use tabs and bookmarks, and don't use sync. Mozilla makes Firefox hard to justify since it keeps adding features I don't really care about (e.g. Pocket). I just want a simple browser that is lightweight.<p>When I've tried out alternatives, I run into sites that don't work correctly. I don't particularly like Firefox, but it "just works" most of the time.
I work for a company whose product runs on the web and it’s super frustrating that when we have a browser error our response is “are you using chrome”? One of the big draws of browser based apps is that they can run unchanged on Linux/Mac/Windows. But now you are telling me that most apps only work on chrome???<p>Also so many of the tutorials on JavaScript are done with chrome. People are learning how to use the chrome dev tools, and then not able to transition to using other browsers for web dev. It’s a mess.
As long as Chrom(e|ium) isn't limited to one architecture/platform like MSIE was, I don't see this as a problem. I'm using Chromium on my Raspberry Pi right now to post this. I could never dream of doing such a thing 20 years ago. I'd have to hope someone hadn't broken the site for Mozilla and that it wouldn't crash repeatedly. The MSIE-dominant days were bad, but we're nowhere near that now.
It's a decent goal to increase Firefox usage, but the blog appears to miss the elephant in the room with this comment:<p>> Don’t get me wrong, though - using Firefox is not painful at all. Quite the contrary!<p>... after noting an anecdote earlier in the post<p>> Last week I saw one site that directly didn’t support Firefox (it displayed a message I should switch to Chrome) and another where the sign in was broken on Firefox, but worked on Chrome-like browsers<p>These experiences make using Firefox painful for end-users, and if Chrome is 99% as good and doesn't have this friction, they'll use Chrome just to experience less online friction.<p>It's a vicious chicken-egg problem, because if Firefox's market-share is sub-5%, then it doesn't matter <i>why</i> that sign-in page doesn't work in FF... Nobody empowered to fix it will bother to look, because the workaround of "Just use a different browser" is very cheap from the site-owner's point of view (way cheaper than spinning up a debugging flow in a browser they're unfamiliar with).<p>Low market share drives increased likelihood of browser-site incompatibility drives users to switch to the larger-market-share browser drives low market share.
There are a couple of misleading things in this post.<p>The assumption that Chromium (& Webkit) is controlled soley by Google, is outdated.<p>If you think Microsoft would have made a strategic shift like basing Edge on Chromium without ensuring they had a seat at the table, you would be very mistaken - and they did not.<p>Microsoft, Google, Brave, and Samsung all contribute to the core, Microsoft very significantly.
If Google will be able to have a monopoly on the rendering engines and dictate web standards that will be hugely detrimental to lots of companies.<p>I don't understand why those companies don't finance the development of alternative rendering engines and browsers. Right now Google is financing the only alternative left, Firefox. So they kind of control that, too.
I recently had to do a video call for a medical appointment. The video client was web based. I opened it up in the latest Firefox and was welcomed with a message informing me only Chrome was supported (or Safari on iOS). Ok, so now in order to receive healthcare in 2021 I must install Google spyware on my devices. This timeline is just swell.
>sign in was broken on Firefox, but worked on Chrome-like browsers<p>I've seen that, but it was related to hardware keys. If Firefox cannot be bothered to support keys, why should anyone be bothered by using it?<p>More importantly though, it seems like the whole world is in this mess, because browser developers develop monoliths. If the browsers were split into small reusable parts, any developer could assemble one, and there could be lots of competing parts. The number of available browsers would explode to infinity. Why is everything lumped under a single massive code base known as "Browser engine" like gecko or blink or whatever? Why do they keep making monoliths? There could be parser engine, css layout engine, svg render engine, etc etc etc. But there isn't, there's one giant lump, browser engine.<p>If anyone made a focused attempt at a new browser ecosystem, it seems like it should attack the glue layer between these disparate parts.
I love the idea/ethics of Firefox 100%, but (and maybe this is just a "me" problem/my own lack of technical-prowess) but I actually find FF TOO "secure"/paranoid. Mainly the 2FA is just too much. I shouldn't need two devices to login to my account. Couple that with an apparent bug in FF that always sends the 2FA verification to my old email address (@gmail.com) despite my FF account showing that my email address should be "@vivaldi.net" and I'm over it. Vivaldi is the real winner, not Firefox. Plus the Vivaldi "ecosystem" also includes calendar and email. Browser supports tab-stacking, themes (including scheduled themes, if one desires), support for RSS feeds, and a ton of other features...<p><a href="https://vivaldi.net/" rel="nofollow">https://vivaldi.net/</a>
I've been using Firefox for almost a year now (on Phone and Desktop) and the only reason I switch to Chrome is to translate websites. I live in Netherlands and don't speak Dutch so to browse any local website I have to rely on Chrome's auto-translate thingy.
> but from my perspective Apple is just another company that’s more focused on advancing their own agenda than the well-being of their users or open web standards<p>Right. Strange that. Who’d have thought that’s how a company would prioritize things.
Doesn't Safari have the same relationship to WebKit as Chrome to Chromium? What's preventing other browsers to use WebKit instead of Chromium and make the open source browser engine competition a bit more lively?
I am honestly surprised that the webdev community allowed this to happen. This is, pretty much, exactly what happened with Trident/Internet Explorer back in the day. This is also how we got the awesomeness that was ActiveX.<p>Though, to be fair to the Chromium maintainers, they've done an excellent job of making it incredibly easy to develop against. Puppeteer is the gold standard for browser automation, Chromium Headless makes it easy to run pretty much any webdriver against it, then there's Embedded Framework, Electron, etc. Firefox could have/should have done more here.
I remember using Konqueror in the middle of 00s. It was much better UI-wise, but a lot of web sites were broken in it so I had to default to Firefox often.<p>Guess what, today using Firefox is the same, even if it's better than Chromium derivatives for you, too often will you need to switch to Chromium when faced with Google Hangouts / Google Meet / Zoom / the fad of the day, or some random websites.<p>And this time it does not worth it since it's the same US corporate product, so I jumped this ship more eagerly. I'm on Yandex (the web browser) now.
Maybe someone has the answer to the main reason I'm not using Firefox:<p>Is there a (sane) way to map Cmd+D to highlight the URL bar? I was trying to do this about a year ago but it proved insanely complicated. I managed to update omni.ja in v80 but then couldn't anymore in v80.0.2 (plus this would get annoying quick to do frequently).<p>In Chromium this is easy since the there's a menu entry for it ("Open Location...") so I can natively create custom mappings for it, but I refused to retrain my muscle memory for Cmd+L so I went back to using Brave. :|
We somehow need to incentivize the proliferation of browser engines more than actual browsers themselves. Maybe an open design committee that could standardize modules the engines should contain along with calling conventions between them? That would encourage people to work on smaller chunks and not have to build the entire thing by hand. Perhaps browser engine prize competitions?<p>If there were even half a dozen capable browser engines to choose from when making a new browser that were all accessible, then we wouldn't be in this mess.
Sure but the Firefox interface is just so horrible. I've tried to switch at least three times in the past two years and after about two weeks I just throw my hands up go back to Chrome.
I get it. We all wish more people would use Firefox.<p>I tried to switch from Chrome to Firefox, and 98% of my websites work fine, but you still need Chrome as a backup for those sites that don't. Without 100% compatibility it's a hard sell when most users have no reason to leave Chrome.<p>I can't recommend Firefox to friends with the caveat "Keep a copy of Chrome around for when stuff doesn't work" Hopefully Mozilla can keep making things better. I'm glad someone is competing in this space
This is precisely why I've switched to Firefox in recent years. It's quite good these days. I don't even have Chrome installed on my current personal PC.
I wish there was an easy way to map all my chrome ext to firefox exts. For the ones that don't have an exact equivalent maybe the closest match would work fine. The point is I have over 30 extensions and every time I decide to use ff I realize I'm missing one or another ext. Even if I download the ff version of the ext it's still missing all the configuration and customized key bindings.<p>This is probably the major blocker from people switching.
I switched to Firefox over 2 years ago, after using Chrome for more than 10 years. And while as a user I have my entire household converted to Firefox, as a developer I go with Chromium whenever I need to plug a shameless browser component in my projects. Why? Because Firefox does NOT have the equivalent!!! Why they won't do the same? I'll switch in a second to them instead of using Chromium. My 2 cents.
For anyone thinking "we can't possibly create a new production-ready browser engine", note that all major browsers except Firefox descended from one such project - KHTML.<p>"But you can't actually do it unless you're a $1T company" crowd forgets (or wasn't around to see) how dominant IE was, and how huge a project Mozilla was even back in the day.
Totally agree. I was using Firefox until recently. After they announced their Rust based parallel engines I started using it.<p>But i stopped using it now the Mozilla Foundation is having hard times surviving....<p>The big problem is the fact that Google has sooo much money... We need a Twitter, a Facebook, or another company with a big cash cow to seriously support a different browser engine.
One annoyed UX I dislike about Firefox is swipe back on iOS. Firefox team should fix their swipe back which go to previous page, it also lead to page refresh, and caused the scroll lose its position.<p>This deliver a poor experience when implementing History API compare to Safari and Google on iOS that work as expected.
I've recently converted my personal usage to Safari as Chrome was proving buggy on the new MacBook Pro. I've enjoyed it, performance is essentially identical and Apple pay in the browser is the smoothest payment experience I've ever had on mobile web.<p>Although, autofill on Safari is objectively worse.
The article says that if you care about the web, you should care about Firefox. I disagree, because my "web" is probably not Batsov's "web". What is "the web" for me? Well, I'd say it's IRC, torrents, mailing lists, git repositories, oh and mostly-textual websites. I use Firefox for the latter, but for most of them I wouldn't mind using emacs-w3m instead. Unfortunately GitHub turned into a shitty JavaScript Web App, and many people still use it so I need to interact with it at times. So yeah, I care about having a Firefox version that can work with it. It doesn't need to be updated every week with the latest user-hostile interface changes. It doesn't need endless security updates, because JavaScript is disabled by default. I don't care about Firefox qua product anymore, because it too turned into a piece of trash long ago. I definitely don't care about the Mozillas. The only reason I still use it is that some mostly-textual websites are too shitty to run in a basic browser like emacs-w3m.
I do my part, using firefox on all my devices and insisting it to be the main browser in my company. Interestingly, I also feel that Firefox is actually superior to Chrome in every aspect that matters: it is faster, passwords sync better and more reliably, and the user interface is better.
This blog is probably not meant for hackernews community overall. I for one have been using firefox in both desktop and mobile for quite sometime now.<p>I guess the problem today is nobody can be bothered to maintain sites for different browsers. Today I see most websites work well only in chrome.
Forgive my ignorance, but why is maintaining a browser so hard? HTML and CSS are decades old by now. Javascript is handled through a separate engine.<p>Is the problem that the standards keep evolving? Or are the standards just too difficult to perfectly support? What is going on?
Too bad Firefox doesn't fully support hangouts. in a work from home world, I cannot operate without the ability to blur background in video meetings. it's the only feature that is holding me back from using ff full time now
Related, maybe someone wants to submit it to the HN queue: <a href="https://gist.github.com/ad72f1da36fbc965e4a1d4daeb1d6cb3" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/ad72f1da36fbc965e4a1d4daeb1d6cb3</a>
I wonder when Google will finally pull the plug on Mozilla. At 4.0% market share they can't deliver that much search volume to justify spending millions on their incredibly bad management.
> It’d be nice to see something similar on the mobile front at some point, but I doubt that will happen<p>AFAIK, Google Play offers a browser choice prompt on new Androids, at least in Europe
I have just set up a monthly donation to Mozilla.<p>If Wikipedia can live on donations, why not Mozilla?<p><a href="https://donate.mozilla.org" rel="nofollow">https://donate.mozilla.org</a>
Firefox is no longer just a browser. It's a brand. The gecko engine needs promoting; not Firefox any longer. The name confusion is going to destroy any hope, IMHO.
Firefox has the best set of tools for developers imo.
Had largely surpassed Chrome in my daily usage (frontend dev) and works well with large sets of tabs
Mozilla betrayed the people a thousand times. It's time to face we the people have lost the war.
It's time to move on and build something new.
About 6 months ago I forced myself off of Chrome and went cold turkey on just using Firefox until it was normalised for me.<p>In the end I gave up on the feature I’d be hoping Firefox would implement (tab search), and went with I just need to use this for the future of the web.<p>It’s been a happy process, I love containers for privacy and in the process I’ve discovered many niceties of Firefox.<p>Don’t miss chrome as my daily driver since I detoxed.
the thing is, mozilla and firefox is the embodiment of a valiant battle for a sane, honest, human-centric digital universe. a battle that was fought and lost in the last decade. dystopia has won and it doesn't think of itself as dystopic, it thinks that it is doing God's work<p>there is no point crying over spilled milk, hoping that it can reconstitute into a jug. post-mortems might useful but they need to account for the tectonic continental plate drifts that tamed even extremely well funded actors like Microsoft<p>what the broader open source community should focus on is where the next choke point will materialize and ensure the same mistakes do not happen again<p>assuming there is a second chance
If there is any validity to crypto and DAO governance, someone would start a DAO to buy Mozilla and run the org in a decentralized way. Why are people messing around with buying copies of the constitution and NBA teams?
What's wrong with using Chromium though? I understand most of the work being done on it is by Google, but do they control the direction of the project?
>it’s open-source in the real sense (a project that’s <i>truly community-driven</i>)<p>I guess that is why some companies are starting to get wary of the term open source.<p>> Chrome started with a great narrative when it was facing an uphill battle with Internet Explorer,<p>That is just not true, the uphill battle was hard won by Firefox and their supporters. People knew there were alternative browser. Developers were taking action in supporting Firefox. Chrome came in, with the help of Google Services steal the thunder. Although you could also blame Mozilla for failing to work on e10s, which was originally schedule for Firefox 3.5, pushed to Firefox 4 and later that is what we now call quantum.<p>>it’s home to the last major rendering engine, that’s not derived from WebKit<p>I dont think that is bad. Gecko isn't necessarily better than Webkit. You need to win on technical merit.<p>> Google were still the company that “does no evil”. It’s almost surreal how things have changed<p>"Surreal". I guess that is just life, when most were too young and naive to believe a new startup company could do evil. And Google was so righteous back then. When a few lonely <i>conspiracy theorist</i> were crying about Google, no one listened. Remember, that was before Steve Jobs declared Thermonuclear war. And before the Great Battle between Apple and Google started. But then even <i>after</i> the thermonuclear war, most people still believed in Google.<p>It wasn't until 2021 did anyone from ex-Mozilla stepped up and suggest what Google <i>might</i> have done.<p>And here is what I wrote about Mozilla [1] not long ago.<p>>And here is another unpopular opinion. I dont care if her salary is 3 million or even 30 million. If she had managed to bring Firefox to 60% marketshare and bring down Chrome on Desktop, would you have still complained if she was paid 30 million?<p>The problem is Mozilla is in such a bad shape and she is under performing as a CEO.<p>Unfortunately people dont learn much from history. And history dictate the only way to solve this problem is Mozilla think of it as a problem. Otherwise its current status at ~10% marketshare is enough to sustain its operation. Nothing bad enough is happening, no interest or incentive for changes. Inertia. Let's keep thing this way.<p>So yes, it is counter intuitive. The only way to save Mozilla ( or change Mozilla's direction, I guess the word "save" is a hyperbole, at least from Mozilla's perspective. ) isn't trying to get more user to use it. It is actually push people to abandon it.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28961544" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28961544</a>
To me the problem is almost information theoretic. Browsers need to have a standard specification for interoperability and one that includes an open source reference implementation of the core parts. It seems chromium has become that standard.<p>I often argue against pure natural language specifications in favor code based specs. I just don't think human language is nearly precise enough to write an adequate specification. Natural language words are incredibly polysemic and contextual. Look for example, at how many meanings the word "break" has: <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/break" rel="nofollow">https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/break</a><p>Kolmogrov has long ago suggested that fully specified information distills down to a computer program: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_description_length" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_description_length</a><p>The ideal language for a pure specification might be a mix of natural language and pseudo code with a pseudo test suit. However, if you are writing that, you might as well go one step further and write working testable code.<p>Other technical fields usually go beyond language for specifications, using blueprints and diagrams which are their version of code.<p>There is also an history of trying to tackle the inadequacy of natural language for technical specifications. A pioneer of this is Donald Knuth with his Literate Programming (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming</a>) and the descendant concepts of having code with extractable inline comments that you can use to auto generate documentation. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentation_generator" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentation_generator</a><p>I would argue that modern platforms with pull request based workflows that tie discussions to version controlled code changes are also the progression of this line of thought.<p>A cleaned up version of these might make sense for a specification.<p>And I get some of the concerns. While natural language under specifies, reference implementations over specify. This is more of a problem with low level languages however. Modern, high level languages are getting fairly close to a form of pseudo code. I fully agree that the reference implementations shouldn't contain or should hide, low level optimizations. I also understand that reference implementations can unduly tie specs to specific hardware, OSs and platforms.<p>But to me, over-specification is less of a problem than under-specification and it can be mitigated by labeling particular functions or blocks of code as implementation specific and not part of the spec.<p>Without spec written in code, the different implementations always have subtle incompatibilities. I see egregious versions of under-specification in government where horrendously vague specs are created in order to issue RFPs for getting software built. They usually end up with non working software at mind blowing cost.<p>People have this weird misconception that they are contracting out to build software. They are not. Building software is really easy. You press the build button or type the compile command. Building software has been fully automated for a while now. What is difficult is designing software and specifying what it must do. This is because there is a vast jungle of protocols, business flows, hardware and software platforms that need to be interacted in different ways for different needs. This is what needs to be specified and only computer code can do it adequately.<p>I wish that Mozilla adopted the chromium core. We really need a well funded non-profit managed release of the reference browser.
Maybe I am a minority, but I and some others I know of have turned their backs on Firefox because Mozilla got woke and spoke out in favor of censorship and promoting fake news. Since they are no longer proponents of freedom on the internet, any reason to still give them the time of the day has been gone away.<p>In fact I now celebrate their shrinking market share.
Recently reinstalled OS and tried Firefox for some time. Could only last a couple weeks before dumping firefox.<p>I guess Safari is still their own. KDE Konqueror still their own. Sad that opera became chrome. Guess I'll be staying Brave for awhile.<p>Firefox's huge decline also makes sense to me. Firefox stopped building their browser ~5 years ago? It's not that Chromium is inherently just better, it's that Mozilla moved off of firefox. When you lose focus on firefox, you lag behind.<p><a href="https://blog.mozilla.org/careers/mozilla-diversity-inclusion-2019-results/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.mozilla.org/careers/mozilla-diversity-inclusion...</a><p>They are far more concerned with hiring women. They hired themselves a 'Culture Manager' and 'people managers' and 'diversity managers'. Note how these are not Rust Software developer manager, protocol developer manager.<p><a href="https://blog.mozilla.org/careers/mozilla-introduces-gender-transitioning-guidelines-and-policy/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.mozilla.org/careers/mozilla-introduces-gender-t...</a><p>Imagine how good firefox could be if they weren't so concerned with their staffing diversity and instead worked on their browser.<p><a href="https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/" rel="nofollow">https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/</a><p>They are concerned about political activism, calling for people to be deplatformed, etc.<p>For that reason, firefox isn't even an alternative.
I prefer typing to pointing -- and I like clean interfaces --, so I use the VIm-inspired but Chromium-based Qutebrowser; but maybe I should just use Firefox and let the inconvenience of pointing inspire me to browse less. Qutebrowser would -- at least alternatively -- use the Firefox backend if it could, but Mozilla has chosen not to make it usable by other browsers than Firefox.
There is one thing I don't understand from the article. What is that he is so afraid of?that the website becomes more standarized and developers don't need to make a website for 5 different browsers? Or that because of that users will have less problems? Is that such a big deal to make most of the browsers dependent on chromium? Isn't chromium open source and tomorrow anyone could create a better browser? I use Vivaldi, can't be happier.... Some people seem to be worry about a lot of stuff