Firefox Was Always Enough

Mozilla doesn&#x27;t have a real sustainable business model right now.<p>FireFox OS could have provided such model, in fact, its successor kaios is doing very well and one can imagine that in the future, it will be the primary OS of half the mobile users on the planet. &#x27;Feature phones&#x27; aren&#x27;t dead. They provide a cheap alternative to touch phones, are usually more robust, and allowing them to run web apps instead of MIDP stuff is a giant opportunity for any web actor.<p>Ditching Rust as a core component of the future of Firefox is also a demonstration that Mozilla isn&#x27;t a tech focused corp anymore. Rust is going to yield a lot of result when it comes to security, memory saftely and maintainability and firing Rust devs was terribly short sighted.<p>So yes Firefox was always enough. Leadership at Mozilla doesn&#x27;t get it.

It seems to me that Mozilla isn&#x27;t just technologically pessimistic, but they also just lack vision for the future of the web and what roles the browser could play in it. Right now, the only reason we&#x27;re talking about them is that Firefox is sitting atop a sizable share of a practically impenetrable market. Very successful companies are being started around much less of a product, but Mozilla seems to genuinely have no idea what else can be done with a browser in the future. If they knew, they would become a proper <i>browser as a platform</i> company.<p>Maybe it&#x27;s me being too naive, but if you had asked me 10 years ago to predict where they would be, I would&#x27;ve said that in the future Firefox would come in different versions. The main one, the flagship, would remain the general purpose browser that we know. But there would be some special editions custom tailored to specific markets. You&#x27;d have &quot;Enterprise&quot; editions, that facilitate internal app development for organizations. If your organization needed to quickly build internal tools, you wouldn&#x27;t need to tussle with WebPack and all the other front-end nonsense. The browser would come already equipped with a development toolkit and environment, ready to connect to your db of choice, etc. I imagined that they could come up with other special versions of Firefox already customized to facilitate integration with popular platforms like Salesforce, Amazon, and others for people who work or develop for those.<p>A proper <i>browser as a platform</i> with an ecosystem. I still think it&#x27;s possible.

If I understand this correctly. Mozilla let the author go, and the author still went out of their way to write a comprehensive and clear minded article full of feedback and honest recommendations.<p>If I see one big problem with Mozilla, is that they chose to let go people like the author. Engineering &amp; product culture only follows.

Recently switched back to Firefox after meandering between Edge and Chrome on multiple platforms (Linux, macOS and Windows) for work and non-work purposes.<p>Firefox Dev Tools are fucking awesome. Firefox sync works great. All the extensions I want are here. It&#x27;s fast enough in ways that microbenchmarks don&#x27;t mean anything to me...and it&#x27;s free as in Liberty (last but not least).<p>I&#x27;ve been looking for a VPN, and even though I find the features rather anemic - I&#x27;ve used mullvad before and I trust the infrastructure that Mozilla VPN is built on and it&#x27;s a way to give money to them. I will probably also switch over from Raindrop to Pocket for the same purpose.

It&#x27;s curious that the 4 bullet points in the final section don&#x27;t make any mention of open source (in fact, the article doesn&#x27;t at all).<p>I think Opera Software circa 2012 was doing all of the things we would hope for&#x2F;expect from Mozilla &amp; Firefox, and doing them much better than Mozilla could. Bar one: it was not open source.<p>When I made the switch to Firefox in 2012, it was my belief that I would not have been forced to switch browser had Opera originally been open source. I strongly believed in open source at the time; I used Opera in spite of that. When they shut down the Presto project, I lamented the loss due to the inability of the community to fork.<p>I&#x27;m wondering if Firefox went away, would a fork be likely to survive in any impactful way; browsers are massive, complex &amp; enormously expensive to maintain, whether you have rights to the source or not. Maybe open source isn&#x27;t the panacea we thought in this particular context.<p>I&#x27;m still on Firefox as I&#x27;m loathe to support any browsers built on Blink &amp; contribute further to a monoculture, but the Vivaldi project have finally started to achieve similar things to what Opera was doing 8 years ago. It&#x27;s notable that it&#x27;s linked in blue in the section of this article headed &quot;A better browser&quot;.

&gt; (Ironically [the Firefox UI bits] were called “chrome” before Chrome even existed.)<p>Not ironic, intentional. Chrome was made by former Firefox engineers, and the name was a joke about exactly this. I remember struggling to come up with a better name for the app other than this code name and then they eventually launched it with it anyway.

I&#x27;m a happy Firefox user. IMHO the thing that needs sorting out is the relation between Mozilla the company and Mozilla the Foundation.<p>I just browsed the website of the Mozilla Foundation and to my surprise learned that Firefox development is not one of its responsibilities. I was assuming that that was in fact its primary mission. It&#x27;s not apparently. Maybe I&#x27;m wrong and it&#x27;s just a vague website but it reads to me like they are spending their time doing activism and marketing and that they do not employ any developers.<p>The reason the foundation leading product development would make sense to me is that having no commercial conflicts of interests are kind of a per-requisite to do what most users (including me) value in Firefox, is to protect their privacy, commit to open standards (over any competitive advantages that proprietary&#x2F;exclusive features could bring), be as secure as they can be, etc.<p>Except it seems that Firefox development is currently not structured like that and Firefox is instead an OSS product developed by a commercial for profit business competing with other companies backing a different OSS product (i.e. chromium) where users have some concerns about the conflicts of interests of the companies backing that (e.g. Google and MS) with respect to exactly the things I value in Firefox.<p>So, given that, what&#x27;s the point of having the foundation and what&#x27;s the point of Firefox as a commercial product (other than guilt tripping Google into keeping the money coming)? I don&#x27;t mean pretty words and mission statements of a commercial entity. But what&#x27;s the point for users picking one company over another? They are both companies that ultimately are run by their share holders; not by their users. A foundation is different: it serves its members and its mission without a goal to enrich shareholders.

I think Safari is going to have the market cornered on technology pessimism (aka privacy features) and browser performance per watt on macOS and iOS.<p>Google is rapidly locking down enterprise by building in tight integrations with Google Workspace&#x2F;G-Suite (see: context aware authentication).<p>In 10 - 15 years the web should be better than it is today. The first step in their recovery is to convey what their vision of the web looks like in 2035 and commit to Firefox being the first browser to make it a reality by 2025.

&quot;Quantitative improvement&quot; is table stakes that I worry have been abandoned with the jettisoning of the Servo team. &quot;Technological pessimism&quot; is a differentiating strategy, but ultimately dooms them to the small subset of users who understand and care about privacy at a deep level. &quot;All encompassing&quot; is a death march. All is infinite and Mozilla can&#x27;t afford to implement everything hoping something turns out to be valuable (Google OTOH can bankrupt competition with this strategy). &quot;A better browser&quot; is where I think Mozilla should focus their attention. They were doing that with their lab experiments, but abandoned them before they could become valuable. Doing this approach well requires commitment to do enough of them that a vision coalesces and then more commitment to see it through. Mozilla used to be audacious enough to invent a new programming language in order to build a better browser. Now they seem to have turned their backs on that initiative and I&#x27;m left wondering if they have any guts left at all.

&gt; Remember what was really cool in Firefox? Tabs!<p>Ah how this resonates with me so much, I remember the difference of tabless IE and oh so magical Netscape &#x2F; Firefox when those were new. I consider myself Mozilla fanboy to this days.<p>But alas, every time I try clean installation with default settings I cannot believe how … bad this became and how far it diverged from original experience: by now Firefox is browser with the WORST user experience regarding tabs usage, from my perspective.<p>Current defaults are: - Super slow Ctrl+Tab modal tab switcher, mimicking OS alt+tab app switching mechanic. But slow. And distracting. And not pretty. And considering tab bar, mostly redundant. - Ctrl+Tabbing order is, naturally, in most recently used order, so visual tab proximity means nothing. - Ctrl+Shift+Tab does mostly nothing [1]. No, it does not select the least recently used tab. No, it does not switch to tab to the left. When tabs don&#x27;t fit the tabs bar width, Ctrl+Shift+Tab opens <i>another</i> (vertical) tabs list and lets you read titles and navigate with arrows. But usually you just instinctively press Ctrl+Tab to &quot;undo&quot; it, but now you stare on that Modal over the opened list and question your browser choice. From there Ctrl+Tab finally stops working predictably and whole experience breaks into horrible mess.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong, Ctrl+PgUp&#x2F;PgDown still operates well. You can still change some settings to get even Ctrl+Tab working the way original Firefox popularized. But still, this state of things makes me very sad. I&#x27;d really like to spread Firefox, but with such details that I cannot explain even to myself it is impossible.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=1576130" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=1576130</a>

I&#x27;ve long wondered why Mozilla hasn&#x27;t worked on a embeddable Gecko engine as an alternative to Electron. The Mozilla alternative could be promoted as a modular, cross-platform component but in a stripped-down, faster and less memory hungry form than Electron (assuming these features can be achieved).<p>The traction that Electron has gained as a cross-platform option for building apps is huge. It&#x27;s only set to get bigger (whether for better or worse).<p>Imagine if Gecko was in this space competing with Electron. Imagine if thousands of developers place their trust in Mozilla because they have built their cross-platform apps using Gecko. They&#x27;d want to see Mozilla grow and succeed - they have a stake in seeing Gecko development continue. Is it too late (or too unrealistic) for this to happen?<p>A very long time ago, Mozilla did have the option to embed Gecko into apps. It was never well-documented and what remains of the documentation is out-of-date and untouched:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;docs&#x2F;Mozilla&#x2F;Gecko&#x2F;Embedding_Mozilla&#x2F;FAQ&#x2F;Embedding_Gecko" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;docs&#x2F;Mozilla&#x2F;Gecko&#x2F;Embed...</a>

Safari is definitely in the technological pessimism camp as that&#x27;s Apple&#x27;s party line on the open web.<p>Safari has continuously caused &quot;headache&quot; to businesses that rely on tracking user behavior for years now, as Apple is very bent on protecting your privacy from every <i>other</i> company outside or inside their walled garden.

What would happen if Firefox took away a significant number of users away from Chrome? Wouldn&#x27;t Google just stop paying for search placement, removing Mozilla&#x27;s main source of income?<p>I get that Chrome isn&#x27;t Google&#x27;s direct source of income, ads are. But, it seems like controlling the web in order to facilitate serving advertisements (e.g. AMP, Extension Manifest v3) is part of its strategy. If Mozilla made a more successful browser, and Mozilla hewed to its stated values, it would just become a threat to Chrome, rather than a harmless surface area for serving ads, and a small opportunity to earn a little good will.<p>From that perspective, it made perfect sense to me that Mozilla has tried to diversify its revenue. The fact that it hasn&#x27;t been successful at doing that doesn&#x27;t necessarily mean it&#x27;s a bad idea.

I dont think I understood the point about mozilla wanting to influence the web being bad for firefox.<p>Particlulalry if having lots of users is how you influence things, since then you need to provide a good product (or lock users in via some external ecosystem).<p>Maybe some recent EU legislation moves can help them in the same way the browser choice thing helped.

I think Firefox is like some banks in that it is <i>too big to fail</i> [0]. Not that Firefox is a financial institution, but something that has embedded and woven itself so deeply into the web in general that I can&#x27;t imagine the web without it. If it dies in some fantastical way, something else (hopefully better and evolved) will fill its place. We can&#x27;t have the Chromes of the world slurping up all our data in the near future. Firefox is a privacy tool as well as a browser.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Too_big_to_fail" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Too_big_to_fail</a>

&gt; Mozilla has always made the bulk of its money from selling the preferred placement of a search engine in Firefox<p>It&#x27;s amazing how valuable eyeballs are -- that you can fund an entire software project just that way.

Firefox must obviously be the core product, the one that people know, love and trust and can easily use - although this doesn&#x27;t mean that Mozilla can&#x27;t try other projects as well, maybe with with more constrained resources so projects that don&#x27;t get enough momentum don&#x27;t linger for too long.<p>And the writer has a point when he says that the weight of Firefox has allowed Mozilla to be a heavyweight at the table of the standards of the web.<p>But there&#x27;s a point he misses (and he was nearly there when he mentioned Gecko).<p>What do Chrome, Safari, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, Edge and basically every browser on Android and iOS have in common? That&#x27;s the web engine - and that&#x27;s WebKit&#x2F;Blink, with Chromium usually being the foundation.<p>That wasn&#x27;t a big problem when the guys at Google were still pushing for better web standards, but that&#x27;s no longer the case. Gecko may have a big window to become a really modular engine that any browser can use on any platform, and it could advertise itself like the modular, corporate-free, privacy-aware, fully standard-compliant solution that can power the next generation of browsers out there - or at least be an alternative to the WebKit&#x2F;Blink&#x2F;Chromium monopoly. I know that a while ago Mozilla had considered exposing Gecko as a browser-agnostic engine, but at some point for some reason they dropped the plan - and that&#x27;s quite a shame.

Firefox on Android still only has 10 Add ons. Ten. It just seems to me Mozilla is deliberately killing Firefox off.

&gt; I don’t have a read on Edge<p>My guess it&#x27;s MS will let Chromium do the heavy lifting, and they will integrate it nicely with AD etc and all IT departments will make it the new corporate default.

I have a love hate relationship with Firefox, its only major trick left is that it’s not Chromium. Making it a monopoly of the non-monopoly browsers. I tried for a while to use Waterfox and Pale Moon but they just aren’t accepted by too many websites and now even mainstream websites are locking out Firefox too.

I just don&#x27;t know if 8% of desktop browser share is enough. It&#x27;s creeping down into Opera range, and at that point, you&#x27;re not a real option, you&#x27;re a niche enthusiast brand.

I always thought with Firefox + Thunderbird, the next natural evolution would be mail service integration and SaaS mail offerings. So many companies now outsource their mail and the Thunderbird devs had so much insight into the space it could have been a natural extension with revenue diversity.<p>They could have been on the path of Google Apps and Office 365 before they even existed. Now, who knows.

Probably should not bother writing this because it&#x27;s not going to be appreciated but I will try anyway.<p>The browser evolved from an information dispersal tool to become a networked operating system with a few implementations loosely compatible.<p>My suggestion is that now with web assembly we have a chance to almost start over with that. The problem is that people are not really approaching wasm as an operating system or shared platform. Rather they are making piecemeal efforts and adding little bits of functionality in here and there in different runtimes etc.<p>So so far it seems a missed opportunity to create a framework where people can collaborate on what the platform is. Something like a common ABI. Or a distributed package registry. Or a voting mechanism for new features.<p>We should have a new shared platform built on web assembly. And for the information distribution part, drop CSS and HTML and start over with content-centric networking and markdown. Focus on instant retrieval and pre-dissemination.

It occurs to me that web standards are a lot like a government. A lot of users, a few rich stewards with vested interests, and no real democracy.<p>If I, a random user, come up with a really great standard that solves a bunch of real problems that users have, it has no chance of being accepted unless it solves the problems of the few rich stewards.<p>So, today, The Web(TM) and its Internets(TM), which now pretty much defines our global economy, is currently being developed by advertising and consumer product companies, and a handful of companies who profit off of the standards that they make. Our future rests not a little in their hands.<p>Feels kinda like watching a big capitalist train moving towards global society in really slow motion.

I prefer Firefox over Chrome for better usability.<p>An example of glaring UI bug in Chrome: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webm.red&#x2F;view&#x2F;XWtg.webm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webm.red&#x2F;view&#x2F;XWtg.webm</a>

Can anyone from&#x2F;formerly of Mozilla explain why XUL had to die? When I was a kid it seemed utterly fascinating, I wonder now if we&#x27;d ever needed Electron if there was a modern XULRunner

Firefox lacks in the default UX area, just from the top of my head:<p>Print to PDF is better in Chrome, comes with a preview.<p>Search marks matches in the scroll bar.<p>Opening a recently closed tab opens a new tab in Chrome instead of replacing the existing one.<p>There were probably 5-10 more annoyances in Firefox for me that I don&#x27;t recall right now. Maybe it was my familiarity with Chrome but overall I still think Chrome has better UX defaults.<p>I like the bookmark tags feature of Firefox though, which Chrome lacks.

Except for mobile, where recent updates made it a hot mess.

Seems overloaded. Archive link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20201216145506&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ianbicking.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;firefox-was-always-enough.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20201216145506&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ianbi...</a>

I&#x27;ve loved Firefox for years. There&#x27;s also been a bug that I&#x27;ve never been able to track down: clicking on dropdowns doesn&#x27;t &quot;stick&quot; and it take multiple tries to select something. Today I finally cracked. I just can&#x27;t have that irritation in my life any more. So Brave it is. #myfirefoxstory

How I long for a funding model where eyeballs=$, but NOT because of advertising or tracking. I pay money every month to be connected. I wish some of this money ended up in the hands of the software companies that created the software I used, and some of it in the hands of the content providers. I can only dream....

Well written article, was a good read. I think that Firefox company should rehire you :-) You hear this FIREFOX? But if they don&#x27;t, maybe Google will be smarter and hire you for Chrome instead ^_^ After all you started in &quot;Chrome&quot; group even before Chrome browser existed. Hehe

To anyone who works at Firefox :<p>I never left. There still isn&#x27;t a good alternative for me.<p>But can someone please fix the extension API? A good start could be to add a supported way to move the tab bar around or at least remove it so it doesn&#x27;t annoy me when I use vertical tabs.

If Mozilla wants revenue diversity, it can be found through empowering independent creators on the open web. The open, standards-oriented, values-based browser is the key, not a sideshow.

&gt; But to be clear: the money always kept coming! On a per-user basis it even increased over the years.<p>Well if the number of users diminishes...

I just hope any Firefox-only developments at Mozilla won&#x27;t strand Pocket, one of my favorite apps (and which I pay for).

what would happen if firefox decides to fire all &quot;executives&quot;, &quot;ceo&quot; and the whole &quot;bureaucracy&quot; leadership, not technical one that is. what money can be saved from doing that which brings me to the second question, does firefox really need a CEO?

ooh! Really cool to see Amna get a mention in this post. Amna lets you use your browser as part of to-do list. Though, it in in itself is not a browser.<p>Feel free to try it out and drop feedback! (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getamna.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getamna.com</a>)

Yes, middle management fucked up Firefox.

No, all your pandering and political posturing doesn’t mitigate the fact that FF is a hot pile of usability garbage

It’s just a web browser. I mean it’s just a web browser. What is there to be so excited about? Really..?

So need to be careful

I will make the same comment I made on another post regarding Firefox and Mozilla:<p>a few tips from from no one:<p>1. Rewrite the Mozilla mission statement. I read that and have no idea what your organization does. Mission statements seem like corporate naval gazing, but if it is honest and well written it keeps everyone focused on what you are working towards.<p>2. Refocus on Firefox R&amp;D and core technologies - Firefox needs to be the best browser. It is the thing that makes the company money and makes it recognizable to the lay person. You will never be able to outspend Google, Microsoft, and Apple, but they are always going to have more competing priorities pulling their best engineers away and causing political infighting about what should be crammed into the browser. Mozilla does not have to have any of that.<p>3. Invest more in Thunderbird the application and develop Thunderbird the privacy focus email service for independent professionals and small businesses.<p>That is it. I like some of Mozilla&#x27;s side projects and I agree with the business philosophy that they should be looking to diversify their revenue stream, but I think they should all be part of two core products: Firefox and Thunderbird. Why Thunderbird? Because I think there is an undeserved niche in the business email service provider space and I think Mozilla can have a universal client on desktop, phone, tablet, and browser that is the trojan horse to up sell that product.

&gt; With this in mind the argument is: Firefox has to be popular enough that Mozilla has at least a veto over problematic points of standards, and the ability to vigorously advance positive standards.<p>Has veto ever worked for web browsers?? I think the problem is user perception: users don&#x27;t blame the page, they blame the browser. Especially when they learn browser X renders the page while browser Y doesn&#x27;t. As an example, browsers were racing to fix malformed HTML so that the user has a good experience.

I had been using Firefox as the primary browser since before it was v1.0 until some time in 2016, which is when I switched to Chrome. The reason was mostly usability related. Chrome felt faster and easier to use.<p>With the reach of Google, Firefox had to be that much better to keep up, like it was compared to any version of IE. Unfortunately, Firefox kind of remained the same while Chrome became better and better.<p>In hindsight, they could have done what Opera did. But then they didn&#x27;t. I don&#x27;t think they did anything particularly wrong. Firefox just aged beyond its usefulness and will die, just because it&#x27;s not needed anymore.<p>I see Brave as the spiritual successor of Firefox. Just like Firefox challenged the then status quo and made way for better browsers to come, Brave is challenging the current status quo Chrome and Google&#x27;s business model at the same time.

They went back 5 years with new firefox mobile

At this point I always wonder how did Mozilla sustain...

Mozilla should launch a stripped-down version of Firefox, with all the past 20 years&#x27; legacy support removed. No quirk mode etc. Just bare minimum implementation of modern core web tech. How fast would it be?

&gt; Now it’s focused on technological pessimism in the form of a security and privacy emphasis.<p>First time I&#x27;ve seen this phrased that way. If all you can think of with regards to tech is security and privacy, you are the EU: &quot;technological pessimism&quot;.

I have recently gone from a Mozilla fanboy to a Mozilla hater in the span of under a year. I&#x27;m sure this won&#x27;t be popular, but I refuse to use Firefox particularly, and would rather use chromium at this point, which, if you&#x27;d heard the way I trash google, you&#x27;d ask me what on earth was going through my head. It has gotten that bad.<p>They keep progressively crippling the browser. There isn&#x27;t a single Firefox major update, either software wise or news wise, that amounts to good news. They try to dress it up but the substance is always bad for the user. Recently, they artificially limited the extensions available in Firefox mobile. I uninstalled Firefox immediately on all my machines.<p>Now they&#x27;re firing the Rust team? Are these people stupid? Rust is pretty much the only thing Mozilla has going for it. I guess it&#x27;s time for Thunderbird to go as well.<p>The idea that Mozilla is somehow the only thing standing between Google and control of web standards is laughable. I used to buy it. But Firefox is funded by Google, and they&#x27;ll get what they want. And you can see plain as day that they&#x27;re getting what they want. At this point you&#x27;re more disconnected from Google&#x27;s influence using ungoogled-chromium than using Firefox. So that&#x27;s what I do. I feel more free online using a fork of a Google product than I do using Firefox. Imagine that.