Can Firefox be revived?

I think it would be better to look at Desktop Browser usage, which is at ~8%.

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?

The problem is Mozilla is in such a bad shape and she is under performing as a CEO.

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 the operation. Nothing bad enough is happening, no interest or incentive for changes. Inertia. Let's keep thing this way.

So yes, it is counter intuitive. The only way to save Mozilla ( or change Mozill'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.

I think they dug their own graves.

Firefox is extremely pedantic and opinionated browser.

It became popular due to extensions, that is, it attracted power users. Then the other guys pretty much reached feature parity while Firefox was busy tossing XUL out the window with all its plugins.

At about that time, they started trying to "protect" me by stopping me from doing useful stuff (just warn and let me bypass).

There was one version, which was too much. It was borderline impossible to connect to a site with a bad certificate.

Yeah, I get the security speech, but for my old router or printer, I just don't care, let me skip the check and just do it.

It's gotten slightly better in the past few years, but Chrome is way better for most use cases.

My issue with FF is them treating their users as casuals or idiots. Like moving closing tabs to second level menu because someone complained that they accidentally clicked it... Or making the UI bigger and thus worse. It's a desktop program, we have very precise input mechanism. The elements should have option to be small. It is absolutely worth supporting powerusers. Maybe stop wasting resources on useless things and focus on making best possible browser for both powerusers and casuals...

Unless they change their attitude about who they target, I don't see a revival...

Last week I was complaining to co-workers that I don't want to donate to Mozilla. But if Firefox was separated, I would donate in a heartbeat. Imagine something like neovim. A Firefox repo on GitHub and people can donate. A team that works only on that, and they make decisions that are best for the user.

I tried Chromium yesterday as the next best thing, since I will not use any browser with "rewards", like Edge and Vivaldi and the rest. And today I found out that Chromium does not block autoplay and has no option for it. smh

Firefox is the best and I hope it lives for ever and it becomes even better that what it is now.

I find it's browser competitive with Chromium. Use it every day. No revival needed: just more users.

So please: just install and use FF already! :)

Here's my prediction for the future of the web:

I think one of two possible scenarios will occur

1. Firefox fades into obscurity/irrelevance, Chromium becomes the platform of the web, and thus Google dictates its future.

2. Firefox fades into obscurity/irrelevance, and Chromium still becomes the platform of the web, but anti-trust action is taken against Google with a result being that Chrome is spun off into its own entity independent of Google, and so while there's still a browser monoculture, that browser is developed by a relatively unbiased company.

Of course in all of this there's always the foothold that Safari has that must be taken into consideration, particularly on iOS where users quite literally don't have the choice to use another browser (as iOS Chrome and friends still use WebKit under the hood).

I'm baffled that despite years of asking, Mozilla doesn't have voluntary subscription option for the FireFox browser. I'm not interested in paying for VPN or any other related product but I definitely would be interested in directly supporting FireFox browser development. As a Web developer, paying for my tools is not an issue for me, conversely, I'd be happy to do it.

The decline started with the ousting of Brendan Eich and the power grab of Baker. The interface got worse, menus were rearranged for no reason.

Classic story of a clique milking an existing code base under the guise of social justice.

I'm surprised that none of the business who are in direct competition with Google (or in fear thereof) start to contribute & make use of Gecko. It's really mind-boggling how many companies and how much money depends on the implementation of the web platform. Why would you use the one that is always acting in Google's interest? For mobile apps, GeckoView should be an interesting replacement of other webviews.

They'll have to pry Firefox from my cold hands, even after the focus towards... let's say questionable priorities and the firing of many of the engineering team.

Despite the managements, it's the best alternative among the big browsers for my needs.

Good overall standards support (a few things missing) and addon suite, even after the XUL deprecation.

And performance wise, Linux ATL, it's fine. Is it better/worse than chrome in a benchmark? Idk, but I'm fine with the perf.

<3 Firefox.

To quote: "Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers."

I personally think Chrome gained so much market share, in large part, because it simply had the best developer tools.

Firefox had FireBug, which was great, and revolutionary for its time!

However! Having FireBug meant that Mozilla's built in tools never got much attention. So their dev tools were severely lacking, and stagnant. They remained that way until a few years back.

Meanwhile Chrome's dev tools just kept advancing. So in the end, FireBug (unintentionally) helped FireFox lose major marketshare

Mozilla should fire their C team and convert to a democratically controlled worker-owned enterprise. They should not be paying a $3 million plus salary to a CEO.

Are the market share counters correct? Like, a bigger percentage of Fx users are more likely to have blockers and privacy settings enabled, compared to users of other browsers.

Last time I checked our company's visitor distribution, GA showed far less Fx usage than server logs, for instance. Not a huge number for Fx in the latter case, but better than 3% at least.

So, basically you want better management for firefox, and hope funding to magically appear out of thin air?

Are you sure that the loss of market share is due to mismanagement? Could it not be due to a competitor with unfair advantage? I mean the fact that even MS stopped their own development would suggest that to me.

So the concrete point you have against management: it is expensive. Does that explain the current situation? What if the CEO had a 300k salary, would that fundamentally change anything?

Edit: as a metter of fact, I also believe that a change is required, but I would look at the funding side, to diversify it. I would look into government funding (multiple governments), license merchandise, ask for individual donations, partner with more companies to sell rebranded versions of their products/services like with Mozilla VPN, etc.

The downfall of Firefox is very convenient for many big players. Google obviously, as they have paid Firefox billions. In the bigger picture, an open, standards-based internet which Mozilla/Firefox stood for, competes with app-stores, data-silos, walled gardens and proprietary solutions of all sorts. Follow the money?

It took a lot of effort by the slashdot intelligentsia to preach the virtues of open source and internet freedom and to riot against violations of those principles. These times are long gone, and today's tech scene would rather like to build one of those closed solutions themselves than keep the old faith alive.

It's a great question, and I don't know the answer. A browser is a very complex application which requires many FTEs and millions of dollars to develop and maintain. Donation models don't work well for open source, there's no way individual users will be contributing (in aggregate) millions of USD for a browser. There are various forks of Firefox and Chrome but I am reluctant to use those because they may be out of date or its developers might have financial or other incentives to install telemetry or backdoors. Previously, an ideological, established and proud institution like Mozilla could be trusted to an extent to refrain from such things. A subscription based model might work but it's hard to say if there's a market fit, as the qualms that HN users have over Google's monopoly are not shared by the population at large, who just don't care or even know about these things. A strategy I have been pondering is to take a browser and drastically simplify it (just the rendering and networking, no JavaScript/WASM, audio/video and APIs) and iterate until it's finished and secure; this ought to be manageable by a modestly funded small team of developers. Then use that to browse the web where I can, and use Chrome for websites that require the full browser stack like Youtube. It's a step backwards but this is where we are.

At this point I think the feedback loop is unstoppable: The lower Firefox's marketshare gets the fewer developers test their pages on it, the more pages don't work on Firefox, pushing more people to Chrome.

I hope so, browser monoculture is really scary, imagine everyone with the same browser with the same security bugs and no way to use something else.

I have been using Firefox as my main browser for years (on a mac). Firefox is fine. For my taste, it is better than Chrome.

My suspicion is that the majority of people in this sort of thread will never use anything other than Chrome, because it is not Chrome. Maybe the web will survive until a more idealistic generation takes over.

I use Firefox as my primary browser and has done so for years. I do not feel like I am missing out on something. But I will be interested to read the comments and suggestions from this thread.

I have a naive question. If chromium is open-source, why not strip it from telemetry and other “badness” and use it as a base to build a browser, which is essentially just UI around the rendering engine? I simply don’t understand how a $3M CEO and >>250 employees is required for a program to exist, which shows tabs, address bar, list of downloads, settings form and a couple of sites for extensions and installation. Today people are writing entire 3d high-tech games on unity/unreal by a team of two, but to render some text and images we suddenly need all that enterprise monstrosity.

Maybe one of Firefox's last chances was Microsoft, before they decided to cave to Chromium. They could have forked Firefox, now we're going to end up stuck with one web engine.

I like to read bad news about Firefox - at some point in time, they stopped listening to their core users and started pontificating moralistic values.

Wow, I hadn't known that Firefox's share was so low. The future of the web is very bleak. It's clear that it has became way too bloated and complicated.

Maybe we should all quit http and move to Gemini.

I am a long time Firefox user (on Linux), however for about 5 years I had to switch to Chromium due to a small issue that seemed to never be fixed: proper support for user profiles, namely how to open a link in a new tab/window in a given profile (that was already running). Luckily it got fixed last year, so now I'm "back".

However, this is only one of the situations in which, from time to time, "something" pushes me away from Firefox to Chromium. For example for about two weeks now Google Meet is not working properly on Firefox (at least on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed).

Moreover, they just keep needlessly changing things: I use the, now obsolete, "compact" UI mode; for about a month I've started experimenting "tabless" (i.e. one tab per window) but found that there isn't any more this option (I had to use `userChrome.css` to hide the tabs); they keep dropping or breaking `about:config` options; when they add new "features" (like UI buttons) they shove them in my UI and I have to remove it from each and every profile; etc.

They need to offer sane paid products to fund themselves properly. With their reach they don't really have to be too creative.

For example, they could sell more features on top of their password manager and compete with things like Bitwarden.

There are a dozens opportunities like this, the fact that they still go towards ads as a way to make money is what has me pessimistic about their management.

No. The organization is deeply compromised and cannot function anymore.

Run by a lawyer. Enough said. These types of projects should be run by engineer leaders.

The worst part is that Firefox is the only viable Chromium alternative in the market right now, and -as noted- they are rapidly going downhill.

The Chromium monopoly is terrible. Google dropped the `alert()` function from cross-origin iframes starting Chromium 92, which broke a lot of websites like codepen.io. I couldn't see anything in the spec that suggested this change.

I have a bad feeling that this will end up something like the Internet Explorer monopoly back in the mid-2000s.

> Is it possible that some company with deep pockets forks Firefox and hires what it's left from its development team to further develop Firefox and improve its market share?

I totally agree with this. We need some serious competition in the browser space.

It will have to be branded as something else. I don't run Firefox because it is the best browser, I don't run Firefox because it is the browser I have always been running.

I run Firefox because it is the best modern[0] browser from a perspective of privacy. Ublock Origin works best (or only) on Firefox, no other browser has support for containers.

Apple branded itself on privacy, firefox can brand itself on freedom and privacy.

[0]: I am not going to be browsing the internet with either e3 or with Links. Those days are gone for me, go a head and do what you want to do.

Firefox has 200M clients right now [0] so if 10% of users subscribed 10$ per year that's 200M $ yearly revenue. I do not know why open source companies don't try to push low $ subscription model.. I happily contribute around 20$ per month to a couple web serial novelists so <1$ per month for an independent browser would be a pittance.

[0] https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

> Is it possible that some company with deep pockets forks Firefox and hires what it's left from its development team to further develop Firefox and improve its market share?

Brave.

I am a FF user and I am typing this in FF. I very much dislike that the CEO is on millions per annum and the company asks for donations. Back to Chrome for me I think..

Whenever I leave tabs open in FF, it'll consume 3GB+ of memory and slow my computer to a crawl. I do the same in Chrome and it'll consume maybe 2GB RAM and it's fine. I want to use FF and support Mozilla. In fact, I lived with FF and this type of behavior for years hoping it'll get better in the next update, but it never did. FF is just not usable for me anymore. I reluctantly switched to Chrome and haven't had issues.

> That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to.

I’m all for people being confident and ambitious, and getting paid what they deserve. But just say “I work hard and have a lot of value in my organization”. Don’t try to evoke sympathy for your family. Do a good job, get paid your worth, end of story.

Why can't we have something like Linux in the web browser world? A web browser built by the community that does not depend on a big bag of money for its continued operation.

Surely writing an open-source operating system that drives the world cannot be harder than writing a web browser? Or am I missing something?

Firefox cut back on a number of potentially useful products. There are still some I'm the hopper. I'm bullish on the sanitizer api

https://www.google.com/amp/s/portswigger.net/daily-swig/amp/...

However, if they don't find a way to grow revenue, I don't think they'll ever realize their potential. Let it be a lesson, someone has to want to buy what you are selling, or it's just a hobby.

> Is it possible that some company with deep pockets forks Firefox and hires what it's left from its development team to further develop Firefox and improve its market share? Can it be in some big company's interest to push for web competition?

It seems like Firefox is getting more and more into bed with Cloudflare. They of course have their own interests like everyone else, but their interests are not the same as Google's interests. It seems like a development that is better than the current state of things where FF relies on Google for almost all of its revenue.

Marketshare: On desktop, they seem pretty stable at 8%. Mobile is a lost cause thanks to the duopoly who pre-install their own browsers.

Deep Pockets: Microsoft gave up on making their own browser. I doubt anyone else will get into this game.

And regarding some comments: Both on mobile and Desktop, FF has almost exclusively improved in recent years, for me. Look and feel is amazing (not a fan of the "compact" removal, though), speed has been great ever since they finally finished Quantum (which many vocal people seem to see as a huge decline, for me the performance made it unusable before).

Mozilla may pivot to VPN and network privacy stuff. But that won't save Firefox. I would rather have independent party on Chromium source, to balance large corporations, than half baked alternative engine.

They're positioning themselves as social justice activists, so I left.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...

I don't think it's as simple as Chrome or Firefox. There's also Safari. There's Chrome-based alternatives too such as Vivaldi and Brave which utilize the Chrome engine but takes steps to ensure your privacy. If the market doesn't want Firefox then why force it to stay in existence? Maybe Firefox should address why the market is rejecting it.

Brave, I know it's a pain in the arse, but can you port your browser to Gecko? I'm on the fence switching to your product, but I'll do so in a heartbeat if it was based on Firefox's source code.

Even better, make an optional paid version that has all profits reinvested in the product. I'm ready to pay for a good browser.

Firefox is good. Chrome is good. At the end it is all about money, people and focus. Chrome has Google that has money from other revenue streams. Firefox money comes mostly from where? Google. What other reasonable revenue stream they have? Donations? Pocket? VPN? None, AFAIK. It is sad, but still my main browser.

I would use firefox focus as my daily driver if it was available for desktop. I use mainly firefox but I'm not comfortable with the many addons I need to install to make it private. I would prefer privacy features baked in.

I wish I could use Firefox. I had it on my MacBook until one day it stopped loading websites. So I tried to uninstall and reinstall it. Didn’t work. It errors every time I try to reinstall. So now I use safari which I don’t love.

I will keep using Firefox until something else supports treetabs and Firefox gets too annoying to use.

I also expect to need to do that switch in the next few years for the reasons OP states.

I'd like instead to see a new experimental browser.

Chrome does most of what I need , I want a ultra focused single tab/window MIT licensed browser. Build in an ad blocker too.

Best bet would be to turn it into an Electron competitor. Make it so that it becomes a better choice for desktop apps.

There was some work done a few years ago, but was cancelled afaik.

For anyone who's sick of Mozilla but loves Firefox, try librewolf, it's a fork of Firefox without the bs. Been using it for a while and it's awesome!

I can't trust them until they've replaced their leadership structure from the tippy top (Mitchell) with reputable people with good track records.

I run multiple browsers, especially across multiple devices. I wonder how many FF users do the same and whether that changes the use stats we see.

Every time I give Firefox a try I regret it. It can’t even reliably save to PDF. A feature I use all the time.

Tree-style tabs is the primary reason I am sticking to Firefox and not moving to another browser

Firefox would benefit highly from exploring new ideas, for example the dappy project https://dappy.tech/ which drops the DNS, in favor of a blockchain-based co-resolution mechanism. They are free to resolve dappy names in addition to DNS.

No. They didn't promote someone who funded anti-gay marriage propaganda to CEO and the comment sections of the internet never forgave them so basically every time they come up someone gets histrionic about that. You can't survive that kind of sustained, targeted vitriol.

I guess we got gay marriage but they took our Firefox and our open, non-corporate web as revenge.

LibreWolf

PaleMoon

Waterfox

Waterfox Classic

SeaMonkey

Download them. Install them. Test your sites with them. Recommend them to others.

Maybe it can be rebooted. Call it…Phoenix!

Their mobile offerings have been laughably bad over the years. Other open source projects have done the things they should have done, meanwhile.

KDE or Arch community can.

I like it.

I think it is clear that Mozilla lost their relentless focus on their core mission a few years ago. The social justice / political theater you’ve alluded to is an indication of cultural rot. I often view activism in the workplace as a precursor to the fall of a business, because it very literally is the act of placing personal employee agendas ahead of customers and products. In this case, looking at that absurd and undeserved compensation for Baker, I also wonder if the political theater is actually a shield that helps distract people from a failing leadership.

Seriously, Mozilla has been sliding steadily downhill for the last 5 to 10 years. Mostly because of people (like Baker) who think that they're 1 level below being holy (if not actually holy). Get off your fucking high horse and smell the concrete. The only thing keeping Firefox a thing is people refusing to use Google shit (and I'm one of them).

What we need is a proper community effort to fork (and say fuck-you-and-fuck-off) to Mozilla people. Take your social justice and virtue signaling bullshit elsewhere. We need the Brave for Gecko basically.

And please for fuck's sake, DON'T MAKE IT ALL ABOUT FUCKING CRYPTO.

PS: Is it me or does it seem like NGOs that dabble in politics (or as a fellow commentator called it; political theater) are run extremely horribly and basically verging on a scam at this point?

The more we find out about Chrome’s tracking features in a cookie-less world, the more FF will gain adoption (again). Reviving FF requires exposing Chrome and Google.

The Mozilla Foundation needs to be a for the greater good political foundation, give up the Firefox tech and lobby for the Chromium rendering technology to become a standard and the Chromium team to become a global public utility under the W3 or similar. Every browser manufacturer then licences and customises the experience around that rendering technology.

Having a single rendering technology to support would be preferential but it's direction can't be controlled by just Google.

Of course this would then mean the end of the Foundation and Mitchell Baker's $3m per year so will never happen.

IMHO the fact that we are moving towards one reliable engine is not a bad thing per se. I think it's a step in the right direction, as long as those contributing to chromium do have a saying in how it should move forward.

As a full stack developer I've battled so many times with weird implementations or unexpected behaviors across browsers that knowing that I can assume that the user will be on chromium is just piece of mind.

As a counter argument I don't think that monopolization of internet standards will be a risk. As long as chromium stays open source and anyone can fork it, I think that the risk of monopolization on internet is not on how web pages are rendered, but rather on how users reach content.

I think the latter is the real problem and I don't think that battling chromium is any good at that regard. Money would be much better spent on developing new ways to allow discoverability of content beyond Google, walled app stores and alikes.