- Cut out all (or at the very least, most) initiatives that don't serve the goal of promoting Firefox's market share or sustainability going forward
- Donate the major money drains that aren't Firefox to the Apache Foundation or another worthy custodian
- Fire all inessential staff that don't want to work on Firefox.
- Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money, and cut their salaries (bonuses tied directly to increase in Firefox market share).
- Make sure that all donations from now on are redirected to things that support Firefox development and nothing else, period.
- Make whatever partnerships are needed to have a steady stream of income, be that donation or selling out to Google or Bing.
Firefox is in trouble. Firefox is also Mozilla's raison d'être, and they should embrace that. We as a community, cannot afford to let Firefox languish until the only browsers in the world are Chromium derivatives. The diversity of truly independent browser engines is far too important to give up without a fight.
Being "Open Source" does nothing for me when Firefox engages in the same crap as other closed source browsers, like Pocket. Mozilla also allowed social issues to take precedence over retaining good engineers. Whether you like it or not, even assholes have a basic right to exist and the more recent culture of shun and cancel has had negative consequences for society as a whole. Maybe they were assholes, but I don't give a shit how nice the developers who made my web browser are.
I suppose the problem with Mozilla is the CEO/people who make decisions about Firefox, replace them and maybe Firefox could be revived. But I have extraordinary doubts that Firefox is salvageable at this point. Mozilla's priorities have strayed so far from mine that I cannot see them becoming something I care about any time soon. I suspect it is similar for others.
There is not one issue with Firefox, the people in charge are not competent. It's mistake after mistake after mistake. These mistakes are a direct result of prioritizing diversity over talent.
- Prioritise getting the new extension framework fully functional. And continue innovating on the capabilities that are exposed. Especially on mobile where the new fenix engine is still limited to a small whitelist of extensions
- Sort out the multi-profile story. Container tabs are great, but the chrome model is also a great fit for many workflow (e.g. different people in a house or home vs. work profiles).
- Try and work on making Gecko easily embeddable again. Webkit/Blink gets all the attention because it's easy to embed into things. I suspect Gecko needs to compete in this market if it hopes to survive. It needs to have more than one company invested in it.
This ship has probably sailed now as they've fired most of their Rust and Servo teams. But IMO they ought to have created a rust-based cross-platform UI framework. They tried to do it web-based with Firefox OS but that was too slow. But with a Rust solution I think they could have owned both the mobile and desktop application spaces, which could potentially have made them a bootload of money and been a huge win for linux.
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Mozilla can't save Firefox. It's not that Firefox can't be saved, but rather that Mozilla as an organization is not capable of doing so.
My take is this - Despite a history of being relatively privacy friendly, the vast majority of funding for the organization comes directly from Google (To the tune of ~90% of their total funding, straight from Google so that Google can maintain its position as the default search in Firefox).
That leads to insurmountable conflicts of interest - They claim they are for people and for privacy, but they are funded almost entirely by Google, and have to secure search deals for their continued existence (the latest just this year: https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-go...).
In this light - I believe it actually BENEFITS mozilla to keep Firefox relevant, but not good enough to replace Chrome. If the browser genuinely becomes good enough that customers start switching from Chrome to Firefox en mass, Mozilla needs a replacement funding plan because Google can essentially turn the lights off at any point by simply refusing to pay them for search at next contract renewal.
While they've dipped their toes into paid products... most of them are not particularly relevant or compelling on their own merits (that's not to say they're bad, just not all that innovative or likely to drive enough revenue to replace the 500million a year google is paying them)
So not only do I not believe that Mozilla is capable of "saving" Firefox in this way, I don't believe they have the right incentives to even seriously try.
Additional Key Strategies:
Google focused on developer experience with its tools.
Google shipped a good enough extension system.
Google invested in matching or beating a few key features but kept Chrome a leaner project overall. Worse is better and 80/20 rule.
Ecosystem evolution:
Google successfully got every major browser vendor to move to their rendering engine, except for Firefox. Gecko has always been harder to embed.
Slowly over time, some web devs stopped testing their work on Firefox since they were using Chrome and most browsers "just worked" like Chrome. Every week I hit a site that I have to use in Chrome because of a bug I'm seeing in Firefox.
Mozilla went all-in on trying to disrupt itself with a mobile phone operating system, which didn't work out.
Mozilla dabbles in many strategies (Privacy, Games, Advertising, WebXR), but none have been successful in growing active daily users.
Some people say Mozilla should focus on executing Firefox, but I think Mozilla is smart for trying to re-invent itself because the browser is a commodity, and if Google wants to own that on-ramp to the internet, it will.
Netscape and Firefox 1.0 were massive products. Mozilla needs a 3rd act to return to a significant marketshare.
Dudes, if saving Firefox was so easy that could be described in a single comment like that, it would have been saved already.
There are more people at Mozilla than the CEO, she is not responsible for all decisions. She is a quite nice person to be honest, has always been very kind to me while I was volunteering and later while I was working there. She is more into the Mozilla mission than many here.
Also, people need to understand that Firefox is not the reason for Mozilla existence, Firefox is one of the tools that Mozilla has (and depends on) to fullfil its mission. People need to wake up and realise that Firefox is the last remaining independent browser, and that fighting against Microsoft, Google, and Apple is damn hard.
There is a huge intersection between people who are often saying they know how to fix Mozilla and those using non-Firefox browsers. If people here who cares about Mozilla would volunteer, and also use the browser, Mozilla would be in a much better shape.
People who keep saying things like "cut their salaries", "cancel all projects", have absolutely no idea how all this works, or even how Mozilla works. I understand you're all frustrated, but you're going at it from the wrong direction. You need to remember that it was side projects that made Firefox. At that time the workhorse of Mozilla was the Mozilla Suite. It was also non-Firefox projects that brought up Rust and many other cool technologies.
Want to fix Mozilla? Take an active part in it.
very simple answer, because Mozilla doesn't control the infrastructure that runs on 80% of smartphones in the world and ships Firefox as the default browser.
It really has nothing to do with the bespoke features that people on HN pay attention to. Firefox doesn't control any platform and defaults matter. There's a reason Google pays them a gazillion dollars to be the standard search engine, which you can change with one click. It's also why Safari is still going relatively strong.
If you look at Wikimedia's metrics, Firefox still has ~10% market share of the desktop browser market[0], not too bad considering Firefox is not the default browser on any platform outside of linux systems for the most part, and that Mozilla is much smaller entity than competing browser vendors. Still down from the ~30%[0] desktop share they had, but now they have 2 large competing entities offering default browsers so the decline is somewhat expected.
Also, contrast this with Firefox's ~0.7% share on mobile[0] where Mozilla has never been able to get a good foothold.
As long as Firefox isn't available as a default on mobile and as the share of mobile device web browsing increases, Firefox will keep losing total market share as a percentage.
Strategy wise, refocusing efforts on retaining that 10% desktop share might be a good idea. From there, work on building up more of the desktop share and then try marketing the mobile browser to the desktop browser community to build up mobile browser share.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_market_share#Summary_t...
It feels like opening a Windows Me installation from 2000. I just want to get browsing done.
At a time when the web was dangerous, Chrome advertised security. Remember when Flash wasn't sandboxed? When Java executed automatically? When nothing had auto-updates?
Firefox caught up, but at best it's "as good". What's it really doing for me?
The answer is presumably privacy. And that's cool. But most people have a hard time understanding what "privacy" means. Further, you can say Chrome is weak on privacy, but it's hardly as bad as people make it out to be.
So basically Mozilla is, at best, equivalent to Chrome, but Chrome was way better for a long time. So it's got to convince people to come back, but its only selling point is really vague.
And then you have some other stuff like companies can manage Chrome via GSuite. So now your work computer is X% more likely to run Chrome. So now you have to choose to have a different experience at home and at work.
What would I do?
1. I'd refocus on the mission. Privacy is critical, security is critical. That would mean a number of things - how is it that Brave is the first browser to integrate TOR? Isn't that insane? TOR has been using Firefox by default forever, and no one thought "maybe we should just support this thing, and start heavily contributing to it" ?
2. I'd invest heavily in next-gen performance and security. Chrome has In-The-Wild zero days being exploited - that's an opportunity. The web is heavier than ever - that's an opportunity.
I'd focus heavily on that. I'd push benchmarks and I'd market those features heavily.
3. I would fire every executive who took a multi-million dollar bonus while firing tons of employees.
That's just day 1 stuff.
Going further I'd consider what it would look like to see Mozilla in the Enterprise. Integrations and management features built into the LTS releases are an obvious start.
Stop fsking with the UI and using creative non native looking stuff just to be cool like chrome, and instead focus on making the rendering/JS/developer tools engine best in class. Along with, stop breaking shit. Hiding shit in about:config and then silently removing the option doesn't make users happy, if they spent the time to figure out how to disable search in the address bar because they are tired of accidentally telling google/etc where they are browsing than actually honor that setting, or better yet, give them that option in the config UI rather than pretending they are all idiots and don't understand how computers work.
There are too many chrome only web sites, so make the developers happy with tools that make their jobs easier. About:memory is better these days, but its still a far cry from what it could be, and AFAIK its still doesn't have something similar for CPU or networking outside of the network and cpu tracing functions in the developer tools. I want to be able to manage my browser with similar functionality to my OS (aka what tab is sending/reading all this data, then drill into what/where its sending it along with better whitelist/blacklist functionality/etc)
Then for users, you will gain their appreciation if it feels faster than chrome, which far to often is still false (despite it too getting better). And yes, for tabs, menus and the like using the native widgets not only will make people happier when they change their system color schemes and firefox isn't doing its own thing, but the system components are frequently far far faster to render than firefox's. And yes, sometimes the code to have multiple UI toolkits is ugly, as is the code to support optimizing some JS path, deal with it, thats the job.
I could go on, but others have said some of my other points.
Firefox is difficult to save because it's been on constant life support from Google to misdirect antitrust investigators. Saving Firefox would involve not only raising its market share (which would probably have to involve a deal from Google/Microsoft/Apple or legislation because they currently preconfigure their systems/devices to use their proprietary browsers, which are mostly "good enough") but also find a way to wean Mozilla Corp off of the Google payments, which would mean investments in tangentially related services (like VPN, etc.)
Instead, mozilla should really lean in on catering to the techie who is going to come to the conclusion to use firefox no matter what mozilla really does anyhow, just from the fact that its not google and you can do more with privacy oriented extensions. It's always frusterating when mozilla does things they really don't have to do, like break certain CSS configs with the move to proton for no reason other than change is good I guess (like, why pull another python 2/3-esque debacle when you don't really have to and could just support legacy syntax?), or taking out niceties like the built in RSS reader, which I found handy to confirm a feed looked OK before throwing it into my actual RSS reader. There are other issues too. Maybe I'm not doing it right in firefox, but I have to go into chrome to find the correct CSS selectors to use in a given webpage for javascripting.
Winning against those requires not only better technology AND marketing AND consumer favor, but also leverage in the legal processes that enable/disable network effects. So anti-trust is unfortunately one of Mozilla's biggest hopes.
This "Have It Your Way" capability would be a profound differentiator and user value proposition to stand out from the sameness of Chrome and Safari. I still use FF but to make it usable I have to install my own UserChrome.css and User.js which isn't easy for non-tech people. On top of that I regularly have to go "fix" new UI behaviors that Mozilla's designers keep shoveling into the UX in a constant game of Whack-a-Mole.
1) become absolutely trustworthy again 2) become the power user's choice again
To me, 1) means absolute control over updates and network connections. Become the antithesis to the patronizing "Ask me again later" school of thought which has become so sickeningly widespread over the last few years, and instead accept that "no means no", whether you disagree or not.
And I don't have to mention "partnerships" with entities like Cliqz or sneaky downloads of marketing extensions.
2) - Firefox tried to appeal to average users and failed, losing a lot of what made it appealing to the power users and evangelists in the process. Reversing that will be painful, because it means allowing people to shoot themselves in the foot, and accepting that some people will do that occasionally.
Making a useful power user browser means accepting that a lot of its value will be created by other people, and supporting that with a deep and comprehensive extension system, instead of clinging to Googles table scraps. Having a useful extension system also means the ability to install from any source I want, no Ifs and Buts.
All of these are risky. Useful tools often are. Give Firefox back its USP and a reason to exist, because "it's not Blink" on its own simply isn't good enough... even if maybe it should.
There is no mass-switching campaign in favor of Firefox. The only foreseeable hope of one happening in the future, is if ManifestV3 kills adblockers, and people decide to switch to Firefox; but now there are so many competitors that oppose ManifestV3 (Brave, Opera, Vivaldi) that Firefox isn't ideally positioned to benefit.
Otherwise, there is no reason to expect the factors behind Firefox's decline to disappear.
Apple bundles Safari with their platforms. Google advertises Chrome on their web properties. Microsoft heavily discourages Windows users from switching away from Edge, and occasional "bugs" reset Edge as the default browser. Most corporations promote Chrome to their employees.
There is no major reason to expect any of this to change. The likeliest change is antitrust action, with "browser choice" screens[0], but I don't see why that would help Firefox more than other browsers.
There's no reason to think that continued incremental improvements in Firefox (the current path) can prevent its decline.
The ballsiest thing Mozilla could do is switch to a forked Blink engine (Mozillium?); they'd save tons of engineering resources which they could refocus on user-facing features & UX, they'd have better webcompat with cutting-edge things (VR, MIDI, etc), they'd still be a part of web standards decisions (since they could still choose how their Blink fork deviates from Google's), and could encourage other Chromium forks to rebase on Mozillium instead of Chromium. But Firefox's most diehard fans would never forgive Mozilla, and they might lose as many users as they gain.
It's hard to think of anything Mozilla can do to double Firefox's market share. Continued decline is the most likely path.
Firstly it is much much harder to keep a clean sheet, when you focus on privacy, than when you merely focus on introducing features and pushing your own agenda like the Chrome project does. Just one misstep and you can already lose lots of believers of the good cause. And missteps Mozilla had more than enough of during the recent years.
Secondly they time and time again incorporate things, that privacy minding people do not wish to have in their browser and make the defaults so that it is "on" by default. This erodes people's trust in Mozilla's vision and where the journey is going.
Another reason, which is a huuuuge fail in my opinion is, that I still!! cannot donate specifically for Firefox, for Thunderbird, for whatever, but only to Mozilla overall. I cannot donate with a cause, but only with trust, which has been slowly eroded. They will not get those donations they hope for and then in turn make stupid decisions, thinking that not so many people want, what they are making now, because they do not donate. Duh! I would immediately donate to projects like Thunderbird. You can pry Thunderbird from my cold dead hands! They should shut up and take my money.
Can you imagine being the one to approve such a bone-headed design? I gave up and downloaded opera instead and it's been perfect. I have my desired links up when I open a new tab, nothing else, and life is good.
Because Mozilla became just another classic corporation that's laser-focused on extracting value for shareholders and executives and nothing else. A year or two ago an article about Mozilla made the rounds here: executives collecting fat bonuses (and some leaving afterwards?). Some mere months later they fired a lot of people.
Is that the right signal to send to a community that wants an open Web browsing experience? Squeeze any money you can and then fire staff. Those pesky people that have the audacity to want money for their work, how dare they!
As the (currently) top commenter @selfhoster11 says, cut out everything that's not Firefox or is not related to its mission.
I could probably agree to use some of their other offerings like Pocket or VPN, assuming they're done well. Mozilla needs the diversified income, like badly. They are at the mercy of Google and always have been. *THIS IS NOT OKAY* and should have been addressed like 10 years ago. If the expenses are so huge, well, again, fire everyone who's not working on Firefox or closely related to it.
Finally, Mozilla needs no "executives". Get a CEO, CTO and CFO who are passionate about the mission, get rid of everyone else at the top. It's a semi-charity organization, the hell does it need a board of directors for?
For myself, I am moving off of Firefox right now (I don't yet know to what though, recommendations welcome) for one reason: they keep changing the UI in ways that I find irritating and then deprecating the methods to change it back. For me it's really that simple. There are other issues I have with FF but that's the one that got me to the point where I'm ready to abandon FF entirely.
> What would you do if you were in charge of Mozilla?
Concentrate on docs, standards, and libraries. Be the "one-stop shop" for all the information and software one needs to do things with the Internet.
> How would you save Firefox?
First you have to answer the question, why save Firefox?
What's so bad about having fewer browsers? (I know most of the arguments, I'm not asking you to repeat them I'm asking you to revisit them.)
Rather than saving one particular browser, I would make it easy for anyone to create a custom web browser.
If you really want to save FF you have to discover or create something about it that beats the competition: speed, reliability, ...? Those are "table stakes" these days, so what is the differentiator that makes it compelling?
Secondly I wouldn't worry about browser market share. Mozilla's place is to supply browsers, and Web and internet tools, that are open source and free of corporate control. Market share is something for for-profit corporations to worry about; under my Mozilla so many other things would take priority: security, standards compliance, maintainability (the goal would be a "long now" browser that can exist and be maintained even if the foundation itself goes away), portability across platforms. Even with 5% market share, if Mozilla offers a viable alternative to corporate browsers for those who need one, that's a strong niche userbase to keep going on.
The current Mozilla organization is too unfocused to reliably provide a viable alternative to Chrome. That may ultimately be what kills Firefox.
If anyone has links I'd be interested in reading; I'm sure there are fingerprinting techniques, but ones that rely on JS would potentially be prone to being miscounted due to NoScript (365k+ users of it according to FF).
For the record, I do not doubt that chrome dwarfs everyone, but I'm curious about the way the numbers are being reported/studied.
Firefox will always be playing catchup because of this, regardless of their market share. This leaves three main reasons for using Firefox:
1.) decoupling from Google / ad privacy
2.) promoting browser ecosystem health
3.) familiarity / history of use
Unfortunately, these three items lead to a very narrow TAM, especially when talking purely about new users. The gap will continue to grow as sites that work in Chrome but don't work in Firefox, despite the site using things not in the W3C spec, will be seen as Firefox issues by non-technical users. These users will eventually default to Chrome.
Firefox itself is just one in a series of reinventions. I am at peace with using a Firefox branded chromium fork in some future date as I think a balanced corporate sharing economy similar to Linux is probably the best we can hope for.
On that theme, some kind of more loosely combined ecosystem that involves internet archive, Wikipedia, Mozilla, OSM, Atom, open standards, free software, royalty free tech and democratic governence and pro-consumer advocacy in a global context is probably a good idea, to counterbalance large corporate interests. It probably already kind of exists in some ad-hoc manner, but further moves in that direction would be good.
* Mozilla VPN ($5/month)
* Pocket Premium ($5/month)
And a way to monetize users:
* Google search ($500 million / year)
* Paid ads in the search bar
And a way to radicalize you to fight for privacy, so that you'll donate:
* Donations (400,000 donations / year)
Let it die, I say.
Personally I would have leaned towards the opposite approach to meet their stated mission of ensuring an open internet. Historically, Firefox has been the means by which Mozilla earned a seat at the table, but I would have liked to see them diversify their portfolio a bit rather than relying entirely on a single browser. If I had been in charge, I would:
Focus on developing Rust, Servo/Gecko, SpiderMonkey. Keep projects like Firefox and Thunderbird as reference implementations but encourage Microsoft, Brave, Opera, and open-source forks to build their own products based on Mozilla technologies. Assemble a broad coalition of companies that base their web browsers, email clients, feature phones, smart TVs, consoles, etc on Mozilla technologies. Explore using licensing and corporate memberships to offset decreases in advertising revenue. The end-goal being to ensure that Mozilla-based browsers capture enough of the market that they have a seat at the table with Apple and Google and then use that leverage to push for web standards that are beneficial to end-users.
Of course, that ship has sailed now that Safari and Firefox are the only browsers with a non-negligible market-share that are not built on top of chromium. Given Firefox's trajectory, Apple is realistically the only player left who can prevent Google from dictating the direction of the web. If Apple decides to throw in the towel or let Google drive, webpages essentially become Chrome-pages.
I don't think Firefox needs saving. Those who use it are active and committed to it.
As I understood it, Google doesn't really want Firefox out of the market since it keeps them out of anti-trust issues... which is why they pay Mozilla to be the default search engine. Without that money, Mozilla would fail. Mozilla obviously doesn't want to fail, so they keep taking the money from Google. I don't see anything about that flywheel which puts Mozilla/Firefox in the drivers seat of their fate. They exist as part of a cost-benefit analysis on the part of Google.
So to phrase this question in a different way, how does a fat-smoker lose weight and quit smoking? They just do. If Mozilla/Firefox wants to legitimately be competitive they're going to have to change the nature of their relationship with Google.
Now, if you were to ask me personally what I would do? ...I would probably try to strategically create an imbalance between the big tech firms by getting cozy with a specific firm, forcing other firms to compete in places where they don't want to. Facebook doesn't have a browser or a mobile offering... which is slowly hurting them (e.g. cookie apocalypse) they might make a decent ally. Amazon is similar, but they don't have an easy symbiosis, unless there was a way to create something between AWS or prime video. Samsung, Adobe, or maybe Salesfore are all bad fits, but if Mozilla created a product strategy to align and maybe have native support for adobe or Salesforce they might be able to make something happen.
In my opinion, I don't see anything like that happening in reality. Mozilla will probably slowly fade away, each CEO getting the comp that they can squeeze out while the business is still making money. Sometime 10-20 years from now we'll think of them like a sun microsystems or silicon graphics.
(*This was a quick throw together... I maybe incredibly off about the details of the Mozilla/Google relationship currently)
It has many little details that aren't as good as Chrome but I don't know how much that affects adoption. Even if it does, that last bit of polish is very expensive to fix and they would need users or another mechanism to fund it.
I would focus heavily on getting Linux to be more mainstream. There is already growing momentum behind Linux and a lot of room for organizations (like Mozilla) that can typically execute on long multi year strategies better than the anarchy of FOSS. There's a lot of work to be done on all levels - partnerships, marketing, technical, finance etc. so people in all roles could contribute.
Maybe that would even play out outside Mozilla, like people leaving and joining other companies that push OSS ahead until it gains enough users for Mozilla to be relevant again.
I think that Chrome and IE proved that the most important users are developers and business admins. If Mozilla wants to make the web a place for real human users in line with their ideals, then they need to focus on making their vision the default for developers and businesses.
If I were Firefox, I'd sue Apple to hell for abusing their dominance in OS and device market share to block me from competing fairly in the browser market.
The primary "author" of Firefox changed, and that had a similar effect to the change in author of the final season of Game of Thrones.
Mozilla can’t go anywhere because as a business, they have no incentive nor any culture needed to survive. They are spoiled by Google whatever they do.
They are like someone so rich that they don’t have any more goals in life. They are still there but they goes nowhere.
Ofc I’m talking about the company, not the employees that did put hard work into the great product that Firefox still is.
It’s too bad because the web have a great need of a Mozilla-like company/foundation.
Mozilla could have been the anti-Google and they could make tons of money by just providing some cloud services (mail, calendar, storage,…) but they just can’t see it because anything will be harder to monetize than their deal with Google.
I'm no expert and would actually like to know, from the experts here, if the following is my subjective experience or not:
I find that for not very heavy or for heavy, but well-behaved sites, I can't really tell the difference between FF and Chrome.
But for very heavy and badly designed sites, Chrome seems to be much faster and have much less latency.
There's this really obnoxious issue where search in the address bar has taken a complete dive recently.
For example, if I want to go to reddit.com/r/videos and it's a page I go to often, I can't just type "videos" because the suggestions that come up are links to threads I've visited recently. None of the suggestions are to reddit.com/r/videos which I visit far more often than a thread I've visited just once.
And it triple annoys me that this used to work just fine but then they recently changed it when they put in those stupid paid suggestions / ads.
* Aggressive competition who are ready to use dark patterns on all platforms to push their own products. All of Google, Microsoft and Apple are doing it one way or another.
* No financing. Pocket and Mozilla VPN are rather miserable revenue streams and therefore FF relies on the likes of Google for the bulk of their budget which means that they are limited in what they can do against Google.
* Really old code base that needs to be adapted for the modern web which takes money and resources from other initiatives.
* The Mozilla Foundation which seems to consider the browser a golden hen that will provide them nice profits to waste.
* major legislation that must level up the browser market or an economic shift that will break Google, Microsoft and Apple dominance on the major user platforms.
* a miracle new money tree should grow up in San Francisco such that it will be an independent revenue source for the project.
* much more people and organizations should invest in improving the browser either with money or effort (magic tree or failure of all other browser engines).
* Firefox should be liberated from the foundation and be a community project like Debian so that people have better feeling of ownership of the project.
Nobody wanted to use the original open source Mozilla browser because it was a weird groupware suite monstrosity derived from Netscape's code. A few clever people created a standalone browser using the Mozilla engine and called it Phoenix. It was eventually renamed Firefox in 2004.
Start another Phoenix that focuses on being a better, slimmer, faster browser than the Chromium ones, just like the original was a better, slimmer, faster browser than the Internet Explorer monoculture.
Also, let's hit a nerve here: Mozilla& Co, ideologically speaking, and by "following the money", are mostly the same hand dealt as Google.I speak for myself but i'm sure many other people also use FF only because there are legitimately no other options besides Chrome, except maybe some obscure ones like qutebrowser/browsh/lynx/etc which aren't really something you jump to for daily driving due to the pain of installation/usage.That or maybe one still has to close/migrate/transition the google/mozilla account for the bookmarks sync features, which is the only useful feature and reason why one should use these 2(/3 including edge I guess) browsers.
To answer your question(s), I would do nothing, because I won't save Firefox.If they save themselves that's fine, but with a fresh memory of the netscape days and the battle of the browsers for the "advertisement bucks", this is not the first rodeo of the company/project/browser, and the usability of the browser is, again, the only reason i'm using it.As a side note, they're way too political for my taste.
For desktop there's not much of a distinguishing factor left. Chrome is good enough. I like Firefox for the privacy, but is that enough of a distinguishing factor for regular (less privacy conscious) folks?
People only really change tech when the one they currently have is visibly & obviously worse, which is part of what spurred the initial migrations to Chrome (I remember switching from FF and in awe at how much faster Chrome was).
That's not to say Chrome hasn't been acquiring it's own list of missteps (manifest V3, restricted Chrome Sync, even attempting Flow), but none of them so far are the type that a non-tech-savvy user would care about, or even know about unless explicitly told.
Then you add on the massive budget Chrome has, compared to Mozilla's struggles to find a revenue source, and it's not hard to see why it's having a hard time.
With that in mind, the obvious solution is for FF to find something distinct it can excel at that the average person finds attractive and that allows for monetization in some way. Problem is, no one really knows what that would be, and the current attempts at being privacy-focused just...aren't widely applicable enough. (Whether or not people should care about privacy is a different debate, and how to get them to care about privacy is its own rabbit hole.)
If Firefox had an amazing debugger I would use it every day. I focus on graphics so this is where my mind is at but there are plenty of things that would benefit everyone like a better memory profiler or maybe being better about explaining to users how to fix issues. Chrome's Lighthouse might focus on how google works but it will also provide solid tips for how to make most websites better. Sure it might be wrong if you really know your stuff but it is also a great place to learn if you don't think you know it all.
I don't think we all agree on what the impact of Firefox market share evaporation is, but my main concern is Google having totalitarian control of the internet: the Browser and Search.
To combat that, I would focus on decreasing the reliance on browser specific tech (specifically: javascript, but also html/css, and maybe HTTP to a certain degree), ensuring that that the web can be browsed without being at the mercy of the client. Return to servers front-loading the entirety of web content. Obviously this would require a massive cultural shift.... The ethics of web dev would have to be shared by vegan-comparable evangelists. (I realize how unrealistic this is after typing it)
I would also try to produce a PoC search engine that mercilessly punishes the ad-driven web, which - we've all noticed- is becoming increasingly pervasive.
Accomplishing these two things, I wouldn't be too concerned about Firefox specifically. Obviously these are immense- perhaps unrealistic goals- but it's what comes to mind.
In its heyday, Firefox grew popular as the browser that saved us from the manifestly inferior Internet Explorer.
Nowadays, Chrome, Edge & Safari are nowhere near as bad by comparison, meaning users have far less reason to switch from defaults. And I’m counting Chrome as a default just because it is pushed so hard.
What to do then? Find a point of differentiation that gets people excited.
Here’s an idea: a radical return to the idea of the browser being a user agent. That is, fully on the user’s side.
Ads blocked by default. AI to warn of potential native advertising. Auto-flagging of dark patterns. Auto-flagging of any form of deceptive practice. A database of sites known to engage in shady tactics. Reader mode that works everywhere.
Firefox: your personal internet bodyguard.
Sadly I don’t think it can happen until the organization is weaned off Ad money, and it can’t do that until it tackles the complexity of the web which demands so many developers. Which probably means making a stand against further scope expansion of HTML/CSS/JS.
Persona, Pocket, a whole bunch of non-technical stuff....
It adds up. I wish they would slim their team down dramatically and become a lean mean killing machine to build the best browser in the world. But unless they get sponsored by some billionaire I don't see that happening.
It'd have to be something that gives you a reason to use FF over Chrome or Safari or IE/Edge. A social approach has "virality" to it. "Oh we're all posting on this Tweet in FF-Social, that's why you're not seeing the replies. Go get FF and join in. Here's the invite link for our group."
Some add-ons and (earlier) wrapper sites tried similar things, but I think FF is one of the few companies that might have wanted to try this, had (at one time) the critical mass & goodwill to pull it off, and had the right vehicle for it.
I can't think of any other solution.
Basically default mode should decruftify all the websites you visit. Destroy all the known garbage on websites that doesn't serve browsing expeirience just tracking and advertising.
Have an easily accessible slider to adjust level of this intervention for current website so you can turn all the crap back on if site doesn't work or complains, or disable event more (javascript, decorative styles).
I'd be also happy if they provided additional tools for modifying the way content is presented, for example influencing order of repeating element like table rows and other. Filtering. Site specific bookmarking. Linking to specific positions in the document. Highlighting.
It should bring back the control to the user and give the users more control they ever had
2. Revert to Redhat pre-IPO corporate model (and stay there)
3. Restart and fill up PAID development team
4. Massive support team in response to user-support/feature-request
5. ???
6. Profit!
Despite PWAs not being a mainstream thing now, there are still a lot of them. Particularly on Linux, a PWA can be the best option for software that doesn't have a native client - e.g. Outlook 365. PWAs have a lot of untapped potential, mainly due to mobile software authors not being familiar with the approach.
With Firefox standing for the open, net-neutral web, it makes sense to me that they would also stand for web-based, cross-platfrom, appstore-neutral apps.
Firefox can scoop up a lot of these users if they don't force out blockers and other addons using manifest V2. I could see articles in Fast Company, Gizmodo, etc. with headlines like "Is Firefox the Hot New Browser (Again)?". It could lead to a huge wave — and hopefully to Google walking back their promises of a forced transition.
Open/Libre Office and their UX are too complicated for normal users like most Linux apps that are modeled after professional desktop applications.
Considering the amount of hardware that's out there and never will work on newer operating systems having a easy to install and use OS for web productivity tasks will very likely be a big driver for overall market share.
Things that could convince me:
- automated clicking for cookie banners
- built-in password manager with network storage
- better bookmark management, with bookmarks as icons on the start page, similar to mobile phone home screens
- built-in video calls with browser sharing (many years ago I saw a tech demo from Mozilla that looked a bit like around.co)
- cloud-storage for tabs and cookies/storage, maybe even JS state, so I can switch machines and get an identical browser window.
Of course, none of this helps Firefox. If anything, it suggests that they are pretty much fucked.
I don't know where you get money for such a venture, but IBM (Red Hat) and Amazon both a vested interest to not have a browser monoculture and don't already run a browser project.
- Google: Try to use anything made by them with another browser and without a blocker and see how long it takes until you get the "SURF BETTER WITH CHROME"-ads thrown into your face
- Microsoft: Edge is pre-bundled and you get little nags in the Google style noted above all the time. Various menus contain little "try out Edge, a browser made for Windows!"-ads
- Apple: Doesn't even allow other browsers on some of their platforms, deeply integrates the browser and the OS in others (i.e. exactly the behavior which got Microsoft in hot water in the 90s)
I don't think it's possible to fundamentally change the trend without intervention of government agencies that forbids Google, Microsoft and Apple from doing this and neither EU nor US show much interest in doing so. So, things will continue and at best Mozilla can hope for some stabilization at the bottom of the ladder.
Side note: Mozilla has done various things over time I'm not happy with, but all of these are at most accelerants. They didn't change the fundamental trajectory, so unlike other commentators I think they are not relevant to this topic, even though we could discuss day in or out if e.g. the pocket acquisition and all that came with it was a good thing.
When you're hit with "you should use chrome" on all your most common sites, and the sites you use favor Chrome, it's hard for any browser to compete.
I know people like to bash Mobile Safari, some of which is reasonable, it's really important to realize it's pretty much the only reason sites aren't chrome only at this point.
- get Web extensions (real ones, like uBlock) into Firefox for iOS.
- start a campaign around Web browsing speed (using numbers with Privacy Protection and/or uBlock0 enabled). That’s the last competitive advantage FF has, and it needs to use it to gain marketshare.
- Keep investing in Open Web initiatives (such as ActivityPub). Mozilla, like it or not, is one of the last bastions of the open web, and they need to keep investing in it (with research such as Persona).
Longshot: go all in on bringing mainline Linux to the desktop/mobile. Linux systems are the only place where Mozilla is the default. Hyper focus on high performance with Linux systems. Memory footprint and battery drain are abysmal. The way security controls for extensions are implemented requires stupid amounts of memory.
The cost of bundling for Chrome and Safari is low, because it's software -- so they are included with a large number of devices, especially where commercial partnerships can be formed (generally on favourable terms to Google and Apple, respectively, I'd expect).
I don't think that the average user notices much difference in terms of behaviour and functionality between any of these browsers. I'll admit that there are probably rare exceptions like vendor-pushed codecs where one or other browser tends to have an advantage (again, typically leveraged by partnerships with streaming content providers).
So: I don't know, but it's something to do with getting Firefox on more devices by default -- and that's not something that happens easily when supply chains are easily influenced by a small number of upstream "ecosystem providers".
Someone explain to me why I would switch to Chrome? If anything I'd switch to Edge before Chrome.
https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2004/12/mozilla-foundation-pl...
This is the passion and marketing needed to save Firefox.
Enable battery status(Important for kiosks), web midi, web USB, web bluetooth, all of it. Just put it behind an option. Stop trying to keep useful web app functionality out of the web. I don't want to support that.
Start innovating and give us features nobody else has.
Integrate with Yggdrasil to trust 200: URLs on the tunnel as secure contexts(Or let people set a whole interface to be secure).
Bring back FlyWeb, immediately. When flyweb died was a key moment that made me lose all interest in FF.
Give us a way to package a website into a manually installable and redistributable "Box", that can be trusted as a secure context, with a manually selectable data folder, so it all just works like a traditional app. Like Web Bundles, but manually installed and treated as secure, with services that can run in the background all the time, etc.
Don't just lag behind or catch up to chrome, support everything they do, go past them and make web apps truly a replacement for desktop apps.
Stop trying to kill everything that can be used for tracking and let the user decide on a site by site or app by app basis.
Taking measures to appeal to a more enthusiast audience won’t do much for the numbers.
Only the masses will, and the masses moved long ago to Chrome because it was a 10x product. The alternative was awful. Not only this, but it was backed by Google, the world’s entrypoint to the internet.
Now, Chrome continues being “good enough” if not great.
For me, I have no reason to move, even being a reasonably privacy-conscious person.
Mozilla needs recurring revenue stream strong enough to help them get off Google deal and scale up revenue to compete with big guns on equal footing.
Firefox has the advantage of not being advertising driven, privacy focused and a great brand.
Services like say Identity(expand Firefox account for say form-less login to supporting websites), password management (LastPass), payment/credit card management , their own email/calendar service to complement Thunderbird, notes/clipboard like Evernote/notion , screen recording sharing like loom and so on and deeply integrate to their browser to provide seamless experience .
Focus on services which browsing better/ safer can build strong revenue runway that can fund all the ambitions they have for other projects
Opt -in for any service and modular. Nothing breaks regular experience. Just offer better convenience people will pay, one thing Apple get right.
[1] Yes it is white labelled Mullvad VPN, but it is still recurring revenue for Mozilla.
But how long is that going to be the case?
Will the web be the default paradigm in the age of the metaverse? What if Firefox was able to be a metaverse platform? There was some early work done on this in around 2014 by @vvuk, which integrated WebGL. VRML integration also progressed. At the moment, Facebook is changing its entire organisation to focus on the metavers (see also their Oculus acquisition), while Google and Apple own the hardware (mobile phones) that it will presumably run on, and have their own browsers. Microsoft's Hololens is also heading in this direction, but they already have Edge.
Facebook needs a web browser for the metaverse. Mozilla needs to remain relevant. Strange bedfellows?
Additionally it looks like Web Assembly has a promising future, so Firefox should having the best support for that.
In this market, we've got an army of secondary secondary browser players-- the Vivaldis, the Braves, Yandex's browser team, the smouldering wreckage of Opera, and yes even Microsoft's Edge and (to a lesser extent) Apple's Safari teams.
I'm sure every single one of those developers knows they're living with a belligerent landlord: they're going to spend too much of their careers having to unwind anti-competitive or just "we wouldn't want to include this in OUR browser" features in Blink.
Make sure you're a serious option for them. Make Gecko as embeddable as Webkit.
In this plan, the endgame actually has a fairly low Firefox market share, because it gradually evolves to be the "packed-in reference implementation" of the Gecko engine. Instead, we focused on building a healthier web ecosystem. More people end up using Gecko!Edge or Gecko!Vivaldi or whatever, and this breaks up market share enough that Google can't barge their way through the standards process by unilaterally cramming features into Blink. The individual vendors can more completely focus on their custom improvements while expecting that the core browser engine isn't going to be polluted to serve a specific (and not their own) commercial interest, and have a vested commercial interest in supporting Mozilla to do the heavy lifting for them.
In the short term, I think maybe they could start appealing to this market as a "too important to fail" concept. Think of AMD 10 years ago: the products are mediocre right now, but everyone knew if they went bankrupt, the industry would stagnate majorly for a long time. That might be a justification for soliciting foundation memberships or hackathons to encourage development work on their engine.
For anyone writing in multiple languages daily this is a deal breaker.
More specifically, if I were Mozilla I would build a semantic web browser capable of understanding what's important on a page (it boils down to text, images, videos, comments and forms), extract it, render it in a NATIVE, CONSISTENT and LIGHTWEIGHT (as in CPU / Mem - no electron, no HTML, JS, CSS), user defined way. Nobody wants today's 10GB webpages and 300 popups. Test it on the most popular websites, sell on a subscription basis for people tired of interacting with crappy websites and modern frontend apps. And, of course, offer an option to see the real page in a normal browser for when things don't work or you actually care about seeing someone's design or about running someone's code.
The only reason why Firefox even rose to prominence was because it was an arbitrage opportunity back when IE6 was "the Internet" and Mozilla already had a superior browser (remnants of Navigator) that they needed to remind users existed. Firefox has been on the down swing since Google released Chrome.
When the top web browsers being used today are completely funded and highly-prioritized by the biggest tech companies in the world and are defaults in their respective platforms (Edge on Windows, Chrome on Android, Safari on macOS and iOS), and when all of them are really, really good, there really isn't room for competition.
Additionally, I think browsers as a "thing that people use heavily" are on their way out. Most people are anchoring to platforms that, at best, take advantage of webviews. For many people, "The Internet" is Google, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and $STREAMING_SERVICES, all of which are mobile apps. This, along with significant hardware and bandwidth advancements and the crypto thing, is why I think the "metaverse" is going to really take hold. But that's another HN post.
Anecdotally, the _only_ thing keeping me on Firefox is Multi-Account Containers. That's _literally_ it. I have been wanting to use Safari since forever since it's so heavily optimized for macOS and, now, the M1 CPU architecture, but the isolation guarantees that MAC provides are amazing. That's not enough to build a huge browser userbase with, though, as most people don't give two shits about tracking cookies, fingerprinting, or whatever. (I only give one shit myself, as I've started using Safari on mobile now. Firefox on iOS is just too buggy, and many web sites don't even recognize it as a valid browser, which is insane to me.)
That said, Mozilla VPN is a really good product that is not free. Maybe it's in Mozilla's interest to pivot onto web-adjacent ventures that are profitable?
Firefox is beyond saving. The question is, what can Mozilla do to save itself?
They had a chance with Rust to turn that into something like Erlang Solutions did with Erlang. ie. A Rust Consultancy and will be able to make a significant amount of money in the long term with that. Instead we were given a corporate foundation that is already in chaos by Amazon.
Mozilla has given up on its mission statement and has partnered and joined the anti-privacy gang: Google and Facebook as they watch them push whatever hostile web standard to W3C, and being powerless to stop or object them.
What a shame.
Firefox’s biggest threat is a company with a really broad range of products that all coalesce into selling scary profitable ads.
To answer my own question: without at least one competing browser, all web standards are effectively controlled by Google. It'll be AMP from here on out.
At this point, not sure why I would switch back to Firefox TBH, unless MS really screws something up. My advice would be to create a seamless cross platform browsing experience that has feature parity across all devices. Keep the privacy first strategy, and look at incorporating key add-ons (could they purchase a Bitward/1Password/LastPass?).
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...
Chrome wins mostly because it has 'distribution'.
'WordPerfect' may have been better than 'MS Word' but it doesn't matter if every version of Windows comes with a link to 'MS Word'.
Google uses its dominance in Search to dominate adjacent spaces.
Firefox is simply not 'that much better' enough to convince consumers to switch, and/or they don't have the marketing budget to communicate that to the world.
It's a bit of a commodity product, and Google has significant leverage.
FF would have to work with a lot of partners to convince them to focus on FF for the thoughtful reasons we want them to, even then, it could be hard.
I'd put all emphasis on performance and embeddability, and practice a lot more restraint towards UX changes nobody asked for.
I'd also either tone down all the privacy talk several notches, or actually walk the walk and make telemetry and A/B studies opt in. Right now they just seem self-righteous and hypocritical.
This is the reason why Gemini are gaining popularity: the scope is limited and focused on doing one thing well.
Most people use the default browsers on their mobile devices and I’d bet many of the people who don’t use the default browser on their PCs have downloaded Chrome because it can sync bookmarks with Chrome on their phones.
Using the non-default browser takes effort and most people don’t care enough to try. For Firefox to overcome that basic barrier, it needs to be a lot more attractive than the default browser. For most users, it’s just not.
Other companies that only make browsers don’t have high market share for the same reason Firefox doesn’t.
In my opinion, the biggest error of Mozilla is not responding quickly to the computing trends.
Mozilla had a lot of great tech even in the early 2000s but it failed to realize how valuable they were.
Take XUL for example, what if they had expanded it to run on top of Linux directly? They could have become a player in OS market.
What if, after that, they expanded it to run on top of mobile phone when Android came out? They could have become a player in the smartphone market.
Number 3 player in browser, OS, and smartphone is not a bad thing. They surely would have been a much bigger company than what it is right now.
firefox lost out from me because some sites didn't work correctly, so i'd say that the first right move would be to really see what can be done to win over more developers as the browser they use for primary development. both firefox and chrome have good developer tools, but how much further could firefox be taken? how much community outreach might land firefox on more web developer desktops? are there corporate barriers to getting firefox on more professional web developer desks? how might they be removed?
also, have viable competitors for both chromebooks and android.
Can we validate that it is in fact losing market share first?
It's possible there are other factors such as the increased privacy capabilities and integrated tracker blocking and tendency for Firefox users to value and use these features and plugins, or even useragent string spoofing... I do the later so I look like a chrome/windows user because some sites will block features from Firefox for no reason (and also it's nice to be less trivially uniquely identifiable).
Where are the stats you are using and how are they collected?
The hardware has to be top of the line and work perfectly with the OS. Work with every major linux distro to make sure they are compatible with no fuss. Only make one or two models total. Rally the entire opensource openhardware community around a single high end model. No companies working on their own lines, but allow any manufacturer to release a phone or sell parts that match spec.
I've got an older laptop that I use for simpler stuff only. Video playback is horribly slow when compared to native clients, and the CPU fan sounds like a fighter jet if I try to open some of the heavier pages in Firefox. Chromium-based alternatives run just fine (albeit with twice the RAM usage, but that's not a problem for me).
Granted, users don't know or care which engine they're using, but it would allow Mozilla to "control" important infrastructure that apps are deployed on. Maybe it would turn into a revenue stream by providing official support, or maybe it just helps keep Google's fingers out of everything.
I'm not sure how they can morally justify contributing to the death of the open web by helping Google's monopoly, but it seems inevitable at this point. Trully sad
Without mobile, any investment in desktop no matter how good would still mean losing marketshare in general.
But winning mobile is not possible IMO. Android Chromium is just too good, slicker, faster, better managing memory etc, and Apple bans other engines and Apple users go all-Apple most of the time.
Simply put, why would I volunteer my free time to support a software project whose CEO makes somewhere in the ballpark of 70x the average American salary?
Mozilla likes to pretend that it's an egalitarian, collective endeavour; but it's really not so different than any other private software development company. It's not even all that unique in the licensing conditions that it places on its software.
There are 3 things I think Firefox needs to support: CEF, Rust, Dev Tools
Something that gets brought up over-and-over is the Chrome Embedding Framework (CEF?) or the API designed to embed Chrome. Firefox isn't as easy to embed as Chrome, and would benefit greatly if it could be oriented to interface with this API. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_Embedded_Framework Firefox needs to support being a fast and light applet. Forgive me for saying the words we do not use.
The 2nd is Rust. Rust was the best thing Mozilla could have supported, but instead they axed the dev team and gave it to the Linux Foundation. That's probably a good thing in the long-run. Rust is a really innovative paradigm shift in language design, and it will be so much bigger than Firefox. However, the development of Firefox technologies with Rust should have continued. We were so looking forward to Servo. Chrome is perceptibly faster, but we were on track to wipe the board with memory safety. I personally would use a "correct" browser over a fast one.
The 3rd is dev tools. People develop with Chrome for amazing dev tools. As an easy example, if you look in the Firefox Network dev tool/tab you can add a column to show the value returned with a common response header. In Firefox you can only choose to show these 6-8 headers. In Chrome you can add additional (custom) response headers, for things like X-Application-Whatever. It's very nice to show your application's custom headers in the dev tool window like that. I've been asking for it for a while on Mozilla's bugtracker. I don't know where to jump in and add it myself.
Killer Firefox features for me are: sending pages to another browser to act on later on (and I use it a lot) and plugins in the Mobile Firefox.
I'm also a fan of having the address bar at the bottom for easier reach, though I admit it's a niche thing that sounds like a gimmick.
On mobile, I switched to Brave and I grew to really like groups of tabs.
I defiantly use nothing but Firefox unless a website won't work with FF.
Chromium is a better browser and it's open source (BSD, GPL etc). They should take advantage of the license. The argument for browser diversity doesn't make sense to me when chromium is open source and hard forks are always possible.
The last time I checkout Firefox was about a year ago. It still uses ugly lagacy windows UI elements in its history/bookmark manager, and switching between personal/school account was a pain in the ass.
I think it is too far away from Chrome and beyond saving.
I know that's reductive and perhaps not to the standards of this website, but that's really it for the majority of people who couldn't care less about the diversity of browser engines out there.
Everything that made Mozilla cool or innovative was shafted.
But after 4 months of crashing my mac every couple of hours, I’m done.
Firefox passed the point of no return long ago.
There's no need to save Firefox. When Firefox came out, it was a breath of fresh air. Because of Mozilla, every browser is now really, really great. Even Microsoft's browser is standards compliant and open source! Yeah, I get the arguments that Webkit is too pervasive and Chrome is too tied to Google and all of that... but in my opinion, Mozilla wanted a world where every single consumer had the choice between numerous high-quality browsers, and that's the world we currently live in! Firefox is losing this current battle, but Mozilla won the war.
The problem now isn't the browser, but rather the websites. Too much tracking, too much fights over who owns your online persona, and not enough usability (I'm so sick of passwords).
Mozilla always had a unique skill... they were a non-profit that was great at taking complicated technical issues that plagued the internet, and packaging them in a way that was usable. They took hard problems and made it so nobody had to think about them.
I'd love to see Mozilla do the same for identity. I'd love to see them be the company that killed password, and made it so identity is simple, easy and safe.
First off, Google can't do it. Nor can the other big players. Why? Because identity and tracking so to tied to their core business model, they have to back off imposing it. Otherwise they'll be accused of making it so "you need a Google account to use the web". (Or in Apple's case, they've had to go so far the opposite way that nobody really uses it.)
There's a lot of money in this! Identity is very closely tied to payments (it's crazy how it's 2022 and in the browser I still am typing in my credit card number).
To me, identity online is tied to an email address. You can have an email address with your real name, a few throwaways, etc. Identity doesn't have to mean YOU specifically. I'd love to see Mozilla work with GMail/etc... but also spin up their own email servers. Since most people now access email from a client (Apple Mail, Superhuman, etc), having a headless email server would help both privacy and also put them in a great place to help own identity.
Lastly, Mozilla always was fighting two wars at the same time. They both wanted institutional changes for the Internet (aka standard compliant browsers) and also were building a really nice implementation of it (aka Firefox). I feel like this is how they should approach identity. Getting everyone to follow the same standards (i.e. I can still use my GMail account for anything listed above), while also building their own stellar implementation of it and giving their competition a reason to compete (their own mail server, including these identity features in Firefox, etc).
The same argument can be made against Google now, since the browser has effectively become an OS.
I've used firefox since it was called pheonix and have no plans to switch away.
I'm unaware of the actions of the company though, outside of starting rust development.
Why do people pick up chrome? do you want to fund ad sales?
...and apparently, the conclusions still haven't landed. Firefox lost because it has no reach. They lost on mobile and they don't have billion user properties to push their browser in the way Google has.
Any and all discussions about Firefox UI choices, its engine, whatever...are completely irrelevant if you have near zero reach. This problem cannot be solved with engineering. Nor will it be solved with donations.
Firefox lost and lost a long time ago. It's over. It cannot compete with these market forces. The world in which Firefox was successful, before smartphones, massive online services and a stagnant IE, no longer exist.
With this in mind, what should happen to Firefox? Short term to mid term, keeping it alive and hoping Google keeps wiring Mozilla tons of money, because without it, Mozilla would soon cease to exist.
Long term? I don't know. I would hope that the technical product somehow can be preserved and kept functional, but maintaining a browser is a costly business. It's not the type of project to send to Github and say "best of luck".
The common narrative in the web community that having an extra independent browser engine around is great is mostly a "feel good" story. Having a slightly crappier engine does nothing for developers or users. Firefox also doesn't keep the web "honest" as it's so small now that it can be ignored entirely. There's a reason both Edge and Brave picked Chromium.
As for Mozilla, I have little confidence in their ability to reinvent themselves, with or without Firefox. One of their ex-employees expressed it well on Twitter: they got addicted to a fire-hose of free money which they largely pissed away on fruitless projects.
As counter point to that I would say that besides failed projects, Mozilla has made very meaningful contributions to foundational computing, think Rust and WebAssembly. It's extra painful that in particular the most useful part of Mozilla, the above, is scaled down.
Mozilla these days comes across as a woke blog. Preachy, deeply political, yet without actual impact. I follow the simple rule in life where if somebody is constantly telling you how virtuous they are, they are the opposite. Because good people don't need to tell the world that they're good. "Progressive" Mozilla is quite the fan of neoliberal economics, as they fire a huge amount of workers (even during COVID) whilst enriching themselves as reward for...running the company in the ground. They are THE privacy browser (nope) and build an advanced container to castrate Facebook, yet don't do the same for Google services (for well known reasons). It's all very hypocritical and hollow.
Preaching is not only tiresome, it also doesn't pay bills. So go an do something useful in establishing "revenue earning products". A bookmarking service and a rebranded VPN fail to impress.
Make Firefox 5 times faster than Chrome.
Most recently when they came out with Colorways I decided to give Vivaldi a shot for the first time in a few years, since it has that easy custom color theming without a pointless time horizon. First problem I ran into was that the built-in ad blocker breaks YouTube. Not a great first impression, but hey you can just disable it and install uBO. But I quickly came to miss the flexibility of Firefox's interface. On the surface Vivaldi is very customizable, but you quickly run into a wall when wanting to go outside what they've built. For example, you can put the tab bar anywhere, but you can't have it in multiple places or pretty it up beyond changing the colors. Firefox on the other hand has enough tab management addons for any taste, plus it supports custom CSS within the addons themselves and at the browser level.
The alternative browser I've been most impressed with is actually Edge, but I can't tolerate it constantly shoving features I don't want in my face or the mandatory telemetry.
So to answer the question, I would save Firefox by breaking the mobile browser duopoly. Desktop Firefox is already obviously better than Chrome and Edge, even in the basic experience with no addons, but people just use Chrome for some reason. I think it comes down to habit, an over-reliance on Google Apps that work better with Chrome's tight integration, and familiarity due to Chrome being the only serious browser on Android. And on iOS the situation seems to be even worse: non-Safari browsers are forced to use Safari's engine anyway, and all of them offer a noticeably worse UX than Safari so why bother. Of Firefox's problems, losing on mobile is the easiest to fix, not that it's super easy. Mozilla "just" needs to focus creative resources on building a compelling alternative browser on Android and a functional one on iOS. That would go a long way toward bringing users back.
Another thing that might help is for Mozilla to make a clear (down to earth, jargon-free) statement of its values and goals as a nonprofit. I think a lot of the criticism Firefox gets in tech circles isn't exactly sincere, because many people have switched away from Firefox due to actual or perceived political differences but don't want to come out and say that, so they contrive or exaggerate some UX or privacy issue. If Mozilla's leadership would speak openly about these issues it might make those detractors a little more comfortable saying something like "I don't use Firefox because the causes they support go against my political convictions", rather than the current situation where they might be reluctant to say that and start a likely pointless argument over whether Mozilla supports a certain cause or not.