Comment by makeitdouble

Comment by makeitdouble 4 hours ago

> demonstrated by their ever-shrinking browser market share

At this point I think Firefox market share stopped being in Mozilla's hand.

Just as it was during the browser war days, the critical issue went back to site compatibility: Firefox performs poorly on Google properties (Gmail is fine, YouTube, gsuite, admin consoles are pretty bad), and document based services like Notion or Figma. It kinda works, but Chrome based browser perform notably better.

The main point of course is that those sites are at fault (sometimea intentionally when it comes to Google), but that doesn't change Mozilla's position. Stop using Google services is just not a great choice, and many of us use them rely heavily on them for work.

Mozilla could make technical miracles and or bring some incredible feature from the left field, but that's a tall order for any company that size, so I'd expect most of their future effort to still end up with lower market share, whether or not they had good ideas.

PunchyHamster 3 hours ago

> The main point of course is that those sites are at fault (sometimea intentionally when it comes to Google), but that doesn't change Mozilla's position. Stop using Google services is just not a great choice, and many of us use them rely heavily on them for work.

That's not exactly what happened. Yes, google did some shady stuff but in parallel Firefox was also slow for everything.

Only when FF Quantum launched the performance caught up, and the same launch gave power user a push to go elsewhere, coz all their plugins either stopped working or worked worse.

And it was too little too late too. IIRC the FF market share was already hovering around 10%. There were some people going back to it after Quantum release but that didn't last and were not at the level where companies like one I work for don't even test on FF because market share is so small clients don't require it

> Mozilla could make technical miracles and or bring some incredible feature from the left field, but that's a tall order for any company that size, so I'd expect most of their future effort to still end up with lower market share, whether or not they had good ideas.

Mozilla could, years ago, not focus on everything else but making a browser (Anyone remember Firefox OS ? nobody ? thought so). Firefox was on the top of the web and the management squandered it all.

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hedora 2 hours ago

It’s not about ff being slow. That was never a reason to switch (unless it was misconfigured and couldn’t use your video card or something, but that happened just as often with chrome back then).
Google actively breaks firefox compatibility at random. It seems intentional from the outside, but it could be incompetence.
For instance, copy paste didn’t work in google docs under firefox the last time I checked.

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- thayne 31 minutes ago
  
  > copy paste didn’t work in google docs under firefox the last time I checked
  Still doesn't. Because instead of using the standard clipboard API, google docs uses a special extension which of course is pre-installed on chrome, and AFAIK not even possible to install on Firefox.
  
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wavemode 41 minutes ago

The Web is in a weird place where, most websites are so inefficient that they require the literal cutting edge of browser rendering and JavaScript execution performance to even run acceptably.
It's natural for a browser engineer to look at a website and go "wow, this is trash. Go ask the makers of this website to, I don't know, stop re-rendering the page 100 times a second."
Whereas the Chrome team's approach for years has been "okay, this website is trash. How do we make this trash run well for the users?"

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makeitdouble an hour ago

I was thinking about incidents like this one (around 2023, way after Quantum)
https://www.zdnet.com/article/youtube-is-slowing-video-loads...
> Firefox was on the top of the web and the management squandered it all
I have not followed Mozill's internal shenanigans close enough to properly understand, and really wonder what's the biggest hurdle for some other company or org to come in and scoop/fork Firefox. I'm assuming it's sheer money.
Mozilla obviously dropped the ball. And then nothing is there to catch it.

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- wavemode 38 minutes ago
  
  The hurdle is that, if you're going to fork a browser, you can just fork Chromium. Might as well start off ahead rather than behind.
  That's why most new browsers are Chromium-based.
  
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Nextgrid 3 hours ago

This is a chicken and egg problem; right now there is no compelling reason for the masses to use Firefox so developers are right to not worry about it and tell people to just use Chrome if they’re experiencing any issues.

But if Mozilla makes a killer enterprise browser and a significant chunk of the enterprise jumps on it they will have an incentive to support it.

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calvinmorrison 3 hours ago

At some point people should recognize the web browsers are an opinionated VM. Many many many languages only have one runtime. There's no true reason Mozilla NEEDs its own engine, and probably would be in better shape today if they shifted to a privacy defensive fork of chrome.

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int_19h 3 hours ago

It might not be a problem in principle, but it's definitely a problem when said one runtime is controlled by a single entity that is both powerful and fundamentally adversarial towards the users.
A privacy fork can only do so much if Google keeps removing underlying things that make it possible. The more it diverges from upstream, the harder it is to maintain.

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makeitdouble an hour ago

I partly agree. Firefox moving to Webkit or Blink isn't as bad as people put it, but under one critical condition: Firefox still keeps the capacity to steer away from Google's roadmap and shoulder a competitive and full implementation of the engine on its own (100% maintain a fork that can deviate from Blink as much as needed, including becomming fully incompatible).
Under that specific scenario, we would get the best of both worlds. There would be less engine variety, but it would save Firefox and offer an out of a Google owned ecosystem.
Now I think that's absolutely not trivial, and if Firefox could pull that out it could probably as well push its own engine way more forward right now.
For instance Apple played that game, ended up basically alone on Webkit, and I'm not sure Safari is more competitive to Chrome than Firefox is. Safari keeps some market share, but the reasons are elsewhere.

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- pseudalopex an hour ago
  
  A fully incompatible Blink fork sounds like Gecko with more steps.
  
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- calvinmorrison an hour ago
  
  I would like to see the browser be the Users Agent. IE: "Cookie Banners?" That's a browser, not website issue. I really care less about the interpreter/VM than I do say, how we built a browser on it (which is why webkit is great, and I had my own webkit GTK browser that did exactly what I wanted, and why so many webkit based apps exist!)
  
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  makeitdouble 32 minutes ago
  
  IMHO rendering engines can be ignored for restricted use cases or if it's fine to work 98% of the time. What we're expecting from a mainstream browser is a way higher bar, so having no control on the engine is a no go. Tomorrow Firefox having to wait for Google to implement a new sandboxing approach, or not able to override deeper DRM or tracking integration would be a pretty bad situation.
  As I understand it that's exactly why Apple took webkit and ran with it.
  > Cookie Banners?
  People really viscerally hate those, do they. That anger should be pointed to the site pushing them IMHO, but aside from that, dismissing the banner is in itself a legal choice (whatever the default was) that isn't only bound to cookies despite the name. Whatever happens on the backend or service can also be bound to that choice.
  I look at it the same way we have newsletter checkboxes. They're a PITA but I wouldn't trust an automated system to make the right choice on every single form, and not sign me to some super weird stuff just because it thought the checkbox was a newsletter optout (imagine a site pushing a "bill me every month for the extra feature" clearly explained option, but with an html input id close to "opt_out_of_free_plan" and it's automatically checked by your browser)
  
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kibwen 3 hours ago

Mozilla might be in better shape, but the web wouldn't be.

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- calvinmorrison 3 hours ago
  
  Do you think Chrome gives a shit about firefox's engine? No.
  don't forget the decade of -my-shitty-browser-extension: somethingdumb;
  
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wpasc 3 hours ago

im surprised this is earning such downvotes. idk about the "opinionated" vm perspective but I think it needing its own engine oe not is at least something worth considering. firefox has been my go-to alt browser for years as my backup to chrome. it was what I would use to "test again in another browser" but as time has gone by, more and more stuff just doesn't work on firefox :(

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- ivanmontillam 3 hours ago
  
  It's already problematic to have Chromium dominating/near-monopolizing, and add salt to the wound letting Gecko die this way.
  Chromium is so prevalent as an engine, that most developers don't test their code on Firefox and just tell everyone to use Chrome/Chromium when they run into issues.
  This has the unintentional side-effect of strong-arming the W3C into compliance with the engine and not the other way around. Why do we bother with the W3C then? if they are powerless and Chromium can do as they please?
  
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  calvinmorrison an hour ago
  
  But if firefox ran chrome, it wouldn't be a problem. Vivaldi, Opera, and others are doing just fine.
  
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- calvinmorrison an hour ago
  
  > idk about the "opinionated" vm perspective
  What I mean is, it's basically a VM. It's got a screen, inputs, storage, networking.
  
  Reply View | 0 replies