Conversation

Notices

1. lnxw48a1 (lnxw48a1@nu.federati.net)'s status on Wednesday, 16-Feb-2022 18:23:30 EST lnxw48a1
   https://www.wired.com/story/firefox-mozilla-2022/
   Yeah, a lot of us are concerned about #Firefox, and about #Mozilla in general.
   1. lnxw48a1 (lnxw48a1@nu.federati.net)'s status on Wednesday, 16-Feb-2022 19:23:58 EST lnxw48a1

      in reply to
      > Mozilla's privacy-heavy browser is flatlining.
      
      The market share is in free-fall.
   2. lnxw48a1 (lnxw48a1@nu.federati.net)'s status on Wednesday, 16-Feb-2022 19:48:48 EST lnxw48a1

      in reply to
      A lot of us are concerned about #Firefox, about #Thunderbird, and about #Mozilla itself. The trouble is, most of the seeds of Moz's current affliction were planted early on, when the #Google search deal was first signed.
      
      They received an unimaginable amount of money, and being good people, they decided to pour it into becoming the Web's advocate and (later on) the Web's privacy advocate.
      
      They built a large organization, with some very high salaries at the top, based on the revenue they received from a single customer. And then that customer launched its own browser, #Chrome, in part because Firefox was going slower than Google desired because so many resources were going into other projects and because Google's plans were not always aligned with what Mozilla believed was best for the Web.
      
      It was always an unsustainable situation, and when things changed due to cooperation being replaced with coopetition, they started a panicked grasping for other revenue sources.
      
      Now, they've cut actual developers, which makes it even more difficult to keep up with Chrome / #Chromium (and the many browsers derived from it). And because they need to find other revenue sources, they keep looking for ad deals ... which runs crosswise with its core users, who want to block ads.
      
      So, yeah, I don't see a way out that leaves them as anything other than a niche product produced by a small team of mostly volunteers.
      
      I do think _personalization_ as a differentiator is going to flop, if they're thinking about color schemes and superhero logos. A big chunk of what people did with XUL (the former technology, and what made it so customizable) was produce ad blockers, script blockers, embedded-media blockers, pop-up blockers, cookie and tracking blockers, proxy tools, and web development tools (webdev toolbars, xml toolbars, json tools, css and xsl tools, sqlite tools). I just don't think that the ability to make your browser look like the Spiderman t-shirt you bought last week is going to win over a lot of people who are using Chrome/Chomium/Edge/Opera/Vivaldi/Brave/Iron.
      
      Now, maybe if they make it the most secure and private browser right out of the box, with ad blocking, script blocking, and so on, plus make it faster than the Chromium family while consuming less RAM and crashing less often, then adding the ability to dress the browser up as Dora the Explorer will total enough advantages to make a difference.
      1. GeniusMusing (geniusmusing@nu.federati.net)'s status on Wednesday, 16-Feb-2022 20:00:16 EST GeniusMusing

         in reply to
         OTOH, if Firefox fails, where is the competition?
         Yes there are other browsers (Brave, Edge, Opera, Safari & Vivaldi) but 4 of the 5 use Chromium as a base and are not really competition in the true sense. Seems like someone will keep sending money so that there is some competition to keep the govt away?
         1. lnxw48a1 (lnxw48a1@nu.federati.net)'s status on Wednesday, 16-Feb-2022 20:04:29 EST lnxw48a1

            in reply to
            @geniusmusing I would hope so. I would hope that someone with some money would pay Mozilla to make their browser more modular, so that they could even build their own browser upon the core the way these Chromium-based browsers do. IMO, if you're marketing a privacy browser and basing it on Chromium, you're fighting against the foundation of your product.
            1. lnxw48a1 (lnxw48a1@nu.federati.net)'s status on Wednesday, 16-Feb-2022 20:09:25 EST lnxw48a1

               in reply to
               Case in point, in any of the #Chromium based browsers, you can turn #JavaScript totally on or totally off. There is no option to turn it off for 3rd party domains.
               
               So many sites are #JavaScrippled these days that turning JS all the way off (without a one-click way to turn it on for one site) is too frustrating for anyone to do.
               
               I did see in #Edge today that I can add sites individually to either a separate Yes to JS or No to JS list. I don't recall seeing it until recently. But that's cumbersome.
      2. lnxw48a1 (lnxw48a1@nu.federati.net)'s status on Wednesday, 16-Feb-2022 20:01:03 EST lnxw48a1

         in reply to
         I'd be willing to pay for a Firefox version that discards all the garbage and blocks ads, scripts, tracking, and annoyances by default--and gets all the latest privacy innovations first and turned on by default--but not until Mitchell Baker and her cloud of highly-paid hangers on at the top of the organization are purged.
         
         (They can't keep a product in production long enough to develop a following. Even way back when they produced something similar to Electron [a runtime for installable apps that is secretly just a specialized web browser subset] and then abandoned it as various projects were starting to use it. Because of the panic, they cannot stick to anything they do. Like Lockwise, their stand-alone password store.)
         
         I also realize that this would be an ultra-niche product, and that the revenue _might_ be enough to sustain that product, but definitely not enough to fund the parent Firefox product.