Slashdot Mirror
Will Firefox Lose Google Funding?
SharkLaser writes "Mozilla's future looks uncertain. Last week Chrome overtook Firefox's position as the second most popular browser, the new versioning scheme is alienating some Firefox users, and now the advertising deal between Mozilla and Google, the one that almost fully funds Mozilla's operations, is coming to an end. One of Firefox's key managers, Mike Shaver, also left the company in September. 'In 2010, 84% of Mozilla's $123 million in revenue came directly from Google. That's roughly $100 million in funds that will vanish or be drastically cut if the deal is either not renewed or is renegotiated on terms that are less favorable to Mozilla. When the original three-year partnership deal was signed in 2008, Chrome was still on the drawing boards. Today, it is Google's most prominent software product, and it is rapidly replacing Firefox as the alternative browser on every platform.' Recently Mozilla has been trying to get closer with Microsoft by making a Firefox version that defaults to Bing. If Google is indeed cutting funding from Mozilla or tries to negotiate less favorable terms, it could mean Mozilla's future funding coming from Microsoft and Bing."
The problem is ultimately that Firefox was out-Firefoxed. Chrome is what Firefox was in its beginning, a pretty small and basic web browser without all the cruft. Part of the issue to my mind, or at least why I abandoned Firefox was simply that the developers refused to fix long-standing bugs, and basically began to ignore the community that used the browser. So far as I'm concerned, IE and Chrome have left Firefox behind.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
IE slowly killed Netscape.. Chrome slowly killed Firefox.
Are there chrome equivalents of noscript and Flashblock?
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
"It's because Chrome is the better browser. It shouldn't matter that it comes from a mega company like Google. If a better product comes out, that should be king. Now why people are still using IE is beyond me." - by gameboyhippo (827141) on Monday December 05, @01:04PM (#38268436)
If that's purely the case as you state it, Opera should have won long ago then as "top most used browser". Opera was technically superior on many grounds:
---
1.) Speed (for years & on most all fronts tested/testable)
2.) Built in features natively without having to use addons
3.) Features other webbrowsers or addon makers literally copied from Opera's playbook (and integrated into their own webbrowsers).
---
* Will Mozilla/FireFox die? No, doubt it - too good of a codebase built up for decades to just "die"... it'll live on (if in anything, WaterFox (very fast, I'm impressed in fact by it)).
APK
P.S.=> No, I think it has to do a LOT with who's backing you in this world (not just programs, but that same goes for individuals also (ala "it's not what you know, but who you know", though I think that's speaking TOO much in "absolutes" also)... in the end? It's a mix of both... imo @ least!
... apk
For the reverse look at this relationship, "How browsers make money, or why Google needs Firefox" - http://www.extremetech.com/internet/92558-how-browsers-make-money-or-why-google-needs-firefox
Flash blocking is built into the browser, and NoScript equivalents are available.
I agree with grandparent, though. The TFA is wrong; Chrome didn't overtake due to version numbering -- Chrome's own numbering is no less nonsensical. It overtook because it is a better browser. I am a power user who spends most of his day working through the browser, and who builds and configures his own machines. I was a Firefox user until Chrome came along, but I left the first chance I got because Firefox's developers refused to listen to its userbase.
Over and over, we were told that Firefox's poor memory usage wasn't a bug, it was a feature. The fact that if I opened a few browser windows and tabs, visited a few sites in each and ramped up memory usage in the process, then closed all but one single tab/window and memory usage barely reduced at all was what pushed me away from Firefox. I can't be spending all day long closing my browser every few hours because it's grown to consume multiple gigabytes of memory. Chrome is an absolute lightweight by comparison.
Note: I have no idea if Firefox ever got around to admitting and fixing this bug. That's the problem with ignoring your userbase. They tend not to come back.
I mean the reason this is a problem at all is that Mozilla is a non profit but still needs to cover operating costs. Since everything they make is free, they need to either monetize customer support (and who has ever heard of that with a browser or email reader) or have ad revenue.
The google deal was just a means to an end, that some fraction of the add revenue from google goes to mozilla because google was firefox default search. The reason its so dangerous for mozilla is because google has such monopolistic power over search they have no one else to turn to to get ad revenue from searching from, hence the inquiries at M$.
But do consider this - Google is paying 100 million a year, but in 2010 they had revune of 29 billion. In exchange, they go from having influence in a quarter of the browser market (Chrome) to half the market (Chrome + FF) and then they have majority influence. I imagine its something they want when pushing WebM video and standards compliance in browsers.
I use Firefox, and have tried Chrome, but as a developer, add on nerd, and moralist I can't give myself to the company whose adds are blocked by a plugin in their own browser. I have compared them, and run them against Sunspider, and the half a milisecond of delay in page loading doesn't make me want to ditch a fully open project for something Google has lordship over. Its the same thing with Android vs Ubuntu on tablets, I want to see Ubuntu succeed because it is an open development process, not just source wise. Google already close sourced Android 3 even though it was blatantly illegal to close source software built on Linux. So I'd rather stick with the open standard. Worst case scenario, I might find a few months to work on FF myself and try to fix some of the slowdowns if I really take issue with them. That's the benefit of open development.
Does anyone know how Mozilla managed to spend $123m in 2010? That seems an awful lot to cover improvements to Firefox and Thunderbird that are not especially earth-shattering. My impression is that many other open-source projects generate more innovation with a lot less money.
We all hate firing people and want be everyone's friend at work.
One bad apple such as Asa can surely ruin the whole batch. Talka bout a negative return. If Mozilla had some balls and threaten to fire Asa after Firefox 4.0 if he did the 6 week release or at least re-engineer the browser and add-ons to be designed for agile development like Chrome before making the leap.
You can design a system that can be agile like the flash trading computers at Wall Street where programmers make changes within the hour of a screaming trader without a crash. Chrome is it, but sadly Firefox was not.
The CEO of Mozilla needed to ahve more vision and that included the CIO who left for Facebook who probably kept Firefox stable before he quit. I no longer run Firefox but I hate to see it go. Many schools I worked at k-12 and individuals depend on Firefox because it is Mac and Windows friendly and so much more stable and secure than IE 6.
Lets hope Chrome does not monopolize the web as Google's actions make me nervous and remind me of IE 5 in many ways. Dart, custom Javascript, and their C++ api (forgot name) is very proprietary. I do not like it! Not Chrome per say but rather the proprietary add-ons.
http://saveie6.com/
imho, as an IT pro, most of my clients that have chrome and i asked them why they installed chrome... their answer was well it was on Google and the link said it makes browsing better.... no other reason. they like Google search, and click on things... not saying there is no reason but numbers wise this seems to explain a bit
Better in some ways, not so good in others. I can think of a few areas FF wins:
* Firebug > Chrome debugger
* Firefox sync > Chrome sync (and it doesn't use your Google account password by default and then send your "encrypted" passwords to Google!)
* Firefox fullscreen mode is better (I like to max the vertical space, particularly on small wide screens. With FF, F11, Ctrl-L still works, which is essential for my browsing habits)
I use both, but to be honest most of the time I can't tell the difference: they both do a pretty good job of actually rendering web sites. Sure, Chrome may have lower memory requirements, but the real reason Chrome is gaining more market share is probably because Google is actually marketing and advertising it.
I agree with you that Konqueror sucks, but I don't see what's wrong with Firefox. Everything renders well, it's plenty fast, etc. Now, the browser at work, IE 7, is even worse than Konqueror. I'm happy with Firefox and really don't give a rat's ass how they number the versions.
Besides, it is still GPL, anybody can keep it alive. To quote Twain, "reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." GPL software needs no big corporation to survive.
As to the "you can uncheck the boxes", I shouldn't have to uncheck anything. What Google is doing with Chrome is underhanded, sneaky, unethical, and... well, it should be opt-in like the supermarket stalking cards; having to opt out of being stalked is evil. Why is it that it's legal for Doubleclick to stalk people but illegal for a person to? Why do corporations have more rights than people?
Ban the opt out, everything should be opt-in, otherwise it's slavery. When Chrome makes its stalking opt-in, I'll try Chrome, but not a day sooner. I try to avoid helpng evil.
Free Martian Whores!
Yep, that's something they call a "feature". Basically, as I understand it, FF grabs memory when it can and doesn't want to let it go, so it doesn't have to bother re-mallocing that memory later. Supposedly, this is to improve performance. And, it probably does improve performance marginally if Firefox is the only program you're running, or at least the main large program you're running. However, if you're running lots of other programs too, it's a giant problem because FF is hogging memory it doesn't need, but those other programs do, so you run into swapping problems.
What can I say, this is the result of the wrong focus. Software engineers made decisions about the direction this company went, and drove it into the ground.
It began as a beautiful thing, something that was needed in a world of terrible browsers. Netscape was over-bloated, IE was, well, IE. Firefox took it by storm because it provided what wasn't available. It was fast, slick, and most of all, capable. I remember being one of the first to compile Mozilla on Mac OS X as a mach-o binary, so I've been there and I remember watching it as it grew up, matured, and then began complaining about the neighbors.
These days, it's an enormous pig of an application. The folks running the show at FF continue to drive focus into stupid areas. There have been massive UI shifts that alienate users. The version number thing is just stupid, everyone knows that. Why did they do it? To compete with Chrome -- can you believe that? They thought Chrome's success was because of version numbers?! Oh wait, let's add bing as a default search engine. That ought to help. How about we get some more broken-UI themes while we're at it. Firefox, your browser, your way. How about we move the tabs over here, do this with the menu bar.. that should help us compete with Chrome. Right...
So I hope it dies. And I hope it dies fast, rather than dragging everyone down, kicking and screaming. "Waaa, competitors, we want your money." Good luck with that. Get real, Chrome has shown innovation far above and beyond the old Mozilla codebase. Firefox is practically windows in this sense -- old code, old technology, new "looks", stupid versioning (NT, 98, 2000 ME, XP, V, 7, 8... excuse me if I got it out of order as I really don't use windows any more than is necessary, which is essentially zero). And stupid management.
To the FF developers that wrote good awesome code, please find a project more deserving of your talent, and let this one die. Software has to evolve with the trends and overall fitness of the software to the environment. In this case, it's time to embrace the new species.
When Adblock does block youtube adverts, there's a good chance the actual video isn't going to work either... which I find insanely annoying.
But all of life is trade-off's and I try not to judge a browser based how a particular extension works today.
I'm not sure what the issue is. Firefox was only somewhat good for the extremely short period between its birth and Opera becoming completely free to use. The only thing keeping Opera from being supreme for all those years was the barrier of cost (or ads). Everything that current browsers use, Opera invented or was using for many years before Firefox was even released. Everything that you have to search for and install as a plugin, in Firefox, is a default feature in Opera. All of this power included in the browser for all of these years, and Opera still has a smaller install, uses less resources and is faster. Currently, Firefox is at the level of IE / Safari. Chrome is a tad better than those three.
Really, this entire article and everyone's comments are a joke. Both Firefox and Chrome, along with all other browsers, are a joke compared to Opera.
Opera still reigns over all of them.
Google is routinely authoring sites that only work in WebKit-based browsers.
Apple (but not Google, to their credit) routinely encourages web developers to create WebKit-specific website via their developer documentation.
So the exclusivity arrangements part is all effectively happening, just like in 1999 or so.