Former Mozilla CTO: 'Chrome Won' (andreasgal.com)

Responding to Firefox marketing head Eric Petitt's blog post from earlier this week, Andreas Gal, former chief technology officer of Mozilla (who spent seven years at the company) offers his insights. Citing latest market share figures, Gal says "it's safe to say that Chrome is eating the browser market, and everyone else except Safari is getting obliterated." From his blog post (edited and condensed for length): With a CEO transition about 3 years ago there was a major strategic shift at Mozilla to re-focus efforts on Firefox and thus the Desktop. Prior to 2014 Mozilla heavily invested in building a Mobile OS to compete with Android: Firefox OS. I started the Firefox OS project and brought it to scale. While we made quite a splash and sold several million devices, in the end we were a bit too late and we didn't manage to catch up with Android's explosive growth. Mozilla's strategic rationale for building Firefox OS was often misunderstood. Mozilla's founding mission was to build the Web by building a browser. [...] Browsers are a commodity product. They all pretty much look the same and feel the same. All browsers work pretty well, and being slightly faster or using slightly less memory is unlikely to sway users. If even Eric -- who heads Mozilla's marketing team -- uses Chrome every day as he mentioned in the first sentence, it's not surprising that almost 65% of desktop users are doing the same. [...] I don't think there will be a new browser war where Firefox or some other competitor re-captures market share from Chrome. It's like launching a new and improved horse in the year 2017. We all drive cars now. Some people still use horses, and there is value to horses, but technology has moved on when it comes to transportation. Does this mean Google owns the Web if they own Chrome? No. Absolutely not. Browsers are what the Web looked like in the first decades of the Internet. Mobile disrupted the Web, but the Web embraced mobile and at the heart of most apps beats a lot of JavaScript and HTTPS and REST these days. The future Web will look yet again completely different. Much will survive, and some parts of it will get disrupted.

Comments

Chrome is fastest

[Anonymous Coward]

The other big three were slow by comparison. On speed alone, Chrome won.

Mozilla didn't help themselves by firing their employees for not being PC enough.

Re:Chrome is fastest

[BronsCon]

Indeed. When I'm using a browser, I don't care whether the CEO of the company that made it shares my political and religious views (if I did, I wouldn't use any browser); I care if the browser works. When Eich was running things, the browser worked.

Same goes for every product and service out there. If political and religious views mattered, I'm not sure who I'd buy land from, who I'd have build a house, who I'd buy a house from and, failing all of those things, who I'd rent from, so I'd be homeless. Of course, I'm not sure which appliance manufacturer's name I'd want on the box I'd be sleeping in, so I'd have to get a sleeping bag and, maybe a tent. Not sure who I'd let make those for me though, let alone which store I'd buy them from... or, for that matter, in which bank I'd keep the money used to buy things in the first place, or where I'd work to earn that money.

People who apply artificial importance to the political and religious leanings of others need to be forced to the logical conclusion of their ill-thought-out decision making skills so they can learn why it's a bad idea to let those things matter.

I have a framed copy of the SF Chronicle "LOVE WON" special edition; clearly I do not agree with Eich on that matter, but I'll be damned if he didn't lead a team that made a hell of a good browser. And that's what matters when selecting a browser vendor.

Subverted from the inside

[TWX]

Maybe Chrome is winning because Mozilla/Firefox is basically chromified now. I use it basically for a combination of historical reasons and because it feels like I have more control more easily over the privacy and security settings, but I am very dissatisfied with a lot of things that have come into Firefox, including this rapid-versioning system that they adopted. It's friggin' stupid that they've been copying Chrome so much, and there's not a lot of reason to continue to using Firefox except that I'm used to it.

Re:Subverted from the inside

[DivineKnight]

Pretty much. What's happening with Firefox is what has been happening with the rest of the tech industry (albeit with a different 'leaders'). Who has been leading design for hardware for quite some time, to the great annoyance of many? Apple. Apple takes away the 3.5mm audio jack, and everyone else thinks it's a grand idea. Same here with browser design -> Google simplifies their design, and Firefox decides "Yeah, let's pitch {popular feature} overboard."

Someone needs to hold a group session at Mozilla, and ask them why Firefox (the browser) was created. Then take a snapshot of the blank stares, and upload it to their front page.

Not with all that resource hogging it hasn't

[EkriirkE]

I used to be all over Chrome a few years ago until its (lack of) resource management prevented me from using several tabs at once. Then I rediscovered Firefox and am still quite happy with it. No plans to go back or have another look anytime soon...

Re:Not with all that resource hogging it hasn't

[Junta]

It depends. On a system with low ram amount, firefox is better and chrome will make the whole system go nuts due to memory pressure.

On a system with plenty of ram, chrome will fly relative to firefox, as firefox will bottleneck itself a lot.

It won because you let it.

[thegreatbob]

Culling legitimately useful, unique features and attempting to emulate the user interface design of your competition... great plan. Written using Firefox 45 ESR, which will probably be my last normal-use Firefox version. It was nice while it lasted. Off to PaleMoon land for plugin support, I guess.

Duh

[ArchieBunker]

It won because you became Chrome Junior with the "australis" interface. That and you cared more about adding video chat than stability or speed.

Re:Duh

[jez9999]

This. I ditched Firefox for SeaMonkey and PM when they fucked up the interface. Chrome didn't win, they shot their users in the face.

Didn't Like Eich

[Kunedog]

Mozilla didn't help themselves by firing their employees for not being PC enough.

Maybe it's just me, but every time I see the current Mozilla make a decision, I'm so grateful they immediately ousted Brendan Eich (with his "proven technical and leadership background" bullshit) and appointed the former head of marketing as CEO instead.

Chrome hasn't "Won"

[mykepredko]

Chrome is number one right now.

There was a point where
- Lynx was the most popular browser
- Then it was Netscape
- IE was the most popular browser for a while
- I believe Mozilla was the most popular browser for a year or so
- Now we have Chrome as the most used browser

What is the most popular browser going forwards hasn't been determined yet. Saying "Chrome has won" means that you've given up trying to compete.

Give us a reason to go to Firefox rather than Chrome and then you'll "win", for a while, at least.

Re:uses Chrome

[myrdos2]

He doesn't use it to browse the web. He uses it for inspiration.

Re:Genius

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup. Firefox management is clearly clueless. They have no idea at all why people were using FireFox in the first place, so thay started stripping away the things that attracted people to it.

Here's a hint: if you start making your browser look like your competitor's (which until recently was their main sponsor; no conflict of interest there) then obviously all browsers start to look te same.

Here's what we want in a browser:
- Lean: make it modular, allow the user to install extra plugins at install time
- Mean: i.e. reasonably fast (10% slower than Chrome in some dumb benchmark doesn't mean a thing and is totally OK), and with reasonable memory consumption.
- Safe: make sure your sandbox works. It's 2017 and some sites still manage to hijack my pages and redirect to web shit. Flash is still allowed to popup extra pages.
- Private: don't collect or send out anything without permission.
- Customizable: put the user back in control. We want to be able to put our buttons where we like them, have our tabs above or below, have square tabs our round ones. One UI (Chrome) does not fit all.
- Extensible: decent plugins support is a must. OK if the current plugin system is problematic, overhaul it. But it should be powerful enough, not this watered down crap that has been proposed.
- User in control: we want to control whether videos auto-play when we open a page, or even if the video can start preloading (which is currently decided by the web page, meaning GBs of traffic whenever you open certain sites). Add in a decent script blocker, add blocker from the start.

Task a small core team with a 10M/y budget to make that, and people will come back to FF in droves. Code name Phoenix.

Plugin author here

[rsilvergun]

a lot of those useful features were culled to make way for the multi-process stuff that's required for them to compete with Chrome on performance. Not actual performance (FF is close enough in that it doesn't matter) but perceived. FF's single threaded model means small responsiveness delays in the UI.

Plugins make that worse by occasionally holding up the UI to do their stuff. It's all very minimal, but if you install 2, 3, 5+ plugins it quickly gets to be a problem.

Chrome handles this by preempting your plugin all the time. That means your plugin's written from the ground up to deal with that and it makes plugin development a real pain. FF is doing that now and just about anything more complicated than a theme is gonna need full re-writes to work. I've been putting off that re-write because work life kinda kicked me in the rear for a while but eventually I'll need to do it.

Re:Plugin author here

[Hognoxious]

Plugins make that worse by occasionally holding up the UI to do their stuff. It's all very minimal, but if you install 2, 3, 5+ plugins it quickly gets to be a problem.

I wonder how many plugins are installed to replace stuff that used to be there until some Uxtard removed them?

Why I use Firefox

[theendlessnow]

Firefox gets proxying and name resolution right, vs. Chrome which has a security problem in that regard.

Firefox maintains it's own certificate store, which might be considered a "con", until you need it and then you're thankful.

Firefox about:config, uh... can you say VERY customizable unlike Chrome.

Firefox gets a 66% on CSS3, where latest Chrome still below 60%. Not that either is "great", and I disagree with some of Mozilla's direction and interpretation of CSS3 (btw, Edge only tries to handle 42% of CSS3).

When Chome first came out it touted its "security", but in many ways it's a lie. Mozilla was asleep, but woke up a couple of years ago and IMHO, seems to be much more active about making their browser better than Chrome (reminds me of builders that walk away from projects).

If this is a speed race, Edge is a lot faster. So... let's just say this isn't about speed.... ok? I could care less about a browser that is fast vs one that works right and is trying to keep up with new standards.

I mean, maybe we agree with Google Chrome and hates OCSP direct checking. But the answer isn't to pull the feature (what they did). Firefox does both OCSP stapling (configurable folks!!) and old school OCSP direct checking, again, configurable. Much better and more flexible than Chrome.

There are a lot more useful extensions for Firefox than Chrome. More themes, just more everything.

With regards to the original post, sounds like old sour grapes to me. Maybe I'm wrong and Firefox devs don't give a rip (which is sort of what he implies), but seems to me that Firefox is moving forward at a good pace, and Chrome is stuck the mud.

With regards to Safari. Use webkit, so 60% on CSS3, but what I really don't like is how Apple has locked down browsing in IOS devices. Sure you can download Chrome, but ultimately it's a wrapper around the webkit that comes with Safari. Ditto btw for Firefox on IOS (yep, Firefox is really more like Chome on IOS).

I have to use them all. And sometimes Chrome works better than Firefox, but more often, I find Firefox does a better job. The great thing about Chrome is that it eliminated (practically speaking) the bad standards that made people afraid to use Firefox.

To Chome's credit, it does a better job at HTML5 (html5test says 518/555 vs 471 for Firefox, 415 Safari, Safari-or-Chome-or-Firefox-on-IOS). Chrome does slightly better on Acid3 testing vs. Firefox (noting that the evil Safari gets a perfect Acid3 score... so maybe this isn't a great test).

Again, I have to use them all, but Firefox is my main browser, just for its flexibility and better understanding of security in some areas. It would be sad to see it go away.

Versions used: Chrome 58.0.3019.110, Firefox 53.0.3

Servo

[magical liopleurodon]

If Servo becomes the main engine, I could see firefox reclaiming the throne

Mozilla didn't win, Firefox lost

[onyxruby]

Firefox was once far larger than Chrome, at one point they had a third of the market.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

Than Firefox decided to get on a rapid release calendar. Users and businesses asked them to go back to a standard release cycle. People told Mozilla that the rapid release cycle made maintenance too cumbersome. Damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead! The switch to a rapid release cycle started in May of 2011.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Rapid...

You can actually see the impact this decision had by looking at historical browser trends. The previous slow decline in browser share transitioned into a 1% loss in one month - their quickest loss ever. Within 6 months Chrome overtook Firefox in browser share and never looked back.

The result of the rapid release cycle was a disastrous impact, if you updated it you broke something, if you didn't update other things broke. Packaging, deploying, extensions, patching and testing became a nightmare for the enterprise. Requests for support for the enterprise were blown off by offering extended support release - which completely missed the point. The result was IT departments chose to use browsers that were willing to offer real enterprise support.

The cries of users fell on deaf ears - all that mattered was making developers happy. Chrome didn't win, Firefox committed suicide through hubris.