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

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...

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.

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.

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.