Slashdot Mirror
Inside Mozilla's Fight To Make Firefox Relevant Again (cnet.com)
News outlet CNET has a big profile on Firefox today, for which it has spoken with several Mozilla executives. Mozilla hopes to fight back Chrome, which owns more than half of the desktop market share, with Firefox 57, a massive overhaul due November 14. From the report: "It's going to add up to be a big bang," Mozilla Chief Executive Chris Beard promises, speaking at the company's Mountain View, California, headquarters. "We're going to win back a lot of people." "Some of the stuff they're doing from a technology perspective is amazing," says Andreas Gal, who became CEO of startup Silk Labs after leaving the Mozilla chief technology officer job in 2015. "I just don't think it makes a difference." [...] You may not care which browser you use, but the popularity of Firefox has helped keep browsers competitive and build the web into a foundation for online innovations over the last decade. Are you a fan of Google Maps, Facebook, Twitter or YouTube? That's partly thanks to Firefox. Mozilla's mission is to keep the web vibrant enough for the next big innovation even as companies offer mobile apps instead of websites, dump privacy-invading ads on you or try to confine your activity to their own walled gardens. [...] To Mozilla, each tap or click on a webpage in Firefox is more than you browsing the internet. It's a statement that you'd prefer a more open future where online services can start up on their own. The alternative, as Mozilla sees it, is a future where everyone kowtows to Apple's app store, Google's search results, Facebook's news feed or Amazon's Prime video streaming. That's why Mozilla bought billboard ads saying "Browse against the machine" and "Big browser is watching you," a jab at Google. [...] Improvements within a project called Quantum are responsible for much of the difference. One part, Stylo, accelerates formatting operations. Quantum Flow squashes dozens of small slowdown bugs. Quantum Compositor speeds website display. And Firefox 57 also will lay the groundwork for WebRender, which uses a computing device's graphics chip to draw webpages on the screen faster. "You can do user interface and animation and interactive content that you simply can't do in any other browser," says Firefox chief Mayo, speaking from his office in Toronto -- over video chat technology Firefox helped make possible. It all adds up to a very different engine at the core of Firefox. That kind of speedup can really excite web developers -- an influential community key to Firefox's success in taking on IE back in 2004.
Remove all the spyware, keyloggers and fucking bullshit from your browser and stop forcing me to rely on random assholes to acomplish anything.
Turns out, fucking with the technicians (breaking https, because *mozilla* feels i dont need to access my devices until they have a mozilla-approved certificate) was the wrong approach. Good luck getting them back. The non-tech-crowd is gone for good anyway ("Hey Chrome is just there on my PC, why would i install that Firefoggs?")...
I ditched it when they pulled a Canonical and decided "F the user, it's our product our way".
Technically true, but that's a great way to render yourself irrelevant and dry up your market share.
Firefox is the Ubuntu of web browsers.
When Firefox kill legacy addons and destroy the best of Firefox forever.
They are trying to hide this. Most of addon community is warning the core developers. Drop the capabilities of legacy addons while they say that webextension will replace it while it has not the same functionality will broke most addons FOREVER.
Turn Firefox webextension into a Chrome clone... Bullshit.
You know, the browser that focused on rendering web pages fast and securely but left all the fancy schmancy UI and features where they belong: extensions.
Browsers are already gigantic and bloated as it is (all of them). You want to win me back as a customer? Start there. You want to fix the pulseaudio/alsa debacle? Make the sound server an extension so people can write a better one without having to fork all of Firefox. People get pissed off at your stupid UI decisions? Extension. People moved to Firefox because they were starved for choices, stop taking those away and you'll be relevant again. If we wanted a clone of Chrome, we'd use Chrome.
Mind the frickin' laser...
Does not permit auto-play videos.
Has per-tab audio muting (and is muted by default).
Does not permit cross-site content by default
Supports ad blocking (esp. pop-ups and -unders), script blocking, tracker blocking, and includes anti-fingerprinting obfuscation.
Does not hide the cache files from me.
Has a download manager that will auto-resume on failure.
And while I have the bandwidth to handle it... I don't want my browser downloading videos and animations until I decide I want them. Don't waste my bits!
Right now, Firefox does most of that 99% of the time for me with a few select add ons installed. The only reason I have Chrome installed is that occasionally I like to use Google Maps 3D, and my kids' school uses Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides for homework.
Thunderbird could have been the key to make Mozilla relevant. Browsers we have many. And while I personally still use Firefox for a few options I like, it could disappear tomorrow and I would barely miss a step.
But to this day, secure, *private* communication and messaging remains a challenge. Thunderbird has had the solution for years, and all it would have needed was a bit of clever marketing / positioning for people and organization to take full advantage of it. Mozilla instead wasted all their political capital trying (and failing) to change the standard everyone uses for video, even though the die had already been cast in embedded chips.
Uh oh.
Pretty much every one of the adjectives he used there are red-flag words to me. Particularly "sleek" and "modern". (At least he didn't say "minimalist", although that's implied).
In the past few years, every time I've seen software proclaim those things, the UI for that software has sucked.
Firefox can't come back - this is a battle they cannot win. Let's take a look at why Firefox became a success in the first place. A monopoly (Microsoft) won the first browser war by bundling IE into their OS, and by pushing IE into the corporate setting. IE became the most widely used browser, and business intranets were forced to be IE compatible. IE stagnated and became a festering piece of crap because MS became lazy when they dominated the market. They wanted stuff like ActiveX (which is really just a windows program embedded into a web page) to succeed because it forced web pages to be dependent on the Windows OS. They began to bastardize and cause many issues with HTML in the way IE interpreted things - HTML was defined by the way IE interpreted it.
It was into this environment that Firefox (or Firebird) came to be a success. The technically proficient (aka you and I) began using it, then we began installing it on friends' and relatives' computers. We taught them if a website didn't work in Firefox then to try it in IE, otherwise always use Firefox first. And so it came to be that Firefox became popular due to a grassroots kind of movement begun by people who recognized the technical insufficiency of IE.
So a monopoly was broken up, and healthy competition ensued. HTML once again became a standard that was not defined by a single web browser and how it decided to interpret it. Firefox succeeded in its goal, which in my opinion was to create a healthy browser competition and make HTML browser agnostic.
Now, we still have a healthy (or as healthy as we can hope something like HTML can be) web browser environment, with multiple players backed by huge corporate entities, who not only have the resources to spend on pushing browser technology, but they can literally push millions of people into using their browser - Microsoft (Edge), Google (Chrome / Android / Chromebook), and Apple (Safari / Mobile Safari). These companies produce browser tech as a side process, because they have millions of users that will by default use their browser, so it makes sense to have more control over that environment.
Mozilla really has nothing more than Firefox (specifically, the do not control hardware, operating systems, or markets containing millions of users), so they cannot leverage people into their browser. Chrome, Safari, and yes, even Edge, are now more than "good enough" as web browsers, so the technical of us have no real incentive to push people away from them to Firefox.
So congratulations Firefox, and we thank you profusely for single handedly reshaping the HTML and browser market for the better. You did your job.
Better known as 318230.
I agree with pretty much everybody else on here that if Mozilla wants Firefox to succeed, they should stop trying to give us more doodads in the browser. Hello! We want LESS. That was the whole reason for the existence of Firefox, if you remember. Strip out all that stuff that nobody uses and concentrate on making it lean and extensible.
I honestly don't see much performance difference between Firefox and Chrome these days. Firefox's lone remaining advantage is that Chrome is butt ugly. As a UI guy, I find the Chrome UI to be jagged, clumsy, and just atrocious. I want a menu bar. I want an app that looks like it was designed and not just thrown together by coders with zero design sensibility.
Protect your browser with the Force Safe Search add-on
I got tired of the apparently incessant need to change things. Just when I would get accustomed to the "Reload" button being on the left side some 18 year old at Mozilla decides to move it to the right side. And vice-versa.
Change simply to change something just about drives me crazy. And I'm happy to stick right where I am now, a Chrome (for better or worse) user.
Caution: Contents under pressure