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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.
Maybe a simple name change and lots of unfulfilled promises of great, great things would suffice.
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.
There's surely some people who can name technical, usability reasons, etc. But I bet the majority use it because:
So, if these are in fact most people's reasons it doesn't matter much what Mozilla do since Google have a much greater advertising power.
Also, that speedup would have to be huge for Joe User to notice and care.
Also 2, Isn't 57 the version where they remove support for classic extensions? The huge number and variety and power of Fx's extensions are one of the main reasons for choosing Firefox. They're gonna remove it and they think they'll gain tons of users. They're just bonkers. I predict lots of people will leave Firefox when 57 is out.
I've been sticking with Firefox over Chrome or Chromium because I like what Mozilla stands for.
But I have to use Chrome for work, and no matter how well Firefox did in some Tom's Hardware browser shootouts in 2012 or so, and no matter what numbers they show on arewefastyet.com and so forth, Firefox consistently felt painfully slow next to Chrome. That finally changed for me with 56 nightly. I'm not sure if it's as fast as Chrome, but for the first time ever it feels close enough that the difference is not an annoyance.
The article also mentions Firefox OS. I think in 2025, when WebAssembly is a mature technology, when $25 smart phones have 4GB of RAM, and when Firefox on mobile is substantially more efficient than Firefox 56 or 57 now... then Firefox OS might be practical. In 2013, it was a great idea not ready.
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...
Computing these days is about the ecosystem. That's the reason for the dominance of app stores and Chrome.
Chrome = integrates with everything else that I use, yes including Google slurping my data. That's *why* I use Chrome. To get my data slurped, so that other Google services that I use (say, Google Now and Maps) work better. Shares bookmarks, sessions, and cache data across devices. A bunch of apps that I use can go back and forth between in-browser version and in-window (as a Chrome app) version, with the same interface. Is the native OS on my Chromebook.
Firefox... is just a standalone app. When they release a smartphone OS that integrates with Firefox and competing services to Google Now, Maps, Gmail, etc. that are *better* than Google Now, Maps, Gmail, etc. then I'll consider Firefox again. Until then, it's just another web browser in an age in which the web browsers are obsolete and have been replaced by operating-eco-systems.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
There are many reasons why Mozilla still has a chance to become the dominant browser. Google is nowhere near as security-conscious as Mozilla. They will not allow master passwords to protect saved password databases; Google doesn't allow plugins that support downloading of YouTube videos and a host of other things. If Mozilla can improve their performance issues, they are the best choice for a default browser due to Google's sacrificing of user security and flexibility in order to maintain their corporate control.
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
These days Chrome is coasting on a bit of momentum and heavily pushing itself by bundling itself with adobe
Adobe what? Flash Player? Adobe and Google have jointly announced plans to remove Flash Player at the end of 2020, leaving digital restrictions management for streaming video as the only significant non-free component of Google Chrome.
Again, even with Firefox 54, the current stable release, it's still very noticeably slower than Chrome. But if you download the nightly build of Firefox I think the speed improvement is fantastic.
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
Because Firefox became Chrome Junior with their interface and stopped making the browser better. Every release had some new feature that no one asked for. A paper airplane button for sharing links with friends? Until they make something faster and less bloated I'm staying with Chrome. Apparently no one at Mozilla is old enough to remember the bloat that was IE4.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Firefox feels fast again and still has lighter footprint than Chrome. I use several browsers daily but mostly Chrome and Firefox. Recently (Since the process & memory changes made it into the main release.) Firefox has become my first choice again.
The old way of doing extensions does not just have big problems, it is a big problem. Firefox/Gecko is a big, complicated, messy machine with lots of moving parts, relying heavily on some technical trickery (eg., XUL, HTML entities, XBL, faking DCOM in Javascript). Old-style extensions supplant and/or replace and/or modify those parts. That lets hackers-as-in-expert-coders do great things, but also lets black-hat coders do all sorts of Bad Things. (This is why Mozilla enhanced add-ons to use digital signatures in 2015.)
Altering core browser functionality is never going to be easy, but the way Gecko is structured makes it really hard to get right, and updates for Firefox can break such extensions in hard-to-debug, hard-to-fix ways. Mozilla's response has been to avoid changing core parts of Gecko, which is part of the reason it has fallen behind newer browsers. Even extensions which just add simple features required lots of weird boilerplate (eg., "XUL overlays").
In contrast, Web Extensions are much less fragile and much easier to code and much safer in every way.
BTW, Mozilla worked with the developers of popular intrusive extensions like NoScript and Adblock Plus to enable them to port their add-ons to (or, more accurately, rewrite their extensions for) Web Extensions.
Again, even with Firefox 54, the current stable release, it's still very noticeably slower than Chrome. But if you download the nightly build of Firefox I think the speed improvement is fantastic.
There is nothing that I do in Firefox that is slow enough to be an issue. I typically only want to see information. Displaying things is usually pretty easy.
I run NoScript. Religiously. Speed is not an issue for Firefox for me.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen