I agree with this blog post. But I don't think Mozilla lost.
I worked for Mozilla for a few years, after seeing John Lily (CEO at the time) speak. It was right after Chrome started getting popular, and a smug person in the crowd asked him about how he felt about Chrome.
John's response was awesome. "This is the web that we wanted. We exist not because we want everyone to use Firefox, but because we wanted people to have a choice" Firefox was a response to a world of "best viewed in IE" badges, and it changed the browser landscape.
Now, we have options. Chrome is great, but so are Safari, Edge, Brave, Opera and Firefox. There's a lot of options out there, and they're all standards compliment. And that's thanks to Mozilla.
So, in my mind, Mozilla won. It's a non-profit, and it forced us into an open web. We got the world they wanted. Maybe the world is a bit Chrome-heavy currently, but at least it's a standards compliment world.
I hope Mozilla sees that. I hope they take credit, and move on to what's next: privacy and net neutrality. Our privacy is under attack, and Mozilla is one of the few companies that can (and would want to) help. I know, I know. Nobody cares about privacy. Nobody cared about web standards, either, but Mozilla bundled it into an attractive package and it worked. It's time for Mozilla to declare victory, high five the Chrome team, and move on to the next big challenge.
We really need someone to fight for our privacy and neutrality. And I really believe that this could be Mozilla's swan song.
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EDIT: Hey cbeard - My email is in my profile; I'd love to talk.
So Mozilla lost Firefox OS. And their browser share is smaller then Chrome, and then it was, but still top tier and winning from M$.
I'm much less pessimistic.
Besides a cross platform and extensible browser we see also the following coming out of Mozilla:
* Rust, a modern low-level programming language with cutting edge "safety" build in at zero runt time cost, luring many system programmers.
* Servo, tomorrow browser, from scratch, in Rust.
* Thunderbird, x-platform desktop email client (interesting for those not trusting the cloud enough).
* MDN, everything MSDN and w3school wish they could be. :)
A lot with revolve around privacy and safety in the future, a space that Mozilla is very well positioned to florish in.
Chrome is a good product. But I prefer Firefox. And seeing what is becoming of Servo I will soon start using that. Form me Firefox has won, and is not at all losing. I dont need the "most popular" browser, I need the most secure one.
And when I see what programming languages Google came up with... (Seriously? Is Go the best money can buy?) Then I think Rust shows single handedly that Mozilla beats Google in that arena as well.
I understand that people who like rust REALLY like Rust, but you do realize that your examples of a purpose for existence consist of:
1. A programming language, that hasn't yet shown "escape velocity" to go beyond D and other would-be-C++-successors in traction.
2. The only major application of that language... a pre-alpha browser engine, which may or may not eventually replace the engine in a browser that is seriously declining in market share with no reversal in sight.
3. A desktop email client, from which Mozilla has repeatedly made clear their intentions to divest and move on.
4. A JavaScript and HTML reference manual.
Mozilla is an organization with over $400 million in annual revenue. Where that money is going baffles me.
If they run out of funding many of those great things they are working on won't get the resources they need.
The amount of funding they get is in direct correlation to how much market share they have in Firefox at the time they negotiate a search deal with one of the big search sites.
> Rust, a modern low-level programming language with cutting edge "safety" build in at zero runt time cost, luring many system programmers.
I love Rust, and advocate it among other memory safe systems programming languages, but right now it still has an uphill battle against Swift, C++17 and .NET Native, on the desktop and mobile OSes.
Adoption is growing slowly, even Microsoft has recently added a Rust library to VS Code, but it will take years to become a major systems language.
I know that HN loves Rust and at the risk of being burned at the stakes, i'd say Rust is overrated. Lets get real, it doesn't have that many users, its not even on top of TIOBE. If you are going to start a career in Rust, good luck finding any jobs. I saw maybe one or 2 in the past, and it requires knowledge of C/C++ anyways. You might say, "its new language give it a break" but I bet Kotlin will overtake it by the end of 2017. There is currently no incentive in learning it other than as a hobby language. And im saying this as someone who dived into Rust, drank the coolaid, not an outsider.
Servo is an "experimental" browser engine. While Chromium is cranking out features, servo is yet to reach version 1.0.
Thunderbird - was "discontinued" by Mozilla
MDN is a mess. The topics are all over the place and its hard to navigate. php.net docs is much more organized.
You can criticize Go but it has a more thriving ecosystem than Rust.
As much I'd like them to succeed, I dont think Mozilla is doing very good right now. They churn out technologically good products, but business wise, they dont know what they're doing. And without money, they wont be able to fight the big companies like Google, MS, FB.
Firefox took marketshare from IE when that was impossible. It could do it again with Chrome, if things change a bit.
Some problems with Mozilla are that they don't do community management well any more. In the old days, there were amazing grassroots-driven projects like spreadfirefox.com. It is not like that any more. Grassroots supporters have trouble participating, even if they try.
For example, I tried to create a Firefox programmers' meetup group in Berkeley, and even though some community people from Mozilla joined the group, no one from Mozilla would reply to my inquiries. (I still would like to restart that idea, but I don't have time to chase them down. We have 4,000 members in our various meetup groups at the moment.)
Another problem is that they are doing things that make their most-dedicated core users lose interest. They should have realized the incredible enthusiasm for Firefox that plugins like Pentadactyl were creating. They're killing off the API that it depends on. Instead, they should have funded the development of Pentadactyl and made it a reason why tech-savvy users choose Firefox. Tech-savvy users drive adoption, but they have abandoned many of their tech-savvy supporters.
There is still hope for Firefox if they are able to get the messages about privacy across. Chrome is slower to use out of the box, partially because of the auto-completion algorithm that tends to send people to Google Search to click on ads before reaching their destination. The older Firefox search box didn't waste users' time like that. (Recently it changed so that it shows titles rather than URLs, which is also slow, because there is an extra security risk of going to phishing sites, if you don't stop to look at the URLs.)
Also, Firefox is the only mobile browser that allows add-ons, so that's another benefit that they should be promoting.
Firefox took marketshare from IE because Microsoft abandoned it for several years (IE6) then did an half-assed update with IE7. It was a big pile of poop and Firefox succeeded not because it was a great product because because it was the right product at the right time.
For Chrome on the other hand, its near-monopoly situation is worrisome but it's actually a pretty good product. So there is no pragmatic reasons to leave it for Firefox, only ideological reasons and it's a driver nearly not as powerful as suffering every day.
The thing is chrome is an open source browser with a lot of really smart people working to make it better everyday . IE, was none of theses things when Firefox came into the market. You also have to remember many of the core developers who built Firefox went on to build Chrome. And then even many of developers that built IE went on to work on chrome. In 2007, they had pulled together an amazing team to kick off the browser that is now chrome. IMO - Mozilla should use blink and be the privacy focused browser.
Tech-savvy users don't drive adoption. They provide insight on product direction to help a nascent company with an immature tech product cross the chasm to mainstream usage, saving it from the usual fate of foundering aimlessly until it runs out of funds.
These two suggestions -- Mozilla getting involved in meetups and not deprecating an API allowing vim navigation in the browser -- would take Mozilla even farther from relevance, assuming any nonzero opportunity cost to those actions.
Because they have to. Firefox could remain an unusable single-threaded XML behemoth, but what point is there in your wonderful extensible browser if it's an unmaintainable slow mess?
IMO Mozilla had started allienating core users the moment Firefox reached 1.0 and became Mozilla's flagship product. The browser component of Mozilla Suite had useful features that were simply dropped from Firefox. (Also around this time Mozilla started the Mozilla(R) Firefox(TM) nonsense which led to Debian's Iceweasel and such. I remember that there was some kind of legal issue with having Firefox logo on cake and banner for FF 1.0 release party in Prague, which fortunately got ignored)
For me, firefox became completely unusable few months ago when somebody decided that pulseaudio is the way to go and nothing else should be supported.
> I started Firefox OS in 2011 because already back then I was convinced that desktops and browsers were dead. Not immediately–here we are 6 years later and both are still around–but both are legacy technologies that are not particularly influential going forward.
I don't understand this perspective. Browsers are legacy technologies that are not particularly influential? What?
I feel like the web dominates our lives more than ever, and everyone uses a laptop or desktop for any actual work they have to do, professional or hobby. While people use their phones for internet access throughout the day as they move about, it must be one in 1000 or fewer who uses their phone or tablet for real work.
Does someone see a replacement on the horizon for the supposedly "legacy" laptop/desktop power combo?
I was also at Mozilla during the time period Andreas outlines--I worked on the Firefox OS test team, for that matter, almost from the beginning of it graduating from Boot2Gecko as a Labs project until right before it got killed.
While my perspective isn't as strategic or metrics-driven as his, I had a lot of time to observe and think as both a community member and Mozilla employee. FxOS also wasn't my baby, so there's that. Note also that I speak for myself here and my own observations and paraphrases--whatever I say that pisses someone off is something I'm saying, not that Mozilla said verbatim.
My primary takeaways were twofold:
(Long, TL;DR at bottom)
1) I agree with you. Desktop and mobile are two separate markets, period. The first mostly serves a workplace audience and the second a personal audience, but most people with a desk job at the very least will use a web browser as part of their day. Desktop may be a minority of the overall, but it's a minority that won't go away anytime soon and so will continue to influence HTML and standards disproportionate to pure market share.
That's important because Mozilla's gambit for preserving the open web was pretty simple (I say was because I think they're just not that focused at this point):
Have enough people using your browser that websites absolutely have to support the emerging standards that browser relies on-- and perhaps in doing so make it less attractive for site providers and browser providers to spend time on proprietary tech that isn't significantly better than those standards, thereby making other browsers move to those standards too.
Doesn't mean these people have to use it everywhere, or that it has to be a majority share (10%+ was what I commonly heard as "enough") or otherwise "win". But it does have to be enough that people will complain if the website doesn't support their browser and that testers are influenced to test the site against it.
(BTW, as a test professional, the fact that Firefox no longer appears in most test matrixes I encounter due to lack of a blip on analytics is very telling, and Firefox has a serious risk growing around site incompatibility or instability in their browser).
That brings me to my second takeaway:
2) The grand majority of people don't use a web browser because of the browser itself; they use it for one of a few reasons:
a) It's default on their system.
You will not win these people over because they're not there for any reason other than it being the easiest or most integrated path. Note that this is pretty much the whole mobile market, and why it was a dire mistake for Mozilla to conflate the two markets, decide mobile was more important due to combined market share, then go tilting at windmills.
It's also, any altruistic reasons aside, why the moonshot was to create an OS so Firefox could be the default mobile experience.
b) Ethics/Community. This was a relatively small but very vocal part of Firefox's userbase. Probably more people were there "against Chrome" than "for Firefox," but whatever. Firefox succeeded in the first place because of "against Internet Explorer" so it's a valid reason to be there. The nice thing about these people is they pull in more people.
Unfortunately, one side effect of Firefox OS as a project was working with proprietary partners who emphasized confidentiality such that you couldn't share with the community in the way Mozilla did before. When Mozilla diverted most of their effort to Firefox OS, it froze out a lot of the community efforts.
I think Mozilla-the-org also became less skilled at working with community, both for that shift and perhaps because they brought in a lot of people from the mobile and other sectors who didn't have that background.
Whatever the case, this base wasn't well-maintained, and I don't think operates as a core in the same way it might once have, at least for Firefox.
c) Customization, and this is really why Firefox (and Mozilla) is where it is today IMO:
The add-on ecosystem is the most compelling reason both to start using but especially continue using a non-default browser, and Mozilla chased theirs away.
Here's the thing:
You have one browser, whose job is to get the hell out of the way of the content and fade into the background, and several installed extensions whose jobs are to solve specific problems you have. 1 browser. Several extensions. 1 invisible, generic browser. Several hand-chosen extensions that make it your own.
Which bit are you sticking around for? Probably the extensions. The browser is a platform, a means, not an end--not just for the web but for its own functionality.
That's why all the complaints are performance and crashes and things that make you notice the browser, not generally native features or UI. It's the whole rationale behind browser-as-OS efforts in the first place.
Syncs and reading lists are nice, but with an ecosystem you can get them after the fact. With no ecosystem, you'd better either really like what you're handed or be trapped into using it a la iOS--and even Apple has figured out they have to be somewhat customizable or people will even switch OSes to get it.
That's where Chrome won.
Specifically, when Mozilla pretty much cargo-culted Google's rapid release program without first creating a version-independent extension store and add-on API, they seriously fucked up.
A ton of add-ons couldn't keep up with release and broke--Firefox's add-on "API" was to either essentially monkeypatch the internals or to create binary extensions, neither of which had any real abstraction from implementation. The need to manually update the compatibility version number and reupload to AMO for every single release froze more out (this was fixed server-side by auto-incing the number but it was just a workaround to a real problem as now extensions might not be really compatible). AMO always had a problem with turnaround on submissions, and this didn't help.
In general Mozilla sent the message of being out of touch with the add-on community, and that it wasn't a clear priority.
Jetpack/Add-Ons SDK was there as a not-really-mature portability measure to mitigate this, but it wasn't powerful enough to support a lot of the best extensions. It also happened in parallel with the rapid release shift, not before it when it was strategically needed. Then Jetpack kind of died off, probably partially because of the shift in efforts towards mobile/FxOS and partially because Jetpack never really became kick-ass enough to make the type of impact that gets more resources.
Meanwhile, right before Firefox stepped into this and never stepped out again, the Chrome Web Store opens in 2010, ready to receive any disenfranchised add-on makers. Talk about right place at the right time. Now Mozilla finally is adopting Chrome's extension API, both because it probably works better with multiprocess but maybe also to get some cross-platform extensions back. I imagine that'll work OK, but maybe too little too late.
AMO isn't what it used to be at all. Meanwhile, Chrome's Web Store is phenomenal. Combined with the (yes, unfair) Google Suite integration in Chrome there's a lot of friction to keep people on Chrome as a platform, and short of Chrome making a huge mistake that shakes people off like Mozilla/Firefox did, there isn't much reason to switch browsers for a cross-platform extension that's already on the one you use.
And when I look at the blog posts re: Firefox improvements, etc., I keep coming back to "it's a platform, not an app" and wonder if they'll ever take that ground back. Maybe if they somehow completely redefine the browser experience or otherwise stay deeply opinionated (Opera is sort of going this route) but otherwise, it'll just be parity and parity doesn't move people.
I'm thoroughly convinced Mozilla won't achieve much impact with Firefox until they understand and execute on building the ecosystem as the vast majority use case and never damage it again. However, that means them also understanding that people came to and left Firefox for any number of reasons other than Firefox itself or its native features, interface, etc., and I don't see that yet institutionally in their execution.
Some bright spots: Rust and WebAssembly are both fantastic. In general, I think Mozilla has been great at addressing the developer segment, both with the browser dev tools themselves and especially with MDN. Maybe what'll eventually preserve Mozilla is getting drummed out of the web browser business and into more of a core tech business. Regaining browser relevance is going to be a heck of an uphill for them.
TL;DR: Mozilla should never have gone full-tilt at mobile and made a grave mistake in assuming desktop was becoming irrelevant to their mission; and by far the biggest fuckup was alienating the add-on community since customization is the most compelling reason why people would use a non-default browser. It's entirely possible they won't come back from that. Their biggest recent impacts have been peripheral to or completely orthogonal to the browser, and might be their brighter future.
You have to make wacky statements like this to pull off the "visionary" schtick. All of the hotshots were talking Post-PC world in 2011.
The reality is that computers are still computers. Mobile is the new TV.
I run EUC in a large diversified enterprise. We have about 0.05% pure mobile users, mostly iPad based. That is growing quickly, but probably won't exceed 3% in the next 5 years based on the current pipeline. There are exceptions, iirc Comcast has 50k iPads. Other field service orgs are similar.
Server based computing is a thing though. There's alot of BYOD and thin clients in our future. Thin clients are approaching $100 and going lower. VDI/Citrix has a positive ROI for me.
I think the future looks more like Issac Asimov's multivac.
The mobile thing is just mass distraction. Everybody says "mobile" is eating the world, but when you look at it, 99 in 100 mobile core users are stupid facebookers who don't even know what is the internet and wouldn't be using the internet at all if it wasn't for Facebook, Instagram or whatever share-your-stupid-life network they may be using.
I installed Chrome on my kid's laptop the other day because the web app they were using in class didn't work in Edge or Firefox.
Another time she had tried to open a link to a Word Doc and didn't realize it downloaded it. I showed her where it was in the downloads folder and she proceeded to upload it to Google Drive to open it instead of using Word.
Very few functions kids do these days require a specialist app, just a particular browser.
Her sister was complaining about having to log into Netflix and I suggested she install the App. Her response was "I don't like Apps, I prefer websites."
Looking back on that era from here (only a handful of years later) it really looks like the desktop-is-dead-all-hail-the-smartphone crowd were just huffing paint.
And those fume hallucinations inspired the 'convergence' bandwagon which lead Canonical/Ubuntu, the Gnome project and Microsoft astray for years before they finally started rolling back those dumb decisions.
The markets for smartphones and tablets are now at absolute saturation point and, to a first approximation, no-one is abandoning their laptops/desktops en-masse in favour of working off of a 6 inch screen.
You read hackernews, which alone suggests you are in the far, far tail of average developed country consumer. Most people hate, and always hated computers. Most people don't even have college degrees, and don't need heavy utility computing to do their jobs. Compare PC sales vs. Mobile.
> Does someone see a replacement on the horizon for the supposedly "legacy" laptop/desktop power combo?
Even on a phone/tablet, communication often includes web hyperlinks. The obsession with mobile is a reflection of business model. If you are in the advertising / surveillance capitalism business, mobile ("sensor phone") devices provide non-desktop signals that can be monetized.
Unfortunately, desktop software was hurt by piracy, with a few large ISVs making the most money. Today, Apple makes money on desktop hardware rather than desktop software. Microoft has tilted Windows 10 towards hosted services and data collection, but ISVs cannot abandon the large incumbent Win32 device market.
As laptop/desktop security improves, operating sytems could be reducing desktop software piracy and improving the profitability of ISVs. Instead, "app stores" are following two leaders who don't care about ISVs: Apple (hardware revenue, 30% ISV tax = tiny ISVs) and Google (data revenue, "free" apps).
We have the security technology and social network/marketing experience to design laptop/desktop software ecosystems that protect data/IP and support new ISVs. If Mozilla/Firefox wants to help, they can make it easier for web/extension developers and content creators to get paid.
This is what I came here to post, and you can see that, in the mobile chart, Chrome and Safari already seem to be levelling off. Maybe a better model would be like an ADSR (attack decay sustain release) envelope in sound synthesis where the logistic curve represents the attack / initial adoption phase, possibly followed by a mirror logistic curve representing mature saturation then eventual replacement by competitors. That said, some products do come back from the dead, like Mozilla itself; the Apple Mac is another example.
Saying "Chrome won" now feels like saying "IE won" in 2002 or so. Look at the chart here:
To me on the Desktop only graph it looks like Chrome is meant to be a logarithmic growth curve not an exponential one. It seems he wanted the data to fit the projections rather than the projections fit the data.
Maybe they could compete on having a better extension system. Chrome extensions are absolutely awful. Every single one I've ever used has had some kind of serious bug, often deal breaking. I could easily fix many of them, but there is no method to do so. Let alone fork it or submit a pull request. You can't even load your own extensions, and you have to pay money to submit them to the web store. A scary percentage of them are sold to malware developers, and they silently update in the background.
They remove anything that violates the terms of service of a website. Like popular extensions that modified youtube or reddit in ways the sites didn't approve of. The only reason they don't remove adblock is because it has so much momentum and there would be an uproar if they did. But they do pay to have their ads whitelisted on the most popular adblock extension, and see to it that it's the top result.
They also try to be a minimalist browser and shove any functionality to extensions that can be shoved there. Since 99.999% of people never change the default settings on anything, they miss out. I wonder if a browser could be successful going the other way. Being "batteries included" and bundling it with lots of useful extensions and features.
You can easily your own extensions in Chrome by clicking the "Load unpacked extension" which can be just a folder from your computer that has a manifest.json file in. You can also easily inspect the extensions that you have installed with the chrome developer tools, ie. copy them and fix them if needed.
If anything, I'd say my experience between the Chrome and Firefox extensions are completely opposite to yours. For one, Firefox has some 1-3 different extension types/apis, so you have first understand which one to use from their convoluted developer docs. Secondly, when you submit the extension, some volunteer "reviews" it whenever they have the time, which can take days to weeks. Once I got feedback and got rejected because there was a typo in the extension.
With Chrome it's very easy to create an extension, you basically only need that manifest.json file and then you can submit it to the store and it's online less than an hour.
In fairness to Firefox, at this point I'm just waiting for their dev tools to get as good as Chrome's before I seriously consider switching, and other efforts like Quantum certainly make the prospect even more attractive. Once they have me on desktop, I'll want to switch on mobile as well for the state syncing benefits.
I wouldn't be surprised if a sizeable portion of Chrome users were in a similar boat, quietly waiting for some small aspect of Firefox to improve.
I started Firefox OS in 2011 because already back then I
was convinced that desktops and browsers were dead.
Not immediately–here we are 6 years later and both
are still around–but both are legacy technologies that
are not particularly influential going forward.
...snip...
To stick with the transportation metaphor: Google makes the
best horses in the world and they clearly won
the horse race. I just don’t think that race matters
much going forward.
It certainly doesn't matter if what you are interested in is: catching whatever the next technology wave is.
But the browser certainly still matters to all those Firefox users who switched to Chrome, and are using it every day.
"Legacy" isn't seen as sexy in tech. It might not be exciting for someone who wants to explore the next frontier or create the next platform. But, legacy is important for users (customers). Legacy is your brand. It's your influence. The foothold that will help you set the direction of what happens next. It's what you bootstrap your play in the next tech wave upon. Legacy is yesterday's hard earned success ready to be leveraged as a head start for tomorrow. (It's just important that you remember to do the leveraging part, and not just sit pretty and self-satisfied with your legacy).
Firefox's decline is abysmal and a failure of leadership.
FirefoxOS was a terrible, terrible decision.
How much influence does Mozilla really have on the direction of web if they have don't have influence on the desktop? Don't many features in mobile browsers start on the desktop browser first?
I hope whoever is in charge of Firefox now is a true believer of the power and importance of the web browser, and the desktop that it's used on, by the most influential band of users you can wish to have: creators.
I will not leave Firefox as long as I can keep working with it.
I don't find any substantial difference when I compare it with Chrome, so for me is just a choice based on the Company behinds the product.
Mozilla values and mine are aligned and I would like people to think more about the companies and less about the product. At the end that's what matter. What kind of Internet are you willing to see in 10 years? It can be very different depending on your choices.
Unfortunately I wish I had that experience. Firefox crashed more than chrome and felt slower even with the multiprocessed thing. This happened on both windows 10 and x/ubuntu
When you get a new long distance plan, do you worry if the plan you picked isn't the most popular plan? Do you decide it means you got a 'loser plan'? Me neither.
To me, this article was written from the perspective of a zero sum game mentality. The author clearly wanted to be #1. Does this mean Firefox is failing? I think the evidence is lacking there. And all the guy really offers as evidence is, "From these graphs it’s pretty clear that Firefox is not going anywhere." But Firefox market share was going up at some point... by the same standard, why wasn't that valuable evidence that Firefox would take over everything? As an explanation, it's devoid.
The article would more sense if it were critical to Mozilla's mission that Firefox have a dominant market share. But 18% of desktop installs is far more than sufficient to influence standards (recent studies show that as little of 3-5% of a market can basically set standards).
IMO Mozilla should just focus on a browser that 10-30% of users -- especially 'influencers' and those who care about digital freedom -- love, and consider that success.
Chrome may be technically great, but we should also acknowledge the fact that it was the sole advertisement for years on the most valuable piece of web real estate in the universe, the google.com home page. I can't think of any other product with that distinction.
What would the browser war look like if google.com advertised Firefox instead?
Funny to see this. I just downloaded Vivaldi [1] today. I still have all my work stuff in Chrome, but I'm giving Vivaldi a second shot now that a more stable version has been released. I like the idea of a browser with more features for developers (as they put it, a browser for our friends). I'm hoping it lives up to expectations.
This motivated me to go even further. I'm sick of the 1999 style popups and redirects I get on mobile sites, especially the Android webviews that so many applications have. I'm setting the AdBlock Browser to my default and disabling in-app web browsers where possible. Until I can trust mobile sites to have respectable ads, they lose revenue.
The more I think about this, the more annoyed I'm getting. The Youtube app has also been redesigned to have a less 'friction free' UI. You now open a video, see an ad first. Ok, that's fine. Back out of a video, it minimizes and you view 'suggested videos' (which feel like more ads). Swipe video away, you're still on the ad screen. Back out of Youtube. I want to watch a video and get out, maybe be pestered by 1 skippable ad for a relevant product. Not hit back 8 times and swipe a video away.
The time might be right for disruption. On the other hand, I might just be spoiled by debt supplemented user acquisition strategies that have very low monetization. We'll see.
I think the general sentiment that things that aren’t on a huge growth curve aren’t relevant or worth doing is very unhealthy–especially for the purpose of drawing conclusions about what Mozilla should do.
What should the conclusion have been from growth graphs back when IE was growing? Everyone else just give up?
The growth of phones doesn’t make desktop irrelevant. Phones can’t replace the desktop paradigm for many tasks, so desktops will stick around. When they stick around, things are better if desktop browsers stay in good health.
As for mobile, people do browse the Web a lot of mobile. Maybe the numbers for Facebook and Twitter apps are even greater in terms of minutes of use, but that doesn’t make the Web on mobile irrelevant or not worth caring about.
Whether on mobile or desktop, we’d all be worse off if the Web becomes less healthy due to neglect arising from being thought as not growing enough to be cool or being left to only to operating-system-bundled browsers. (The low switching cost of browsers due to not having to switch devices keeps the browser space competitive even if also tough for Mozilla when Mozilla doesn’t have an OS as an anchor.)
Sure, non-Web things (IoT and other) will exist and individual people may be a bit tired of doing Web and go do those other things. That doesn’t mean that the Web isn’t worth caring about anymore or that it doesn’t continue to be important for the health of the Web for Mozilla to be there with an independent engine–doing what Mozilla has always done without pivots to new shiny.
When individuals grow tired of Mozilla or the Web, going to do some other thing elsewhere for a change is cool, but I think spreading defeatism about what those of us who stay do is not cool.
If there's anything i can trust in the web it's none other than Mozilla Firefox.
Google Chrome is not Open Source and your privacy is not guaranteed, you don't know what's happening under the hood.
Please wait for the Servo project to complete, then you'll know who won.
Mozilla Firefox is not just a browser, it's the community of freedom, it's what I have grown up with. Finally Firefox with Ublock Origin is just enough to enjoy the Web.
#MozillaFirefoxMasterRace
Ideological leanings aside as an end user I went back and forth between Chrome and Firefox several times.
In fact I would visit https://arewee10syet.com every couple of months and sigh for years wanting to switch back.
On Firefox I used to have hundreds of tabs open and no visible ui chrome most of the time, just vimperator/pentadactyl and usually hidden treestyle tabs. Along with a rotating collection of adblockers and privacy extensions.
These days? I just use Safari on a Macbook with Content Blockers (https://webkit.org/blog/3476/content-blockers-first-look/). My battery lasts double digit hours and everything is always snappy. Readability and integrated 'read it offline later' mode is a cherry on top.
Ultimately I think we forget that with Flash being truly dead and buried on pages with no junky javascript trackers even a NeXT computer, far less powerful than your phone, should be enough.
And all the browsers are now able to limit the damage a heavy/crappy page (like gmail) does to its own tab.
tldr; And Jesus wept for there were no more worlds to conquer.
> 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.
This rings untrue to me, because I cannot believe he wrote this on his smartphone. I get that desktop/laptop are no longer the main entry device to the connected world, but they are essential to the connected world in a way that horses are not important to the world of transportation.
I use firefox for entirely idealistic reasons, but it's hard to ignore the fact that it is slower. There are times when it just feels so bloated, though thankfully a quick restart gets it running smoothly again. I know firefox team has had passes of perf improvements in the past, but it seems like it still isn't a high priority. When it comes to browsers, speed is the #1 feature.
I switched to Firefox because Chrome was keeping my fan always busy (high CPU usage and temperature) and using too much RAM. It was always around 5GB for my common usage. In Firefox it's always around 2.7GB. There were some privacy concerns too.
Having said that, Firefox also has its issues. It is so unresponsive sometimes, giving long hangs. That's the main problem to me. There are others, like it being slower in some pages and some of its extensions UI give me a pre-web 2.0 vibe or look abandoned. (But its Mendeley importer extension is way better than Chrome's).
This is what you get when you force a perfectly technical CEO out and let the MBA types steer the ship. A browser is a forever bleeding edge tech; you need engineers all the way to the top. They chose political correctness over technical prowess and the product has lost the edge.
[+] [-] gkoberger|8 years ago|reply
I worked for Mozilla for a few years, after seeing John Lily (CEO at the time) speak. It was right after Chrome started getting popular, and a smug person in the crowd asked him about how he felt about Chrome.
John's response was awesome. "This is the web that we wanted. We exist not because we want everyone to use Firefox, but because we wanted people to have a choice" Firefox was a response to a world of "best viewed in IE" badges, and it changed the browser landscape.
Now, we have options. Chrome is great, but so are Safari, Edge, Brave, Opera and Firefox. There's a lot of options out there, and they're all standards compliment. And that's thanks to Mozilla.
So, in my mind, Mozilla won. It's a non-profit, and it forced us into an open web. We got the world they wanted. Maybe the world is a bit Chrome-heavy currently, but at least it's a standards compliment world.
I hope Mozilla sees that. I hope they take credit, and move on to what's next: privacy and net neutrality. Our privacy is under attack, and Mozilla is one of the few companies that can (and would want to) help. I know, I know. Nobody cares about privacy. Nobody cared about web standards, either, but Mozilla bundled it into an attractive package and it worked. It's time for Mozilla to declare victory, high five the Chrome team, and move on to the next big challenge.
We really need someone to fight for our privacy and neutrality. And I really believe that this could be Mozilla's swan song.
-----
EDIT: Hey cbeard - My email is in my profile; I'd love to talk.
[+] [-] cies|8 years ago|reply
I'm much less pessimistic.
Besides a cross platform and extensible browser we see also the following coming out of Mozilla:
* Rust, a modern low-level programming language with cutting edge "safety" build in at zero runt time cost, luring many system programmers.
* Servo, tomorrow browser, from scratch, in Rust.
* Thunderbird, x-platform desktop email client (interesting for those not trusting the cloud enough).
* MDN, everything MSDN and w3school wish they could be. :)
A lot with revolve around privacy and safety in the future, a space that Mozilla is very well positioned to florish in.
Chrome is a good product. But I prefer Firefox. And seeing what is becoming of Servo I will soon start using that. Form me Firefox has won, and is not at all losing. I dont need the "most popular" browser, I need the most secure one.
And when I see what programming languages Google came up with... (Seriously? Is Go the best money can buy?) Then I think Rust shows single handedly that Mozilla beats Google in that arena as well.
[+] [-] StevePerkins|8 years ago|reply
1. A programming language, that hasn't yet shown "escape velocity" to go beyond D and other would-be-C++-successors in traction.
2. The only major application of that language... a pre-alpha browser engine, which may or may not eventually replace the engine in a browser that is seriously declining in market share with no reversal in sight.
3. A desktop email client, from which Mozilla has repeatedly made clear their intentions to divest and move on.
4. A JavaScript and HTML reference manual.
Mozilla is an organization with over $400 million in annual revenue. Where that money is going baffles me.
[+] [-] bobajeff|8 years ago|reply
The amount of funding they get is in direct correlation to how much market share they have in Firefox at the time they negotiate a search deal with one of the big search sites.
[+] [-] pjmlp|8 years ago|reply
I love Rust, and advocate it among other memory safe systems programming languages, but right now it still has an uphill battle against Swift, C++17 and .NET Native, on the desktop and mobile OSes.
Adoption is growing slowly, even Microsoft has recently added a Rust library to VS Code, but it will take years to become a major systems language.
[+] [-] akerro|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baby|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kenoph|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nyolfen|8 years ago|reply
then you really ought to be using chrome
[+] [-] vatotemking|8 years ago|reply
Servo is an "experimental" browser engine. While Chromium is cranking out features, servo is yet to reach version 1.0.
Thunderbird - was "discontinued" by Mozilla
MDN is a mess. The topics are all over the place and its hard to navigate. php.net docs is much more organized.
You can criticize Go but it has a more thriving ecosystem than Rust.
As much I'd like them to succeed, I dont think Mozilla is doing very good right now. They churn out technologically good products, but business wise, they dont know what they're doing. And without money, they wont be able to fight the big companies like Google, MS, FB.
[+] [-] JoshMnem|8 years ago|reply
Some problems with Mozilla are that they don't do community management well any more. In the old days, there were amazing grassroots-driven projects like spreadfirefox.com. It is not like that any more. Grassroots supporters have trouble participating, even if they try.
For example, I tried to create a Firefox programmers' meetup group in Berkeley, and even though some community people from Mozilla joined the group, no one from Mozilla would reply to my inquiries. (I still would like to restart that idea, but I don't have time to chase them down. We have 4,000 members in our various meetup groups at the moment.)
Another problem is that they are doing things that make their most-dedicated core users lose interest. They should have realized the incredible enthusiasm for Firefox that plugins like Pentadactyl were creating. They're killing off the API that it depends on. Instead, they should have funded the development of Pentadactyl and made it a reason why tech-savvy users choose Firefox. Tech-savvy users drive adoption, but they have abandoned many of their tech-savvy supporters.
There is still hope for Firefox if they are able to get the messages about privacy across. Chrome is slower to use out of the box, partially because of the auto-completion algorithm that tends to send people to Google Search to click on ads before reaching their destination. The older Firefox search box didn't waste users' time like that. (Recently it changed so that it shows titles rather than URLs, which is also slow, because there is an extra security risk of going to phishing sites, if you don't stop to look at the URLs.)
Also, Firefox is the only mobile browser that allows add-ons, so that's another benefit that they should be promoting.
[+] [-] eloisant|8 years ago|reply
For Chrome on the other hand, its near-monopoly situation is worrisome but it's actually a pretty good product. So there is no pragmatic reasons to leave it for Firefox, only ideological reasons and it's a driver nearly not as powerful as suffering every day.
[+] [-] taf2|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sowbug|8 years ago|reply
These two suggestions -- Mozilla getting involved in meetups and not deprecating an API allowing vim navigation in the browser -- would take Mozilla even farther from relevance, assuming any nonzero opportunity cost to those actions.
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|8 years ago|reply
Because they have to. Firefox could remain an unusable single-threaded XML behemoth, but what point is there in your wonderful extensible browser if it's an unmaintainable slow mess?
[+] [-] dfox|8 years ago|reply
For me, firefox became completely unusable few months ago when somebody decided that pulseaudio is the way to go and nothing else should be supported.
[+] [-] nilved|8 years ago|reply
Maybe, but they're getting rid of extensions instead, so they're effectively committing suicide.
[+] [-] aerovistae|8 years ago|reply
I don't understand this perspective. Browsers are legacy technologies that are not particularly influential? What?
I feel like the web dominates our lives more than ever, and everyone uses a laptop or desktop for any actual work they have to do, professional or hobby. While people use their phones for internet access throughout the day as they move about, it must be one in 1000 or fewer who uses their phone or tablet for real work.
Does someone see a replacement on the horizon for the supposedly "legacy" laptop/desktop power combo?
[+] [-] geoelectric|8 years ago|reply
While my perspective isn't as strategic or metrics-driven as his, I had a lot of time to observe and think as both a community member and Mozilla employee. FxOS also wasn't my baby, so there's that. Note also that I speak for myself here and my own observations and paraphrases--whatever I say that pisses someone off is something I'm saying, not that Mozilla said verbatim.
My primary takeaways were twofold:
(Long, TL;DR at bottom)
1) I agree with you. Desktop and mobile are two separate markets, period. The first mostly serves a workplace audience and the second a personal audience, but most people with a desk job at the very least will use a web browser as part of their day. Desktop may be a minority of the overall, but it's a minority that won't go away anytime soon and so will continue to influence HTML and standards disproportionate to pure market share.
That's important because Mozilla's gambit for preserving the open web was pretty simple (I say was because I think they're just not that focused at this point):
Have enough people using your browser that websites absolutely have to support the emerging standards that browser relies on-- and perhaps in doing so make it less attractive for site providers and browser providers to spend time on proprietary tech that isn't significantly better than those standards, thereby making other browsers move to those standards too.
Doesn't mean these people have to use it everywhere, or that it has to be a majority share (10%+ was what I commonly heard as "enough") or otherwise "win". But it does have to be enough that people will complain if the website doesn't support their browser and that testers are influenced to test the site against it.
(BTW, as a test professional, the fact that Firefox no longer appears in most test matrixes I encounter due to lack of a blip on analytics is very telling, and Firefox has a serious risk growing around site incompatibility or instability in their browser).
That brings me to my second takeaway:
2) The grand majority of people don't use a web browser because of the browser itself; they use it for one of a few reasons:
a) It's default on their system.
You will not win these people over because they're not there for any reason other than it being the easiest or most integrated path. Note that this is pretty much the whole mobile market, and why it was a dire mistake for Mozilla to conflate the two markets, decide mobile was more important due to combined market share, then go tilting at windmills.
It's also, any altruistic reasons aside, why the moonshot was to create an OS so Firefox could be the default mobile experience.
b) Ethics/Community. This was a relatively small but very vocal part of Firefox's userbase. Probably more people were there "against Chrome" than "for Firefox," but whatever. Firefox succeeded in the first place because of "against Internet Explorer" so it's a valid reason to be there. The nice thing about these people is they pull in more people.
Unfortunately, one side effect of Firefox OS as a project was working with proprietary partners who emphasized confidentiality such that you couldn't share with the community in the way Mozilla did before. When Mozilla diverted most of their effort to Firefox OS, it froze out a lot of the community efforts.
I think Mozilla-the-org also became less skilled at working with community, both for that shift and perhaps because they brought in a lot of people from the mobile and other sectors who didn't have that background.
Whatever the case, this base wasn't well-maintained, and I don't think operates as a core in the same way it might once have, at least for Firefox.
c) Customization, and this is really why Firefox (and Mozilla) is where it is today IMO:
The add-on ecosystem is the most compelling reason both to start using but especially continue using a non-default browser, and Mozilla chased theirs away.
Here's the thing:
You have one browser, whose job is to get the hell out of the way of the content and fade into the background, and several installed extensions whose jobs are to solve specific problems you have. 1 browser. Several extensions. 1 invisible, generic browser. Several hand-chosen extensions that make it your own.
Which bit are you sticking around for? Probably the extensions. The browser is a platform, a means, not an end--not just for the web but for its own functionality.
That's why all the complaints are performance and crashes and things that make you notice the browser, not generally native features or UI. It's the whole rationale behind browser-as-OS efforts in the first place.
Syncs and reading lists are nice, but with an ecosystem you can get them after the fact. With no ecosystem, you'd better either really like what you're handed or be trapped into using it a la iOS--and even Apple has figured out they have to be somewhat customizable or people will even switch OSes to get it.
That's where Chrome won.
Specifically, when Mozilla pretty much cargo-culted Google's rapid release program without first creating a version-independent extension store and add-on API, they seriously fucked up.
A ton of add-ons couldn't keep up with release and broke--Firefox's add-on "API" was to either essentially monkeypatch the internals or to create binary extensions, neither of which had any real abstraction from implementation. The need to manually update the compatibility version number and reupload to AMO for every single release froze more out (this was fixed server-side by auto-incing the number but it was just a workaround to a real problem as now extensions might not be really compatible). AMO always had a problem with turnaround on submissions, and this didn't help.
In general Mozilla sent the message of being out of touch with the add-on community, and that it wasn't a clear priority.
Jetpack/Add-Ons SDK was there as a not-really-mature portability measure to mitigate this, but it wasn't powerful enough to support a lot of the best extensions. It also happened in parallel with the rapid release shift, not before it when it was strategically needed. Then Jetpack kind of died off, probably partially because of the shift in efforts towards mobile/FxOS and partially because Jetpack never really became kick-ass enough to make the type of impact that gets more resources.
Meanwhile, right before Firefox stepped into this and never stepped out again, the Chrome Web Store opens in 2010, ready to receive any disenfranchised add-on makers. Talk about right place at the right time. Now Mozilla finally is adopting Chrome's extension API, both because it probably works better with multiprocess but maybe also to get some cross-platform extensions back. I imagine that'll work OK, but maybe too little too late.
AMO isn't what it used to be at all. Meanwhile, Chrome's Web Store is phenomenal. Combined with the (yes, unfair) Google Suite integration in Chrome there's a lot of friction to keep people on Chrome as a platform, and short of Chrome making a huge mistake that shakes people off like Mozilla/Firefox did, there isn't much reason to switch browsers for a cross-platform extension that's already on the one you use.
And when I look at the blog posts re: Firefox improvements, etc., I keep coming back to "it's a platform, not an app" and wonder if they'll ever take that ground back. Maybe if they somehow completely redefine the browser experience or otherwise stay deeply opinionated (Opera is sort of going this route) but otherwise, it'll just be parity and parity doesn't move people.
I'm thoroughly convinced Mozilla won't achieve much impact with Firefox until they understand and execute on building the ecosystem as the vast majority use case and never damage it again. However, that means them also understanding that people came to and left Firefox for any number of reasons other than Firefox itself or its native features, interface, etc., and I don't see that yet institutionally in their execution.
Some bright spots: Rust and WebAssembly are both fantastic. In general, I think Mozilla has been great at addressing the developer segment, both with the browser dev tools themselves and especially with MDN. Maybe what'll eventually preserve Mozilla is getting drummed out of the web browser business and into more of a core tech business. Regaining browser relevance is going to be a heck of an uphill for them.
TL;DR: Mozilla should never have gone full-tilt at mobile and made a grave mistake in assuming desktop was becoming irrelevant to their mission; and by far the biggest fuckup was alienating the add-on community since customization is the most compelling reason why people would use a non-default browser. It's entirely possible they won't come back from that. Their biggest recent impacts have been peripheral to or completely orthogonal to the browser, and might be their brighter future.
[+] [-] Spooky23|8 years ago|reply
The reality is that computers are still computers. Mobile is the new TV.
I run EUC in a large diversified enterprise. We have about 0.05% pure mobile users, mostly iPad based. That is growing quickly, but probably won't exceed 3% in the next 5 years based on the current pipeline. There are exceptions, iirc Comcast has 50k iPads. Other field service orgs are similar.
Server based computing is a thing though. There's alot of BYOD and thin clients in our future. Thin clients are approaching $100 and going lower. VDI/Citrix has a positive ROI for me.
I think the future looks more like Issac Asimov's multivac.
[+] [-] fiatjaf|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cptskippy|8 years ago|reply
Another time she had tried to open a link to a Word Doc and didn't realize it downloaded it. I showed her where it was in the downloads folder and she proceeded to upload it to Google Drive to open it instead of using Word.
Very few functions kids do these days require a specialist app, just a particular browser.
Her sister was complaining about having to log into Netflix and I suggested she install the App. Her response was "I don't like Apps, I prefer websites."
[+] [-] s_kilk|8 years ago|reply
And those fume hallucinations inspired the 'convergence' bandwagon which lead Canonical/Ubuntu, the Gnome project and Microsoft astray for years before they finally started rolling back those dumb decisions.
The markets for smartphones and tablets are now at absolute saturation point and, to a first approximation, no-one is abandoning their laptops/desktops en-masse in favour of working off of a 6 inch screen.
[+] [-] dkural|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acchow|8 years ago|reply
On light days about an hour.
I'm usually on a laptop/desktop for 8-10 hours a day.
[+] [-] walterbell|8 years ago|reply
Even on a phone/tablet, communication often includes web hyperlinks. The obsession with mobile is a reflection of business model. If you are in the advertising / surveillance capitalism business, mobile ("sensor phone") devices provide non-desktop signals that can be monetized.
Unfortunately, desktop software was hurt by piracy, with a few large ISVs making the most money. Today, Apple makes money on desktop hardware rather than desktop software. Microoft has tilted Windows 10 towards hosted services and data collection, but ISVs cannot abandon the large incumbent Win32 device market.
As laptop/desktop security improves, operating sytems could be reducing desktop software piracy and improving the profitability of ISVs. Instead, "app stores" are following two leaders who don't care about ISVs: Apple (hardware revenue, 30% ISV tax = tiny ISVs) and Google (data revenue, "free" apps).
We have the security technology and social network/marketing experience to design laptop/desktop software ecosystems that protect data/IP and support new ISVs. If Mozilla/Firefox wants to help, they can make it easier for web/extension developers and content creators to get paid.
[+] [-] flerchin|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mathnerd314|8 years ago|reply
They're market shares & hence bounded by 0 and 1, so exponential seems pretty unrealistic. The logistic curve is a better starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function#In_economics...
[+] [-] zumatic|8 years ago|reply
Saying "Chrome won" now feels like saying "IE won" in 2002 or so. Look at the chart here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_5
[+] [-] ttoinou|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daemin|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Houshalter|8 years ago|reply
They remove anything that violates the terms of service of a website. Like popular extensions that modified youtube or reddit in ways the sites didn't approve of. The only reason they don't remove adblock is because it has so much momentum and there would be an uproar if they did. But they do pay to have their ads whitelisted on the most popular adblock extension, and see to it that it's the top result.
They also try to be a minimalist browser and shove any functionality to extensions that can be shoved there. Since 99.999% of people never change the default settings on anything, they miss out. I wonder if a browser could be successful going the other way. Being "batteries included" and bundling it with lots of useful extensions and features.
[+] [-] enra|8 years ago|reply
If anything, I'd say my experience between the Chrome and Firefox extensions are completely opposite to yours. For one, Firefox has some 1-3 different extension types/apis, so you have first understand which one to use from their convoluted developer docs. Secondly, when you submit the extension, some volunteer "reviews" it whenever they have the time, which can take days to weeks. Once I got feedback and got rejected because there was a typo in the extension.
With Chrome it's very easy to create an extension, you basically only need that manifest.json file and then you can submit it to the store and it's online less than an hour.
[+] [-] buu700|8 years ago|reply
I wouldn't be surprised if a sizeable portion of Chrome users were in a similar boat, quietly waiting for some small aspect of Firefox to improve.
[+] [-] kenshi|8 years ago|reply
But the browser certainly still matters to all those Firefox users who switched to Chrome, and are using it every day.
"Legacy" isn't seen as sexy in tech. It might not be exciting for someone who wants to explore the next frontier or create the next platform. But, legacy is important for users (customers). Legacy is your brand. It's your influence. The foothold that will help you set the direction of what happens next. It's what you bootstrap your play in the next tech wave upon. Legacy is yesterday's hard earned success ready to be leveraged as a head start for tomorrow. (It's just important that you remember to do the leveraging part, and not just sit pretty and self-satisfied with your legacy).
Firefox's decline is abysmal and a failure of leadership.
FirefoxOS was a terrible, terrible decision.
How much influence does Mozilla really have on the direction of web if they have don't have influence on the desktop? Don't many features in mobile browsers start on the desktop browser first?
I hope whoever is in charge of Firefox now is a true believer of the power and importance of the web browser, and the desktop that it's used on, by the most influential band of users you can wish to have: creators.
Edits: formatting
[+] [-] hacalox|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vopi|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ShinTakuya|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] granitosaurus|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] threepipeproblm|8 years ago|reply
To me, this article was written from the perspective of a zero sum game mentality. The author clearly wanted to be #1. Does this mean Firefox is failing? I think the evidence is lacking there. And all the guy really offers as evidence is, "From these graphs it’s pretty clear that Firefox is not going anywhere." But Firefox market share was going up at some point... by the same standard, why wasn't that valuable evidence that Firefox would take over everything? As an explanation, it's devoid.
The article would more sense if it were critical to Mozilla's mission that Firefox have a dominant market share. But 18% of desktop installs is far more than sufficient to influence standards (recent studies show that as little of 3-5% of a market can basically set standards).
IMO Mozilla should just focus on a browser that 10-30% of users -- especially 'influencers' and those who care about digital freedom -- love, and consider that success.
[+] [-] millstone|8 years ago|reply
What would the browser war look like if google.com advertised Firefox instead?
[+] [-] TACIXAT|8 years ago|reply
This motivated me to go even further. I'm sick of the 1999 style popups and redirects I get on mobile sites, especially the Android webviews that so many applications have. I'm setting the AdBlock Browser to my default and disabling in-app web browsers where possible. Until I can trust mobile sites to have respectable ads, they lose revenue.
The more I think about this, the more annoyed I'm getting. The Youtube app has also been redesigned to have a less 'friction free' UI. You now open a video, see an ad first. Ok, that's fine. Back out of a video, it minimizes and you view 'suggested videos' (which feel like more ads). Swipe video away, you're still on the ad screen. Back out of Youtube. I want to watch a video and get out, maybe be pestered by 1 skippable ad for a relevant product. Not hit back 8 times and swipe a video away.
The time might be right for disruption. On the other hand, I might just be spoiled by debt supplemented user acquisition strategies that have very low monetization. We'll see.
1. https://vivaldi.com
[+] [-] hsivonen|8 years ago|reply
What should the conclusion have been from growth graphs back when IE was growing? Everyone else just give up?
The growth of phones doesn’t make desktop irrelevant. Phones can’t replace the desktop paradigm for many tasks, so desktops will stick around. When they stick around, things are better if desktop browsers stay in good health.
As for mobile, people do browse the Web a lot of mobile. Maybe the numbers for Facebook and Twitter apps are even greater in terms of minutes of use, but that doesn’t make the Web on mobile irrelevant or not worth caring about.
Whether on mobile or desktop, we’d all be worse off if the Web becomes less healthy due to neglect arising from being thought as not growing enough to be cool or being left to only to operating-system-bundled browsers. (The low switching cost of browsers due to not having to switch devices keeps the browser space competitive even if also tough for Mozilla when Mozilla doesn’t have an OS as an anchor.)
Sure, non-Web things (IoT and other) will exist and individual people may be a bit tired of doing Web and go do those other things. That doesn’t mean that the Web isn’t worth caring about anymore or that it doesn’t continue to be important for the health of the Web for Mozilla to be there with an independent engine–doing what Mozilla has always done without pivots to new shiny.
When individuals grow tired of Mozilla or the Web, going to do some other thing elsewhere for a change is cool, but I think spreading defeatism about what those of us who stay do is not cool.
[+] [-] digitalshankar|8 years ago|reply
Google Chrome is not Open Source and your privacy is not guaranteed, you don't know what's happening under the hood.
Please wait for the Servo project to complete, then you'll know who won.
Mozilla Firefox is not just a browser, it's the community of freedom, it's what I have grown up with. Finally Firefox with Ublock Origin is just enough to enjoy the Web. #MozillaFirefoxMasterRace
[+] [-] amq|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 101km|8 years ago|reply
In fact I would visit https://arewee10syet.com every couple of months and sigh for years wanting to switch back.
On Firefox I used to have hundreds of tabs open and no visible ui chrome most of the time, just vimperator/pentadactyl and usually hidden treestyle tabs. Along with a rotating collection of adblockers and privacy extensions.
These days? I just use Safari on a Macbook with Content Blockers (https://webkit.org/blog/3476/content-blockers-first-look/). My battery lasts double digit hours and everything is always snappy. Readability and integrated 'read it offline later' mode is a cherry on top.
Ultimately I think we forget that with Flash being truly dead and buried on pages with no junky javascript trackers even a NeXT computer, far less powerful than your phone, should be enough.
And all the browsers are now able to limit the damage a heavy/crappy page (like gmail) does to its own tab.
tldr; And Jesus wept for there were no more worlds to conquer.
[+] [-] wodenokoto|8 years ago|reply
This rings untrue to me, because I cannot believe he wrote this on his smartphone. I get that desktop/laptop are no longer the main entry device to the connected world, but they are essential to the connected world in a way that horses are not important to the world of transportation.
[+] [-] brian-armstrong|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yamaneko|8 years ago|reply
Having said that, Firefox also has its issues. It is so unresponsive sometimes, giving long hangs. That's the main problem to me. There are others, like it being slower in some pages and some of its extensions UI give me a pre-web 2.0 vibe or look abandoned. (But its Mendeley importer extension is way better than Chrome's).
[+] [-] utku_karatas2|8 years ago|reply
This is what you get when you force a perfectly technical CEO out and let the MBA types steer the ship. A browser is a forever bleeding edge tech; you need engineers all the way to the top. They chose political correctness over technical prowess and the product has lost the edge.