Mozilla is trying to innovate and bring new features to Firefox, but the browser continues to lose users. Despite these concerning market trends, the company is actively...
  • Wildmimic@anarchist.nexusEnglish
    2 hours

    I find it sad that most comments here just focus on the OPTIONAL AI possibilities, which doesn’t even register as an issue for the masses. The problem is an inherently weak-toothed antitrust law framework in the US. The moment the courts did decide against splitting chrome from Alphabet, the options for Mozilla became very, very limited. They can’t out-feature Alphabet, they do not have near-unlimited reach to advertise their browser. All they currently can do is play catch-up.

  • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3 hours

    If I was Mozilla’s CEO, I dunno what I’d do.

    It doesn’t matter what Firefox implements; Google can spam instant “switch to Chrome” links in front of most of the world’s eyeballs. User couldn’t care less about privacy and adblocking performance, apparently. This isn’t Microsoft, and Mozilla is literally funded by Google as a token effort, so they can’t outdevelop Chrome nor attack it.

    What are they supposed to do?

    • doeknius_gloek@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      3 hours

      There was a blog post not too long ago, where an Ex-Mozilla engineer shared his thoughts on exactly this topic. The tldr was something like

      “Don’t try to be like the other browsers, chasing daily active users. Get back in touch with your userbase and understand why they choose Firefox every day instead of just mindlessly picking one of the larger browsers like the majority of users. Then build a browser for these users, instead of pushing them away by doing what the other browsers (which they actively try to avoid) do.”

      I share this sentiment, but it won’t make the money people happy, so I don’t think it’ll happen.

      EDIT: Found the post: https://blog.unitedheroes.net/5751

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3 hours

        I dispute this as well:

        “Don’t try to be like the other browsers, chasing daily active users. Get back in touch with your userbase and understand why they choose Firefox every day instead of just mindlessly picking one of the larger browsers like the majority of users. Then build a browser for these users, instead of pushing them away by doing what the other browsers (which they actively try to avoid) do.”

        This is a nice sentiment.

        But these aren’t the Internet Explorer days.

        A browser engine with less than 1% market share isn’t going to be supported by web developers, and then everything about its development becomes an uphill battle. Major sites won’t work, and they can’t afford to fixe them all on an ad hoc basis. And again, it’s not like the IE days where the “default” browser is so unbelievably dysfunctional, the OS was more open, and the user base was a bit more technical.

        I’d argue one of Firefox’s most important functions (alongside Safari) is to stop Chrome from becoming the de facto web standard, instead of the HTML spec.

        And it’s been repeatedly demonstrated that “these users” the quote describes is an exceedingly small base. It’s reasonable for Firefox to want to expand that, instead of catering to an ever shrinking pie.

        I do partially agree: Mozilla needs to touch some grass. They need to get sane. But there is no “option to pick” presented to most of the world. And if Mozilla caters to the same oldschool Internet users like they always have, Firefox will die.

        I don’t have a good solution. I’m just arguing that sentiment is applicable to an era we are no longer in.

        but it won’t make the money people happy

        Aka pay the Firefox devs.

        I understand Mozilla wastes a lot of income, but still. This isn’t a hobbyist piece of software, it’s an expensive, labor intense project that needs constant professional attention.

        The income part isn’t trivial, unless they find some alternative source of funding (like the Ladybird project apparently has).

        • XLE@piefed.socialEnglish
          2 hours

          “The income part isn’t trivial, unless they find some alternative source of funding”

          Addressed within the article by the insider:

          For what it’s worth, I’m not concerned for Mozilla isn’t it running out of money. So long as Google or another large search engine exists, it can get cash. There are also a few other financial stability angles it can do which (frankly) would be better.

          Google can easily afford to fund Mozilla, and it can’t afford to stop. They still need to act like they aren’t a monopoly.

          • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2 hours

            …Do they?

            I feel like we are very close to a cyberpunk future where Alphabet doesn’t have to pretend.

            And I feel that’s quite dismissive. Mozilla doesn’t have enough development resources as-is, hence the whole original article. And abandoning Servo. And a bunch of other things. If money was a non-concern, they wouldn’t be here.

            • XLE@piefed.socialEnglish
              2 hours

              The problem is a bit circular. Mozilla is flippant with money because they get it from Google and they act like it will be eternal. Assuming an absolute worst case scenario: just based on 2024 finances, Mozilla has enough money to keep running for about three years with no funding if expenses remain stable (123/41=3).

              It’s worth noting that Servo and competing engine Ladybird are still in development, and they do not get Mozilla money…

        • warm@kbin.earth
          2 hours

          Firefox is a well known browser. People just don’t use it because Chrome offers something else. Firefox has always been a “Chrome lite”, following in their footsteps instead of standing on it’s own terms.

          They abandoned their privacy direction, only coming back when it’s beneficial for them to market it. While Chrome sucks for adding features that aren’t standard, Firefox needs to just be quick with it too. It took Firefox forever to add tab groups, something people were asking for all the time.

          They are absolutely out of touch with their user base and have no direction. Opera GX targeted the gaming niche and now they have similar market share to Firefox, which is insane. It’s a shit browser, but at least they went for something. Firefox just idles and adds whatever is popular way too late. Nobody wanted AI shit added, why was any development time wasted on it? The engineer is right.

            • warm@kbin.earth
              2 hours

              You know what I mean. It was around for 4 years before Chrome, now they have both existed together for 18 years. Firefox was steady for a few years, then Chrome came along and blew it out of the water. Obviously Google pushing it on their main page was the biggest reason for it’s insane adoption, but it was also just the better browser at that point, Mozilla have been doing catch-up ever since and constantly tripping up.

                • Victor@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  1 hour

                  They are correct, yes? Firefox 1.0 in 2004, Chrome in 2008. I remember I was in highschool when Firefox came out, in uni when Chrome came out. Seems about right.

    • MadMadBunny@lemmy.caEnglish
      3 hours

      Avoid forcing AI to its users? I switched to WaterFox just to avoid it.

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3 hours

        While problematic, yeah, I’d dispute that as Firefox’s market share problem.

        Users like you and me, who are even aware of projects like Waterfox, are a minuscule, vanishing minority. We aren’t switching to Chrome anyway. But we aren’t representative of the web’s user base.

        And if most Chrome users were sick of the Gemini spam… they’d have already switched to Firefox, where it’s toggleable and an order of magnitude less in-your-face. But they aren’t.

        Same with Manifest V3. They neutered UBlock on Chrome long ago, yet that’s clearly not dissuading most Chrome users.

        In short, if in-your-face-AI was a dealbreaker for most, Chrome wouldn’t be gaining market share.

        • thinkercharmercoderfarmer@slrpnk.netEnglish
          3 hours

          I think it’s a network problem. Most people use Chrome, therefore most people’s friends and co-workers use Chrome, so there’s a strong incentive to go with the pack. Google is obviously exploiting this to get their ecosystem claws in deeper, but I think the main thing is that Google effectively dethroned Microsoft as the default, and Mozilla has just kind of “been around” the whole time as the weird alt browser that the IT guy uses, even being propped up by Google in exchange for Firefox users’ search data.

          What should Mozilla do? IDK. I don’t think “more AI” is the right answer, but I also don’t know what I would do in their position. It’s a tight spot.

          • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2 hours

            I don’t think “more AI” is the right answer, but I also don’t know what I would do in their position.

            Yeah.

            I think “nontoxic” machine learning features are nice. You know, oldschool stuff. Firefox’s auto translation, as an example, is really cool, (AFAIK) completely local, and way better than Chrome’s equivalent.

            But they poisoned that well with the yet-another-stupid-chatbot thing.

            I dunno what Mozilla was thinking. It was so shitty. And now there will be a negative reaction to anything even ML-adjacent, even if it isn’t enshittified.

            • m-p{3}@lemmy.caEnglish
              2 hours

              Personally I use the chatbot side panel once in a while, it doesn’t get too much in the way while doing something else.

              But all the other features using a small trained model are legit nice (translation, image captioning) and thankfully all optional.

              • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
                2 hours

                I mean, I’ve been messing with LLMs before Llama 1. I don’t hate chat bots in general. But I found the sidebar kind of stupid. It didn’t feel like a smart model when I tried, it didn’t have knobs to tune, and literally everything has a chatbot anyway.

                There are cool Firefox forks built as “agenic browsers” to interact with LLMs in a structured way. But I think they should be just that: separate. A different program to open when you want an LLM messing with your browsing, with all the security hazards that entails.

      • Arcane2077@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        3 hours

        As long as it can be turned off, it’s not a dealbreaker for me. I prefer living in the upstream where, AFAIK, firefox gets all the vulnerabilities patched first

    • pelya@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2 hours

      Google was already doing that for years. Most of Firefox users use it because it’s leaner than Chrome and supports adblockers. None of these advantages will suddenly disappear, but Chrome will inevitably become worse all by itself, and more users will migrate away from it to Firefox.

      So Firefox strategy should be to simply not screw up by adding unnecessary stuff like AI.

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2 hours

        Chrome will inevitably become worse all by itself

        But when?

        Again, this isn’t Microsoft, whom you can rely on for prompt footgunning. Chrome is still very fast, reasonably lean, and developed with more resources than Mozilla.

        Hence Firefox could die before Alphabet starts to really tighten the screws. That’s what I’m most afraid of, as the next step for Alphabet would be “depreciating” Chromium, closing the source, and killing all the forks.

        I don’t want a world where the only viable browser is a Chrome binary.

    • m-p{3}@lemmy.caEnglish
      2 hours

      They need to build their own privacy-oriented services, and offer different tiers. Also important is that if they do launch a product, make sure they plan on keeping it alive or people won’t trust it and migrate to it (like how Google kills products). Make it a safe-haven for those who cares about privacy. And I’m not talking about using third-parties and rebranding them as their own…

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2 hours

        Yeah.

        I think they tried with a few services, like the VPN, but could never afford to go whole-hog with a stack like Proton.

        …In fact, it’d be interesting if Mozilla merged with Proton, DuckDuckGo or something.

    • Nindelofocho@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2 hours

      Completely my opinion: I think the problem is Mozilla is beholden to the requirement that it MUST grow and make more and more money. It is a business after all.

      If Mozilla just focused on maintaining a good product that browses the internet well and just stays there. It doesent have to do cutting edge, it doesn’t have to be ultra quirky. It doesent have to focus on increasing market share. It just needs to focus on being a good product.

      People are going to come and go. Opinions change and people do get tired of being taken advantage of. The Honda Civic didnt get so popular because it was the most performant car, the most spacious car, the most efficient car, etc It got popular because while it wasent the MOST of those qualities it was quite good with those qualities.

      Firefox’s best bet at this point is maintaining good qualities and being as accessible and compatible as possible.

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2 hours

        It’s a rigged game though. Mozilla’s struggling to even implement feature parity with the income they have, and being “good” isn’t going to place redirects to install Chrome over half of people’s phones and web browsing.

        …Personally, I think Mozilla should dump Firefox.

        And put everything they have into Ladybird, or maybe Apple’s WebKit.

        Mozilla are playing a rigged game, and the only way to survive is get out of Google’s grasp. Practically, that means joining some other entity who already has dev money and a good project.

        • CameronDev@programming.dev
          English
          2 hours

          Mozilla might as well just close up shop. If they were to abandon Firefox, what exactly are they bring to the table for anyone else?

          • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
            58 minutes

            The brand, development power, and bits from the Firefox codebase they could re-use.

            More importantly, Firefox’s devs get to work on something that already has leverage in an ecosystem, eg WebKit for Apple or Ladybird for Linux.

            • CameronDev@programming.dev
              English
              59 minutes

              Developers can just be hired directly, and the Firefox codebase is open source.

              Only brand requires partnering with mozilla, and what does the other partner gain from the Mozilla brand? They don’t even have much brand recognition anymore anyway.

              • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
                55 minutes

                I ninja edited, but basically I just don’t see Firefox surviving without “ecosystem leverage” like WebKit, which is permanently embedded in the Apple ecosystem.

                Or even Ladybird, which I imagine will be a permanent fixture on Linux systems.

                So… however they organize it, Mozilla should take their browser dev experience there. But maybe they could keep Firefox the brand alive, and automatically shift users to whatever the new rendering engine will be.

                Alternatively I guess Firefox could stay Mozilla and just adopt WebKit or Ladybird’s engine. “Merge” development efforts across different teams, so to speak, but keep the browser frontend separate.

                • CameronDev@programming.dev
                  English
                  24 minutes

                  Its a bit early to make the call that Ladybird will be successful. They have made a lot of noise sure, but they are a small team, tackling a huge project, and they have just had 2 language changes in the last few months.

                  The deck is well and truely stacked against them. Maybe they pull it off, maybe not, but its very early to make the call IMO.

                  Servo is looking surprisingly good, but still has major rendering issues. At least it looks like a browser now.

  • Kissaki@feddit.orgEnglish
    1 hour

    Only semi-related to the roadmap and release notes mentioned, but;

    I hate the new what’s new page that opens after updates. What I want is the release notes, not some huge bannered colorful vast marketing ad space. Until three versions ago it was fairly simple to at least scroll down to open the link. Now it is hard to spot in the violent, pushy, irritating ad space. And it pushes mostly the same stuff every time. Very annoying.

    Chrome and Edge are even worse, of course, not even linking technical/complete release notes. But doesn’t change the worsening on Firefox.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3 hours

    Man who has lost nine fingers: “I’ve reversed course and I will not lose another nine fingers”.