I’ve found myself agreeing wholeheartedly with the recent pushes to get people to switch from Chrome to Firefox. Google keeps pulling dumb trick after dumb trick in an attempt to have more control over the web. It’s hard not to think that this kind of behavior warrants quitting Chrome and other Google products. But taking a look at Firefox usage statistics, it’s pretty obvious that the trend (looking at Monthly Active Users) is going in the wrong direction. This raises some questions: why is Firefox usage going down, and what does Mozilla need to do to bring it back up?
Harsh, but fair. Firefox’s out-of-the-box defaults are very counter-intuitive to its privacy-focused marketing. Nonsense like recommended articles littering the new tab page, forced Pocket integration that you can only disable through about:config, recommended themes and extensions based on your usage, Google being the default browser, and so on, all seem to fly in the face of claims that using Firefox allows you to take control of your privacy.
Sure, I disable the Pocket integration, set DDG as my default search engine, and do other things to decrapify Mozilla’s terrible defaults (Firefox is my browser on all my computers and mobile devices), but regular users shouldn’t have to.
Thom Holwerda,
I agree with you, and I’m sure others will too. Mozilla has made mistakes and can be kind of obnoxious when they don’t listen to the community as much as they should. However some of these things generate revenue for mozilla. It’s one of those things where it’s easy to point out ways mozilla can do better for users, but it’s harder to find a way to do it while remaining financially viable. That’s the hard part to solve.
They are aware they need to diversify and this is exactly what they are doing and then get criticized for it.
If they did it right (and the community can check it) then the privacy should be fine with these suggestions.
Wow, double standard there, don’t you think? It’s okay for Mozilla to do these privacy-invading things because they need money, but it’s not okay for Google to do the same stupid crap in order to earn money?
Personally, I’m in the camp that it’s not okay for anyone to engage in these practices for money, but I guess that’s not trendy these days. As long as you’re the underdog, it’s okay? Is that it?
Would you make a monthly donation to Mozilla, so they wouldn’t have to do that? If so, how much?
Actually I would, if they offered me a superior browsing experience and removed all the tracking, recommendations, and privacy invasions. I’d probably go for $30/month for that, if they provided it. It’d be better than a subscription outright, as I could always write it off on my taxes. Unfortunately, they provide no such option.
darknexus,
I realize that you despise moziila, but you are jumping to a wrong conclusion as there was no double standard whatsoever. Obviously mozilla doesn’t have a cash cow like google does. ergo the observation that it’s hard for mozilla to come up a financially viable model.
While I didn’t indicate my position on advertisers earlier, you can probably guess that I don’t like them either. However it is still necessary to ask the question: how would you keep mozilla alloat if you were running it? It’s easy to critisize their practices and it’s easy to say donations can pay for it as you allude to in another post,,but only a tiny fraction of users ever get around to donating anything. Mozilla sells rights to the default firefox search engine, which most users are ok with but that’s a lot of eggs in one basket, how exactly would you diversify?
Which privacy-invading things?
Mozilla has been very consistently focused on the community. Unfortunately, there were some tough decisions that had to be made to keep FF viable, and the answers were guaranteed to make parts of the community angry.
They had hit a dead end with their single threaded performance, and they were hemorrhaging users because of performance. I don’t miss one misbehaving website bringing my web browser to a halt. I lost a couple of addons, but it was worth it. FF is so much more performant now then it was. It stays usable when it’s loaded up, which is nice.
As for addons, Mozilla told extensions developers upfront the new extension API was going to be a work in progress, and they weren’t going to be able to monkey patch the browser like they used to, which is a very sensible position to take. They also said they should open tickets for any missing functionality, and they would see how it could be added safely.
The new API also introduced Chrome extension compatibility, so developers wouldn’t have to write two versions of their extension for two different browsers. Most of the momentum was behind Chrome extensions/applications anyway, and FF’s beloved addons were slowly dieing.
No, those decisions were going to make the majority of the community angry when you spout privacy and anti-tracking rhetoric out one side of your mouth and spew ads and tracking out the other.
This is not that hard to understand. It’s not the fact that they have to make money that gets the community angry. It’s the hypocrisy involved in claiming to be centered in being all for an open, private web when they institute a walled garden and sell our data in reality.
Look, it’s this simple. Either they’re all for the user’s privacy and choice, in which case they put an end to this garbage. Alternatively, they can stop the bull***t pretense and admit that they’ve gone in a new direction and don’t give a damn about privacy and openness anymore. They’re trying to have their cake and eat it, and they simply can’t do that in a situation like this. It’s time for Mozilla to choose where they really stand.
Couldn’t have put it better myself.
Here’s my story:
I used Firefox as my primary browser, for years. I guess I jumped on Firefox train right after IE6. And I locked myself effectively in there, customizing it as my heart desires. I changed maybe 50 settings. I used perhaps 20 add-ons. I even had an add-on to make it look like the old Firefox when they went out and changed the look of the browser (but that change made me angry anyway. I didn’t ask for a visual change, did I?).
And I used a secondary browser to handle google stuff. My gmail and keep was open only in that second browser (first Opera, then Vivaldi). Firefox did not get acquainted with Google cookies ever. So my browsing was essentially private. Without any cookie, and with various fingerprinting techniques disabled, Google was unable to “customize” search results for me. I wanted to get universal search results whenever I searched for something, not something designed specifically for “users searching for agricultural machinery in Kathmandu”. (And no, DDG almost never gives me the result I am searching for. It is light years behind Google.)
I did not like making changes for the change’s sake. I stayed on the ESR channel, just to avoid changing my browser’s behavior from my custom-designed way once every 6 weeks.
Then came the second change to make me wonder “what are these guys trying to do?”: The depreciation of old add-ons. Suddenly I became aware that half of the add-ons I used on a daily basis would stop working as soon as I stopped clicking the “later” button on that nagging update reminder.
If I had to adjust my browser from virtually scratch, if I had to find working alternatives for the gazillions of add-ons which will stop working… I would do it on Vivaldi, right? Why bother with Firefox anymore? It does not have any of its previous benefits any more. Its memory use rivals that of Chromium derivatives. Its extensions are not unrivalled anymore. It pushes some services like pocket a tad too very a lot much. So, here I’m, writing this on a heavily customized Vivaldi. So long Firefox, and thanks for the fish.
hdjhfds,
Agree completely. I’ve had minor gripes with firefox, but these issues and especially not being allowed to run plugins without mozilla’s permission is completely hostile to the very base of users who used to take pride in running & customizing firefox. As much as I want to think of firefox as the best browser for user freedoms, that’s an obsolete position now. Mozilla have thrown it away and become just as controlling and overprotective as the corporate browsers, which is a damn shame. Mozilla take note: I used to actively promote you to friends and family, but your actions betray the audience that loved you the most.
Mozilla for years tried to make sure the addons are safe to use. They’ve always controlled it and you could ‘side load’. They had lots of problems with people abusing it, like installing malware or privacy invading as addons installed with other software.
And help with the transition to a newer more secure model and a model which fitted where the rest of the browser should go (architectually), but a good chunk of the addons were abandoned.
They had to move forward in some way. addons was preventing them from moving and slowing them down for years just being a working browser. They tried to serve both groups of users: those with lots of existing addons and those that want a fast/working browser. They couldn’t find a model which served both. Obviously they had to let go of the old addons.
Lennie,
This is exactly what I meant by “overprotective”. If mozilla wants to distribute and or sign safe addons, then great, no complaints there. However a forced walled garden policy goes against user freedoms and is something I cannot stand behind whoever is behind the scheme.
Would you be ok with linux forcing walled garden rules on behalf of users even if it was in the name of stopping malware? No of course not! Safe by default is fine, but at the end of the day the owner needs to be in charge. All the arguments against walled gardens apply against mozilla too. It really sucks that mozilla has resorted to anti-freedom restrictions, but so long as they do it is clear by definition that mozilla is no longer the browser of choice for internet freedom. If you want a browser free from corporate “we know better than our users” tactics, unfortunately that excludes firefox these days. I’d welcome them to come back to our side, but mozilla’s leadership has been making some really bad choices and meanwhile their market share continues to fall. It feels harsh to say this about a browser I used to be fond of, but they do deserve criticism for alienating their base, including me.
It’s not merely the API changes, but that the new API’s are less functional. At least it’s open source, and there are some decent forks that overcome mozilla’s regressions with respect to free software. The issue is that these don’t have enough market-share to get serious attention from extension developers who tend to focus entirely on mainstream browsers.
Walled garden ?
It’s just as much a walled garden as Debian apt repository is, you can still side-load.
Lennie,
This is incorrect. Debian doesn’t force users to only use debian approved software. However starting with firefox 42, normal users can only load extensions that are approved by mozilla and the about:config setting “xpinstall.signatures.required” to override mozilla’s policy isn’t being respected.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1078289
Haven’t we had this discussion before?
The intent behind removing the xpinstall.signatures.required preference is to get ahead of crapware that was doing things like editing Firefox’s prefs store directly or using shaped windows to fool users into thinking that Firefox itself was guiding them through granting the addon permission to run.
The idea is that, even if a bundleware addon’s installer goes so far as to try to downloading one of the unbranded or developer edition builds (which they *do* provide and which do still have xpinstall.signatures.required), it will result in a visible change to the browser’s icon (at minimum) which will hopefully prompt someone to realize that something’s wrong.
ssokolow,
But surely you already know why this strategy doesn’t work even without my having to explain why. Any malware that escaped browser containment and has the permissions required to do that means you are already toast anyways. In short mozilla took away user freedoms in exchange for no additional protection under a privilege escalation attack.
Don’t get me wrong, security measures are clearly necessary, Good security measures are those that help empower owners to protect themselves from malware. Bad security measures are those that deprive owners of control and freedoms in the name of their own security. Substituting the later for the former is shortsighted and morally objectionable.
As someone who’s removed hostile extensions from various browsers in the past, the gatekeeping of addons makes total sense.
We, unfortunately, live in a very hostile online environment, and a world where people are generally just shitty. If you want to know why we can’t have nice things, look around at our fellow human beings.
Mozilla seems to have instructions on how to self-host or side-load extensions. I haven’t tried them, and there are suggestions to set “xpinstall.signatures.required” to false to turn off signature verification.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Distribution_options
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Distribution_options/Sideloading_add-ons
Again, I think it’s the hypocrisy that gets at most people. If Mozilla really believe the online world is too hostile to allow users to make their own choice (a sentiment with which I actually agree) then just say so and stop the rhetoric. They’re driving people away by preaching and never practicing, on all fronts.
“allow users to make their own choice”
Which they still can by side-loading ?
Lennie,
No, that doesn’t work any more, you have to install the nightly build of firefox to do that now. Part of my frustration is that mozilla broke some of my own plugins and I need their permission to run them on my computer and phone. You can justify it if you want to, but it’s clear that mozilla doesn’t place much value in a user’s right to have a say in what plugins they are allowed to run. I concede a lot of people don’t seem to care about walled gardens and are perfectly willing to subject themselves to the will of corporations – “we know better than you, which is why we are taking away your control”.
@Alfman
First, the Developer Edition channel can allow side-loading but isn’t nightly.
Second, the unbranded builds just call themselves “Nightly”. If you actually look at “About Firefox” you should see that they’re not receiving updates from the nightly channel even though the branding is “Nightly”.
Third, if you *really* want something that says Firefox but allows disabling signature verification, both the official Mozilla ESR-channel builds and Distro-made builds such as the ones Canonical makes for Ubuntu will do that for you.
ssokolow,
They are not the same version of firefox with restrictions removed, they are unstable builds with experimental features and additional data collection. In mozilla’s own words:
I’ve tried those builds before, but let’s be clear, these builds are really meant for people working on/with mozilla’s code base.to test mozilla’s upcoming changes. There’s nothing wrong with this, but you really become an alpha/beta tester for mozllla at that point. 99% of the time you this is not what you want even as a web / extension developer. What we really need is to use and test against the *same* browser that users & clients are using and from our point of view it isn’t reasonable to corral us into unstable builds to get back the freedoms that got taken away.
Yes, it’s true that you can get the enterprise builds that don’t have the restrictions, which is probably the best option with the caveat that it’s almost a year and a half behind the mainline browser that most users are running. Also, unless you are in an enterprise setting it’s unlikely your users will be running the enterprise version. It’s really a shame we can’t just get the *same version* of the browser without restrictions, since that would go a long way towards respecting user choice..
My preferred workaround is one that you mentioned, skip mozilla’s builds and use 3rd party builds instead (yay open source code), but that doesn’t lessen my disappointment in mozilla impeding user freedoms with its own builds.
As an aside: Enterprise systems are typically the most restricted environments, so I find it ironic that the enterprise build is the least restricted. Still, it’s nice to be exempted from the restrictions imposed on standard users, microsoft does the same thing with windows 10 enterprise Standard user=”what you want is irrelevant to us”. Enterprise user=”oh you want to do this, let me get out of your way” Haha.
Have vivaldi implemented native scrollbars yet or is the ui still a hodgepodge that looks out of place on everything except w10 default theme?
Uhh… I have no idea. I still use the win 2000 style look on win7. It looks OK to me, but I don’t know what you mean with “hodgepodge”.
I used Firefox since when it was called Phoenix and Firebird, but some time during the Firefox 3.x days I switched to Chrome, because it was just so much faster. I tried new Firefox versions about once a year but always found them sluggish, with lots of stuttering and micro-freezing. When reading about the upcoming “Firefox Quantum” I installed the 57 beta and since then I have once again been a fan of Firefox. Now I use it every day on all computers and I love it! Current versions are super fast and super stable and the new extension API has evolved enough to allow most of the missing old extensions to be ported or reimplemented.
There are a few things that currently keep me on Firefox:
AFAIK no other browsers let you put the bookmark toolbar next to the address field. It’s great to have a few bookmark folders (with separator lines in them!) on the main toolbar, not having to waste vertical screen estate with a full bookmark toolbar.
AFAIK, no modern versions of other browsers have a rich enough extension API to allow extensions like Torrent Control that will catch clicks on links to .torrent files and automatically send them to for example Transmission.
AFAIK, only Firefox has builtin custom proxy support, allowing you to have proxy settings specific to the browser instead of system-wide. I have a custom proxy.pac to redirect both the work intranet and my home LAN to ssh tunnels. There is also the FoxyProxy extension for those who don’t want to write a .pac file, which is rock solid on Firefox but incredibly buggy in Chrome.
Firefox Multi-Account Containers (official extension by Mozilla) let me have for example my work Google mail/calendar/drive tabs next to my personal Google mail/calendar/drive tabs, and my banking sites in a cookie jar separate from everything else. I can right-click links and choose “Open in container -> Personal/Work/Banking/Shopping/etc” and also make some sites always open in a specific container.
Containers are awesome! I love them for testing websites.
There’s nonsense like that right below this article. Or have you blocked the Zergnet content recommendation widget that’s embedded right below the article? Clean up the garbage on your own site before you complain too loudly about others’.
The recommendations I’m seeing here on OSAlert are currently about some BS brainwave-language-tech (the photo is really just a pair of Google Glasses), made-up celebrity gossip, and I think the last one is either trying to sell me a magical microwave oven or a male prostitute.
I am back full-time with Firefox. Just like most of you, I have been using it before version 1.0. Then I switched to Chrome (on & off) for years. To be honest, what made me switch back to FF was the threat no to allow adblockers in Chrome. FF might not be perfect, but it feels like the only browser to stand up to Chromium. it makes sense to help! I am willing to accept a certain level of inconvenience for that. That said, I still open chrome every now & then, specially since certain banks don’t work well. with FF.
Brave didn’t really convince me. It’s good, but it being Chromium makes it irrelevant. Either you’re resisting, and you’re not Chromium, or then if you’re Chromium, why not just go all in & use Chrome?
I enjoy Sync, I use FF in Windows, Linux, mac & Android.
Folks need revenue to develop software, and Firefox is open source. Open source has to solve this problem, and very few people are talking about it.
Everyone’s talking about it. Everyone has been talking about it since, at least, the 90s.
1) Don’t try to sell a building block.
2) Don’t give away features people are willing to pay for/Build lots of things around it which make people’s lives easier and charge for it.
3) Don’t put software out under a FOSS license if you have any designs on making money off of it.
Mozilla’s problem is they’re a 501c3 competing with Google’s Chromium/Chrome team, which doesn’t have to be profitable because it’s one of Google’s many data collection tools, so the browser market has reached the bottom.
I user Firefox for one reason. It has the “Panorama Tab Groups” extension
Firefox is opensource and good enough.
Chrome has a market share that is too high.
That’s reason enough for me to use Firefox. If Firefox had an ultra-dominant market share like >80% and started abusing its position I would use something else.
This whole article is misleading. Firefox didn’t loose its users because it’s not respecting user privacy. It lost and keeps loosing users because Chrome is faster. And it took years and years to bring up FF at least to a comparable level. Not to mention that it crashed every now and then before the Quantum engine came around. Chrome was way more stable.
Keeping Google as the default search engine is not a bad move because Google is not just the most privacy intrusive but it’s still the best search engine with the most relevant results. Maybe because it’s privacy intrusive.
Average users don’t care that much about privacy, just look at how many users Facebook still has. There’s news about data breaches, ignoring privacy every week from these giant companies. Do you hear about masses switching from Alexa or Siri to something else because Apple and Amazon let their contractors listen to actual recorded conversations/voice commands? I don’t.
Besides for the privacy conscious there’s a much easier choice: just switch to Brave. It does the same things Chrome does without recording your ever move on the web.
Mozilla only has itself to blame for this. Their only, and therefore most important, product is a browser. And they managed to screw that up. For years.
By the way do you know how many browsers Mozilla has? I knew of course two of them: Firefox and Firefox mobile. And there’s a third, probably well-known in tech savy circles, Developer edition. Then there’s of course the nightly edition and the ESR. They’re probably making some money off the latter.
Why is there a beta? Why do they have a VR version? And a VR chatroom? And what do they have to do with IoT? I don’t have a VR goggle but as far as I understand they are designed to be gaming platforms not a primary way to interact with a computer.
They act like a company without a vision. Or leadership. Trying things left and right and developing them until they are interesting. But not making any money off of them.
Agreed. They need to make the browser engine the best possible. That means fast and not a memory hog. Adding more and more features is not what brings users and they aren’t worth anything if the browser is slow and janky
I love Firefox but I think its biggest problem is on-boarding. Most people I’ve introduced Firefox to will take a single look at it and say “I’m not gonna use that” without touching the keyboard or mouse. The same is not true for other major browsers.
I can’t add much to this debate, as I’m not really in the business of being a professional web developer although I do develop IoT and Cloud based applications mostly collecting and distributing data. So I don’t consider myself a heavy browser dev/user, but a lot of the IoT interfaces do need reliable browsers, so from a end user perspective,………..
I’ve found some of the recent changes and improvements in Firefox a big positive. Speed, reliability and usability seem to have taken some significant steps forward in recent times. I had previously almost abandoned Firefox as a lost cause as it just kept throwing a spanner in the works, but it seems to be back on track at the moment, so much so I’m about to begin trials of the mobile version for our portable device users.
I realise it’s all just spurious comments, it’s tough for browser devs, once the end users turn off their platform they tend to turn off until their current platform stuffs up, not matter how hard you try to win them back it’s a waiting game!