At the end of 2008, Firefox was flying high. Twenty percent of the 1.5 billion people online were using Mozilla’s browser to navigate the web. In Indonesia, Macedonia, and Slovenia, more than half of everyone going online was using Firefox. “Our market share in the regions above has been growing like crazy,” Ken Kovash, Mozilla’s president at the time, wrote in a blog post. Almost 15 years later, things aren’t so rosy.
Across all devices, the browser has slid to less than 4 percent of the market—on mobile it’s a measly half a percent. “Looking back five years and looking at our market share and our own numbers that we publish, there’s no denying the decline,” says Selena Deckelmann, senior vice president of Firefox. Mozilla’s own statistics show a drop of around 30 million monthly active users from the start of 2019 to the start of 2022. “In the last couple years, what we’ve seen is actually a pretty substantial flattening,” Deckelmann adds.
The decline and potential demise of Firefox is a massive problem that everybody seems to be kind of tiptoeing around, too afraid to acknowledge that if Firefox were indeed to disappear, we’d be royally screwed. We’d end up right back where we started 20 years ago, with Chrome being the new IE6, but with the big difference that Chrome isn’t bad enough yet for people to care.
The situation is especially dire for the Linux world, and I feel like a lot of Linux users, developers, and distribution makers simply aren’t thinking about or preparing for a future where they can’t rely on Firefox anymore. Aside from Firefox, there really isn’t any browser out there that takes Linux seriously, and this is a big problem. Chrome is a disaster on Linux – it doesn’t even do something as basic as video acceleration unless you use one of the third party, custom maintained versions of Chromium, and, of course, it’s a vessel for Google’s advertising business. Things like the Gnome Browser or KDE’s Falkon can barely be taken seriously, and on top of that, are based on Apple’s WebKit, which isn’t a great position to be in either – and that’s it. There’s nothing else.
The desktop Linux world is playing with fire by being so reliant on Firefox, and now that Firefox and Mozilla seem to be in some serious dire straits, I’m dumbfounded by the fact nobody seems to be at all preparing for what happens if Mozilla ever truly goes down.
Thom Holwerda,
I’m also vocal about these concerns, but more often than not the reaction seems to be one of “I don’t like mozilla anyways”, even here in the osnews comments. While I don’t agree with everything mozilla has done, to me the demise of such a significant FOSS alternative is far graver than any of the gripes we had with mozilla. People liked to complain about mozilla’s practices, but their downfall seems like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. I agree with you Thom: we’re not going to be better off without mozilla, it will be a sad day for me if that comes to pass.
Actually, it’s more like out of the frying pan into the volcanic crater filled with blazing upwelling lava.
Alfman,
Okay this brings memories. It all came from Mosaic browser back in the day (way before my time). One person from the team went onto founding Netscape, while another went to Microsoft to write Internet Explorer. Basically both of them shared the same rendering engine for a long while.
And, the story is better told here: https://www.news-gazette.com/news/mosaic-started-web-rush-internet-boom/article_a459cd7f-dafe-5de4-a5fe-c3723a009af2.html
I don’t think any Mosaic derived engines are alive anymore. Mozilla now has their Gecko, which is brand new. Anything else (Webkit/Safari and Blink/Chrome/Edge/Opera) all derived from the older KHTML/Konqueror code base.
Why did I tell the story?
Sorry, I left out the context. I actually met and worked with one of these people.
The problem is not Linux world’s reliance on Firefox (is that even true?). If Firefox was to disappear today, remaining Firefox users would simply switch to one of Chromium-based alternatives. It is the web’s over-reliance on blink and webkit that is a problem. This was what Firefox has managed to change in IE days but back then it was Firefox team that was lean and Microsoft team in disrepair, not the opposite. Today, we have to accept duopoly as the next best thing, even if both Google and Apple are evil in their own ways. Firefox no longer plays a role in here.
Mozilla has long since lost its leaders and stopped being user-centric. They are now a weird mishmash of ideas, everything from copying Google, pushing their own services no one was asking for, superficial improvements, often more annoying than useful, being slow to improve performance, spending time and resources mostly on office politics. I am not exaggerating, they have pretty much killed their Android browser with just one user-hostile update. These are all signs of a corporation that has overgrown its charter. Literally, one could take away all the Google money, shrink the team by 90%+ and end up with much better and much more focused teams and products.
Early growth of Firefox was fueled with just 3 features: tabs, being light and not being IE. This is all gone, though. Google did what they do best – copied this model and improved on it. Of course, they have also plugged it into their user tracking machine – they are not doing it for free.
Today there are now only 2 features Google and Apple cannot or don’t want to copy: privacy and openness. I don’t expect Mozilla to deliver on that, though – they would have to reorganize themselves and forget Google money. The way it works in business, it is far more likely they will simply run their company into the ground and only then a new team/project will emerge (or not).
So true, and not an exaggeration. They absolutely ruined Firefox for Android with the version 79 upgrade, both with the UI and by jettisoning their *entire* expansive extension infrastructure and leaving users to choose between… six (6) “vetted” extensions. But all in the name of security and streamlining the user experience…. The day they pull that same nasty trick with the desktop version I’m gone. And that’s despite me being a staunch Linux user and constant user of Firefox for around 20 years, ever since it was in beta and called Phoenix.
rahim123,
I agree with these points. No one was asking for those changes. We complained but mozilla wouldn’t listen. Mozilla was determined to copy the restrictions and UIs of it’s competitors and forcing them upon us without considering what we thought. So yes, there’s definitely bad blood there for ignoring us. But here’s the thing though, they took those cues from google, apple, and microsoft who routinely push anti-features against user interests as well. Mozilla isn’t unique in this regard. Even with mozilla gone things aren’t getting any better with respect to our gripes. So even though I don’t excuse their behaviors and anti-features, I still think it is foolish to ignore the dangers of a couple dominant corporations in control over everything.
I totally agree with your assessment of the dangers. Unfortunately I think that scenario is already playing out to due to other factors besides browser usage trends, and Google has already established itself as the self-appointed custodian of the web.
For example, I created and maintain a large and active web forum that has basically used the same theme since I started over 10 years ago. Google has been consistently pestering and threatening me for years that they will de-rank the site in their search results if I don’t make it “responsive” and “mobile friendly” and generally buzzword-compliant. The thing is, despite it not being technically a “responsive” design, it works just fine in mobile browsers with minimal effort, and my users are generally happy with it. Also the site operates in a small enough niche that there’s not really a lot of competition for them to de-rank me against. So I’ve been resisting Google’s pressure thus far, but the vast majority of webmasters don’t have that luxury and are forced to bend under Google’s harassment. The situation is similar with Google’s insistence on HTTPS everywhere with potential de-ranking for non-compliant users, when encrypted sessions for the nature of my website’s content is absolutely laughable. Then there’s the issue of Google Adsense, which unfortunately is what motivates a huge sector of the websites that exist today. Google Adsense requires GDPR compliance with the typical annoying banners that all my users and visitors hate, despite my site not falling into that jurisdiction. Very ironic given the fact that I do absolutely nothing with cookies or logs or user data beyond what is strictly necessary for the site to function, whereas no explanation is needed about Adsense’s egregious privacy violations. So Google has positioned itself as a web bully that forces unwanted paradigms on small-fry web properties that have no choice but to comply, or else be driven into obscurity.
Then there’s the issue of website and web app designers that simply target and test Blink and WebKit and call it a day. This is especially evident with many WebRTC (browser-based audio/video communication) platforms that claim they don’t support Firefox. And it’s particularly ironic given that Firefox helped to pioneer the WebRTC protocol and included good support for it well before anyone else. Many times a useragent spoof makes those sites work perfectly well on Firefox, which is proof that it’s pure laziness/cheapness on the part of the developers. But when you try to connect to a 10:00 meeting at 9:55 and are met with a “We don’t support your browser” message, the tendency is to simply open Chrome and get it over with.
The comparisons with the IE6 monopoly are complicated. The IE6 thing happened because it came by default with the world-dominant OS and due to its deep integration with Windows DLLs it was by far the fastest and most efficient browser in the context of the huge processor and RAM constraints that existed at the time. It would launch in 2 seconds on my Windows 98 SE installation, whereas Mozilla under Linux on the same hardware would take over 30 seconds and then start thrashing the swap partition. Phoenix/Firefox reduced that time to maybe 12 seconds. So IE6 was simply the most viable (if not the “best”) browser at the time, so developers targeted it and started the cycle that let to that monoculture. Fast forward 10 (?) years, and Chrome/Chromium were just unbelievably faster to launch the program and render pages compared to IE and Firefox at the time, which helped them gain a foothold. From there I believe that Blink-based browsers have mainly attained their status due to the rise of Android combined with the increasing pressure of the juggernaut that is Google.
Yep, I totally agree with your assessment of the dangers. Unfortunately I think that scenario is already playing out to due to other factors besides browser usage trends, and Google has already established itself as the self-appointed custodian of the web.
For example, I created and maintain a large and active web forum that has basically used the same theme since I started over 10 years ago. Google has been consistently pestering and threatening me for years that they will de-rank the site in their search results if I don’t make it “responsive” and “mobile friendly” and generally buzzword-compliant. The thing is, despite it not being technically a “responsive” design, it works just fine in mobile browsers with minimal effort, and my users are generally happy with it. Also the site operates in a small enough niche that there’s not really a lot of competition for them to de-rank me against. So I’ve been resisting Google’s pressure thus far, but the vast majority of webmasters don’t have that luxury and are forced to bend under Google’s harassment. The situation is similar with Google’s insistence on HTTPS everywhere with potential de-ranking for non-compliant users, when encrypted sessions for the nature of my website’s content is absolutely laughable. Then there’s the issue of Google Adsense, which unfortunately is what motivates a huge sector of the websites that exist today. Google Adsense requires GDPR compliance with the typical annoying banners that all my users and visitors hate, despite my site not falling into that jurisdiction. Very ironic given the fact that I do absolutely nothing with cookies or logs or user data beyond what is strictly necessary for the site to function, whereas no explanation is needed about Adsense’s egregious privacy violations. So Google has positioned itself as a web bully that forces unwanted paradigms on small-fry web properties that have no choice but to comply, or else be driven into obscurity.
Then there’s the issue of website and web app designers that simply target and test Blink and WebKit and call it a day. This is especially evident with many WebRTC (browser-based audio/video communication) platforms that claim they don’t support Firefox. And it’s particularly ironic given that Firefox helped to pioneer the WebRTC protocol and included good support for it well before anyone else. Many times a useragent spoof makes those sites work perfectly well on Firefox, which is proof that it’s pure laziness/cheapness on the part of the developers. But when you try to connect to a 10:00 meeting at 9:55 and are met with a “We don’t support your browser” message, the tendency is to simply open Chrome and get it over with.
The comparisons with the IE6 monopoly are complicated. The IE6 thing happened because it came by default with the world-dominant OS and due to its deep integration with Windows DLLs it was by far the fastest and most efficient browser in the context of the huge processor and RAM constraints that existed at the time. It would launch in 2 seconds on my Windows 98 SE installation, whereas Mozilla under Linux on the same hardware would take over 30 seconds and then start thrashing the swap partition. Phoenix/Firefox reduced that time to maybe 12 seconds. So IE6 was simply the most viable (if not the “best”) browser at the time, so developers targeted it and started the cycle that let to that monoculture. Fast forward 10 (?) years, and Chrome/Chromium were just unbelievably faster to launch the program and render pages compared to IE and Firefox at the time, which helped them gain a foothold. From there I believe that Blink-based browsers have mainly attained their status due to the rise of Android combined with the increasing pressure of the juggernaut that is Google.
In fairness, there are now many more than 6 addons available, and in Nightly you can add any addons you like. But I agree, this was a huge hit to what made Firefox on Android actually better than Chrome on Android, and it’s not really fixed yet.
Look I’m sorry but I 100% understand why Firefox is dying and this is from someone that uses Firefox daily but is testing other browsers (currently leaning towards Icedragon or maybe Pale Moon) and ya know what? Its REALLY hard not to give a shrug and just walk away from a company that said “We do NOT need you filthy user peasants, we have degrees and are smarter and better and more virtuous than you!” and then start crying when everyone walks away and are left in the dustbin of history.
From the God awful UI changes (Seriously go try Seamonkey and see how much nicer Firefox USED to be, the UI is so much more simple and sane and not buried under 20 sub menus) to the obvious cribbing of Chrome to running off the extension devs that made FF worth using (seriously they should have worked on a sandbox for extensions or some sort of Rosetta style layer) to the virtue signalling that ran off most of the users that had hung around after all the above disasters? The company known as Mozilla didn’t die….it committed suicide by nibbling on the barrel of a shotgun while flipping off its user base!
So I’m sorry but I can see why so many have no more shits to give about Mozilla dying, its like they stood on the train tracks with everyone warning them FOR YEARS that a train would end up coming down the track but they just threw up their nose and told us we were idiots for “not getting it”…well you got it Mozilla, right in the face. RIP.
That’s is in fact no different than it was with IE6. It was great until it “won” and Microsoft basically disbanded the team. The bad press IE6 gets is from years later when it became an unmaintained dinosaur.
IMO, the difference is actually in that that MS just wanted people to use Windows instead of the web. Google on the other hand wants total control of the web, which is a much more dangerous situation. MS stopped developing IE which allowed Mozilla to catch up. Google will not make that mistake.
The problem with Firefox is Mozilla.
Or more precisely: Mitchell Baker
To quote Wikipedia:
“In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008.[14] On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated “I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That’s too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to.”
By 2020, her salary had risen to over $3 million. In the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic.”
But at least we now have the “most colorful Firefox ever”, which is unable to use the accent-color in windows.
And it still doesn’t come with an integrated ad-blocker.
It’s Carly Fiorina all over again…
Winifred Mitchell Baker is precise, she goes by Mitchell Baker. A former lawyer.
https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
https://www.ghacks.net/2020/08/11/mozilla-lays-off-250-employees-in-massive-company-reorganization/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22059281
A virtue-signalling tech leader who took a self-awarded 400% payrise while at the same time doing a sub-optimal job, why I am not surprised?
At this point, virtue-signalling is for tech leaders what adding a sunflower to the corporate logo is for oil giants (see: BP).
Just to be clear, I think Eich should have never been proposed for CEO of Mozilla considering his views on Proposition 8. But that was back then. This doesn’t change the fact that the Mozilla of today is concerned more about politics (internal and external, but mostly internal) than their products. This is what you get when you have a bureaucracy at the helm instead of technical people: they do what they know (politics).
Given that Brave is doing fine, I’m not sure if Eich should not have been proposed because of a personal view that he is entitled to have.
He had a vision. And this vision is working, in a sharp contrast with what we see from Mozilla.
Brave is falling deep down the crypto rabbit hole, I find it hard to consider it “fine”.
Hold on, you complain that Mozilla is guided by politics yet you would oppose a CEO based on his politics? Self-awareness much?
When you are a non-profit that relies on goodwill, some amount of politics is needed when it comes to CEO selection. But the CEO itself should be technically inclined regardless, because if you appoint a lawyer, you will get political nonsense (aka what they know to do) as the company’s output.
The article states this is a problem for Linux but I would say the current status quo is also a problem for Linux. Firefox has crappy performance on Linux in my experience. It performs fine on a Mac and on Windows. But on Linux any Chrome based browser feels a lot snappier. Firefox may have the video acceleration but it’s failing in some other way.
When/on which distro was your experience? I’ve not noticed any performance differences across all supported Firefox platforms (having used Firefox on Fedora, Ubuntu and Linux Mint, plus Android, Mac and Windows).
Ubuntu and Manjaro. I note in the comments a couple of other people mention it too, so I don’t think it’s just some odd setup I’ve got.
Yeah, it’s maybe since they moved it to a Snap… Last time I used it on Ubuntu was prior to that change, I guess.
Manjaro doesn’t use snap for Firefox. It’s not the startup time that’s a problem anyway, it’s the rendering time and things like the smoothness of scrolling and rendering. I’ve tested (just visually) Firefox, Chrome and Brave on all three platforms. On Mac and Windows Brave is fastest but it’s barely noticeable. On Linux Brave and Chrome are noticeably better, quality of life better. It’s actually embarrassing because I want to use Firefox.
I’m a Firefox user on Mac, Windows, Linux and Android, having “outgrown” a Chrome phase. I love that Firefox Sync “just works” at least as well as Chrome Sync, but independent of the Googleverse. I love that Facebook tabs are fenced in and my Facebook account isn’t auto-logged-in everywhere else. I love the wide array of extensions. The developer tools have evolved to become at least as good, and in some cases (CSS inspection) even better than Chrome’s. And the performance is fantastic thanks to the new rendering engine built with Rust.
Due to Chrome’s gradual bloat and Firefox’s privacy perks, as well as the desire to continue to support an open web, Firefox is the browser I’ve started to recommend to everyone. I highly recommend every Firefox-loving OSAlert reader do the same: we are the tech nerds who people trust for recommendation! And it’s partially our fault that Chromium’s market share got to where it is in the first place.
I totally agree with this. Using Firefox on Windows, macOS and Android and enjoying its sync feature.
And what about Waterfox ?
Currently using Firefox with the intention of keeping them alive. Learn it the hard way with GPU back in the late 90s/early 2000, the demise of one graphics accelerator company after another and now consumer are left with AMD/Ati & Nvidia. It’s a huge price to pay.
I have been a die-hard Firefox user since before it was called that. I never bought into Chrome. I use Firefox on my Mac ( not Safari ). I use Firefox on my iPhone. I do not use Brave and have ranted to many about avoiding the Chromium monoculture.
I am ashamed to admit that I have been running Microsoft Edge on Manjaro Linux lately. It is where I am typing this comment.
The main reason is that, on Linux at least, Firefox does not work with half the video conference apps I need to use every day. Both Edge and Firefox use memory like crazy but Firefox was causing me to actually run out and cause my drive to thrash. I have not had that happen in years. There are many sites where Firefox just does not seem to work well anymore. Sadly, when I am using my computer for work, I cannot afford that.
I started by running both Edge and Firefox and using Edge just for video conferencing but I have found myself using Edge more and more. Just last week, I realized that I went a full day without using Firefox. This week, I have not used Firefox at all.
Firefox has not lost me ( yet ). At least, I hope not. I still think the Chromium monoculture is something to be worried about. I still really like the idea of Firefox. I am attracted to the the idea of a browser with Rust in it. Things are looking grim though. I certainly never would have thought that a Microsoft browser on Linux would be winning me over though. What a crazy timeline.
With Rust and Servo they did a good job. But I agree with you about the woke nonsense.
https://research.mozilla.org/rust/
The fact that firefox is now a snap on ubuntu by default also isn’t helping. Aside from the performance issues (startup), it is quite unstable. It crashes often.
I’ve been using firefox for years. I don’t feel like switching any time soon. Performance is much better than it used to be, and aside from the snap nonsense, i haven’t had that much problems with stability.
Firefox has some great features (social media fencing, anti tracking, the reader, etc) and an awesome plugin ecosystem.
It’s just great.
What’s not so great is the company.
I really don’t care about gen Z wokeness issues. I don’t give a rat’s ass about pronouns.
No, i don’t want to use your vpn..
Please stop making political statements and stop taking a stance in matters that really do not concern a company.
If we could keep firefox (the browser), but get rid of the company … that’d be just swell.
I really can’t get what all this b*tthurt about “wokeness” and pronouns is about, It just seems that someone gets offended too easily, and I’m not talking about “snowflakes” but grown men.
I don’t necessarily agree on Notepad++ author’s views on China but I won’t stop liking and using that software for such reason, nor I will complain about them.
“Wokeness” is a great way to keep people at their toes and silence any criticism while at the same time coming out as the better person.
It’s the reason why tech leaders such as Mitchell Baker (who took a self-awarded 400% payrise while at the same time Firefox’s market share cratered) are deploying loads of it.
Anyone who dares criticize Mitchell Baker for the above, or criticize the fact Firefox doesn’t take measures to meaningfully differentiate from Chrome, risks being called “a bigot who doesn’t want a female leader in tech”.
How about wanting a female leader in tech that leads towards a differentiated Firefox with integrated ad-block, integrated GDPR consent setup, integrated video downloading and other things like that?
Instead, Mozilla is letting Google make Firefox less and less important, until they are confident to terminate sponsorship, and then what?
Just to be clear, I think Eich should have never been proposed for CEO of Mozilla considering his views on Proposition 8. But that was back then. This doesn’t change the fact that the Mozilla of today is concerned more about politics (internal and external, but mostly internal) than their products. This is what you get when you have a bureaucracy at the helm instead of technical people: they do what they know (politics).
That Firefox is a snap on Ubuntu is more of an Ubuntu issue than anything.
Also, what do you mean “it is quite unstable. It crashes often,” and then immediately after “i haven’t had that much problems with stability”? Is it unstable, or is it stable for you?
Speaking as ex-Linux zealot, the harsh reality is that Linux desktop doesn’t matter at all.
Most people apparently only care about POSIX toys and don’t care what OS runs on their laptop, as long as they can jump into bash, awk, sed and whatever else comes into the package.
The Linux kernel is being used as a free beer POSIX implementation with extras, and that is the only thing that the industry cares about, specially former UNIX shops.
The only Linux kernel based desktop platforms that matter to the general public are ChromeOS and Android, while the Linux community spent the last 20 years arguing and rebooting what the Linux Desktop should be like.
Yeah, and I see no end to this:
OSS → ALSA → PA → PW
Xorg → Wayland (still a big question)
HAL → DeviceKit → Udev
And then don’t get me started on all the libraries which break backwards compatibility all the time.
In general i would say that there are no issues and excuses like i am not competent enough to use it or technical issues or lack of support for something to blame this time. People in general are just acting stupid this time and are listing some stupid excuses to justify their web browser selection decision. A very shortsighted and i won’t say ignorant behavior. As ignorant would assume people are not aware of the consequences when choosing Chrome over Firefox. They are. Yet still they do that and majority couldn’t care less if Firefox will exist tomorrow or not. People in general are happy with Chrome and Google and Facebook and TikTok and YouTube, Gmail … After all it’s all free (and makes us happy). Isn’t it? What more can you ask for. The reality is it’s not free. Majority of internet usage in 2022 is not free. Using it comes with a significant cost. And that cost is you pay the usage with your privacy. There is total lack of public discussion. On things like how this will and can get abused. Total lack of transparency. People in general are just OK with it. Majority craves for more and more “cloud”. An entity such as Mozilla likely must stay silent on underlying issues. As when they get the money from Google. Likely the terms in that contract prevent saying anything “bad” about Google and their practices. And lets face it. If they would do that then they would likely become insolvent soon.
How about preparing for a present where users, developers, and distribution makers can’t rely on Firefox anymore? Slack already doesn’t support videocalls via Firefox, which means that for some web apps, Firefox is already a non-priority.
Not a Desktop Linux user, I use Firefox because its sync feature doesn’t require a Google account (Chrome’ sync does and then defaults to that account for all Google services that you visit, even YouTube) and Firefox also allows the use of VideoDownload Helper.
kurkosdr,
Missing “/sarcasm” tag. It kind of reminds me of 1984. Orwell would call the loss of alternatives “double plus good” haha.
Firefox abandoned what made it special and tried to be a better? Chrome and failed miserably at that. Also I don’t like their “we smart, you dumb” attitude.
People have no idea how important Mozilla is for the infrastructure of the Internet.
– Mozilla creates the primary SSL root certificate store, which is also the one used by all Linux distributions.
– Mozilla is also the one who communicates to sysadmins what the current industry best practice is for enabling or disabling certain protocols and features for SSL/TLS.
– Mozilla is the lead in CA/B Forum (those that make the rules on what a SSL CA and Browsers vendors should adhere to and implement)
– Mozilla leads Let’s Encrypt
– Mozilla employs the most important person when it comes to development of new IETF security protocols like TLS/1.3 and QUIC, etc..
So in case of HTTPS Mozilla has always taken the lead, Netscape was the one that created the first protocol in the first place.
And those were just the fist examples I could think of.
1. Not a lot of work, can be done by pretty much anyone
2. https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/
3. Not a lot of activity to be honest to call it critical or crucial
4. Let’s Encrypt will do just fine without Mozilla
5. A single person? RH will hire them if Mozilla goes down.
Sorry, Firefox is their most important product – it’s the only competitor to Chrome at the moment.
Artem S. Tashkinov,
We’re facing bugs with microsoft TLS1.3 crypto services at work right now and that’s no joke, but at least when there are other alternatives we have options. Whether it’s browsers, TLS/SSL, CAs, we need to consider the cons of monopolies and monocultures. So many people seem to have forgotten the lessons of IE. Consolidation to the point of eliminating competition is a recurring theme in the tech industry and that’s a problem. We should do more to avoid having all our eggs end up in one basket.
Totally agree, seems to me awareness of these things are far to low.
If I’m not mistaken IETF even has rules: need to be multiple interoperable implementations before it gets assigned as a standard. So yes, we need multiple implementations just to have open and free standards which can be interoperable (just open source isn’t enough !). Firefox uses Network Security Services (NSS). Some other projects that use it are Openoffice and descendants (LibreOffice, etc.) and the most used Linux IPSEC stack LibreSWAN uses it, etc.
And OpenSSL project is behind in allowing QUIC implementations based on it, people are using forks for a couple of years now. And people working on forks and IETF standards are wondering if they should just abandon working with them. RHEL needs the FIPS support which OpenSSL seems to get the most development money for and other implementations aren’t certified. So how are we going to combine those interests ? Are (some) Linux distributions going to ship 2 libraries ?
Or people just gonna run a Docker container with NGINX and an OpenSSL fork as a QUIC proxy ?
Yes, people should abandon OpenSSL. Not joking. It’s kind of bad.
Yes. Put OpenSSL into legacy mode, and slowly deprecate it in favor of whatever Google is doing. The Google part is slightly sarcastic, but they do have their boringSSL library which is supposed to be OpenSSL/LibreSSL compatible.
The BSDs should at least have their own crypto library in base since they can have OpenSSL as a dependency in ports. There has been talk by the FreeBSD devs in switching to bearssl (https://bearssl.org/) in base.
We should, but no one cares. Not even those who should care.
Google is the standard, and we should do what Google does. Google used to have a “Don’t be evil.” sign at one time, so they wouldn’t be evil. /s
Flatland_Spider,
I don’t blame the masses who use whatever’s preinstalled or recommended by google and have no tech background. But it’s disappointing to see knowledgeable people shrug off monocultures & monopolies.
With mozilla gone, web standards will play a much smaller role since google will effectively control the browser that nearly everyone will depend on. Chrome will replace standards in much the same way IE did.
As mentioned those are just the ones I could think of at the top of my head, their is a lot more work going on behind the scenes and I think you underestimate at least 3. The CA/B Forum is the only reason (they have their issues to of course) that we have a working HTTPS ecosystem at all. You say CA/B Forum isn’t critical ? This seem odd.
5. Probably Google. They’re pushing the protocol updates after all. RH would probably be fine with running Chromium as default, after porting it to Wayland.
I appreciate you pointing out when FF dies Mozilla’s c-suite will still have things to do and be able to bank an outrageous salary. I was worried for them!
Being important to the infrastructure of the Internet doesn’t seem to be making them money, and the FAANG companies are pumping out more web tech then Mozilla. HTTP/2 and QUIC is from Google for instance. FB/Meta and Twitter produced the most popular web frameworks and toolkits.
Anyway, Mozilla seemed to be the last one representing the people on web standards, and they just sold everyone out with their “Advertising is essential to the web” crap. To Facebook/Meta no less.
Mozilla was supposed to be different and ethical, but they’re not. They’re a sock puppet, and Google doesn’t need their puppet anymore. Best case, Fackbook, MS, or whomever will probably prop them up to buy their committee votes.
Hey Opera ? Still around, guys ? You know when *YOU* lost me ? When you turned into a Chromium “empty” shell.
Your Presto based iterations (up to version 12) were probably not the finest on the web rendering front, but man, it was so damn fast, frugal on memory usage and included everything I needed : mail, chat, download manager, extension, theming, etc. I even paid you support several times since version 6 just to show you my appreciation of your hard work. And guess what ? Getting screwed and loosing everything in the end wasn’t exactly the most pleasant feeling.
And now Firefox…
Opera was amazing prior to Chromification. The fastest full-featured browser I’d ever dealt with.
Opera completely sold out and was basically just chrome but with Chinese based services.
Have a look at Vivaldi, being built for power users by the original team.
The day that Opera choose to become another Chrome is a day to be mourned. And they didn’t even bothered to release Presto to the public to see if someone would take interest, scrapping everything as if all their work since 2003 was just garbage.
They gave up the single sole thing that made them different. And attempting to compete against the likes of Brave, selling themselves as a “private and web3 browser”, while being closed source and a Chinese subsidiary is a lost cause.
Isn’t the Death of Firefox actually the failure of the open source model? Where KHTML/Webkit was branched by those wanting to follow a different direction. Geko never was.
Why are there not multiple projects running on top of gecko like there are on chromium? Adding innovative features and offering alternative directions to those Mozilla are/have
Adurbe,
Actually there are. Firefox has gotten forked as a result of mozilla insisting on removing features, ugly interfaces, blocking extensions, etc. Two I’m familiar with are iceraven on android and waterfox on linux…
https://www.ghacks.net/2021/08/05/is-iceraven-the-better-firefox-for-android-mobile-browser/
https://www.waterfox.net/
The fact that firefox is open source allows 3rd parties to remove the anti-features and create new browsers. But the existence of these forks doesn’t imply long term sustainability without mozilla. Tweaking browser code is far less work than maintaining the whole thing year after year. So I predict these forks will fail if mozilla fails.
They may continue to exist in some form, but without new resources the open bugs, support, compatibility will likely get worse with time. This is kind of what happened to thunderbird, inadequate support has left bugs open for decades (thunderbird was also built on gecko). Old users will continue to use it, but it becomes irrelevant to the internet at large.
Sadly, Thunderbird is still by far the best GUI email client on Linux, and it’s not that great of an email client.
Not really. Open Source works well. Mozilla is a management failure.
FF a failure of a company to build a revenue base, a failure of a company to not slide into complacency, and a failure to build a trust in the brand with consumers.
Mozilla made poor engineering decisions which cost them their leadership position, and ultimately resulted in Google creating Chrome. Poor non-decisions is probably more correct. Mozilla stuck with the single process model way too long, and they didn’t push performance.
Of course, people are still mad about the switch to multi-process which resulted in a mass exodus to Chrome, so I guess we need to look at ourselves on that one. Mozilla probably should have turned Servo in to a legit product and let FF die leaving it to the single-process-4-evah crowd.
Gecko is under the MPL license, and KHTML is under the 2-Clause BSD, for one. License politics.
Apple needed a rendering engine for iOS, and KHTML was smaller then Gecko at the time. Google followed Apple, everyone else followed Google, and here we are.
Chrome’s JS rendering engine was faster then anything else at the time when NodeJS was first built. There was an experiment to build a NodeJS competitor using Mozilla’s Jaeger Monkey engine, which was faster then Google’s JS engine when it came out, but no one cared. NodeJS was the thing to run server side JS, and it added shine to Google’s web cred.
At one time there was. FF was built to be used as a base for cross-platform applications much like Electron is today, and it was used for that at one time. I don’t remember why people stopped using it. Deprecating XUL might have had something to do with it. Not that people liked working with XUL in the first place, from what I heard.
The FF code base is hard to work with from what I’ve heard, and people were thirsty for a taste of that Google magic.
Mostly, Google is a public darling causing people to drool when name dropped, and Mozilla is some company people have never heard of, so it must be bad.
This is mostly about Mozilla being nothing without Google, and Mozilla thinking they were bigger then what they are.
I made two comments here yesterday but one was hidden/removed, disappointed in the hyper censorship stance. I’m a very long time (decade+) lurker on this site. Anyway, here’s a bland alternate:
The Firefox team simply make too many unnecessary and sloppy changes. If you ignore the technology behind the browser, the interface alone have baffled the “Ma&Pa” users who have fallen back (by way of IT boffin relatives) to Chrome and more recently Edge.
Same thing happened to my comment. I guess “certain criticisms” of choices made by the Firefox team aren’t allowed.
And if we can’t have an open conversation about the problems then those problems will never get fixed. Oh well!
Something occurs to me. Was not the greatest strength of open source/free software, as drilled into us again and again and again by its advocates, that anyone could fork it and that the project need not be tied to one person or organization or entity? Perhaps those who care the most about Firefox should let Mozilla go down in flames (a fate which they have earned), come together as a group, and keep Firefox alive themselves. It would be more difficult than complaining in comment forums, of course, but would probably yield better results in the long run.
darknexus,
Just my opinion, but I just don’t see the business model. The tech monopolies can use their respective cash cows to subsidize browser development and distribute below cost, not to mention their inbuilt marketing advantages. In the worst case scenario restrictive platforms like IOS force customers to use a specific browser. There’s no competing with that. Just having source code isn’t enough, FOSS developers still need a way to support themselves. That’s the hard part. Donations are a pittance. Everything mozilla did to generate revenue and distance itself from google was shunned. It may simply be impossible for anyone to provide what people want: build a mature browser that’s well supported and yet doesn’t have any means of funding it’s own development. People have criticized to no end, but I haven’t heard a single sustainable solution that deals with financing.
Even if we cut apart mozilla and restructured into more efficient units, even so we still haven’t solved the business model. So what is the business model?
Mozilla never really had a coherent plan, and discontinued many promising products.
They bought Pocket, but they never did anything with it. They could have integrated it with sync and bookmarks to allow people access to their bookmarks and sessions from wherever. It could have been like delicio,us and pintrist. Add a person search engine to help me find pages in my browser history, and it could have been great.
Persona could have been like Auth0, Okta, or another of the many cloud auth providers. Have personal and business plans, maybe an appliance for on prem, and it could have been a solid product.
Lockwise, Mozilla’s password manager, was gaining traction. Once again, killed way too soon. Really rolled into FF, but the stand alone app is gone.
Sendfile was killed. That was a cool filesharing hosting thing when the email attachment was too big. Filesharing is a giant can of worms, so I don’t blame them. However, it’s dead.
Mozilla’s IoT platform paid off for the companies which picked it up, from what I heard.
Mozilla could have built something like Google Workspace, but they didn’t. Mozilla could have focused on Web Development and built Dev tools, but they didn’t. They could have built something like Electron, but they didn’t. (Mozilla actively broke this. https://lwn.net/Articles/436798/) Mozilla could have a commercial version of Signal for businesses, like Threema, but they don’t. They could have built something like IFTTT, or bought IFTTT, but they didn’t.
As an armchair analyst, I feel they had their chances, but they couldn’t see the forest from the trees.
Another thing which killed Mozilla products is they aren’t easy for people to stand up on their own. There was a lot of interest in keeping the Persona code base going, but I’m not sure anyone built a working version. This seems to been a theme with Mozilla. They’re a FOSS company, but none of their code is community friendly.
A browser by itself isn’t valuable, unless it’s part of an OS or platform. Mozilla had the ideas of building a ecosystem, but they killed the parts which would have made it happen.
The alternative to all of this, which was mentioned by a Mozillian near me, was to become the Apache Foundation of the web. Be a home for things like React, Vue.JS, Bootstrap, npm, etc. This idea was not picked up.
Flatlander_Spider,
The thing is without a sustainable revenue source it’s hard to avoid that outcome, no? A lot of FOSS projects are subsidized by enterprise sales, but how do you convince “rich” businesses to pay for alternative browsers when they’re already using the dominant default ones for free. Paying for alternatives adds costs and maintenance burden – they will still have to support the default browsers anyways.
Microsoft and google are much better positioned to offer enterprise products & services. Maybe mozilla could expand into new computing markets competing with microsoft and google servicing enterprise needs. Then it could use those profits to subsidize the browser. This would be hard to do, but at least it’s an idea. However I’m struggling to see how browsers can be independently viable on their own without some new revenue source.
I agree there’s tons of cool things that can be done, but when there are too few users, especially paying ones, they still need to solve the business model. Creative ideas are always fun to think about but when things costs real money to implement and run and there’s no revenue coming in for them, it creates a sustainability problem heading towards a dead project.
I don’t want anyone to get me wrong, I love innovation and thinking & talking about possibilities. But it’s a huge problem when you have a user base who not only expect things to be free, but who also criticize you if they’re not free of advertising and tracking – everything that your competitors are doing to raise money.
It wasn’t for the lack of trying though. They did try incorporating firefox into an ecosystem.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/why-the-death-of-the-firefox-phone-matters/
We should blame Mozilla’s management for failing, the buck stops with them. But even with the benefit of hindsight it’s hard for me to see what they could have done differently for a drastically different outcome. They failed, just like everyone else did. The competition they are up against are steamrolling over everyone!
Opera had the same market difficulties and had to throw in the towel to become a chromium fork. Even microsoft themselves who have a cash cow (and had a decent edge browser at the end) threw in the towel to become yet another chromium fork. Regarding the firefox mobile platform, nobody has held up remotely well against the apple/google duopoly.
It’s disheartening, but I don’t see to stop the dominant companies from continuing to take over one industry after another. They succeed not because people like them, but because they are revenue positive, which is the only metric that matters when it comes to the survival of the fittest corporations.
Yes, and that could very well happen. RH or Suse could pick up development, or the EU could decide to sponsor FF development provided Mozilla divests itself of FF assests or Mozilla corp goes away.
Yeah, Mozilla has earned it. I’m not switching away from FF, but Mozilla doesn’t have my empathy or loyalty.
I agree. The community rallying around a browser for *nix and alt operating systems would be better then relying on corporations to provide features for the community.
However, I’m more in favor of supporting Servo (https://servo.org/) then trying to rehab the FF codebase. I kind of forgot Servo existed, but it checks lots of boxes. Mainly, it could be small enough to add security features which might be hard to add to FF.