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...
  • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9 days

    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
      9 days

      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
        9 days

        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).

        • warm@kbin.earth
          9 days

          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
              9 days

              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.

              • Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                8 days

                I do agree Chrome was the better browser, hell I switched to it primarily after a few years because of how much faster it was.

                I don’t really think that’s the case anymore though, Chrome has been enshittifying for years now, and in my experience, they’re pretty on-par, except of course I can use extensions without the impending doom spectre on Firefox and on mobile.

                • warm@kbin.earth
                  8 days

                  Exactly. I also swapped, it was just so much better back then.

                  I use Firefox now, but they don’t seem to know what they want to do with it. Speed wise it’s fast, it’s more private, it has good extension support. I think they could have leaned into features like Firefox Send, added a P2P mode, people would have used a built-in file sharing thing with good support to it. Pocket was nice, maybe they could have evolved it some way.

                  They just never really tried to give the browser an identity I feel like.

                  “Why would I swap to Firefox?” All I can say is, it’s more private (after toggling settings off, ugh). Most don’t care about consolidation of the web to one engine.

                  Most of us caring more about FOSS and privacy, use forks like Librewolf and we will probably all end up on a Servo browser.

                • Victor@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  8 days

                  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.

      • Alaknár@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        8 days

        but it won’t make the money people happy

        “The money people” is Google which is bankrolling Firefox so that it won’t have to divest Chrome under monopoly laws.

    • SirEDCaLot@lemmy.todayEnglish
      8 days

      If I was Mozilla CEO I know exactly what I would do. I would double down on the users.

      Immediately put out a press release that Mozilla will not for as long as I’m in charge make one single dime selling user data. Put in our very corporate charter that we are required to collect as little data as possible to make our products work. Also make a public promise that any AI features which aren’t 100% local will require a very big opt-in and we will try to avoid shipping any such things at all.

      Focus on speed. Chrome started getting market share in the first place because they advertised it could render a web page in under 100ms. So that’s what I would shoot for. Screw everything else, the main rendering parts of the browser should be fast, threaded, and stable.

      Part of that would be to include some script selection processes in the browser itself. This would partially be like an ad block but more like a priority system. Right now you go to a news website and there’s a good chance you’re pulling tens of megabytes of JavaScript that tracks everything and actually runs a fucking auction in your browser where advertisers are bidding on the right to show you an ad. This does not help the user. So I would focus on developing a system that identifies what JavaScript code renders the bulk of the web page and what is for things like ads, the add code goes dead last. That way the content of the page loads very quickly.

      Then I would basically license ublock origin and include that functionality in the browser itself. I would throw Dev time at optimizing the hell out of that. And that would be one of the questions asked at first run, do you want to block advertisements? If user says yes then ublock is enabled. That alone will probably get a shit ton of users, because it will do the same thing as Chrome did years ago, just make the experience of web surfing better.

      I would stop reinventing the UI every two years.

      • Flagstaff@programming.devEnglish
        8 days

        If I was its CEO, I would endorse AdNauseam as an official, built-in, opt-out ad-blocker.

        • Alaknár@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          8 days

          opt-out

          Not two months ago I was downvoted to oblivion on this community when arguing with someone who claimed that any feature being opt-out is bloat and dark patterns.

  • zebidiah@lemmy.caEnglish
    8 days

    The browser is losing millions of users a month… To forks of Firefox!

    The browser isn’t the problem, it’s actually the feature. The enshitification layer is the problem

  • deczzz@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    8 days

    Millions? The link to the “source” is an article about shake to summarize feature on iOS. Nothing about the loss of users… Click bait as per usual.