- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmit.online
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmit.online
Can the open source browser get its mojo back before turning into history’s footnote?
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fuck hypertext
“What if, now hear me out, what if we throw out the baby and the bathwater!?”
I read this blog post from jrconlin about leaving Mozilla recently. I really appreciate the tone and insight and I think he hits the nail on the head about their leadership.
Article is fluff, just read the source of info: https://www.firefox.com/en-US/whatsnext/
I like built in ad blocking and further privacy protection. I’d like to see more of it, to firmly establish where firefox stands in the big tech war against personal freedom.
Unpopular opinion - for me Firefox is a joy to use. I appreciate that we still have a strong alternative to web monopoly. Sure things could be better but when was this not true? I’ve used it for many many years and there’s nothing on the horizon that I would consider as alternative.
I don’t think it’s that impopular. I’ve never switched to Chrome or any derivative. I never felt a need to migrate, and with Google tightening rules on extensions, I feel even better standing by FF.
I’ve loathed the higher management giving themselves raises while market share was in free fall, but I have no complains about that piece of software. Over time, all the performance and weight issues have been dramatically improved, so what’s greener on the other side??
Are Firefox fork users not considered firefox users? Without Firefox, the forks cease to exist. LibreWolf, etc users should be considered Firefox users.
We don’t need ai for browsing
Really hoping for the best for this browser. They absolutely need to drop ai as well as reassess their budget distribution. They are vastly overpaying their ceo.
I personally think the report of bleeding users is exaggerated, Most people I know(yes its a biased sample group) have left chrome, and its 50-49 split between brave and firefox, with the 1% being on safari(this metrics includes mobile users) and most of these people have turned on some kind of
do not track/do not send analyticscheckmark, plus people who are miffed about firefox switch to something based on firefox, which imo are just more users of firefox.The more cash Creepy Goose injects into Mozilla, the higher the CEO’s salary will be and the less users there will be. I’d like to thank Mozilla for being a money-sink for about 15 years now. It’s like Creepy Goose has been carrying a tiny ball and chain just so that authorities can say “oh yeah, they have competition”.
Once LadyBird reaches v1, Mozilla will be in deep shit as it won’t be necessary to pay them as a token competitor anymore.
Well of course Firefox is dying. That’s why their leadership was captured by people who used to work at Meta, Alphabet, and Microslop.
I’m bought in. Whatever Firefox is doing is better than Chrome in every way. The VPN feature is useless though. I can’t get any website that I actually care about to work with it turned on. Same with the email and phone number masks (Mozilla features not Firefox specific). Can’t use any Mozilla email/phone mask to work with 90% of the services I use. Amazing ideas in theory, but in practice they’re mostly useless.
Stop cramming AI into the browser and you might get some people back.
Was on FF for years and then they announced AI so i went to WaterFox and have LibreWolf ready just in case WF starts fucking around.
I hope you know that Waterfox and LibreWolf have their fate tied to Firefox, right?
These aren’t hard forks. They consume the engineering efforts of Firefox itself in order to stay relevant. They aren’t developing their own solutions to web standards and CVE patches, except in extreme circumstances.
If Mozilla loses funding for their engineering organization, which is the grand majority of their entire budget, Firefox stops keeping up to date with web standards and security patches and rapidly falls behind. Leaving just Chrome as the only option, or Safari, but I know none of us want to choose Safari.
All the soft forks go with it.
Now, if all the soft forks abandoned their own projects in order to pool their efforts together to maintain a single fork in this scenario, then they might make some success in staving off irrelevancy, which, instead of becoming irrelevant in the course of a couple of years, might take half a decade instead. Which does leave enough time to cobble together enough contributors and a large enough project to keep it afloat.
But I highly doubt that all these various forks will pool their engineering efforts into a single project, at least not immediately and at least not willingly.
If Mozilla loses funding for their engineering organization…
It’s pretty safe to assume they won’t.
Mozilla’s funding is provided by Google. It’s not going to dry up while Google needs to maintain the appearance of a non-monopoly. It’s also the reason Mozilla is so careless with their spending.
Why would that be safe to assume? As far as I can see, the US admin wouldn’t bat an eye if Google had a monopoly on the internet standards.
Just going off a quick glance here I can see the latest Fox corpos buying Roku. There was the Bytedance merger too.
I’m not trying to argue with you, but you seems to have high hopes, and I would like to have some hope myself if you can explain your reasons to me?
Companies have a long history of funding their competitors to avoid looking like monopolies. Microsoft did it for Apple. And while the Trump administration has been allowing more mergers than ever before, two competitors in a single space collapsing into one would be very unprecedented.
But even in a scenario worse than if Google stops contributing to Mozilla, they’ll have three years worth of stored money to draw upon
On the off-chance you have some experience with of, what’s your take on Vivaldi, currently?
(edit: super curious, but how recent of an ex-reddirper would one have to be to downvote a simple request for honest input in a place where they don’t matter? Asking for a friend.)
not as great as Brave but stilla good browser
That is one of the worst alternatives you could have given, might as well say use Chrome, it’s super safe!
My biggest issue with Firefox is that they don’t spend enough on UX design. They need to make an actual Safari competitor and use native code with fluid animations.
The Firefox forks are just so damned good. Zen, Librewolf, and Waterfox are just great.
This assumes a broad misunderstanding I keep seeing here on Lemmy.
These forks rely heavily on Firefox core engineering and development, which, if Firefox dies off, they will no longer have access to, thus relegating them to history as well.
These are not hard forks. These are forks that maintain release parity with Firefox itself, absorbing the grand majority of all engineering efforts into Firefox into their own projects, meaning they are strongly tied to Firefox’s success or demise. And “strongly” is an understatement. We’re talking 95 to 99% of Firefox engineering efforts are consumed by these forks.
So somewhere from 1 to 5% of the engineering effort these forks rely on to continue to stay relevant, secure, performant, and up to modern web standards is provided by their contributors.
Keeping Firefox up-to-date with web standards and security is an engineering nightmare. I mean, just look at Safari.
Having forks is awesome, but sitting back on our haunches, believing that they are safe, independent browser developments is absurd.
Firefox has to die because Mozilla is a shitty org. All they care about it money. The money from Creepy Goose is just too much. The devs should move on to Servo, Ladybird, or a Firefox fork. The users will follow.
I understand the relationship between Firefox and the forks. What I meant by my comment is that I suspect that a lot of their loss in users might be because of people going to the forks rather than the main product.
I totally agree and thought about going back to plain Firefox multiple times, but I would like to argue that if you can do it better than Mozilla at basically 0 budget, that is kind of on Mozilla.
Take Librewolf and Ironfox. They have clearly shown that there is an audience for hardened/privacy first Firefox. Mozilla can capture this audience very easily: Offer it yourself.
I really don’t feel like researching all the settings I need to change to arrive at a Librewolf-ish level of privacy. I also think Librewolf could still do better. And I think Mozilla should do it better than them.
Could everything these forks do be done as an extension?
No, the changes are made at compile time and extensions don’t have access to modify many of the features being stripped out by forks.
I don’t think that’s what they implied, but you’re right. And it sucks.
Downstream. WaterFox et. al. are downstream of Firefox. “Soft” and “hard” forks are not a thing.
A hard fork means that a project forks and then doesn’t take upstream patches any longer. That absolutely happens all the time. Not for the Firefox downstreams, which are all soft forks, but those concepts are a thing.
The problem is that they take their sweet time incorporating security updates.
Dont believe the article at all. Everyone I talk to is switching back to Firefox. I never left.
Mozilla’s own numbers tells the same story. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
Didn’t know they have those data. Some c/dataisbeautiful material here!
Some things are really interesting. I’d expect more people with extensions, but the majority don’t use. I’d also expect more linux users, but it seems the popularity among linux users is about same level as the general users. It’s also interesting to see a reasonable amount of 32 bit systems
I’d say it’s not clear if those numbers include FF forks that still use Firefox auth and sync or not.
By default it does as they send baseline telemetry to Mozilla servers, unless fork or individual user disables it. That said, many privacy oriented forks do disable it by default so they wouldn’t be counted.
Those look like the numbers of the telemetry endpoints, and that’s the first thing most forks remove.
Both are true, I’m not sure I’d call it “millions per month” though…
Usage has been slowly dropping year on year since 2022 but also this year usage is up
Looks basically the same to me in absolute numbers (although good luck getting a clear picture here), lower percentage of relative users.
In the same 12 months, Brave reported a 33% increase in monthly active users.
screenshots
(That small rise in the previous screenshot is 2.33%)
Brave
88100000 to 117600000
I was with Netscape 1.0. Never left.
Mosaic.
Never left.
(btw)
I never finished downloading Netscape from the university gopher because my roommate took the phone cable. And they only had 24 connections available to the while place.
Same, and I personally know two people who I would describe as college educated white-collar folks, but definitely not into “tech”, who recently told me they switched to Firefox.
