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Ask HN: How can we help Firefox not to dissapear?

by urlwolf on 10/31/23, 1:03 PM with 123 comments

• by numbsafari on 10/31/23, 2:07 PM

  Mozilla needs new leadership, one that is focused on building the userbase, rather than lining their own personal pockets and riding it into the ground. The chair of the board receives 3x the salaries of the rest of the executive leadership combined[1].

  There are so many ways that Mozilla the organization could do more to promote not just a browser, but the open web writ large.

  1: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-990...

• by adhesive_wombat on 10/31/23, 2:06 PM

  I genuinely wonder what the Mozilla leadership think when they see threads like this.

  Do they just not see them and float above the real world in some bubble where a web browser is some abstract thing that has no intersection with reality? Do they know they exist but pretend they don't? Do they scoff and say "they just don't understand, bless them"? Do they scoff and say "those idiots still think we care"?

  How is possible to command generational wealth for the platform: millions upon millions in funding, and the goodwill of nearly all open source enthusiasts, over decades, have the entire community basically unanimous in saying "this is going downhill", see all the metrics agree and still plough onwards and downwards?

  For a friend, how can I get a job like that?

• by AndrewKemendo on 10/31/23, 1:51 PM

  See my long thread here about a month ago:

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37801542

  Bottom line from that thread: The organization supporting Firefox does not have the trust or gravitas left to gain enough competent followers to create the conditions needed to sustain Firefox as a leader

• by JoshTriplett on 10/31/23, 2:09 PM

  Watch for the repeated mentions of "I don't use Firefox because (specific issue)" for which the answer often turns out to be either "that was fixed years ago" or "have you reported a bug so that there's any hope whatsoever of someone fixing it?".

  Don't let Firefox threads turn into a litany of unreported hearsay bugs. Get them reported and fixed.

• by Gualdrapo on 10/31/23, 2:00 PM

  Consider contributing or donating to what was intended to be the replacement of Gecko (Firefox's web rendering engine), Servo.

  https://crowdfunding.lfx.linuxfoundation.org/projects/servo

• by PurpleRamen on 10/31/23, 1:56 PM

  Fix Mozilla. Or fork Firefox and create a team with equal resources. Firefox by itself has lost all selling points which could sway the normal people. And Mozilla is unwilling or unable to add new strength. So at this point there probably is not enough benefits one can use to advertise Firefox and let it win against other browsers.

  But maybe this is also just my impression. Why not start with a website listing reasons and strengths of the different browsers, and research the selling points of browsers and Firefox specifically. Maybe this could be used to figure out which features could be used for advertising, and which features Firefox is missing to compete with others.

• by dangus on 10/31/23, 1:57 PM

  Nothing. The Mozilla Corporation pays for the development of Firefox with:

  1. Google's fee for default search (the vast majority of their revenue)

  2. Paid Firefox services (Mozilla VPN, MDN Plus, etc)

  Remember that there are things we don't have any control over in life. You have no control over the success or failure of Firefox because its financial means of survival are controlled by people who are not you (unless you feel like signing up for a VPN).

  My understanding is that the Mozilla Corporation is doing just fine for itself. They even have some financial information published [PDF]: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202...

• by gal_anonym on 10/31/23, 1:58 PM

  AdBlock on mobile is a Firefox great advantage that everyone can appreciate. You can install it with AdBlock on mobiles your friends and family uses.

• by jpm_sd on 10/31/23, 1:56 PM

  Google is keeping them on life support for anti-trust reasons. What impact do you hope to have?

  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-go...

• by throwawaysleep on 10/31/23, 1:24 PM

  1. Software companies need to support it. My employers both don’t anymore, including one that says it is “socially deprecated.” A bug in Firefox gets closed as “did you try Chrome?”

  2. People need a reason to use it that isn’t privacy. I don’t care about privacy personally and certainly am not changing browsers over it. Could be a killer extension or some new browsing system.

• by ggeorgovassilis on 10/31/23, 1:57 PM

  I'm a long-time, hard-core FF user on all platforms and I admit to having used weird extensions. As time goes by, however, I wonder whether it's worth it. Too many websites break because they aren't tested with FF. I wonder whether it'd be a viable way forward if FF forked Chromium and added the excellent rights & extension management on top. That way no more effort would have to be spent on the rendering or browsing engines, end-user experience would improve (as a result of better web page compatibility) but the things we love about FF (extensions) would still be there?

• by Andrew_nenakhov on 10/31/23, 3:02 PM

  I use Firefox on all my devices, and you'll have to take them feel my dead cold hands before I switch back to chrome. Not only Firefox is the only obstacle that protects us from browser engine monoculture, it is actually superior to chrome (in my experience) on both mobile and desktop.

• by fimdomeio on 10/31/23, 2:16 PM

  Firefox does not have the platforms. If you're for ex: google you have android, google.com... to promote your browser. It's the same for all the big browsers except Firefox. For the average user, I don't know how can Firefox compete with that.

  Too bad Firefox OS did not became a real thing.

• by RcouF1uZ4gsC on 10/31/23, 1:57 PM

  > value the fact that it's preventing a tech monoculture on chrome (dominated by one corporation).

  Actually the company that is preventing a tech monoculture on Chrome is Apple with the mandatory Safari on iOS.

  A company can afford to ignore Firefox, but they can’t afford to ignore iOS.

• by freitzkriesler2 on 10/31/23, 2:14 PM

  The sweet moment in time when Firefox was the dominant browser was a great time. Google really does deserve to lose the antitrust case for chrome. I hate it so dang much.

• by AnonC on 11/1/23, 4:03 PM

  You can evangelize Firefox among your circles and on technical forums (such as HN).

  Beyond that there’s nothing you can do. Firefox is paid for by Mozilla Corporation, whose major revenue source is Google’s search partnership. Initiatives like Mozilla VPN and MDN Premium are minuscule in comparison. These are also not available everywhere and Mozilla Corporation doesn’t seem aggressive enough to create more paid or subscription products that people are willing to pay for.

  Don’t donate on mozilla.org assuming it will help Firefox directly. That goes to Mozilla Foundation to promote the open web. Not a penny from that can go to Firefox development or marketing.

• by jaimehrubiks on 10/31/23, 2:07 PM

  What would happen if Google loses it's currently ongoing antitrust lawsuits? That would mean it cannot keep paying Apple the default search engine fee. But would that mean it cannot keep paying Mozilla the same fee? Effectively halting Mozilla finances?

• by whalesalad on 10/31/23, 1:52 PM

  Continue to use it.

• by ZeroGravitas on 10/31/23, 3:23 PM

  I'm fairly content with how they are doing. I can't think of anything that would let them buy users to compete with the big names, and if they could afford to they'd probably be doing something to tarnish their core values.

  Certainly, almost every suggestion I've read in threads like this over the years is indistinguishable from concern trolling, so it would seem the hive mind doesn't have any good ideas either.

• by alihan123 on 10/31/23, 2:09 PM

  How to save Firefox? Change Mozilla. Mozilla does anything, but a development or advertisement of either Gecko and Firefox. Mozilla wastes too much time on online petitions and asking Big Tech not to be bad and the main source of income they have is Google - Google pays them millions, so it does not surprise me, why doesn't Mozilla wants to get in a way of Google. We need a community like a one of Debian.

• by edoceo on 10/31/23, 2:08 PM

  How much difficulty is there in creating a wrapper that could then host multiple rendering engines in it? Like a browser-wrapper that could switch between the chrome, webkit and firefox engines -- embedded in there some how? Perhaps even some of those more exotic rendering engines as well. Then one could browse with a safer wrapper which manages bookmarks/history/etc and perhaps each could be an isolated container so no profile leakage. You could have one "browser" and then one tab using Chrome/Blink w/o add-ons for YouTube but other tabs using FF engine, or servo or webkit or whatever?

  Is this a thing Rust could do? Or would one need to code this wrapper in C because we'd have to link/embed so many other C projects.

  I'm sure it's very difficult -- but is it impossible?

• by unregistereddev on 10/31/23, 2:17 PM

  1. Use it. I have used Firefox on and off since the early "it's better than IE" days. More users gives them the opportunity for more resources. More users increases the odds of websites testing on it. It's currently my favorite mobile browser, because adblock makes mobile web far more usable.

  2. Test your website(s) on it. Maybe you don't officially support Firefox, and maybe you're not a QA, but if you are a web developer you should use your site in Firefox and fix any bugs you find. Don't give your users a reason to abandon Firefox.

  3. Join the discussion when you disagree with Mozilla's leadership. It may or may not change anything, but large vocal online communities have impacted the direction of large open-source projects before.

• by lproven on 10/31/23, 4:16 PM

  This is my take, but it's just IMHO:

  https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/29/mozilla_asleep_at_whe...

• by Someone1234 on 10/31/23, 2:01 PM

  You cannot. Most of their funding comes from one source: Google, and that is pay per impression largely. Unless they get another large source of funding to offset what they're going to continue to lose, then they will shrink until they disappear.

• by djaahk on 11/1/23, 8:18 AM

  So, trying to unpack the OP's multiple questions a little:

  1. Preventing Firefox going out of business -> as noted by others, Mozilla is actually doing decently well financially, and continues to dedicate a large part of its resources to Firefox -> however given some of its revenue sources, maintaining a certain share of users is important to maintain that state of affairs

  2. Driving more adoption of Firefox -> Most users have pretty simple browsing needs, and a non-negligible share still don't know what a browser is (we all know a few I wager) while still using one daily, -> Competing browsers have semi-exclusive or exclusive distribution channels for their products which help drive their adoption (Google.com, some Android flavours, ChromeOS / Mac and iOS / Windows, Bing, Outlook & Office) -> Thus as with any product, driving adoption could be done by: --A. offering a killer feature many (actual) people care enough about to download the browser for - for most people, this would need to be significant speed or friction reduction (Adblock, etc) which Firefox already does well but perhaps not significantly well enough --B. get users early, i.e. partner with websites, apps and influencers that reach younger users to promote/recommend Firefox and its features, notably on the privacy and personalisation side (themes, meta filter, Adblock, password and history sync, etc) - think some viral Tiktoks on the benefits or simple product placement --C. get a series of not-just-tech ambassadors to promote the browser along with the work of the Foundation, which may be done cheaply as they do have commendable initiatives --D. Partner with like-minded organisations to recommend each other's solutions where possible, e.g. Automattic or such -- etc etc

  Firefox has been my daily driver on all devices for 20+ years. I personally feel it's never been as good as it is now: it's fast, the memory woes are gone, the sync works like a charm, password suggestion and management is seamless, the Android version is great (love the bottom navbar option).

  Probably not perfect - what is - but I just wanted to share a more upbeat comment here, and perhaps one more geared towards the majority of users, who will be less technical and choose their browser's (or better said default to their browser's) for vary different reasons.

• by gc9 on 10/31/23, 2:47 PM

  Complain to website owners about sites that don't work on Firefox. Try to provide detailed steps to reproduce the error, detailed error messages from the console (control meta J), and screenshots.

  I think Firefox enforces some security constraints more strictly than Chrome. One error I've seen often has been blocked resources due to Cross-Origin Resource Sharing without the proper permissions, such as via Access-Control-Allow-Origin headers.

  For security related errors, I emphasize that this is a potential security issue and I use FireFox for its security.

• by jqpabc123 on 10/31/23, 2:09 PM

  What could we do to prevent FF from going out of business?

  *We* don't have any control over the situation.

  What Mozilla *could* do but won't is take a strong stand on privacy by default --- something more than lip service. But their sugar daddy wouldn't approve so they can't.

  In any case, it's probably too late now --- credibility and integrity have been lost.

  Brave is what Firefox could and should have become. Brendan Eich (boo, hiss) grabbed the opportunity that Mozilla intentionally chose to ignore.

• by breckenedge on 10/31/23, 1:52 PM

  FF already went out of business once. It wasn’t the end.

• by nunez on 11/1/23, 1:00 PM

  Most people don't care about what browser they have anymore. The world has moved onto apps, for better or worse. This will only accelerate if we move into AR/VR more seriously.

  I love Firefox, but as long as Safari continues to be the default on iOS and Chrome continues to be the de facto default everywhere else, I don't see much hope for Firefox long term.

• by foul on 10/31/23, 2:26 PM

  By "strangling" its leadership and "strangling" Chromium. That can only be done by doing substantial development without Mozilla's consent and filling niches where Google have no profit. Both are impossible feats though.

  I don't think Mozilla is dead like it seemed a year ago though, obviously nowadays it's as influential (close to zero) as some companies like Atlassian.

• by ceeam on 10/31/23, 2:25 PM

  Gecko should be decoupled from Firefox (embeddable)

  It should support hardware APIs like Web Serial API (their stance that a browser is not an app platform is ridiculous)

  Chromium's huge and underappreciated weakness is that their font rendering on Windows is horrible (at standard 96 DPI anyway), FF could've capitalized on things like that.

• by 28304283409234 on 10/31/23, 4:04 PM

  Fork it into a browser people pay for. Become more successful than Mozilla. Hire Mozilla developers.

• by morsch on 10/31/23, 2:17 PM

  Firefox is up against companies like Microsoft, Apple and Google, who are happy to use their dominance in their fields to increase their own browser market share. Microsoft's own attempts are almost pathetically desperate, in fact. So, regulation, I suppose.

• by rchaud on 10/31/23, 2:04 PM

  Ask Google to provide even more funding to Mozilla?

  Beyond that, FF should be alive as long as there are paid developers to keep it up to date in terms of W3C web standards and security. Mozilla is a non-profit whose revenue is mostly unrelated to the number of FF users.

• by anotherhue on 10/31/23, 3:58 PM

  Mozilla exists to siphon effort away from competing browsers while furiously twiddling its thumbs to avoid innovating in anyway that might offend its gracious Google funding.

  Their existence is actively harmful to the web. Firefox deserves better.

• by colinsane on 10/31/23, 2:08 PM

  reach out to the devs for any number of webkitgtk browsers, agree on a 10-year plan to factor it into a bunch of smaller, more maintainable libraries/interfaces and eventually split from Apple, and go to work.

  unless you can bring better leadership to the project, Firefox is a dead end. you’re talking about monocultures: how many different webkitgtk or qtwebengine (chromium)-based browsers are there? how many gecko browsers are there? which one’s the real monoculture?

• by okasaki on 10/31/23, 2:06 PM

  I think Mozilla disappearing might be good for the web. They're a sick company IMO, and Firefox kind of sucks.

  "We care about your privacy" but they also send your memory dumps to Mozilla when Firefox crashes. "Might contain private data" ... yeah ok. Just one of infinite examples, really.

  I bet in a couple of years after we would see the development and rise of an actual non-corporate browser that serves the user. No telemetry, build-in ad blocking, no extension signing, no pushing services, no build-in ads or search engines, more powerful extensions, etc.

• by akagusu on 10/31/23, 3:51 PM

  I don't think Firefox will disappear anytime soon because Google needs it alive so Chrome can stay out of the "monopoly" territory.

• by lamontcg on 10/31/23, 9:41 PM

  People won't be happy with Firefox until they've destroyed it and we have to choose between Chromium-clones and Safari. Victory.

• by thunkshift1 on 11/1/23, 6:28 AM

  Everyone except the folks leading firefox want it to succeed

• by tekla on 10/31/23, 2:03 PM

  Give Mozilla money. Stop beating around the bush.

• by g-b-r on 10/31/23, 5:52 PM

  At least the Android version would for sure have to be taken up by a different organization, they've done everything they could to make it unusable

• by meiraleal on 10/31/23, 6:59 PM

  Riot against currently leadership. It won't happen so I'm hoping for it to burn so something can come out of its ashes

• by chickahoona on 10/31/23, 2:28 PM

  Firefox is a product that hasn't found any way of monitization. Without money they cannot implement the features that chrome offers and web developers use on their web products. As such users will have zillion of little bugs, be annoyed which make them move to chrome and the circle will continue.

  Let it die. Let Google be sued and forced to break Chrome away. Let every engine be based on the same engine. Less bugs. Easier for developers. Less user problems.

• by lucideer on 10/31/23, 2:06 PM

  Kill it.

  Replacing it will be a gargantuan effort, but until it's truly dead every attempt to do so won't even be given a chance due to appeals to "just use firefox" or to stop diluting the efforts of the firefox team.

  Firefox as it stands is a zombie sucking the efforts of good talented developers away from hypothetical new hopeful things.

  As others have said, it's also a backstop for Google against antitrust suits. Firefox surviving without any hope of ever thriving is the ideal scenario for Google.

• by Eumenes on 10/31/23, 1:56 PM

  Let it die. Its essentially ran by children at this point. Between the recent obsession with identity politics and crap like this, I'd rather use IE: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...