this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2024
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Mozilla has been a sinking ship for decades now.
There's a reason Chrome was able to steal the alt browser market from Mozilla at a time when even laymen understood that IE was awful - Mozilla stopped innovating the second they were winning. They had tabs! What more could you want?
Chrome came along at a time when browser performance wasn't a focus, when JavaScript meant websites were slow, and said "fuck that, let's make it fast". Say what you will about Chrome or JS, Google was on to something and the modern web today is 95% thanks to Chrome pushing things forward.
Everyone jumped to Chrome and Mozilla fucked around for literally years before they got the memo that actually browser performance matters. They were once the best browser tools on the market until once again Chrome pushed the envelope, and once again developers switched while Mozilla sat back and did nothing.
Mozilla meandered back and forth, releasing shitty products nobody wanted (like pocket and send) instead of focusing on the most important thing: the browser.
Yet they're somehow still here, hobbling along, doing fuck knows what instead of making a better browser and innovating to beat Chrome.
Mozilla was doomed from the start.
Netscape Inc. wanted to sell browsers eventually, which makes sense. It's product which requires a massive amount of engineering effort. But, when Microsoft started tying IE to Windows and giving it away free, there was no way that Netscape could actually make any sales. The bigger reason their business was crushed was that Microsoft was also giving away their web server (IIS) away for free, while Netscape was charging for theirs.
Some kids today are too young to know that Microsoft was sued by the US government over this and lost the case (along with what was very likely Microsoft falsifying evidence). But, then Bush Jr. took office and the government basically took a case they had won and effectively threw out the win.
When it was clear that Netscape was going to fail as a business they open-sourced the browser either as an act of charity or spite. The problem is that it's still a massive and expensive project to build a web browser. That's especially true in a world where standards keep evolving and the browser has to keep having new features added.
Since making a browser was so expensive, they needed financial support, and eventually that came from Google. At first Google just wanted Firefox to exist as a hedge so that Microsoft wouldn't dominate the browser market. But, once Google came out with Chrome it was both a way to keep directing traffic to Google search, and a way to pretend they don't have a monopoly on browsers.
But, if 90% of the funding of your project comes from Google, there are some obvious lines you can't cross. So, Mozilla has to keep doing this dance where they make a browser that competes with Chrome, but one that doesn't cross certain lines that would make Google mad and result in them shutting off the funding.
Google would shut off the funding to Firefox in a heartbeat if they took ad blocking and privacy too seriously. But, Google doesn't care too much if Mozilla messes around with AI or ads.
Didn't expect to see Lemmy defending privacy raping mega corp Google today...
Hey can we save the word rape for actually important shit instead of privacy concerns, thanks.
Wooooords have meeeeeanings, pleeeeeease don't misuse them for emphasis.
Using metaphors is perfectly legitimate.
A broad statement in response to a specific complaint. Not every metaphor is "perfectly legitimate"
Why is this metaphor different from others? From my point of view, it does just what you stated - adds emphasis. Nothing less, nothing more. To do that with a negative statement, you need a word with a negative meaning, so "rape" works well.
Thinking about it more, it's a word that can be triggering for someone, because of the ugly meaning. But the ugliness of the meaning is also what makes it suitable for the metaphor. We can say the word, just like we can use words like "dying", "torture" or religious stuff like "hell", "heaven", "godly" - it makes for effective metaphors, but I can see how someone could be offended.
You can disapprove of their privacy practices while acknowledging its innovations. There's a reason Chrome got a stranglehold on the market.
When the innovation is "making shitloads of money violating people's privacy" I don't respect anything...
Although Google making Chrome almost certainly had a part in it. For a while, you couldn't use Google without a "try our new Chrome browser!" pop up in the corner, and there aren't many who don't use Google.
Firefox doesn't have the same advertising reach, and neither do they have the reputation of Google, as a big company to help them in the eyes of laymen. Basically everyone's heard of Google, but less so Mozilla. You'd may as well ask them to install Konqueror, or Netscape for all the good that it would do.
Exactly. Google had the existing userbase of -- and free advertising to -- every single person who visited google.com. All it took was a little banner saying "Get Chrome! It's free and better!"
That, combined with having billions of dollars to throw at making Chrome successful, of course they became the #1 browser.
The Firefox team has never had the funding they really need to compete with Chrome. I see the AI and ad push to be a desperate attempt at securing enough funding to stay relevant. It's really sad to see.
As long as Firefox lets me turn off any unwanted ad or AI integration, I will keep using them, but damn I hope they secure some funding and get their shit together before they lose the majority of their userbase.
That's where the web started getting worse.
Yeah.
Everything gets made for IE and people scream like its the end of life on the planet, and still ridicule it to this day.
Everything gets made for Chrome and people cant stop slobbing knob over how glorious and great it is, and how good its been for everything, and blah blah blah.
Chrome is worse than IE ever was.
I never switched to Chrome and never really noticed any performance issues. If a page took half a second or a second to render, it was an absolute non issue to me.
Decades? Slowest sinking ship in history.
The two slowest trends in tech: the fall of Mozilla and the rise of Linux
Stopped innovating? Just because the user interface didn’t change much? They’ve contributed a ton to web api’s and the open web in general. They also contributed massively to rust, and private / secure browsing standards. It has absolutely not been left to languish. Now I prefer some other UI’s but you won’t catch me claiming Mozilla ceased innovation.
They’ve also contributed in general to JavaScript. So yeah, Google definitely pushed the envelope there, but Mozilla didn’t just watch it all happen. Also, factor in that they were key contributors to web assembly.
Ok. Now pretend you're me, a normal person who doesn't even know what Rust is.
How has Firefox improved for me? The browser is clearly an inferior product.
Yes they contributed a lot to web standards, bit they didn't contribute to actual user experience which is why people install a web browser in the first place.
Mozilla consistently gets complacent.
That seems paradoxical to me. Maybe you mean user interface, but those standards are a massive part of experience. How media loads, caches, and renders. How cross site resources work. How DNS works. Etc. And just think of all their massive contributions to CSS and animations. I mean they play a pretty big part in user experience.
Not to mention MDN, for which many of us can be thankful alone.
I think the point is that the average web user doesn't even know about things like caching, rendering, CSS, DNS, etc., let alone care. It's awesome that Mozilla contributes to those things, but for 95% of the user base, unless it makes itself readily apparent in the browser itself, it might as well not exist to them.
I think what the commenter is saying is that's great but where was that in their own browser at the time? Google was kicking ass moving browsers forward it's great Mozilla contributed the scenes but why not take that and at least have made it work in their own browser.
That's part of the story, but even more important is that they shoved it down everyone's throat.
I think performance was part of Chrome's success, but there was also all the memes in 2010 about installing chrome to replace IE, and the ads that Google ran on their search page. I don't think Pocket came out until Firefox was already deep into the decline. I do think Chrome held onto those users because of their ram efficiency at the time, and nice features like built-in translate. Now, users can't switch because the web depends on Chrome, just like back in the IE days.
I don't think I fully believe that, normies don't care about how fast a page loads and the proof of that is that they were using IE for so long.
What? I've been using FF since 2006, or something like that, how is the web dependent on chrome?
It's one factor among several. Another large factor is that Chrome was easier to deploy and manage in a corporate environment for many years. Really until Edge came out a whole lot of people had it foisted on them via their IT department at work, I'm sure many still do but Edge has definitely changed things and made that less common since it gets included with the OS. Combined with Google constantly pushing it everywhere these workers were guaranteed to encounter the option to download it at home even if they didn't explicitly seek it out, and since they already used it at work it wasn't a scary download it was familiar and made by that great company Google that everyone is so impressed by. They click the download and that's that, they don't even know Firefox is an option.
That's for sure, my company doesn't even allow FF
Despite my above rant, I still use Firefox as my primary browser. The web works absolutely fine on it. I think I've encountered one site that required chrome to work correctly in the last year and that's a huge improvement over where we were back in the early 2000's with IE.
No, there's other reasons why people don't switch, compatibility is not the issue.
In the past i switched to Firefox for a few days, and the memory usage of google (gmail, calendar) was enough to make me switch back.
This time i did thunderbird too. The memory usage is still bad, but i was able to stay... for now.
I have to switch to chromium often, unfortunately. Various websites are untested with Firefox, and many apps such as Teams are not compatible with FF. Probably better than the early 2000's but still really bad.
I use teams on Firefox and haven't encountered any issues. Admittedly I only use it occasionally, as I do mainly use the desktop app.
I think they added some compatibility in the past year or so but I had issues detecting my microphone on Linux just 2 weeks ago. I've had some smaller ecommerce sites fail to load properly on Firefox/Librewolf, Red Hat's Training website doesn't work on Firefox, and also some features on apps like Google Meet and Miro are unavailable. It's nothing that makes firefox unusable, and I can always open up ungoogled chromium when needed, but it is a serious issue for browser diversity and competition that the web has defaulted to chrome now.
At least it's notable when a website doesn't work correctly in Firefox rather than being a frequent annoyance
The problem is that browsers aren't profitable. Mozilla need a revenue source other than donations, and that's why they're trying to make another product that'll stick. They need to make money somehow. If Google stops paying them because of the antitrust lawsuit, Mozilla will probably disappear in a few months.
Browsers are profitable, Mozilla only exists because of the money the browser brings in.
Yes, it's true that the money is currently coming from Google but only because Google is willing to pay more than other search providers. If Google stopped paying, someone else would pay instead.
To put it another way, Google isn't forking out millions to Mozilla out of the goodness of its heart
EDIT: to everyone down voting this, please explain to me why Google also pays Apple an obscene amount of money to be the default search engine on iOS if there's no competition in this space?
Have we all forgotten that time period when Yahoo! was the default search provider in Firefox?
Judging by the replies and down votes, yes we have.
No.
Google pays to keep its monopoly on search.
Chrome, Android, etc. all are just tools to funnel views on their ads.
If Mozilla would fold, Google would have a monopoly on browsers, which could cause problems for them. So they finance fake competition.
No other company could pay even close to that amount of money.
Agreed.
Google pays literally tens of billions to make sure they're the default search engine across everything - including the likes of iOS.
Why is it that when Google pays Apple hundreds of millions of dollars, it's because they're enforcing their search monopoly, but when they pay Mozilla a fraction of that, it's because Mozilla would have no way of staying afloat otherwise?
Why is Google paying apple so much if nobody else could afford it?
Make it make sense.
Because that way they avoid any competition.
Thing is, businesses like Google's ads are not linear. If you can track 90% of people 90% of the time, your ads are much much more valuable to advertisers than a company that only tracks 70% of the people 90% of the time. So it makes sense to create a moat by literally shitting money on everyone around you.
Think about the opposite: if Apple would switch to DDG by default, most people would leave it at that. And that would mean, a significant chunk of the US search traffic is gone. Europe and the rest of the world are not that apple-heavy, but Apple users are rich power users (on average), these are extremely valuable.
I think you're missing the point here. You're claiming Google only pays Mozilla to have a competitor, yet they also pay apple even more money for the same thing in an area they're just competing.
The point is that there is competition in the default browser search space, it's just that Google pays more than anyone else.
If Google stopped paying Mozilla tomorrow, someone else would pay them for the same default search engine spot. It might not be as much, but it would still be a significant amount.
A few years ago it was Yahoo that footed the bill.