My only question is, why do so few people use Firefox?
this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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Most internet usage is mobile and people use whatever's preinstalled on their phone because it just works is my guess.
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This sure is an opinion.
Lol, that sentence sure describes The Register in general
Never even heard of The Register before right now. Been using Firefox for most of my life. This checks out.
Opinion piece by a person who has little to say outside of ad-hominem.
Indeed. Article reads like a spoiled brat. "Get over it". The second something like that appears, it's crystal clear the writer thinks they're above the reader.
Yeah, and she didn't quit, she stepped down to get previous position on the board.
Lets just take Firefox and make it the open source standard. If we all get behind it like we did for Blender, we might succeed.
I doubt it tbh.
For blender it's fine, but for browser engines it's different because of their sheer size, complexity, need to adhere and collaborate with others to form web standards, need for security experts, day one vulnerability patches, etc.
If Mozilla dies, random volunteers or existing projects like LibreWolf can't just pick up the slack.
Volunteers can't run a modern web engine, it takes hundreds of millions per year to upkeep.
There's a reason why we're down to just Google, Apple, and Mozilla. Nobody wants to foot the massive bill unless they have a damn good reason for doing so.
It's probably more expensive to maintain a browser engine than a full operating system at this point. It's truly insane how large and costly they are.
I'm sure Linus was told the same at some point.
The Linux kernel is actually a perfect example of this.
It's worked on by hundreds of companies, and the bulk of the work is done by a small number of megacorps.
If it was worked on by a group of volunteers doing bits whenever they had spare time, it'd be in a much less useful state right now.
You're seriously underestimating how large and complex web engines are. There's a reason we're down to 3 engines and the community hasn't been able to create one.
It's hard to do. It requires hundreds of millions a year to keep going.
If it were genuinely so trivial to maintain a browser engine, more would be doing it. Even easier, Firefox forks could take over maintaining the engine, as opposed to just tweaking the browser (not even having to work from scratch with a new engine). But they don't, for the reasons I've already mentioned.
KHTML was the basis of WebKit and then Blink/Chromium, so the community did make something. It was just overtaken by the corporate projects, for those same reasons you mention.
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Firefox will live on regardless of Mozilla's support. Since it's FOSS the community will keep it alive
A huge portion of Firefox code is ancient. Never mind that the codebase is gigantic. Small FOSS projects fail to organize properly, I can't imagine maintaining Firefox without Mozilla would be a small feat.
the corporate world seems desperate to kill it. its chrome/edge or GTFO
They all want to FULLY control the end user.
- probe and profile the device used
- force unstoppable ads
- require GPS location and maybe 2fa to make sure it's you that is watching the ads. -web assembly alone will make script blocking impossible and enable scammers to run anything they want.
The end result will be something like the DVD menus from the 90s and 00s. The difference is that it will have full access to all the data on your computer or device.
In swear this mainly has to do with it's about:config being so much more robust and vast than chromium's //flags settings. The fact so many privacy related forks (Librewolf, Mullvad, Mull, Tor) are based off of firefox and not chromium (Ungoogled Chromium) should point to why these corporations are seething at it.
Google was/is keeping Firefox afloat via funding as the article points out. This is mainly due to the fact that Google didn't have a real competitor in the browser space for some time until Microsoft got Edge off the ground and finally killed Internet Explorer.
Personally I see Firefox as being the superior browser for privacy and customization. I also don't think it's going anywhere, but it's funding relying so heavily on one entity is an issue. If Google decides to pull it's funding of Firefox and no other major corporation steps in to provide the needed cash flow... well who knows, guess it'll be a chromium world after all.
Good corpos should made suffer ,the more they cope and seethe the better
Will it though? Seems like the kind of task that requires a huge amount of effort, way beyond the kind of capacity you get from casual contributions in peoples' spare time...might be difficult to maintain feature parity and implement new standards without a full time team on it.
couldnt you say the same about linux?
Linux is currently mostly made by big corpo, but they are held by community and Linus'es checks.
Unfortunetly for browsers most of the giants focused on Chromium, which Google has final say over. Also Linux is OS, where browser should be simple and websites should work even if some one API is not supported. In Chromium's world web"apps" are won't be compatible with anything non-Chromium. Any browser would be required to support 99+% of Chromium features or not work.
Linux is cheating by having every major tech company help develop the kernel
Sounds like we just gotta add Firefox to the kernel while Linus is on vacation.
firefox doesnt have any corporate friends besides mozilla?
Not many and none that I can think of with deep pockets (besides google). I think the corporate world has almost completely piled on Chrome.
True, but web designers already treat Firefox and its offshoots as an afterthought. Do you think without Mozilla it would get even worse?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
And when I see Mozilla Corp's CEO Mitchell Baker stepping down, I wonder if it's really because she'll be more useful devoting all her time to the foundation than overseeing Firefox's decline into a web browser afterthought.
Almost ten years after Chrome appeared, in 2017, Mozilla CEO Chris Beard admitted, "Firefox did not keep up with the market and what people really want.
Baker told Fortune she decided to step down as CEO because she wants to draw attention to our increasingly malicious online world "and how humans are engaging with each other and technology."
In Baker's subsequent blog post, she announced that Laura Chambers, a Mozilla board member and entrepreneur with experience at Airbnb, PayPal, and eBay, will step in as interim CEO to run operations until a permanent replacement is found.
In Fortune, Chambers was more forthcoming: She'll "focus on building out new products that address growing privacy concerns while actively looking for a full-time CEO."
It's hard to buy that all's well with Mozilla, given Baker's poor results at shepherding Firefox forward and the lack of a real replacement CEO.
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