> On smartphones, its share of browser usage is virtually nonexistent
that's surprising b/c i've had a good experience with firefox on android: i particularly like the "send tab to desktop browser" feature, and although i'm still using adb for debug, newer versions apparently do debugging direct with desktop browser instances, no adb needed. for all i know, chrome has similar features as well, so i'll just say that i haven't found firefox mobile lacking.
i was totally unaware that mozilla was making that much money (or any significant amount of money) from corporate deals, but that's probably b/c i'm naieve. proprotionally larger donations will go to wikipedia instead of mozilla in the future.
Yes, Firefox on Android is awesome. My favorite features:
1. The best options for delegating from websites to installed apps I've seen (via the long-press menu or by touching the Android when it appears in the URL bar).
2. Extensions. For me, browsing is practically uncivilized without Self-Destructing Cookies and there are lots of other useful ones.
3. The new "Open later" feature, where Firefox collects the URLs you click on, but doesn't load them until you switch to it. Among other things, it is a great way to collect links to look at from the Google Search app.
My only real annoyance with it are the occasional sites that make broken mobile browser assumptions so I end up spoofing Android Chrome or Mobile Safari. At least there's Phony, so the spoofing is pretty easy.
It's more than ads. With ublock origin in advanced mode you can easily block images and javascript (except on sites you whitelist). On mobile, that makes a lot of difference; the data usage can easily become half or even less than you'd have with Chrome, and because of that it also loads much faster. It can be the difference between nearly hitting your monthly data cap or ending the month with plenty of data to spare.
Even without Ublock, Firefox Android supports extensions, so I can toggle an image blocker extension during those lean times when I'm close to hitting my monthly data cap.
Unfortunately, I've found that Firefox is a bit slower to render pages than Android Chrome, and scrolling experience sometimes feels janky. That said, it's unlikely that Android Chrome will ever support ad blocking, so Firefox will stay on my device.
I tried to be the good guy on mobile and put up with ads for years. But I recently installed uBlock because I almost couldn't even read the content anymore.
Agreed. Erstwhile ad-free websites like BBC News for example now have an annoying full-page ad on mobile with a requisite tiny "Close" button. The worst part is, the news article loads before the ad, so you can see the article text and image for ~1 second before the screen flashes white and the full-page ad loads. That's a fail on so many levels, it's far simpler to view the site on on Firefox Android with Ublock Origin enabled.
BTW I have the BBC news site whitelisted on desktop because the ads are not nearly as intrusive and UX-breaking.
The breaking point for me was a neverending barrage of autoplaying, unstoppable video while on the subway. Now it's not just intruding on my own patience, it's pretty rude to everyone around me and I can't make it stop.
Sadly it breaks intents and doesn't call on local apps despite system settings. Instead it loads the site and only displays an android icon allowing to switch to an app. It's very annoying on slower connections (on the subway for example).
As you might guess, I don't agree that Firefox breaks intents.
If you're outside the browser, intent resolution proceeds normally. What changes is that if you're in Firefox you need to take an affirmative step to raise the intent instead of going to the web page. To me, that's the sensible default.
Otherwise you end up with nonsense like the following:
1. Clicking on an intent-matching link (e.g. Play Store, Google+, Twitter)
2. Being kicked to the intent-handling app
3. The app deciding not to handle the link (it's some sort of corner case)
4. Being kicked to whatever browser the app picks (often not the one you started with)
Back when devices were sold on the Play Store (not the Google Store), I lost track of the number of times I did this dance when I just wanted to look up something about a Nexus device. The problem was the Play Store app, unsurprisingly, didn't know anything about devices even though it matched Play Store device URLs.
I had a similar frustrating experience on iOS this morning. Clicking a YouTube link in Mobile Safari prompted opening the native app. I wanted to watch in the browser, so tapped "cancel," which cancelled the entire page load. There was no way to follow the YouTube link without uninstalling the native app. Firefox for iOS ignored the prompt, and I could watch the video.
Doesn't work in all situations, but often you can open a link the associated app directly in its long-press menu. Alongside the usual options of open in a new tab, copy address, there's an open in app. One place where this does not work is Google search result because they insist on rewriting the URLs to redirect via them.
My favorite feature is the reader view (does not always work but if it does it shows a little book in the URL bar), that removes all clutter and interstitials and just shows the main text body of the page in large enough automatically wrapped text.
Reader View is unfortunately no longer being maintained since Mozilla decided to integrate Pocket. It bugs me since I find Firefox's Reader View actually does a better job than Pocket in most cases of stripping out the clutter.
Pocket were added as it were easier than implementing their own Reading List, although Pocket will be shipped as a default extension in the future rather than being integrated.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215694
It sure is awesome, it just isn't as usable as, e.g., opera on a phone. I really wish they'd invest more time in basic usability issues like scrolling, font size etc.
In day to day use, FF beats Chrome in every aspect except video playing. The "Open later" feature is the greatest mobile UI improvement I've seen in the last year.
> > On smartphones, its share of browser usage is virtually nonexistent
> that's surprising
Not really.
Think the desktop. Think MSIE. For a long time it was a horrible browser, but held its market-share simply by being the default. Because people don't know they can change browser. Internet is the blue E. Etc.
Now think Android. All phones comes preloaded with Google Chrome, and most people still don't recognize the idea that a browser is something you choose. Since Chrome is a reasonably good browser (apart from sending your every keystroke to the mothership), people have even less incentive to look up alternate browsers.
And with Chrome being spammed everywhere Google has a piece of internet real estate (No I will not "upgrade" my Firefox to Chrome. Please stop asking), it keeps on winning usage on the desktop and thus helps cement its market-share on Android too. People genuinely ask why Firefox can't sync with their Google-account, implying that if it can't sync with Google, they don't think it can sync at all.
Evidently that's how people work these days. I don't get it either.
I use Firefox on my Android, but I don't think there's any reasons for the vitriol. For example this needs a reference, because I don't buy it:
> apart from sending your every keystroke to the mothers
Chrome is not just reasonably good, but actually the forefront runner in some areas. It has some nice touches to it, like how it pops that magnifier on taps, preventing fat fingering. It's also the best browser in terms of web standards implemented.
For example it's the only mobile browser I know that implements the Push and the Notifications API, so you no longer need the native Facebook app, as Facebook's web interface now delivers push notifications on Android: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/03/push-notif...
Along with other features, like giving access to the phone's camera, or giving each website its own "window", Chrome is the mobile browser that is built for web applications and sadly Firefox Mobile is not. And actually this has always been a difference in philosophy. It's why Chrome started with the one process per tab and with strong sandboxing on the desktop as well, Chrome being built for applications.
So you know, I love my Firefox, but sometimes I feel that they are spending resources on a small niche mobile OS that would have been better spent on improving Firefox Mobile. It's the end of 2015 and Add to Homescreen is still broken, which pains me greatly because I prefer web stuff instead of native apps.
> Chrome is the mobile browser that is built for web
> applications and sadly Firefox Mobile is not. And
> actually this has always been a difference in
> philosophy. It's why Chrome started with the one
> process per tab and with strong sandboxing on the
> desktop as well, Chrome being built for applications.
I'm curious how that would work. I know the desktop Firefox will only - very gradually - move to a complete sandboxing architecture, because of the way it will break many add-ons.
But Firefox for Android already supports extensions - is it only the Chrome-like/WebExtensions-like extensions it supports now? Is that why it will be easier to move to a complete sandboxing system on mobile first?
Multi-process to isolate tasks, and whitelists for system apis to minimize the priviledge of each task. Servo has no back-compat concerns. It will be using browser.html -- no legacy XUL addons at all.
Looks pretty "even" to me? Mostly the things Google seem to be focusing on is things they can use in their services or that can use their already existing services as a back-end, for example speech synthesis.
> implements the Push and the Notifications API
Push API is available in Firefox Dev Edition¹·².
> Along with other features, like giving access to the phone's camera
What do you mean? This is available via the same API in Firefox.
> giving each website its own "window"
Think you could clarify what you mean with "window"?
The first mobile browser I used and that delivered deeper integration for web apps was Safari on iOS. By including some meta tags in your HTML head, like apple-mobile-web-app-capable, viewport and apple-touch-icon, upon adding a shortcut to your homescreen it would use a high-res icon and then on opening it would hide the address bar, set the initial scale and even use a startup image. This would make it possible for web apps to pretend that they are apps.
And of course, these are proprietary extensions to Safari, so since then a proposal for a standard happened and got implemented in Chrome. The way forward is to specify a JSON file containing a specification, called the app's manifest. I already mentioned it above, but see here: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2014/11/Support-fo...
Firefox Mobile on Android does not implement it. BUT, they have a very similar manifest for Firefox OS, but that is not compatible with the new W3C standard. I can't really blame them for Firefox OS, as they probably developed this format before the W3c specification, of which they were also a part of. See here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps/Build/Manifest
But yes, take a recent Android and try Add to Homescreen for say Facebook or Twitter. And compare the result. Yes, a shortcut gets added to your homescreen, with a low resolution icon and no integration whatsoever. Heck, sometimes it doesn't even use the normal favicon. My old iPhone 3GS was handling this better 5 years ago.
Their strategy right now is to implement new APIs meant for web apps, including the above mentioned manifest, but only for privileged applications, packaged as a zip file and only installable via the Firefox Marketplace, an effort part of Firefox OS. And even though that's cool and you can install and run some of those apps on Android and probably on the desktop as well, that's not the Web.
And I'm not even asking for much. For my needs all I want is high-res icons, as I've got a resolution of 2560×1440 on my Nexus and those icons that Firefox adds are freaking horrible.
Well yeah, that was partially my point, Android Chrome already has at least partial support for service workers along with the Push and Notification APIs. On my Android I've been receiving Facebook's push notifications through Chrome and works well.
Firefox is my default on Android, but I do hope to see some progress on these, as I personally prefer web apps to native ones - more portable, not subject to a walled garden, plus the browser is the ultimate sandbox.
(Tedious disclaimer: not speaking for anybody else, my opinion only, etc. I'm an SRE at Google.)
> All phones comes preloaded with Google Chrome
That's not true. There's still a fair bit of Android Browser out there - it's up to the OEM whether they ship Chrome or their own customised version of Android Browser.
> (apart from sending your every keystroke to the mothership)
(Perhaps you're thinking of the instant search feature? That's quite a long way from "every keystroke", and the page above explains how to turn it off if you don't like it.)
I believe the parent is referring to the URL/search bar, which does pass along every key stroke to Google. This is for purposes of search suggestions/autocomplete. Unfortunately, since search and URL are combined into a single bar on desktop Google Chrome, that means that every URL you type is passed along to Google, including some you may not want to be passed along. As Firefox has a separate URL and search box, it doesn't have the same issue. On mobile, it's a bit of a different story since there is only one bar for Firefox and it has the option to pass every keystroke along to your preferred search provider for suggestion/autocomplete purposes. I can't recall if it is on or off by default, though. I have it on on Firefox on Android.
> I don't believe you. Here's the source, show me where it does this
You're wasting your breath. This thread is littered with people uncritically repeating that assertion. It's officially graduated from "fact" to "article of faith among the cynical and ignorant".
She's did not link to the source for Chrome. She linked to the source for Chromium. Chrome is a closed source browser based upon the open source Chromium code.
> Think MSIE. For a long time it was a horrible browser,
> but held its market-share simply by being the default.
That's not entirely true. IE since about ~4 was the best browser around (I choose to ignore IE5 for Mac). NN4 was horrible.
The problem with IE was that it stagnated, so when Firefox came out it soon started to kick IEs ass and only then the "default" part became a problem.
IE5 for Mac was fantastic in terms of standards support. It was quite literally a joke in the CSS WG for a while that something from some old abandoned draft would be discussed for weeks and then eventually we'd decide to do what IE5 for Mac did a decade earlier.
wow thanks for the nostalgia trip. you're actually right though i think i remember seeing badges on certain myspace pages that suggested you install firefox to see the page correctly.
Really? I remember Netscape being hands down better than IE, but that might have been after Netscape went out of business and before Mozilla formed, so maybe around when IE4 came out in other words.
I was a webdev back during the 90's browserwars, and I can confirm that Netscape 4 was terrible (despite not wanting to admit it), IE4 was better and IE5 was pretty good.
> Evidently that's how people work these days. I don't get it either.
Installing and switching your workflow to using a new app, OS, browser etc. takes effort. If the effort required is too high compared to the benefit gained, most people aren't going to do it (I imagine hackernews readers have a much higher tolerance for this!).
That's why monopolies in technology are so dangerous in my opinion as when you can force a "good enough" product on customers competitors aren't going to get any traction unless their product is significantly better. This means companies don't try to compete so the customer misses out on the incremental improvements from sustained competition.
To be fair, there's little reason that browsers shouldn't support syncing among each other for most or all data. History, bookmarks, passwords, open tabs/sessions? Why can't this be serialized to a common format and synced between Firefox, Chrome, Opera, whatever else?
In fact, this sort of work is what Mozilla should concentrate on, rather than an irrelevant "me too" mobile os nobody asked for: standards. Mozilla has the credibility and neutrality required in order to successfully lobby for standards across commercial players without threatening them.
To be fair, they do a lot of that already, but they often approach it in adversarial terms, which is doomed to fail. Persona, for example, is interesting but will never align with anyone else's interest; whereas easy sync would (making it easier to switch OS would appeal to at least one between MS and Apple, and to Google too).
Now they're going to compete at the high-end, which means they have to find OEMs that will bet their flagship models on it. Good luck with that.
There are three elements to OS choice: standardization, marketing and openness. Looking at the desktop market, you can see how Microsoft dominated standardization, Apple managed to dominate marketing, and Linux used its unrivaled openness to sneak in between the two.
In the mobile world, Android already occupies two of those slots, basically pre-empting any linux-like effort from ever gaining significant traction. That means the only ways you can break in the mobile OS market (assuming you're not producing breakthrough tech creating its own market) are 1) flooding the market with such a massive amount of units that standardization stops being a factor, or 2) flooding the airwaves with such a massive amount of excellent advertising that your devices become more desirable than Apple ones. Good luck with that.
(Note how price is not a factor. Mobile devices are inherently aspirational, as Nokia found out.)
The hard truth is that the land grab is over: if your mobile OS has not made it yet, chances are that it never will -- at least as long as devices stay in this particular form factor and nobody comes up with groundbreaking tech.
Mozilla should concentrate on standards, including a kick-ass Android browser; everything else is a waste of time.
You're right that this doesn't follow devoid of context, but luckily we're talking about a specific entity and a specific situation. The assumption that motivates this assumption is the idea that Mozilla has finite resources, not just in the literal sense, but in the sense of having to make significant trade-offs in what to focus on. This seems like a fairly reasonable assumption to make given that they're often so far behind on things that are fairly widely considered positive, like one-process-per-tab.
You may disagree with that assumption, but at least address it instead of being wearisome and linking to a Wikipedia logical fallacy page.
That's why you need a kick-ass Android browser, and the best you can do in the iOS walled garden: pouring your marketshare from desktop to mobile as much as you can, without threatening actual OS makers. Mozilla are not (or should not be) interested in setting standards for device drivers, so they don't need any marketshare at that level.
To be honest, I think they've finally realized that the OS was a pipe dream -- the iOS release could have happened years ago, but now it's finally been sanctioned. Coincidence?
Getting marketshare on Android or iOS is very hard though: there's some real argument that you will never have enough influence there to make any difference. Certainly trying to get people to install alternate browsers seems harder on mobile OSes than desktop ones.
I’ve had cases where I created a file that was not listed anywhere on my webserver (not listed in any index or robots.txt, not linked anywhere), and visited it with Chrome, and only a few minutes later the Googlebot would access it.
Google is definitely sending more than just search inputs.
It depends on how we're defining "horrible". From my perspective, Firefox is the horrible browser on Android. I can't get it to run at a consistent frame rate for the life of me. Even a bare-bones example of an animation loop will wildly fluctuate between ~25FPS to 90FPS, yet the same page in Chrome on Android will peg at 60FPS.
I use ff on android too, but I think they could do better. I miss chrome feature where it enlarges the touch area i there are multiple links near the touch point. Also, reader (great feature btw!) sometimes doesn't show all content. And sometimes there is no reader button? Then my favorite bug: cookies don't get cleaned if you close the ff app, you must select "exit" from menu.
I love ff and mozilla, but I don't think they are trying enough on android to win larger market share.
I do like Firefox on Android but I won't use it for a single reason - the scroll physics doesn't match native app scroll physics.
The scroll acceleration or easing is "off", compared to Chrome on Android and native widget list views. I wouldn't normally complain that Firefox doesn't match Chrome's behaviour in some specific area, but it's incredibly frustrating to be used to scroll behaviour on a platform and have a single app reimplement that in a non-conformant manner. It just feels... icky, and broken.
There have been bugs filed about it but nothing seems to have been done.
This is the one main thing stopping me from using Firefox on Android and recommending it to others. It might seem minor but it affects the very way I interact with the app, and I use the browser on my phone at least 50% of the time I'm looking at the device.
> i particularly like the "send tab to desktop browser" feature
Is this feature a discrete mechanism? Because I do this all the time, but by a different means: on desktop, I go Hamburger Menu > History > Tabs From Other Devices, which shows you a list of all your tabs from every synced device.
Yeah, it is a little bit different. AFAIK "Tabs from other devices" shows only tabs that are currently open.
Send tab to browser is more like "ah this seems cool, I'll read it on my desktop later > send to device > close tab in current browser".
Now when Firefox on the second device syncs it will automatically open a new tab with the URL you wanted to read.
When its not default, the default is good (since 4.2 its been Chrome), and there isn't a grassroots movement of enthusiasts to replace all installs of the default, adoption will be awful, every time.
What could get Firefox Android marketshare are webapps that depend on it being listed in Google Play. But thats also the problem - I'm not sure what webapp tech Mozilla is pushing today that Google is not pushing an equivalent of.
As it is, average fat finger users are not shopping for new web browsers on Android. They probably would on iOS since Safari is turning into another IE disaster, but Apple won't let them.
> that's surprising b/c i've had a good experience with firefox on android
The earliest Android browser was lacking things that people had gotten used to on desktop (like tabs), but since the introduction of Chrome I would be surprised to see high usage of any third-party browser on Android (and iOS, of course, makes it difficult to consistently use a third-party browser). It's worth noting that even in the days when third-party browsers would have been most compelling, usage was still tiny.
I don't think the fact that firefox mobile is good quality really makes it that surprising that usage is low: people simply aren't in the habit of customizing their devices in any real way, especially on mobile.
I try using Firefox Mobile every few months but I sadly keep going back to Chrome.
Firefox crashes my phone all the time. Also I keep hitting the "Share Link" option when I want to open in a new tab, why is that the first option? Who shares links that often?
Happy user of Firefox on Android with self destructing cookies and ublock origin. As futile as it sounds on Android I don't like using Chrome, but I'm fully aware that all my data might still somehow be ending up at Google despite using FF.
I'd use Firefox for android, but on my device (galaxy s4) scrolling is incredibly laggy where as its perfectly smooth on chrome. This is with all extensions off.
Mozilla can be more ambitious. Or atleast as bold as they once were, when they took on Microsoft.
If they can convince Baidu, Yahoo et al to keep them open, independent and competitive against the likes of Apple, Google or Microsoft, then there is no reason they can't pull the same thing off to fund an open social network or a open search engine that can shake things up a little at Google and Facebook.
I am really quite sick of the Google and Facebook ivory towers deciding where and how things should work. Most of these decisions are based on empire defense rather than the common good.
They speak the language of the common good, but constantly do things that benefit them disproportionately.
So what is their purpose at the end of the day, other than "... we are the rich; we own america. God knows how. but we intend to keep it".
They need saving from themselves. And I am glad Mozilla exists like a Ralph Nader does to keep things honest.
Please don't! This has been both tried before and it ended in a waste of resources, money (Diaspora, anyone?) and goodwill.
You can't beat the network effect of a social network with "we are open source", people don't care that much. You either have a usecase no one else has thought about, a technical killer feature or you don't try.
With a search engine, the network effect is not as big, but you better deliver something consistently better than Google right from the start.
Both are not fields ripe for disruption as the web browser game was in the mid-2000's.
Well really, open source doesn't mean anything in the context of a Website. So what if you have the source code Google uses to run their query engine, crawlers and index if you dint have all of their data. The same applies to facebook.
The Open Data movement is more applicable here. With that in mind there is Common Crawl and Open Street Maps.
The thing about collecting data out of good will or for some nonprofit mission is that you have different standards, motivations and methods for connecting data than for public for-profit corporations. Some data should not be collected, at least without permission. Privacy and copyrights are issues Google and Facebook deal with after the fact not before they collect the data.
Do you have any sense of proportion? FB is worth hundreds of BILLIONs and somebody wasted $500K or whatever on diaspora...thats not a waste of resources its a single FTE for at one of these companies today....Or do you have something else in mind?
I doubt the average FTE at FB costs 500 grant, but whatever. The point is, Diaspora didn't get that money from google or one of the giants who could care less. And it is now gone without making a lot of a splash.
But in the end, that's kind of my point - FB is humongous and I hope Mozilla does not pick a fight there. As much as I despise FB, I'd rather Mozilla enters the competitions they can win.
This is a common misguided sense of what "winning" is.
Mozilla's contribution to the web, is not that they have the most popular browser, but they have a browser with enough users that they get a seat at the table to influence open standards.
And there is no reason they shouldn't replicate the model and expand that sphere of influence into other domains. Diaspora failing is not a good enough reason to bend over to Zuckerberg.
>that they have the most popular browser, but they have a browser with enough users
Well yes, but they arrived at this by having a vision what a good browser is at a time when browsers were abysmal. They didn't arrive there by just wanting an open-source browser. Yes, there was a network effect at play too (everyone "optimized" for MSIE), but they were able to bootstrap their user base with the tech-savvy who were fed up with the horrible HTML/CSS/JS support browsers of the time offered.
They did not have that vision with FirefoxOS - they wanted to secure a foothold in the mobile market, but had no compelling idea on how to gain that in the face of Apple/Google. Similarly, disliking Zuck is a a really bad reason to pour energy into yet another open social network.
For what it's worth, Diaspora kind of sucks at the moment but it's not gone. Federation works, so it will probably be a good while before the network of Pods gone entirely.
This is constantly improving and if you have any relevancy issue examples you can always reach out (adam@duckduckgo.com).
Also if we're your default you can always use !g to forward a search to encrypted.google.com if the results don't meet your needs. In fact you can forward your search to over 6000 sites (https://duckduckgo.com/bang) and even suggest your own bangs :)
Mozilla is a legacy browser business that's mostly surviving off of Marissa Mayer's quixotic obsession with building a search business for Yahoo!. Their mobile ambitions have thus far been a rounding error in terms of overall market share, and Firefox on iOS is a massive capitulation to Apple in that it uses Apple's HTML and JavaScript engines, not Mozilla's, so even if it succeeds (SPOILER ALERT: it won't) it mostly just helps them keep their legacy browser viable for longer because it lets iOS users share bookmarks between phone and desktop, it doesn't help them grow marketshare or fight the Webkit/Blink duoculture. And they're developing Rust, despite their constant insistence that Servo isn't a product. (Although I think that's largely a product of them remembering how Netscape killed itself through rewriting a browser from scratch, and not wanting to repeat the experience.) I don't think they have the resources to open up another front in this war, much less one as ambitious as an open social network (or one that bites the hand that feeds them as much as an open search engine -- they're not being funded by Google anymore, but they're funded by Google's rivals in search).
And you think Facebook doesn't have powerful rivals? You think the content industry or the advertising industry that keeps it running likes the fact they are beholden to one network.
This is a matter of using some imagination and presenting the case to the right people.
I am unsure as to why those powerful rivals of Facebook would want to pay Mozilla, a company with no special expertise in building a social network, to build a social network. Especially since the most well-funded company that is a direct rival of Facebook is probably Google, which is the company that Mozilla just got away from being dependent on, and has their own social network already that they probably would prefer to this hypothetical Mozilla social network.
Look at the content world, whether its Disney, the movie studios, Comcast, the news networks, ESPN, HBO etc. why aren't they putting their top quality content on Youtube?
Why are they building their own infra?
Why are Amazon and Netflix making their own content?
The most simplified reason - after whats happened with the music and news industry, the content producers don't trust Silicon Valley. And most importantly marketing of content cannot happen without Facebook today. And that's just media.
There is the telecom sector (Verizon, Vodafone, AT&T) which believes all kinds of interesting things about the traffic silicon valley generates.
There is the advertising industry which has seen more and more of the data and tools they used, being built into FB and offered directly to their customers.
There is Apple which has suddenly realized their user base might pay for security, privacy and non ad supported networks.
There are all kinds of other players in tech from Twitter to Linkdin to Quora to Snapchat to Uber who are constantly worrying about how their data might overnight start flowing into FB\Whatsapp\Instagram etc.
And this is just the US. There are all kinds of extremely resourceful entities outside who would love leverage against FB and Google.
Mozilla is the ideal non threatening entity they might get behind. Nobody is expecting FB to be dethroned anytime soon, but that doesn't mean any of them are enjoying the control they hand over to them. Tapping into that frustration, can result in a more even playing field in both search and social.
I am likely to piss a bunch off here, but i find that Mozilla, and various other large FOSS projects, have gotten distracted by design and social issues.
Meaning that they are diverting resources that could have gone towards hammering out the best code there is towards eternal UI tweaking and "getting XYZ into coding".
I'm inclined to feel the same way, but I feel like there's been a pretty big shift in the last ~decade where users suddenly care about design far more than functionality, quality, etc (yes this is mostly anecdotal). I find it a more likely explanation that the people at Mozilla are more aware of this than I am and are optimizing for what they think is important to their success: a userbase.
I think most users don't care either way. But a vocal minority has gotten very hung up on UI/UX design.
Frankly i see this as a ripple from the .com era. As the web went commercial, people that formerly learned about print (and other) media production moved online. Thus we got the "geek" persona, someone who worked with servers but was still "stylish". This to distance that activity from the "nerd" persona, that was seen as "non-stylish".
Sadly, the geek get all the attention by being "social savy". Thus a small, but apparently loud, group of people end up with undo influence.
I think the Mozilla-Yahoo alliance is a very natural one. I think Yahoo going all-in on Firefox is the key to Yahoo's relevance, that is, if there anything Yahoo can do to remain relevant at this stage.
I don't know nothin' about nothin', but Mozilla's involvement in Rust is a huge plus that someone is focused on the right things. Don't have to be the biggest thing in the world to do good for the world, or industry.
I get a sense that the hype surrounding Rust has fallen away rather quickly since its 1.0 release around half a year ago. I won't speculate on why that is, but for a language that was poised to become very popular very quickly, we've seen remarkably little use of it so far.
The only major Rust projects at this point are Rust and Servo, and both of them are quite closely tied to each other. There are a handful of libraries, and lots of small-scale demos or sample code, but that's about it.
We aren't seeing companies across the board rushing to use it. We aren't seeing more than a handful of significant open source projects using it. We aren't seeing freelancers use it for their projects. We aren't seeing researchers use it. We aren't seeing academics adopt it for teaching purposes.
Rust is not taking off like Java, or C#, or Ruby, or even Go did. While Rust will likely have some future, its impact may be much smaller than many of us anticipated even just a year ago.
> Rust is not taking off like Java, or C#, or Ruby, or even Go did.
You seem to have a very short memory. Go's first memorable and noteworthy projects, Docker and Vitess, didn't appear until almost exactly a year after its 1.0 release (and the language itself had been largely stable for two years prior to 1.0). Both Java and C# took just as long to find widespread traction, and that was with much more determined and focused backers. Meanwhile, Ruby was around for a decade before finding any significant adoption. You didn't mention Python, but it took 15 years of laboring in Perl's shadow for it to finally ascend into the greater programming consciousness.
For reference, Rust has been out for six months now. :P And fortunately, I can tell you that Rust is getting action at a lot of companies, and we're excited to see them start writing reports about their experience.
Rust is trying to improve the quality of core infrastructure, not random CRUD apps. It takes time for large companies to rewrite and migrate these systems, but it is indeed happening behind closed doors (source: private conversations with said companies).
It's been less than a year since 1.0. Most development is closed source behind closed doors, so you won't get to hear about new things being built in Rust. A bunch of startups, as well as Dropbox are using Rust, for example.
I would call Redox and Piston large rust projects as well.
There has been at least one OS course being taught with Rust as well.
Not sure I like the adversarial title, but it's great that the changes are going over well. Firefox does a lot to better the entire ecosystem that is the Web, and I'm super glad they're around.
Also generally my first move when I install FF on a new machine is to switch out the default search provider so... This doesn't affect me too much
Just to counterbalance- I really like the adversarial title. I'm not the biggest fan of Google the company, and Firefox distancing themselves from them makes me happy.
Just to add even more counterbalance, I consider both Google and Mozilla enemies of public discourse on the internet.
What I'm referring to is the fact that turning the web into a platform on which a wide variety of applications can run makes it more complicated and consequently more failure-prone and more tedious to use the web to publish and to read text, images and links to other pages of text and images.
I don't in isolation mind the creation of a new application-delivery platform (and I appreciate the fact that the new application-delivery platform is not the intellectual property of a single corporation). I just wish there were some way to tell publishers of text, images and links to other pages of text and images to switch from the new application-delivery platform to something else, something whose design is not a compromise between the needs of the application-delivery platform and the needs of publishers and readers of text, images and links to other pages of text and images.
Documents work better when they are mere data as opposed to programs requiring or assuming a complicated execution environment. HTML documents were better than PostScript and MS-Word documents for this reason -- until JavaScript was added to HTML, and web pages became programs assuming an execution environment, and then that execution environment got more and more complicated.
And to add to that, it's just a freakin title, adversarial or not. The title simply states fact that one company no longer needs another companies revenue, why can't it be left at that? I like all titles, regardless (link bait, trolls, flames, truth, false bias....whatever, it's all good and the best stand on their own merit)!
Unfortunately this posturing is not because of any independence in Mozilla or any new revenue generating ability. Instead, they've just to switched to Yahoo/Bing's side now.
A bad article. Mozilla relies on Yahoo's Search-Engine (Bing) cooperation (instead of Google) and probably with partnerships like Pocket (will be removed).
Mozilla's work on Firefox, Rust and Servo is great. Thunderbird and a real multi-process browser could get a bit more love. The later probably can only be achieved with a Servo based engine (probably not not with Gecko and its XCOM, XUL legacy code - the current multi process work uses just two processes (sandbox plugins) and doesn't scale - opening hundreds tabs won't spawn dozens of processes as we know from IE and Chrome (with all its downsides but even more upsides (stability, usability, UI latency)). Firefox with Firebug and all its plugins is the best web development browser, Chrome with its ever changing DevTools (UI changes) comes second (for me).
Mozilla's browser is very important for the open Web.
Mozilla has repeatedly stated that they're not receiving any money from bundling Pocket, and I see no reason why they would lie about this considering that they're actively seeking to diversify revenue sources. And even if you think Mozilla is lying, there's no way that Pocket is putting up the hundreds of millions of dollars necessary to make their hypothethical contribution to Mozilla's coffers anything more than a rounding error.
I haven't read every news. I never mentioned that someone is lying!? Nor do I think that way. I just know it from Firefox, it appeared suddenly. And I had to search on Google how to get rid of this unwanted service and disable it on all family computers. I had to change settings in the hidden "about:config" - not even an UI setting was available. Why would they integrate a closed third party service to an open source browser is beyond me. It seems the responsible person had no idea what he decided and is out of touch with the product and its community.
I know I'm being a cynical ass, but I flat out do not believe that they have no incentive to integrate Pocket. Maybe it's not financial, but it has to be something.
There's a lot of hate around pocket, and it provides a cool, but simple feature. Yet I haven't heard anyone who loves it and actively wants it. The best I've heard is "yeah, it's OK", even online. I don't know why they would push so hard for a product that there's so much hatred for, and nobody rooting for, whey they could just say "Wow, OK. Guess you guys don't want it. We're scrapping it". It's far from a killer feature, so who's it for?
Pocket is making money with their database of what people read and when they read it. This isn't insignificant.
Even if there isn't some sort of payola deal going on to feed that money back to Mozilla, this is clearly being done for profit. Maybe it's some sort of indirect benefit, maybe it's someone doing a favor for a friend.
The alternative isn't any better: if there isn't any benefit for Mozilla, they are letting for-profit businesses insert themselves as a feature dependency.
Firefox wanted a similar "temporary bookmark" feature to augment Reader mode and other things. Instead of coding it themselves, they decided on using an existing addon that gave the same functionality.
Now you're moving around the goalposts. I was replying to "Even if there isn't some sort of payola deal going on to feed that money back to Mozilla, this is clearly being done for profit. Maybe it's some sort of indirect benefit, maybe it's someone doing a favor for a friend."
There's no indirect benefit (aside from having a new feature). There's a very clear and logical reason behind the integration. In retrospect, they should have consulted with the community first perhaps, but it's false that Mozilla did this for some direct or indirect benefit.
Multi-process is happening just fine with Gecko, XPCOM, and XUL. It's the extension ecosystem (the do-whatever-with-the-internals nature of the extensions API, and getting all the extensions to upgrade) that's the obstacle. Nightly is currently multi-process (although not large numbers of processes, but there's a pref to flip); it just hasn't shipped in the release channel yet.
Mozilla did not make any money from the Pocket integration. Would you let it go already?
Also the Developer Edition, which is the alpha channel, is multi-process as you'd expect it to be. But speaking of hundreds of tabs, try doing that in Chrome, do that in Firefox, and compare.
> But speaking of hundreds of tabs, try doing that in Chrome, do that in Firefox, and compare.
At least in my experience, bad example. Chrome works with ~300 Tabs, Firefox freezes or crashes regularly with way less then that. And this machine only has 8 GB RAM. Let's hope the current changes in Firefox stabilize it.
I use dozens to hundreds tabs in IE11 and Chrome, sure it may use 16 GB ram, but I have more than that. Firefox often removes the tabs from the memory, going back to the tab means reloading the page. I will check out the recent Alpha for sure, I have it installed.
I use both daily and wouldn't describe either as being across the board better. For any one feature, you can find something else which the other one does better and each release tends to round out weak points (e.g. for awhile Firefox's responsive design mode was a big win but Chrome has caught up and added things like network speed simulation, too).
The right way to look at this is to go back to what we used to suffer through and recognize that it's awesome that we have two sharp dev teams putting at lot of effort into making life easier for web developers. Using the “worst” one is still far ahead of the best two years ago.
> - display JavaScript data structures in more visual way
Sort of? Is the existence of the 'inspect' function enough?
> - breakpoints on DOM changes, events and Ajax requests
I'm not sure about this. I mean, you can set the breakpoints in code per usual but I expect you mean setting them on the nodes themselves and perhaps global breakpoints in the net panel?
> - debugger API to work together with IDEs like Netbeans
It's possible with the remote debugging protocol but the only implementation I know of is the proof of concept that Paul Rouget put together two years ago, although I don't think he released any code.
Firefox is the only major browser not controlled by one of Google's major competitors. Even without a deal for the search engine default, there are all sorts of reasons that is valuable to Google (collaboration on web standards, an insurance policy for browser design mistakes, not all Firefox users would switch to Chrome and so on).
Last I checked (which was years ago, mind), Mozilla's search partnership with Google was bringing in $4 billion in annual revenue for Google, with $300 million of that being kicked back to Mozilla. Google wasn't sponsoring Firefox for kicks, there was a definite financial incentive.
Firefox created the revolution of "better browsers"! Google was smart enough to have market their own browser by having themselves be the default search on it. Once you land on Google, the "install Chrome for a better experience" slowly had people move to it.
Either way, there's no denying that Google literally spammed Chrome everywhere, and often with misleading or dishonest text.
"Your browser is outdated. Upgrade it now (to Chrome) for a better experience", "Make youtube faster with Chrome" etc etc.
It was literally impossible to go anywhere on the web, without the top of every second screen you visited saying "Upgrade to Chrome". It was massive and it was dishonest.
Ofcourse moms and dads everywhere jumped on this, like they jump on the "free scans" and "you have a virus" messages without ever considering if Chrome was a different browser or there being any technical merit to the claims about being better. Google used the exact same strategy as malware authors.
They even bundled it as a drive-by install with other popular software (like Flash). Update flash and suddenly your default browser is Chrome, which conveniently imported all your Firefox data and now reports all of that to Google, one keystroke at a time.
It's hard not to call this spyware.
Plain and simple: Chrome's marketshare is based on being evil and nothing else.
These days Chrome may feel like a better product, because Google keeps making their pages for Chrome and nothing else, using proprietary Google only extensions.
And that reminds me of a story I've heard before... Something about there E's..?
While I disagree with "free scans" and "evil", I think you're hitting pretty close to the mark.
Back then, Google's Chrome was still an exciting new thing being discovered by many non-techies, fast and simple. Google seemed like a company dead set on being the good guys.
> Back then, Google's Chrome was still an exciting new thing being discovered by many non-techies, fast and simple. Google seemed like a company dead set on being the good guys.
Yea this was pretty odd. Usually all the people around me are the last to switch, because they make their decisions based on "whichever thing they saw first or more prominently". In Chrome's case, I switched quite a while after most of my friends: they all saw Chrome marketed all over the place while I consciously enjoyed a Firefox feature or two that Chrome was lacking. I finally ended up switching when Firefox's incredible slowness made it too painful to keep using (this was around v3.5, I believe).
A spyware? Come on. To my experience it was the clear advantage on the design, security and speed (launch and JS speed). It was way ahead of Firefox or IE. I often asked people why they use Chrome they say it feels faster and not cluttered. Sure commercials helped but IMO, it was the word of mouth made it that popular.
Randomly generated token included in installer. Used to measure success rate of Google Chrome once at installation.[99]
Encoded string, according to Google, contains non-identifying information about where Chrome was downloaded from and its installation week, and is used to measure promotional campaigns.[99] Google provides the source code to decode this string.[95] On Google search query On first launch and first use of address bar[99] Optional.
Unique identifier along with user preferences, logs of usage metrics and crashes. default disabled
Text typed into the address bar. Optional
Information about how often Chrome is used, details about the OS and Chrome version. used on update
None of these things are "Stealing users data". From what I can see, you have to go out of your way to even send usage metrics and crashes to Google. All of these tracking metrics are similar, if not identical, to what other major browsers are currently doing.
If you download and install App A because you want App A, but unasked App B also gets installed as a paid-for drive-by installation which sets itself as your new default browser, which upon first launch (because its now default) imports all your data, history, bookmarks and passwords from your actual preferred browser and then proceeds to send all this data to App B's vendor without making it clear to you what just happened...
How is that not stealing? How is that different from what we usually call spyware?
There is nothing legitimate about how Chrome has hijacked a multitude of users' PCs and their data. There's no way to defend this behaviour.
It's called "sync" and you can bet everyone who has a Gmail account who gets asked to "log into Google" when Chrome is opened (as their new default browser) will enter their username and password without giving a second thought to it or realizing what they just authorized.
That's ofcourse if they even noticed that their browser now looks slightly different at all.
Voila. Data stolen. Or are you going to argue that this represents completely concentfull and legitimately syncing?
I'm saying Google shouldn't have the Firefox/MSIE data in the first place, because lots of users never intended to install chrome, but got it as a drive-by installation.
They are the illegitimate third party "stealing" the data.
You mistakenly assume this feature which by default requests your google login for sync will be understood by users as this, when they open their browser and see "Log into google". Much more likely is that your casual user will think they're logging into Gmail.
This is a dark UX anti-pattern, using the same technique as a regular scammer or phishing site.
Google is absolutely, horrifyingly into evil territory here.
"I think hanging someone is worse than just giving them poison."
I don't particularly care about this spyware debate but I can't see how something bad being better than something else bad bears any relevance unless we are talking about choosing between two bad options.
> speed (launch and JS speed). It was way ahead of Firefox or IE.
By the time V8 shipped, SpiderMonkey's TraceMonkey (and not long thereafter JaegerMonkey) was pretty competitive. There were differences between the engines—TraceMonkey fell off fast paths more often while V8 sans Crankshaft had fewer optimizations for tight loops—but they weren't night and day differences.
This is all history, of course. Nowadays, V8 and SpiderMonkey have essentially the same architecture (although as I understand things SpiderMonkey is more unified with the IonMonkey JIT core powering both Baseline and Ion, whereas Crankshaft and non-Crankshaft V8 are more divergent).
Some did. Some people moved to Chrome because they saw ads for it everywhere. Some moved to Chrome because it was bundled with something else they installed (e.g. Flash, Acrobat Reader), with the "make it the default browser checkbox" pre-checked by default.
Google spent a fair amount of money for a few years on marketing and paying all sorts of other software to bundle Chrome as an opt-out.
No, people moved there because it had multi-million dollar campaign. Ads everywhere from radio, tv, to outdoor posters and billboards is what they had to pay for, and then another millions worth of advertising through ad sense, youtube, google. Still excluding priceless ad positions like mentioned above.
Then there was their active push to eliminate other browser by providing chrome-only experiences. Mostly tech demos and games, but also actively blocking random features in other browsers.
And let's not forget android.
So in short, no, people didn't move there because it was better. You are really overestimating people.
You're probably right, but as a personal anecdote, I switched to chrome when it came out because I felt it was a better browser. The lack of clutter and the significantly faster JS engine made it feel far nicer to me than FF. For I.E. and Safari it wasn't even a competition. That was circa 2008.
It's still just a browser and most of the world doesn't care about the intracacies of one browser or the other in determining which is better like more tech savvy people do.
They just want something that works and for most people they were told that that was Chrome, because it was pushed right in their faces from Google Search and whatever other Google services they used. Not to mention all the installers they had it bundled with.
I'm convinced it was 80% advertising that got the average person to install desktop Chrome originally. On mobile I think it was 99% due it being the default on Android. Most people don't change default apps or settings.
CVE counting is a poor proxy for actual security. A browser that does not sandbox its renderers or enforce a permissions model on its extensions cannot reasonably be considered secure in 2015.
When it's ready, hopefully Servo will be used as the basis for a browser that can provide security comparable to Chrome. But there's much more to that comprehensive goal than just writing a renderer in Rust.
> But there's much more to that comprehensive goal than just writing a renderer in Rust.
Which is why the latest Servo builds have very strict sandboxing. People assume that Servo's security story is "just write it in Rust and it'll magically be secure". In reality, nobody on the team is that naive. The goal is to create a browser engine that achieves and significantly exceeds the state of the art. The architecture for that exists right now.
The architecture may exist, by Servo as a day-to-day usable browser does not yet. Don't get me wrong; I absolutely look forward to the day that it does.
Neat that they have a sandbox up and running, though. I wasn't aware of that. Is there a paper somewhere I can read about their sandbox architecture?
Hopefully this means they can achieve market share parity now. I'm seriously considering switching from Chrome to Firefox due to how badly it behaves on my Ivy Bridge era MBPr.
I'm not sure where you think Firefox is getting new adoption. Enthusiasts will try both it and Chrome and go with whichever they prefer, but the muggles are now being smothered in Chrome on a lot of Windows notebooks and all Android devices since 4.2, and Chrome is absolutely good enough to keep them from going through the mental gymnastics to realize what a web browser is, research alternatives, install Firefox, and know the difference between the word "Internet", the swirly icon, and the Fox globe one while realizing they mean different things.
Unless Firefox can get distributor deals with Dell / HP / etc the way Google has to get Chrome preloaded (between that and its default-on-Android status is what is rapidly pushing its market share) nobody has the pressing need to go out of their way going borderline door to door replacing IE6 with Firefox on everyones computer like they did in 2005-2008.
On a MacBook I've found its almost impossible to beat Safari, it works amazingly well and doesn't annihilate my battery life. Personal choice though, I'm not committed to any specific browser and all do certain things better than the rest.
Safari doesn't sync with any android browser, making it no-go automatically (for me).
Firefox, on the other hand, is the only browser that can sync between desktop-mobile and has adblock on both sides. Chrome unfortunately doesn't on the mobile side.
Safari does seem to be the battery life king. I wonder how it manages to do that. Could be related to why it's a slower performer than Firefox and Chrome.
I try to se Safari, but tab management is awful. There isn't (as far as I know and I really searched for it) any kind of session management that allows me to keep a separation between my work browsing sessions and my home/personal projects sessions.
Dunno, I think that depends on the content. I'm building a js-css-webgl game, and I find Safari is lucky to break 50% of the performance I get from Chrome/FF.
There's a few WebKit bugs filed about slow WebGL performance under both OSX and iOS Safari, I wonder what Apple is doing differently to Google/blink in the rendering pipeline to cause it?
No idea, sorry. My guess is that it's the JS VM but I don't know how to check. I just tried running a profile, but Safari froze and beach-balled to death. When I do profiles in Chrome it drops from 60fps down to 45. :/
Fortunately for me, Safari also doesn't implement some HTML5 APIs I use (e.g. PointerLock), so I feel justified in pretending it doesn't exist.
Firefox, or maybe Gecko, has been on a downhill slide with end users for a long time. I've been hoping it'll get better for at least a couple years and it hasn't.
A good browser is hard, like really hard. It's in the same order of magnitude as writing an OS. To improve the user experience they need to hire guys like https://randomascii.wordpress.com (Bruce Dawson).
Performance, I don't mean benchmark performance but the sucky stuff.
Today on Linux I have to restart Firefox every ~20min because it slows to crawl. I don't know why and don't really care, because it'll take an unknown amount of time to root cause and 6 months from now an OS or browser update is likely to cause something similar.
I'm not dissing the Firefox devs. Google seems to have more people to throw at this problem.
I'm pretty sure some OS people would take issue with that statement.
Firefox has indeed been losing share gradually, but not due to their browser implementation. That's been improving such that I think the slide would be worse otherwise.
Firefox still doesn't support some basic Mac OS X features like rubber scrolling and contextual menus. And it is known how slowly they've adapted Lion style fullscreen and invisible scrollbars. Chrome folks, on the other hand, keep up with Mac OS X updates very quickly. Nowadays, Mozilla cares more about stuff like diversifying profits (Pocket integration for example) than making user-friendly browser.
I've been using Firefox and Chrome interchangeably on my MacBook and did not notice that rubber scrolling is not implemented, as it's not something important to me and what do you mean by contextual menus?
But btw, this goes both ways. On Windows 10 my Firefox looks better and behaves properly with a bigger DPI value, whereas Chrome does not. Now that's an important feature ;-)
> Mozilla cares more about stuff like diversifying profits (Pocket integration for example)
That's not a good example -- Mozilla supposedly didn't get any money to add Pocket.
Why they added that Pocket integration (with no easy way to uninstall it like an extension, and yes I know you can goto the ever so user-friendly about:config and make changes), I'll never know. After tons of complaints about that bundleware, Mozilla continues to leave it in.
But then they remove great features like Tab Groups because it's "too expensive to maintain them". I would actually pay them to maintain this feature indefinitely, I'm sure others will as well.
This is the first I've heard about Tab Groups being removed and that makes me sad. However the comments in the bug tracker [0] make it sound like it isn't about the money. They also have a migration plan for existing users to back up their data and move on to an extension [1].
> I would actually pay them to maintain this feature indefinitely, I'm sure others will as well
If you are not paying for it, you are the prod... oops, wrong browser vendor! /s
Seriously though, I know there are trade-offs to consider, but some of the technical decisions being made for Firefox make me wonder what they were thinking (case in point: Pocket). Too bad most Firefox forks tend to wither over time.
I wonder what they'd do if Yahoo decides not to renew their deal with them. Would they go back to Google or go to Bing? What if no search provider thinks they are worth the amount they are getting with their current deals?
It pains me to say, but I'd rather Mozilla used all their man-power to fix the god-awful performance of desktop Firefox.
Granted, I have a lot of pages and tabs open, more than 20 at any given time. But I fail to understand why that leads to such a dramatic slow-down after having the browser open for a day or two. If I type text, it will appear with a delay of up to 20s - on a 16GB computer where a lot of RAM is free. And with only uBlock.
Something in the core of Firefox is completely rotten.
> I have a lot of pages and tabs open, more than 20 at any given time.
20 tabs is shockingly low for causing performance problems, especially that severe and _especially_ on a computer with freaking 16 GB of RAM. I abuse tabs pretty badly on Chrome: on my 16 GB workstation I'd have a few hundred open, many of them for weeks at a time, and on my 8 GB laptop, I usually have up to 100, and I rarely get performance problems, certainly never to that degree.
I was one of the late-switchers to Chrome because there were some Firefox features I enjoyed, but the garbage performance finally forced my hand back in 2009/10 or whatever. I periodically check back with Firefox out of a healthy sense of wanting to be aware of alternatives, but it consistently fails at what's perhaps the most important to me: performance.
I currently have 1290tabs in the tab bar, about ~40 of them loaded with memory usage around 2GB for the whole browser without noticing any issues.
My most CPU intensive extensions are Stylish @ 3%, µUblock @ 2%, and All Tabs Helper @ 1%. For tabs it's about:performance @ 22%, a YouTube video @ 6%, and a paused YouTube video @ 2%.
This is with Nightly (binary downloaded from Mozilla) on a 4core 3.7GHz AMD CPU, with an integrated 8core GPU: the A10-7850K running Gentoo Linux.
No, I have Flash disabled, both on Windows and on MacOS. Developer tools are a resource drain, but bearable - the browser simply gets slower after a couple of hours of use. And then much slower, like unbearably slow, even the developer edition where I don't have uBlock or any script/flash/adblocker installed.
> In 2014, that deal accounted for most of the nonprofit organization's $330 million in revenue, according to financial results just now released for that year
Wow, that's a lot of cash. What are the top expenditures of Mozilla?
$40 million "branding and marketing"
$38 million "general and administrative"
$10 million depreciation
$13 million "program services" (whatever that is)
$213 million "software development"
Note that this is not counting income taxes (another $2.5 million) as an expense, because this is basically the "how much taxable profit is there?" calculation.
Nate that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation claims Mozilla has "1000+" employees; if that claim is true I would expect $200+ million just for salaries, benefits, payroll taxes, office space, etc (obviously depending on where the employees are located).
Mozilla cares about good user experience more than money and sometimes even more than self interest and principles.
Unfortunately the quality of DuckDuckGo's search results for non-english-speaking countries are nowhere close to google's, which is why google is still the default there.
Actually, I kinda am from non-english speaking country myself and use a couple more languages that are not English. Funny enough, Google localization is one thing that made me switch to DuckDuckGo. Somehow, Google thinks if my IP is from Latvia — it has to speak Latvian to me (which I'm admittedly a bit less comfortable with than English), if it's from Netherlands — it has to speak Dutch (which I don't speak at all). And (aside from manually adding bizzare GET-arguments into url) it doesn't even allow me to chose language myself. One evening it asked me to confirm some user-agreement in Latvian before I'm allowed to continue using search, I got annoyed and said "That's enough".
Yes, in some languages Google search is sometimes superior, but the difference isn't huge and I always can type "!g something" into DuckDuckGo if I need to (and I don't have to confirm any user agreements in that case).
In fact, what still makes me use Google search sometimes isn't localization or some clever heuristic features like flight search, but "search by image" feature. I don't know any other engine that would do that nearly as good as Google. TinEye is left far behind, unfortunately.
That Google feature pisses me off massively as well. Let's call it premature personalization. I'm in Germany, yet sometimes I'd actually like to visit news.google.co.uk or .com. Yet it seems to sometimes redirect me to the German news.google or the one I had previously open. On one of my laptops it even redirects me to the Italian one, yet I don't think I ever visited that one.
Maybe, just maybe, google could stop thinking it is so much smarter than its users?
By the way, DuckDuckGo now has country/language localization as well, though it does not seem to be the default.
I fully agree with the second part of your comment regarding DDG search results; I am from Asia. But Mozilla caring about user experience is something maybe from the bygone era. All it cares about now is market share and revenue. The Pocket episode was the last nail in coffin for me along with the continuous bloat it has been putting into once my only browser options which was for years for me.
I believe Mozilla's keeping Google as the default could be smart. If a company is trying to compete with Google they now see a local contract as a double win.
I feel like Mozilla ought to be banking / investing a large slice of their revenue and aiming to live off the profits. They need to turn themselves into a self funded foundation that truly needs money from no one. They definitely shouldn't get used to rivers of gold flowing in, especially as their market share keeps falling.
While this might be true, I don't think this needed to be said out loud. Statements like this always have a way of turning into "famous last words" sometime down the line.
Sure, they're reliant on money. But since they have multiple options, then they're no longer reliant on Google money. It's a big step forward for them.
I love Firefox, their addon api is pretty fucking sweet. I've made 2 super simple addons, one to kill a paywall on my local guardian site and a second just last night to easily set lightblue background with black text using a context-menu button, literally took 10 minutes. Can't beat Mozilla documentation.
That's encouraging news, this is something I've wanted to tinker with. The only time I tried to get into extension making (which, to be fair to them, was 6 or 7 years ago), it seemed a complicated thing with rather poor documentation.
How would one go about getting started in this now? I hear there's "old style addons", jetpack-based ones, and something about making it Electrolysis-compatible... and then there's WebExtensions looming in the horizon. Could you give me one definite starting point that's reasonably modern and future-proof?
I don't know much about Jetpack or Elrolysis, next to nothing in fact. Best place to begin would be with the "Getting Started" tutorial https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/SDK/Tutorials/Ge... Installation instructions here https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/SDK/Tools/jpm#In.... Caveat I haven't used the updated SDK using their jpm tool but my FF 41 is happily running addon packaged with out-of-date SDK. Good news for you is the new work-flow sounds even easier as you no longer need to call bin/activate to use cfx tools. I will eventually update SDK but I was perfectly happy with my old solution: alias ffsdk='cd /home/$USER/addon-sdk-1.17 && source bin/activate && PS1="ffsdk:\W$ "'
a) because there are more conformists in this world than non-conformists(Are we visionaries? Maybe. ;)). b) bunch of people up Google's a$$ thinking they can attract attention to themselves by making an HN Chrome extension. I can offer you lightblue HN http://i.imgur.com/H7Axkk7.png lol
"The article is not saying "Firefox doesn't need any corporate money". Corporate deals are really the only reason why they're still alive at all since they are virtually nonexistent in mind share.
Instead, the article is simply saying that Google wised up and realized they had no need to give Mozilla that much money so instead, Mozilla convinced other gullible corporations to give them money.
Once that stream dries up (and it will), Mozilla will meet the fate that it deserves and die."
== I don't see why this text was offensive or the comment was killed by flags...
The article clearly says that 2014 revenues was something like $300 million and most if not all was from a single-point corporate contract. Somehow, undisclosed in the article, all of this revenue has been replaced by non-google corporate contracts. Such that 2015/2016 will presumably not see much decline. Or, in other words, Mozilla was able to fully replace one Corporate sponsor with another (or another set).
The key question for everyone here is what, if anything, does that matter? By not explaining of discussing the changes in the terms of the contracts/business model, not much at all transparency has been added to Mozilla's motivations or long-term outlook.
Maybe this info is out there somewhere else, but decent reporting should have highlighted those links somewhere in tha artcicle. I'm surprised as well HN comments don't seem to cover this topic anywhere either, but maybe I;ve missed the discussion somewhere...
These are the cold, hard numbers on which @incepted based his comments:
Mozilla gets the bulk of its revenue from search deals.[1] For 9 years, from 2005 to 2014, Google paid Mozilla to set Firefox's default search provider to be google.com. In those 9 years, the Firefox browser share rose to peak of ~30% in 2010 and then fell consistently due to competition from Chrome.[2]
In 2014, when Google's contract with Mozilla came up for renewal, Firefox browser market share was just 12.4%.[3] Google probably decided that continuing to pay Mozilla the same amount of money for much less traffic wasn't worth it, so they didn't renew.
Mozilla then locked Yahoo! into a five-year contract.[4] One year into the Yahoo deal, Firefox's browser market share is now 9.8%.[3] If the long term declining trend continues, four years later the market share would be even smaller. That's when Yahoo!'s contract ends.
That's also when the question will arise: if Google paid $300 million a year for search traffic from 12.4% browser share in 2014 who will pay how much for far less search traffic in 2019?
that's surprising b/c i've had a good experience with firefox on android: i particularly like the "send tab to desktop browser" feature, and although i'm still using adb for debug, newer versions apparently do debugging direct with desktop browser instances, no adb needed. for all i know, chrome has similar features as well, so i'll just say that i haven't found firefox mobile lacking.
i was totally unaware that mozilla was making that much money (or any significant amount of money) from corporate deals, but that's probably b/c i'm naieve. proprotionally larger donations will go to wikipedia instead of mozilla in the future.