| I think that many of the changes that Mozilla has made to Firefox that people in this thread are complaining about may not have directly driven away a large number of users, but, they indicate a serious problem with decision making within Mozilla. It is clear that the only reason many changes were made, and features removed, was solely because Chrome did it. And Google has very different motivations and goals than Mozilla. Google wants to make money, and use Chrome as a pillar in their platform. So, by emulating Chrome so closely, not just does it indicate that the developers are making bad decisions, it also means that the browser will not be as good. EXAMPLE:
They proposed removing FTP support from Firefox, and the justification was just a link to an announcement that Chrome was doing it. [1]
It makes sense for Chrome to do it from a business perspective, but it does not make sense for Firefox. Or, better yet, I remember that there was talk of having Chrome switch back to using a native pdf renderer back from the javascript one. This sacrifices portability and arguably security for speed. Or sometimes there are design decisions in Chrome that are outright hostile to the user, to help Google's partners, such as removing the "save as" option for html5 video. It is only a matter of time until Firefox makes it harder to download video, solely because Chrome is doing it. When Google does this, I at least understand that their sabotaging this functionality is part of their larger strategy. Mozilla doing it is just baffling. I mean, the original Firebird went in the opposite direction as Internet Explorer 6. If Mozilla had the same culture back then, they would have put all of their resources into making an inferior clone of Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer was a better user experience in a lot of ways, especially for the first few years. But people started moving to Firefox because it was worth it. The security, control, and flexibility was worth it. I specifically remember turning people onto Firefox because they were sick of ads, and there were special add-ons that they wanted. If Mozilla wants Firefox to work, it needs to do what Chrome wont let you do. It needs to integrate aggressive ad-blocking. Let you have control over the content you view. I think that people would happily use Firefox if it empowered them. 1: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1174462 |
That bug was filed by the person who wrote most of the FTP implementation in Firefox and was one of the few people who maintained it. The reasons to consider removal were that it was a maintenance burden, extra security attack surface, and not really relevant to users nowadays. The posted link only spoke to that last point: that other widely used browsers were removing it and it wasn't being a problem for their users, apparently.
The first two reasons for removal were not clearly explained in the bug report initially, because they were obvious to both the bug filer and his intended audience: the networking module owners and peers.
See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1174462#c23 for more details.
Would the summary being "consider removing FTP support" more accurately reflect intent? Probably. Did the actual engineers involved know what the bug was about? Yes.
> Or, better yet, I remember that there was talk of having Chrome switch back to using a native pdf renderer back from the javascript one.
I assume you mean Firefox? Speed was part of that discussion, but so were the various features pdf.js lacks but the proposed replacement supports.
> It is only a matter of time until Firefox makes it harder to download video, solely because Chrome is doing it.
If you assume that Mozilla is just aping Google. But if, on the other hand, you just have that as a preconceived notion and try to make all decisions fit that theory no matter what the actual reasons for them are... then you might just guess wrong on this.
I agree with you on the broad point that Firefox needs to do things Chrome can't or won't do. The worry with your "aggressive ad-blocking" suggestion (much as I would like that personally!) is that a likely outcome is a large enough number of sites blocking Firefox altogether that users stop being able to use it at all for normal browsing. If Firefox had a monopoly position in the market it _might_ be able to get away with that sort of move, but it doesn't have that position.