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by glandium 2581 days ago
Do you think all Mozilla employees are Engineers working on Firefox?
1 comments
robocat 2581 days ago
Of course not. But perhaps they should have been ;-p. In 2010 Firefox's market share peaked[1]. Chrome has spanked Mozilla for a decade and Mozilla haven't effectively competed (to me apparently by choice of their focus).

Meanwhile the Chrome team has beaten Mozilla at open source, which should be Mozilla's strength (V8, node.js, Electron, closure compiler, remote debugging, Samsung browser, Edge 76, Chromium, etc etc). The brightest non-browser component to come out of Mozilla to me is rust, which is a tour de force (Mozilla does have some serious technical chops), and as a developer mdn is superb.

Mozilla chased multiple dead-ends during that time, perhaps most notably Firefox OS (even though gonk was based on Android? [2]).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...

[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/B2G_OS/Plat...

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fenwick67 2581 days ago
Chrome beating Firefox in marketshare is not a technical problem, it's a marketing problem.

Google owns the largest digital advertising platform in the world and controls the most popular consumer OS, it's hard to beat that reach.

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robocat 2581 days ago
Regardless of marketing, Chrome is and was still better than Firefox technically.

And Chrome beating Edge and Safari is technical, not marketing. If iOS wasn't closed (Apple's market advantage), would Safari be dominant there?

Mozilla had us up to 2010 because Firefox was a better browser.

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sct202 2580 days ago
Safari has an upper limit on market-share though because it can only be on iOS or Macs. Looking thru my website's stats, it looks like Safari has the overwhelming majority of iOS users and about half on Macs, and from experience Safari is faster than Chrome on old iOS devices.
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fenwick67 2580 days ago
> Chrome is and was still better than Firefox technically

I'd really like to see how you came to this conclusion. I hate to be a fanboy but I don't really notice any performance difference between the two in daily use, except in some webGL demos.

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glandium 2581 days ago
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20038013
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robocat 2581 days ago
Firefox could be collateral damage.

Google fought dirty back against Microsoft. Microsoft pulled very dirty tactics to ram Edge down the gullets of Windows users. Google used the same tactics as used by a large percentage of installers on Windows: business as usual?

Or Google actually supported Windows 7 users, because Microsoft wouldn't. Maybe Google really needed a browser that worked and was secure on Windows 7 (not Internet explorer).

Microsoft owned the APIs to their OS yet Chrome beat them on their own turf - ouch!

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robocat 2580 days ago
Aside: I just noticed servo's roadmap (updated 20 Mar). It looks like a major focus of Mozilla is the AR/VR market!

""" Our 2019 goals for Servo - especially the Mozilla staff - are aligned with the Mixed Reality efforts at Mozilla:

* Higher quality text rendering with WebRender and Pathfinder, originally designed for desktop but now tuned for VR and AR hardware.

* Expanding the set of VR/AR platforms that can run Servo natively

* Contributing to new standards such as as WebXR, based on implementation experience on new platforms

* Achieving competitive performance and compatibility of new and existing mixed reality web content """

https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Roadmap

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