I understand why this spark conversations about the current Firefox market share situation.
But I also believe that Firefox's dominant past plays against when it comes to analyzing the product right now.
Firefox is amazing, it works wonderfully, it continues to improve, respects privacy, adopts Mozilla's ethical values.
Yes, not many people use it, but criticizing this point so aggressively I think it is also influenced by the culture aiming at hypergrouth, dominance, monopoly, "Move fast and break things".
I am very happy with what Firefox does for me right now. Imagine a situation in which Firefox does not exist and today the product comes to light, it would be a great celebration, and the market share would be zero.
Thanks Firefox, I love you very much, although there are few of us who use you and maybe that doesn't change.
To be precise, it was 289 million on July 1st 2018, and 248 million on July 9th 2019. It was 239 million on August 24. Yes, the numbers are huge. Any product that has this many users would be considered a major success, but the trend is still troubling.
Why would the typical user make the effort to download Firefox when they're already happy with Chrome? The typical user isn't on HN with strong opinions on privacy, has little notion of what constitutes a tech monopoly, covets convenience, and has already configured their one browser extension but doesn't remember how (and it turns out that same browser extension isn't in Firefox).
For most people, they can already see the internet in Chrome, or Safari, or maybe even Internet Explorer. Why would they switch when they don't even know what they're switching to or why?
Meanwhile Chrome has the full force of Google behind it, and Chrome is actually one of their important projects that they aren't going to abandon any time soon. It's really Chrome vs. the world, and Chrome is winning.
Firefox 57 launched at the end of 2017 and was very much a love-it-or-hate-it change. Some people saw a significant performance improvement and that was important for them. Other people didn't have a problem with its performance anyway but saw the entire ecosystem of extensions that made Firefox different thrown under a bus.
I'm firmly in the latter camp, and if it weren't for the security implications I'd still be running pre-57 Firefox with the full set of extensions I found useful. If I didn't need to use all the major browsers anyway because of my web development work and I wasn't so untrusting of Google in terms of privacy, I might easily have decided at that point that Firefox no longer had any compelling advantage over Chrome and switched. Presumably some people did.
I prefer firefox, but I'm on a mac and it runs pretty hot. I believe they're improving this though. Once performance is solved it'll be my default browser.
I've seen thousands of Chrome ads in my life. On TV, on FB, on other ads on other websites, etc. I really don't think I've ever seen a FF ad. At least, I really can't recall seeing one. From what I've seen, the public has just not really heard of them. It's mostly just us geeks. It's hard to get market share when your audience doesn't even know you exist. And then you have Android, which comes with Chrome and has a much larger worldwide audience than iOS. I don't know how this is different than windows shipping with IE in the 90s, except Alphabet is allowed to continue while MS was not. Android has about 76% of the world market compared to iOS's ~22%. iOS has been in a slow decline most of this year as well, while Andoid is going up by as much. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide
I'm sorry, what? It was either the underdog of MSIE or of Chrome, it never was dominant the way the actual dominant browser at the time was dominant. The peak was 30%, and when Chrome took over from MSIE, it had 21% with MSIE and Chrome at 30% each.
You have a short memory. Netscape Navigator 3 had a >75% market share. Mozilla, which became Firefox, was a total rewrite, but that rewrite was done by the same people and was released as Netscape 6 - 9.
A majority of early adopters (of computers and internet connections in general) running some early version of this doesn't seem very relevant. I really don't think this ancient history (browser history does not go back much further than this) is working against Firefox today.
Mozilla is now openly peeing in Google's punch all the while being dependent on piles of money they take from it.
At some point Google will get tired of this and will withdraw from the agreement. They won't be the default search provider, but that will play to their advantage - Firefox out-of-the-box user experience will take a sharp nose dive. Say all you want about DDG and alternatives, but they still can't hold a candle to Google's search quality. So what Mozilla will end up with is (a) a dip in funding and (b) a dip in the user share. This might be just enough to either make them reconsider their ethics or to kill Mozilla altogether.
So, yeah, a good CEO that can shed the Google dependency is very much required.
Say all you want about DDG and alternatives, but they still can't hold a candle to Google's search quality.
I'm rather torn on this point. On one hand, yes, DDG for example feels some years behind Google in its relevance ranking. On the other, Google itself has been degrading the quality of its own results with ads, etc. so badly that they've seriously degraded their own "above the fold" relevant results.
I've always written off Duck Duck Go in the past, but lately after not being able to find relevant info on Google, I've been giving them a go and have been rather impressed. Especially on image results, which are way nicer to use and give you direct image links. Plus they don't obfuscate all the URLs with tracking redirects, so I can copy a link without visiting a page (that might redirect the URL on me again.)
There's still some things they miss, and my main complaint with DDG is it's too aggressive in taking the search you asked for and substituting in results it thought you meant. I suspect that problem comes from their upstream providers like Bing, which has similar issues.
I start with DDG now, and switch to Google if their results are not good enough. 90% of the time its fine.
Google intentionally broke image search, and their top search results are getting very bad. Its as if my question was "show me links to as many ads as possible that might be related to my search terms." Do Google advertisers realize I see their ad when it matches only one of my search words? If they read more than one of my words, they know that was a wasted advertisement.
Oh, I wasn't aware of the lawsuit. That's ridiculous. Well in any case, I wrote a Userscript to restore direct links to Google image results, and also to filter out spam site results (cough e...-e...com), if anyone were interested: https://byuu.org/other/script/google
Middle-clicking or control-clicking will load the original images.
Bing direct links images as well so they'd probably go after Microsoft well before DDG, so I think we're safe. But I can always do the same for DDG if need be.
Agreed. I've given DuckDuckGo a try a few times in the past, and it never stuck. With the latest rounds of Google-being-Google, I gave DDG another go and so far haven't looked back.
I still remember the old days of Altavista, Yahoo, Lycos and Infoseek, to name a few. I would usually have to try several and comb through their results to find what I wanted.
These days, I'm getting a sense of deja vu, because Google is slowly getting worse and DDG is slowly getting better. Most of the time, I'll get the desired result right away, regardless of the engine I use. But sometimes, I'll be surprised at how bad the results are on one and then I have to try the other. And although it's not happening very frequently, I have to do it more and more often.
I guess that's good, in a sense. Sure, it's nice when things just work and you don't have to think about them, but we've all seen that lack of competition is, in the long run, bad for the users.
I feel exactly the same: I've been using DDG for 7 years now for privacy reasons, but I have been using !g (ddg's shortcut to search on google) a lot because ddg was often lacking useful results. But I've now noticed that Google itself has become a poor search engine too!
Nowadays, I still use !g when out of luck with DDG, but 90% of the times, Google don't give me the answer I'm looking for either. And I don't feel it's because DDG improved that much but because Google declined.
DDG is just so bad. Yesterday I found a website on my desktop. I wanted to view it on my Raspberry Pi so I could copy/paste the commands. So I typed in some keywords from the title and the name of the site. By default the Raspbian image uses DDG apparently.
The page I was after was not to be found.
Well at least on the first page, I didn't bother checking beyond. Did the !g thing and got the page I wanted straight up first hit.
Interesting, I guess Google used the fact that both searches came from the same IP to prioritize the one I wanted[1].
In any case, I just connected to my work PC and did a search from a clean VM there, we don't do anything remotely Raspberry Pi or TensorFlow related there. The link you posted was the first hit at work, but the one I wanted[1] was the third hit.
Yet for DDG the results were the same, no hits. I even tried pressing "more" once, still nothing. I even tried "maker.pro install tensorflow" (without the quotes), and similar result. I tried "maker.pro tensorflow raspberry pi", still not finding it.
Maybe I just need to learn what DDG focuses on in a search string, and I've been trained to what Google weights.
But the reason Google got big was because it was the first search engine where, for 99% of the time, I didn't have to spend several minutes optimizing search terms just to find the right thing.
It doesn't sound like your torn at all, if you think DDG still feels year behind Google, despite Google's results degrading. Sounds like you still think Google is a lot better.
No, quite the opposite. To clarify: this is the first time I've started using DDG on multiple devices and it's stuck. I'll rephrase: I think that DDG is still a few years behind Google's unadorned best-effort result set, but not that far behind Google's actual presentation today. I.e. Google's degraded itself so much as to make the competition viable for this search user.
"Say all you want about DDG and alternatives, but they still can't hold a candle to Google's search quality."
I use DDG as main search engine since a while. It usually works, but occasionally (less than 10% of searches however) I have to repeat the search using Google. The point being that even if I had to revert to Google for half of my searches, this would mean for Google 50% less information about my search habits, and exposure to their injected ads/information, which wouldn't be a trivial figure at all.
One doesn't use DDG because it's superior to Google (it's not and won't be for a long while) but rather to send a message to corporations making profits out of user information.
I'm convinced Google doesn't give a rat's ass if ten thousands users like me don't use their search engine and services as we're already flagged in their database as users with adblockers, therefore immune to advertising (including ads that manage to defeat the blockers), but they would surely panic in terror should DDG use become somewhat trendy among Joe Users after some media coverage, social media campaign etc. The reason being that "normal", usually non technical, users are the ones providing Google mostly with real numbers because they allow webpages to analyze their habits and don't obfuscate their online behavior.
Should a big number of those users make the transition to DDG or alternatives, we would likely hear of flying chairs at Google headquarters.
I use DDG because it's superior to Google. Maybe not in results, but in UX. In particular, I use bangs ALL the time. Given that I can just add !g to quickly search Google in the <5% of the time (based on my history) that I need it, I prefer DDG. (I would still use it for privacy reasons even if it were worse -- it was and I did for several years).
I've been using DDG, finally, for a little less than 1 year. For most part my DDG searches have been sufficient, in the sense that I generally find what I'm looking for and my need is met.
On few occasions where my need is not met, I do a !g and sometimes Google gives me what I want, but not in all the cases. I have to refine my search query in many, if not most, of those cases.
One area where Google is definitely better than DDG, for obvious reasons, is where Google shows better YouTube videos and I believe also Image results. But for regular searches, DDG has been satisfactory.
The one thing that drives me nuts about startpage is that by default, links open in a new tab.
You can change this in Settings, but it's stored in a cookie which my devices clear from time to time. (Not that I'd rather they store it a different way, the situation is just unfortunate.)
It is in a sense a google proxy. Better results IMO than DDG, more similar to Google without sending your IP/info to google.
I don't understand the stuff too much at a really high level to know which is more private, DDG vs Startpage.
>On 29 March 2016, Ixquick.com was officially "merged" with the same company's Startpage search engine[3] (a search engine with the privacy features of Ixquick, but using only Google search results[4]). Users entering ixquick.com are now automatically re-routed to startpage.com. Ixquick had long declared on its sites, that it operated in compliance with European Union privacy standards, and it retained its original European search engine, Ixquick.eu,[8] until about April 2018, when it was also redirected to startpage.com.
>Prior to the release of Tor Browser version 4.5, Startpage.com was its default search engine.
> Say all you want about DDG and alternatives, but they still can't hold a candle to Google's search quality
I started using DDG, believing that "it shows me inferior results, but privacy-wise, it is worth it." Yet I've come to learn that DDG's results are often on-par or better than Google, and inferior only a small fraction of the time.
Often when I "!g" a query, I find that I get pretty much the same results with Google too. There are maybe 10% of cases where the results significantly differ.
My perception now is that Google performs better on programming-related queries, and much better on giving me local results (especially results related to my city). But when searching for content that you'd often find on blogs, or looking for reviews of products, DDG almost always beats Google by showing less SEO-heavy, more authentic results.
Sure, but they count on it for significant revenue. If Google didn't want to pay it, but they kept Google, they'd be giving up that revenue from some other potential provider.
(Of course, if Google didn't want to pay it, it might cause a crash in the 'market value' of such a placement anyway).
I'd be happy to support Mozilla financially, but I'm too lazy to go figure out how to do it. Link me to a Patreon, or shove some subscription model more prominently in my face, Mozilla.
> Contributions go to the Mozilla Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization based in Mountain View, California, to be used in its discretion for its charitable purposes.
I've read about this before I think, for some reason donations cannot be used for development and has to be used for outreach etc?
All it means is that they can use the funds as they see fit. There should be a breakdown somewhere on their site of what % of funds go toward development verse admin/fundraising as they are a 501c3.
Yeah but I have to go remember to do it and stuff. Meanwhile at ArsTechnica.com, it shows a big banner telling me to subscribe, and I do. More reminders that I can give money to Mozilla would remind me to do it. Eventually they'd hit me at the right time/place to put in the effort to set up a sub, and I would.
It sounds like a matter of time before they introduce a paid plan for Firefox Accounts, with e.g. a higher limit on Firefox Send, a VPN service, and the fuzzy feeling of supporting improving the web.
On the flipside, Chrome went from being the best browser on the market to a bloated spying machine, and I'm very glad firefox exists to offer an alternative.
If on top of that, they manage to do it using Google's dough, I say bravo and hope they'll remain smart enough to feed from the vampire for a long time
I'd guess the intersection of people who will even consider using Firefox, have search engine needs that won't be satisfied by DuckDuckGo, and won't be able to change their search engine is vanishingly small, so I'm not that concerned about the user experience hit. But, yeah, the dip in funding would be brutal in that scenario.
That's probably true to some degree, but I found that the most effective thing that Google does to improve search results is to connect multiple searches you submit in relatively quick succession.
Googling a paper or article, skimming it, then searching for something that's in the text makes Google appear like magic. When I enter the first word of my follow-up question, Google will often suggest a complex 10 word query exactly like I would have entered it.
Apparently, many people have the exact same follow-up questions that I have after reading the same text.
That doesn't require a whole lot of tracking. It does require a session cookie, but that's not the sort of tracking I'm opposed to at all.
Another thing that Google does well is searching for local content. I think this is very difficult to replicate for DDG.
But for context free and non-local queries, Google is usually no better than DDG in spite of all the wealth of data they have on me. For some niches DDG is actually better than Google and they don't fill half of their result pages with ads.
Sometimes I wonder whether the entire ad targeting thing is a fraud. Maybe Google doesn't actually track us after all ;-)
>They won't be the default search provider, but that will play to their advantage - Firefox out-of-the-box user experience will take a sharp nose dive...So what Mozilla will end up with is (a) a dip in funding and
Right, like from 2014 to 2017 when Google wasn't the default search provider for Firefox. It was such a shame to see their income go from 300 million to 500 million.
Google's search quality has been on the decline for a while now. If that trend continues and DDG merely manages to stay the same, it will probably only be a few more years until they're as good as Google...
When Firefox decimated Internet Explorer in the 2000s, it was just... better. And I think Chrome had some fairly obvious gains over Firefox and IE which led it to gain market share. I was an early adopter of Chrome, but that was in the days before Google seemed so sinister...
I use Firefox now because I care about privacy, and I'd rather use a browser developed by a non-profit that cares about that as well. But I suspect that's a bit too abstract for most people to care about, at least at this point.
Chrome's advantage seems fairly baked in; people aren't going to shift unless there's a decent reason to. I wonder what that reason could be. Can privacy concerns become a sufficient motivator for people to shift browser; or even, thinking a bit bigger, to change the fundamental architecture of the web?
Chrome also has a persistent advantage in being able to advertise Chrome on google search results.
Which they do, if you access them using a non-Chrome browser, or at least used to... I confess I'm not sure because I still use Chrome. I agree with you about the advantage of "if you're already using it, something has to be a LOT better to get you to switch".
> Chrome also has a persistent advantage in being able to advertise Chrome on google search results.
And also on gmail, googlemaps and YouTube… They even paid for ads in the subway here in Paris! They also bundled it with software like Adobe Flash, which made it available on virtually every computer circa 2010…
And they ship it as their default browser on Android…
There's a rule of thumb that says any film advertised on the side of a bus is probably not a very good film.
This is probably just me, but whenever I see an advert for a web service on TV or on a billboard (especially for stalwarts like Google or Ebay), I always apply the same logic: their product must be crap if they're having to advertise it the old-fashioned way — it feels desperate and demeaning to the product.
Oh, I never realized that the new reddit for mobile was an AMP app. It's the second slowest website I browse regularilyony my phone: so much for the «accelerated» part of AMP …
Samsung sells a lot of phones but far from the majority of them, they have around 25% of the android market, which means 75% has Chrome installed by default.
Chrome also had a very posh reputation in those days, for some reason. I remember many of my very non-technical friends who never cared or even understood the notion of a browser suddenly get very enthusiastic about Chrome. Whatever the marketing trick for that was, it was very successful.
Firefox was a lot better than IE, but decimated is not the right word. I think it had about 25% market share at its peak?
Chrome might be better than Firefox for some use cases, but the difference is definitely not as big as it used to be between Firefox and IE. Yet its market share is way higher.
Which leads me to think it's not (just) about being better. I'd guess lock-in/cross-product marketing is another major factor.
during Chrome's climb, Firefox was a fairly slow mess and in some ways caused by users having tons of addons enabled at any given time. Firefox was a lot better than IE when Firefox came out (and remained that way even during its slow period), but Chrome was a lot better during its initial rise than both of them too.
Firefox is way better from a performance standpoint than it was during Chrome's climb, but Chrome gobbled up all of the "not built into my OS" market share and unless someone is severely for privacy, does it have enough to differentiate to get people to switch? To me, they seem to be very much peers of equal value.
This sort of thing always seems to happen. A shiny new thing comes along that's a little bit faster or cleverer, and all the geeks say “Yeah, well it may be controlled by a single company, but they're probably not evil, and anyway it'll never get big enough to be a monopoly, so it's harmless fun, and I'll use it and advocate it to my non-techy friends!”
And then we end up with Chrome, and Facebook, and Slack, and Twitter, and WhatsApp, and GitHub, and LinkedIn, and nobody ever seems to learn that if you don't insist on an open ecosystem, even if it's “just for now”, then eventually we all lose that option altogether.
I wish they hadn't maintained dominance as much as they have, but at the same time, IE being a non-standards compliant actor and Chrome at times including non-standard web features have brought out the best in Firefox: with IE, it forced Firefox to become a thing. With Chrome, it forced Firefox to streamline the cruft and become better.
Now at least, users have choice of what they deem the "best browser" to be and I honestly don't think they're inherently wrong for feeling that way. If someone uses Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Edge (though with that last one, I feel for them because it doesn't have the best tab recovery when Edge closes unexpectedly), or some derivative of any of the above, I think they're going to be reasonably okay.
Hmm OK, there might be some misunderstanding there because I'm not a native speaker, but in my mind it's a small step below "obliterated". If it also refers to just taking a small bite out of its market share, then my apologies for the misunderstanding.
No, you were right in the first place, RcouF1uZ4gsC was being pedantic.
Originally, decimated came from when the Roman army would conquer another group, and would assert dominance (and instill fear) by killing off 1 in every 10 soldiers. So it literally meant removing a tenth.
English has mutated the meaning to mean "nearly wipe out", which is very different from the original meaning. But that's common in language. Confusing.
Kill, destroyed and taking a large percentage are all not representative of what Firefox did to IE, so it all comes down to how small the "part of" can be, I guess. I'm not a native speaker, so it might be that I sized it incorrectly.
> Decimation (Latin: decimatio; decem = "ten") was a form of Roman military discipline in which every tenth man in a group was executed by his cohorts.
its so obvious that native ad blocking could be that feature. when a non-tech user opens up a browser with ad blocking it blows their mind. they go to youtube and put on a song, and wait! they don't have to reach for the mute first to silence some loud ad? they don't have to wait to click "skip" on the ad? it just works?? the user just wants the content and we can give it to them.
imo this would be the step from chrome, which will never implement it because they depend on it. but the web is not ads. the web can survive without ads.
Enabled for new users by default. Existing users currently need to go to Preferences and set the cookie setting to “Block tracking” rather than one of the other options to get these benefits.
I'm not trying to be disingenuous. I don't have an ad blocker installed, and except for when I turn tracking protection off because it broke some site's functionality I can't remember the last time I saw an ad.
The hard part will be doing it while not running afoul of the ethical standard that they have set for themselves, and so many of us hold them to.
It's easy to increase market share if you're willing to play dirty and have lots of money to throw around. When you have neither... well, I'd hate to be the new CEO.
> Then Brave came along with automatic ad-blocking.
I don't think I will ever use Brave due to how it "blocks ads" I think the industry should be doing the job of Brave which is to ensure ads aren't infested with bad code. No ad server should serve arbitrary JS that hasn't been tested and secured. If it costs money to ensure this then they should charge more for ads. If an ad infests machines, the ad company should be liable, and they should really go after the person who paid for the ad too.
I will never use Brave because they're replacing ads with their own and making money doing it. uBlock Origin on FF is better and not scummy like Brave.
People shouldn't break the law, but until that never happens, I will do what I can to protect myself.
You are misinformed. Brave does not "[replace] ads with their own" and we never have. We are working with publishers to do private/anonymous ads which pay them 70% and the user 15% of gross revenue, but these are not out yet.
We already pay users 70% of revenue for ads that go in the user's own space, not in any publisher slot.
Whether user or publisher ads, in Brave neither kind uses any tracking. Matching is done locally against an objective (same for all users in a region on a given day) catalog; views and clicks confirmed using a Privacy Pass like "blind signature" protocol. No user identifier or linkability among events on any server, even ours.
If you acted on incorrect information, I hope you'll stop repeating it and give Brave a try. Thanks.
Mozilla, please oh please have Firefox Sync support Multi-account containers. I have way too many settings and redirects configured with MAC and Cookie Auto-Delete to work with MAC that I dread having to switch to another computer.
Rethink the whole thing from the ground up with privacy in mind. This includes transparency to whats going on under the hood, an integration of important plugins (your average video downloading plugin is likely siphoning all kinds of information), sandboxing, privacy-aware defaults, and banning and blacklisting a whole lot of known crap!
Now the technical core of firefox seems now very solid(if they keep the extensions api stable), with long term decisions like rust and quantum paying off..
But the problem seems to be, that many websites are developed and tested in chrome only, sometimes with chrome-only features.. so it does not help only implementing nonstandard feature after nonstandard feature. They need to get the developers back and that can only work with a massive investment in the firefox dev tools as they are far, far behind chrome devtools. I sympathise with firefox and mozilla a lot, but even for me, it would require a huge improvement to even consider changing back. I am annoyed enough from the occasional firefox debugging. No wonder more and more developers simply skip firefox due to low marketshare and save the effort.
> They need to get the developers back and that can only work with a massive investment in the firefox dev tools as they are far, far behind chrome devtools.
This isn't a universal truth -- I consider them much better in many respects. It's much better to point out concrete deficiencies as these can be acted upon.
One area where a company like Firefox could do well is embedded browsers. Some years ago I had a need to embed a browser into a windows app and there were really not many good options available. Mozilla had something (XULRunner) that seemed not maintained anymore. Mozilla could build a better competitor to Electron. That would give them developer mindshare and probably also contributions once companies are building products with that framework.
Or they could be innovative with their browser. Sometimes I have trouble telling chrome and Firefox apart. They are so similar.
In retrospect, it seems that Mozilla's biggest stumble was their decision to ignore embedding. Around 2009-ish, the decision was made to break any compatibility guarantees for embedding, at first temporarily (which was necessary until new APIs that could support multiprocess in the engine), and then the idea was that you wouldn't embed Gecko at all, and instead use XULRunner. Then XULRunner was killed off for Firefox webapps, which itself was killed off for... nothing?
The interesting thing about Electron was that it was produced by a group independent of Google. If Mozilla spun off XULRunner as a subsidiary and allowed them to make decisions on marketing, there’d be actual competition.
(There’s also not much point to disabling XUL extensions entirely since Firefox now requires extensions to be signed).
I can't help but feel that a lot of Brave's userbase are pushing it because they have a financial investment in BAT from the ICO. Brave certainly doesn't help with the monoculture threat either, its just Chrome.
Having Google as your default search engine or include Google's safe browsing inside your browser doesn't help with the monoculture threat either, but i guess mozilla thinks otherwise.
i duno. the other day i used a friend's computer without an adblocker and searched google for "AWS". i could not see a link to amazon AWS on the results page. it was under 5 ads for azure, gcp, and some other crap. i mean, i use an adblocker on my own devices and had no idea it had gotten that crazy. it was horrifying. the non tech-savvy people are clicking god knows what and fueling a massive industry of identity theft, not to mention the psychological pollution and interference to genuine knowledge and information that so many ads represent. sure brave is sketchy in its own way, but it's a paradigm shift in the right direction. something has got to change. so i can totally see why users and not just investors would want to give brave a try.
But that adblocking there is not uBlock is it? It is not controllable by me and can be turned to "acceptable ads" any day. If it only let mobile to use extensions like FF does.
Finding a niche is one thing. If you change a product used by a portion (albeit small) of the mainstream into a product that would appeal only to a niche audience, that may well end up going against you.
The causal arrow points the other way. Today Firefox finally started blocking third party cookies (some, not all as Brave does; they use Disconnect.me's 3rd party cookie blocking list) by default. This does not limit mainstream appeal, it follows Safari and Brave, who have been leading the privacy by default movement among browsers.
just want to give a shoutout to Firefox Focus and whoever is at Mozilla that made it happen. absolutely fantastic no tracking one tab experience that has made a dent in my browser tab management and privacy defaults like nothing else has. thank you!
It's worth noting that Firefox Focus is just another chromium-based browser. If things keep moving in the direction they currently are, this may be the sad fate of Firefox proper :(
Yeah it's a shame they have significantly slowed down updates to it. To me it sort of felt half done since you could sort of have tabs if you opened links. But it's a solid browser hope to see it continue.
Recently I've been using Firefox preview for Android and really enjoying it. Looking forward to it replacing Firefox for Android
i dont get why people want that. for me the restriction of unitab frees me from tab management and forces me to get rid of things i no longer need since im a tab hoarder.
Firefox is an open source project. I'm sure if you pitched in with time and / or money to maintain said features, they'd be much less likely to disappear.
I already contribute to other software projects that are more important to me than Firefox. And it would be impossible for me to contribute every feature I want to every open source project I use anyway, so what you propose is not very practical and doesn't really help, does it?
On the other hand, it only takes me a few seconds to complain on the official channels when they add a feature I don't need or remove one that I use so I think I'll keep doing that. Maybe enough users will agree and Mozilla might react to the complaints. Probably not though, they've been pretty deaf to the community lately. A change of CEO might be a chance for that to improve, so that's why I made my comment.
Assuming this is naivete and not a deliberate attempt to mislead... Firefox is an open source project, but here is no openness in the product management. The decisions regarding features to keep or discard are determined by politics internal to Mozilla.
> Assuming this is naivete and not a deliberate attempt to mislead
Can you please edit out gratuitous swipes like that from your HN posts? It breaks a number of the site guidelines and your comment would be fine (with higher signal/noise) without it.
I'm sorry you feel that way, but I'm interested to know why you feel that way. "It's open source, so it's your fault something doesn't meet your preferences" is an extremely common conversation bomb in this space. I included the opening phrase to highlight the fact that I'm aware of the possibility that this was a bad-faith response, but I chose to interpret it in the best possible light.
What's gratuitous? Is "naive" considered an insult on Hacker News?
Sure, naive is a pejorative. But the insinuation of "deliberate attempt to mislead" is worse. The site guidelines ask everyone simply to assume good faith, so there's no need to highlight the possibility of bad faith. Doing that doesn't add any information and just distracts from the rest of your comment.
> Assuming this is naivete and not a deliberate attempt to mislead
I sincerely hope it's neither. I'm well aware that a third party can't direct Mozilla as to how to channel its resources. They can however ensure there are sufficient contributors external to Mozilla to maintain the features they wish to keep.
Even if the end decision is still made by Mozilla internals, the decision to keep functionality is much easier if they don't have to battle for resources to maintain it thanks to external contributors being willing to do so.
At the end of the day, being an open project does not require the maintainers to do work simply because a subset of users wishes it.
I've used both products for as long as they've existed. Google's search quality has become absolutely terrible and only reflects their ad strategy.
DDG has become superior in many important ways.
Been using firefox ever since chrome became unusuable from a memory perspective to use without the great suspender a few years back. Been happy with the change ever since. Hope the company continues to thrive.
I wish the best for him. I returned to Firefox this year and it felt a good product, one that goes in the right direction after so many years of Chrome dependency.
I mostly use DDG and Startpage. But sometimes Google, when I'm not having much luck. But not via Tor, obviously. And even VPNs can trigger Google's "you look like a bot".
I used to love Metacrawler. And I see that it's back, but just drawing on Google and Yahoo!. Also by InfoSpace, Dogpile, which draws from more sources. But I haven't used either enough to say much.
Just downloaded Firefox again for the first time in ages...what's lame is that some G Suite / Apps / Mail features are only available in Chrome forcing me to use Chrome for work..
What Google app features are not available in Firefox? I use Firefox and my work uses Google's products and I never run into any issues with gmail, calendar, docs...
You can use Firefox privately though. And for work, if you want to get out of the vendor lock in, you can use a browser just for Google stuff. I do that at work as well because Chromium works better with my GPU for video calling, so I run Wire in kiosk mode. Everything else I do in a nicely configured and customized Firefox.
Does it? What alternative accurate wording would you suggest? Everything else I can think of is euphemism. Leaving a job is ... leaving a job. It doesn't say why.
I think the question most would ask is what does Brave offer? Outside of tech, I don't think most people are willing to experiment with new(ish) software unless there's a very compelling advantage (and for most, I don't think BAT is a feature)
It wouldn't be created and run by Brendan Eich who was run out of Mozilla for the crime of (privately) voting the wrong way on a ballot initiative. That was and continues to be a bad look for Mozilla.
Profit motive does not go away in a "non-profit" (FYI, Firefox is produced by the Mozilla Corporation, which is the for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation; top salary last seen [2017] was $2.3M+). Mozilla depends for its profits (to pay such salaries and bonuses) mainly on the Google search deal.
In my opinion, this conflict of interest between users and Mozilla's search revenue share held back tracking protection in Firefox over the years. We (I was there, this is all in public bugs and news now) rejected third-party cookie blocking three times.
Meanwhile Brave has a transparent rate card, where we pay the user 70% of the gross revenue for user-private ads, and 15% for publisher ads (not yet deployed; the publisher makes 70% and we take same as the user). So we get <= what users get, and we will fail if our users don't like the private/anonymous ads+donation model enough to opt in at sufficient scale that we can cover our costs.
Using chance to comment, even though I like Firefox a lot and writing this comment from Firefox, I am switching to Chrome in Android.
Every time when I need to pay something web sites redirect me to my bank site, which has good mobile app, Firefox doesn't open necessary app, which forces me to log in again and again from browser, Chrome opens banking app, where I already have all things set up.
This is one example of how Firefox Android is annoying, please fix, or keep losing 90% of your market share, because people on mobile want this simple feature by default.
I usually see a button of an Android next to the URL bar on sites that have a compatible app. Take for example watching a YouTube video on FF. If I click on it, FF opens the associated app.
But I also believe that Firefox's dominant past plays against when it comes to analyzing the product right now.
Firefox is amazing, it works wonderfully, it continues to improve, respects privacy, adopts Mozilla's ethical values.
Yes, not many people use it, but criticizing this point so aggressively I think it is also influenced by the culture aiming at hypergrouth, dominance, monopoly, "Move fast and break things".
I am very happy with what Firefox does for me right now. Imagine a situation in which Firefox does not exist and today the product comes to light, it would be a great celebration, and the market share would be zero.
Thanks Firefox, I love you very much, although there are few of us who use you and maybe that doesn't change.